exploration for development

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

EXPLORATION FOR DEVELOPMENT

Charles j. PalusDavid M. Horth

he challenges faced by organizations today are increasingly complex: volatile,multidimensional, and unprecedented. Leaders today find themselves fac

ing challenges from all sides: an accelerating pace of scientific discover3ç deregulation, mergers and acquisitions, shifting demographics, new business models,and a fluctuating economy.

Consider the following complex challenges:

A cross-functional task team at Chemstar, Inc., a high-tech chemical products company, is formed to address a serious quality problem in the manufacture of its flagship product, a chemical analyzeL The team observes that theproblem has been recurring in various forms for five years. It appears likely thatfundamental limits to the underlying technology are driving Chemstar’s customersto new products. There is a climate of fear in the organization—including fearthat a root-level solution to this challenge will bring radical changes, ending thecompany as they have known it.

Orion Research Center, the R&D department of an office solutions company, is seeking better ways to strategically select and prioritize projects. This teamof scientists and technologists has been given the task of “picking winners”—high-return projects that match corporate strategy and capabilities. They feelan increased sense of urgency because Orion’s competitors are picking winnersat an accelerating pace. The team attempts to analyze all relevant data but runs

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into a wall: the inputs are too complicated and incomplete for clear decisions. Tomake matters more challenging, they have just been asked to help evolve thecorporate strategy rather than simply apply it.

Telco, the product of a series of mergers and acquisitions, is now a nationalleader in network and information services and a global contender in wireless communications. Different branches of the combined company come from quite different source cultures. Layers of differing legacy operating systems encumber allnew work. Government regulations persist alongside deregulated sectors of the business. On top of this is the pressure for an essentially U.S. company to “go global.”How can Telco provide seamless service when its origins, cultures, and environment.s are so fragmented?

Facing complex challenges requires leadership capabilities at the communitylevel. Complex challenges are bigger than individuals. When one leader at a timetakes on the challenges, these challenges are likely to be local in immediate scope,but what is needed for complex challenges is a whole-system response. Complexchallenges also typically sprawl across the domains of multiple stakeholdersinvested in the resolution of the challenges. No single entity has the technical capacities for resolving the challenge, and no single entity “owns” it either. Leadership has to come from the community of stakeholders to integrate and apply theirshared knowledge and expertise. Intelligent transformation, rather than only incremental change, is the expected result of community-level engagement of complex challenges.

The framework described in this chapter, exploration for development, enables leadership development at the level of the community and its interconnections while also fostering individual leader development. First we summarize theframework, and then we describe its elements. The rest of the chapter describespractical ways to implement the framework.

Exploration for Development

Exploration for development is a framework for enhancing organizational capacityfor leadership (see Chapter Fourteen) that focuses on making shared sense andmeaning in the face of complex challenges as the basis for committed actionand transformation.

Complex challenges are situations or contexts that defy existing approachesor solutions. They are central in importance and demand decisive action. Yetbecause the organization, team, or individual does not know how to act, there isalso a need to slow down and reflect.

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Several criteria help identify these challenges:

• They def~’ existing solutions, resources, and approaches.• They question individual and organizational assumptions and mental models.• They demand individual and organizational creativity and learning.• They require a refraining of the leadership perspective—the definition of what

leadership is and how it is accomplished.

Typically, when a community first encounters a complex challenge, there isan initial lack of shared understanding as to what the challenge is and what itmeans. Because the complex challenge represents new territory for the organization and requires new ways of thinking and acting, there is no adequate language to describe k—or there are many languages, but each is wedded to discretedomains like finance or engineering (Heifetz, 1994; Hurst, 1995). “Making sharedsense and meaning” refers to the process of bridging among the various positionsand creating new shared perspectives and understandings. In a complex and turbulent environment, shared meaning about the work is vital to the leadership tasksof direction, alignment, and commitment.

Although individual leaders can describe complex challenges that arise in theftparticular contexts, there is also great value in articulating complex challengesas broadiy shared in the organizational community These shared challenges maybe named by senior leadership and posed top-down, and they also may emergefrom the grassroots level as a result of people seeing new connections within andacross particular challenges. These two levels of seeing the challenge tend to meetand amplify in the middle of organizations, underlining the important place ofmiddle managers in exploration for development (Oshry 1999).

The metaphor of “exploration” refers to facing challenges in a way that inventories and mobilizes the community’s resources, enters into and maps unknownterritories, and thereby extends the community into new places and increases leadership capacity for facing future challenges. Exploration for development dependson able individuals coming together as a purposeful community prepared for discovery and growth. Thus individual leader development and some group-level development are helpful precursors to the shared leadership processes described inthis chapter.

In this framework, there are three primary leadership capabilities that communities need to mobilize to address complex challenges (see Figure 15.1): sharedsensemaking, connectivity and navigation. These capabilities are interdependent;for example, navigation benefits greatly from competent practices in sensemakingand connectivity To more fully understand them, it is useful to consider the central features of each one.


Shared Sensemaking

In times of challenge, people need shared understandings about what they faceand why They benefit further if the understandings they share are accurate andeffective and generate fresh perception and meaning. Where does this kind ofshared understanding come from? Traditionally, it depended on one or morestrong leaders, expert opinion, established wisdom, and the channels of culture.However, the increasing complexity and chaos in and among organizations severely strains these traditional sources. The exploration for development framework honors and works with these traditional sources but adds to them deliberateand competent sensemaking. Sensemoicing is what people do in the rush of complexevents to comprehend and anticipate what is happening to them (Kelly, 1955;Weick, 1995). Amid complexity and near-chaos, asking, answering, and reanswering “What is this? What is happening to us now?” is a key capability

This kind of sensemaking is largely a social process. It is a matter of debating and sometimes agreeing about what is familiar and unfamiliar, of naming

FIGURE 15.1. LEADERSHIP CAPABILITIES FOR ADDRESSINGCOMPLEX CHALLENGES.


things, of discerning patterns. Competent sensemaking provides the foundationfor committed action. In practice, it becomes a deliberate, participative process ofshared leadership (Drath and Palus, 1994).

Sensemaking Competencies. In familiar situations, a tendency for automatic andreactive sensemalting can be effective. This tendency can be a liabiit)c however,in unfamiliar and complex situations. In our research, we have identified six cornpetencies for deliberately making sense of complex situations: paying attention,personalizing, imaging, serious play, co-inquir% and crafting (Palus and Horth,2002). How communities apply these competencies often proceeds in repeated cycles, each cycle following the “sensemaking loop,” shown in Figure 15.2.

Paying attention is the selective use of multiple modes of perception when taking in a situation. Attention is a resource that can be harnessed and enhanced tosee patterns in chaos and in complexity Whole communities can suffer from formsof attention deficit disorder (Davenport and Beck, 2001). People come hurtlinginto a complex challenge loaded with assumptions and formulaic approaches. Paying attention begins a process of slowing down in order to be more deliberateabout the encounter (Perkins, 1994).

Personalizing is tapping into life experiences, passions, and values in order togain leverage on complex challenges. Great energies lie at the multichanneled confluence of avocation and vocation, of the personal and the organizational. Ouridentities are, for better and worse, powerful filters for our attention and for howpeople pursue their craft (Bateson, 1994). Competent personalizing requires conscious engagement, as well as conscious disengagement, of such personal experiences and filters to facilitate effective resolution of the challenge.

Imaging is the representation of evolving ideas and communication throughthe use of all kinds of images—pictures, stories, metaphors, shared displays, and

FIGURE 15,2. THE SENSEMAKING LOOP.

Paying

Imaging


visions. Words by themselves are not enough for making sense, even though organizational habits often assume otherwise (Edwards, 1986). When somethingstrange comes along, people need to ask, Is this an opportunity? A threat? A pieceto a larger puzzle? At this time, an image or an animated series of images canbe a very good way to take in the situation and make sense of it (Schwartz, 1991).Imaging is imagination with intent; imagination is playing with images.

Serious piqy refers to the generation of knowledge and new ways of doing workthrough free exploration, improvisation, experimentation, levit>ç and sport. Oneof the pitfalls of everyday sensemaking is that it can become too rigid. Makingsense of what you may never have seen before requires play with a serious intent. Seriously playing is characterized by bending some rules, having fun—andharvesting what is learned in the process. Overcontrol is what people in authoritydo to keep the leadership all to themselves, a crippling stance when faced withcomplexity. Play is a dance between automatic and deliberate—a great place toget a not-too-tight handle on sensemalting processes (Schrage, 2002). Play becomesserious when it is contained within the purposes of co-inquiry (Gergen, 1991).

Co-inquiry is sustained dialogue in address of a challenge within and across thecommunities that have a stake in its reconciliation. The variety of the stakeholders and their issues is a source of much of the complexity of the challenges facedat all levels of society It is also the source of much opportunity (Bray, Lee, Smith,and Yorks, 2000; Cooperrider and Whitney, 2002; Fisher, Rooke, and Torbcrt,2000). Productive dialogue can take many forms, all of which encourage peopleto surface assumptions and share meaning making rather than confront each otherwith unrestrained advocacy (Dixon, 1998). At CCL, we often use the dialoguepractice of “puffing something in the middle,” that is, sharing and recrafting artifacts such as pictures, scenarios, and prototypes as tangible, malleable embodiments of meaning (Palus and Drath, 2001).

Crafting refers to the syinhesis of issues, objects, events, ideas, and actions intointegrated, meaningful wholes. What is often missing in organizations is the recognition that artistry is needed to shape order out of chaos (Nissley, 2002). Aesthetics in this view is (or can be) more than a frill. Knowledge management in theface of complexity must become more like an inspired artistry of knowledge, including the best of people’s passions, imaginations, and intuitions (Nonaka,Takeuchi, and Takeuchi, 1995).

Connectivity

The richer the connectivity in an organization, the greater the organization’s capacity to respond to complex challenges as a whole system. To enhance connectivity people working together in teams, groups, organizations, and communities need


to better connect with each other around the work that they share. We invite people in the organizations we work with to explore the possibilities for enhancing thenature, qualit~c configuration, and number of connections throughout their organizational system, to ultimately build a well-integrated structure of leadership.

These ideas can be challenging if one is used to thinking of leadership in traditional ways, as something that arises from “within” the leader. If leadership isviewed as shared work, leadership can be seen as “between” whatever entities areinvolved: individuals, teams, groups, communities, organizations, systems of organizations, cultures large and small, industries, and so on. Enhancing the nature,qualit% configuration, and number of connections between entities, then, canbe viewed as leadership development. This means that leadership can never comesimply and solely from within an individual but must be created in the relationalspaces between persons, between groups, and so on (Drath, 2001). In our practice, we refer to this view as “connected leadership.” Trait, situational, and transformative theories of leadership have, on the other hand, focused mainly on theindividual leader traits and behaviors (Day, 2000).

Here are a few guideposts for beginning to develop a connected leadershipperspective:

Think more, not less. It is a mistake to think of connected leadership as a reduction in authority and accountability or a reduction of the need for strong individuals who can make an impact. An important developmental principle ofconnected leadership is “Transcend and include”: include the strengths of heroic,hierarchical leaders, but transcend the limitations (Wilber, 2000). This means thatstrong leaders need to become vulnerable in opening up to different ideas. It meansdeveloping a strong “loyal opposition” so that underlying assumptions can be surfaced and debated. It means developing a shared process for making sense of complex work so that authority and accountability can be negotiated and assigned inways that are responsive to the community’s or the organization’s emergent needs.

Invent newforms of leadership. Leadership is traditionally thought of as a set ofbehavioral principles or individual characteristics that can be overlaid onto anysituation. Connected leadership encourages the appreciation of such traditionalmodels of personal leadership (include) but creatively reinvents them (transcend)according to the strange new worlds being explored. This kind of invention meansholding lightly to what one already knows about leadership and experimentingwith new ways of setting direction, creating alignment, and gaining commitment.

Invite people to partic4bate hi leadershi~ Leadership is a set of processes that people participate in and contribute to, in surprising varieties of ways, rather thansimply “what leaders do.” Even formal leaders must be aware of the modes ofparticipation available to them in overlapping and evolving informal communl


ties within the organization (Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder, 2002). Connectedleaders try to be explicit about the processes, the means, and the expected outcomes of community participation—including the fact that it is being invented,tested, and modified along the way

Navigation

Complex challenges are landscapes of possibility and constraint. The capabilityof navigating refers to effective ways of learning by doing amid uncertainty andchange. Addressing the possibilities of this landscape requires imagination, andworking with constraints requires creativity and disciplined experimentation. Navigating is about traveling this shared landscape flexibly yet wisely: How do we takethe next step? How do we go in the direction we want?

Rather than one leader plotting an ideal course, the community tests its wayforward using small wins and networks of connected leaders. The community applies various navigation skills and abilities: experimentation, improvisation, prototyping, successive approximation, invention of practical tools, mapmaking andmap revision, and learning in public. The idea of a grand strategy thus gives wayto that of emergent strategy An ideal vision becomes less important than attentionto a visible horizon. Communities that learn to navigate for themselves in such waysare well situated for future leadership challenges.

Navigation as a capability features two aspects that are in constant creativetension with one another: analysis and synthesis. On the one hand, navigation isgoal-oriented and hence objective and analytical. Analysis is concerned with reducing wholes to parts, symbols, and formulas. Yet navigation is also emergentfrom experience and hence is subjective, intuitive, and synthetic. Synthesis is concerned with interconnections, contexts, and larger wholes—seeing them as wellas making them. Later in this chapter, we discuss tools for deliberately interweaving analysis and synthesis in order to navigate effectively

Practicing Exploration for Development:Tools and Techniques

There are a number of tools and techniques that we and others have found to aidin the practice of exploration for development. What these tools have in commonis the combination of “doing real work” (addressing valid business objectives) whilealso developing leadership at the community level. Let us look at a few such tools,in terms of the three components of the exploration for development framework:shared sensemaking, connectivit) and navigation (see Figure 15.1). Keep in mind


that each of these tools often draws on more than one of the components, buteach tends to emphasize or highlight a particular component.

Shared Sensemaking

A variety of tools can be used to support shared sensemaking. What these toolsdo is help groups, as a collective, see their issues and challenges in rich detail. Thisincludes seeing the diverse perspectives, assumptions, and experience bases throughwhich the challenge can be understood; seeing where there are common, sharedperspectives; surfacing lots of information for everyone to examine; looking forand testing patterns; putting private intuitions and hunches “on the table” for comparison and contrast; and thinking imaginatively about the work.

Visual Sensemaklng. People are visual creatures living in a visual world. Yet organizations typically function with a narrow range of visual media and methods, such as text on screens or paper and talking heads in conference rooms.The digital revolution has brought some variety to this visual sparseness. TheInternet and desktop graphics tools such as PowerPoint have opened fresh avenuesfor creating and conveying information. Yet the visual literacy required to be creative and effective in the visual realm is generally lacking (Stafford, 1994).

In our practice, we use various visually based methods designed to help organizational members make sense of complex challenges and point to options foraction. We refer to this more generally as “visual sensemaking.”

Visual Explorer (VE) is a tool to facilitate visual sensemaking based on our research on complex challenge competencies (Palus and Horth, 2002). VE provides aset of 224 images printed in color on standard-size paper. The images were selectedbecause they were interesting, provocative, diverse, or ambiguous and lent themselves metaphorically or otherwise to the complex challenges of business and life.

Visual Explorer works well in activities designed to look at any sort of mutualquestion or issue. Telco used VE with a group of senior directors to visualizeand wrestle with the challenge they faced. Having first done some thinking anddiscussion about their challenges, the directors came together and were instructedto browse the images (which were laid face-up in a hallway) and select two: “Onethat stands for the way your challenge is now, whether literally, metaphorically,emotionally, or intuitively, and another one that stands for what a positive pathforward with your challenge will look like.”

With selected images thus in hand, members gather in smaller groups of fouror five to dialogue about their challenges, using the images as mediating objects.A volunteer goes first and starts by describing her first image in detail: What is theimage? What are the details? What is mysterious or surprising? Then she describes


the challenge itself and how it connects with the image. She repeats this withher second image. Then each person in the group responds to the images the volunteer has just described, first describing what they see in the image—especiallyif they see anything different. Then each person makes his own connections to theimage in light of the challenge the volunteer has described. This is a key movein the process, and we suggest using language along the lines of “If that weremy image, and if that were my challenge, I might connect them like this or“What I notice in that image is “ Overt problem solving, advice, and criticismare temporarily off-limits. Finally, the originator of the image takes it back, sharing any new insights she has gained. Each person thus volunteers to place his orher images and challenges in the middle of the dialogue.

Visual Explorer creates shared sensemaking by using images as the startingplace for dialogue. In ordinary conversation, people tend to revert to entrenchedways of thinking. The images selected by each participant to represent ideas shefeels strongly about provide a way to publicly discuss difficult aspects of these ideasin a safe and inviting forum.

Telco used the Visual Explorer exercise with a variety of groups of seniormanagers over the course of their leadership development process. People oftensaid something like, “I was doubtful at first about the pictures, but we were ableto talk about our challenges in depth.” One kind of comment gets at this idea ofvisual sensemaking: “People in our group tended to see very different things in thesame image—and that was OK.” For us this indicates perspective taking, which intypical discourse is a metaphor for what literally happens in the visual field. Another set of comments is along the lines of “It was fun. We laughed. The connections we made led to a lot of puns and jokes.” Also common is this set of ideas:‘We came up with metaphors we otherwise would not have. It seemed easy to tellstories to go with the images.”

Collage is another visual sensemaking technique in which groups of peoplecombine diverse images or artifacts. Collage is an excellent tool for assisting people in assembling diverse perceptions and crafting new ideas together.

For example, we worked with a director-level group at Telco as the participants formed action learning teams to address specific aspects of their commonchallenges. Before doing a step-by-step action plan, the group members synthesized their explicit and implicit knowledge into a collage, representing what thepath forward for their team would look like.

We provided a stack of images clipped from various sources, a stack of trademagazines from their industry, glue, and scissors. They also had all the VE images they had used in a previous session. Working quickly, the group members produced a rich depiction of where they wanted to go—including vivid depictions ofthe difficulties. This led to a sober discussion of the politics they faced in working

448 Handbook of teadership Development

across boundaries and a frank appraisal of sponsorship possibilities among seniorleaders. Working with this image in the middle of a rapid-fire dialogue, they thenproduced a detailed action plan.

Mapping Tools. Various methods are available to imagine, create, critique, andrevise shared maps of a complex challenge. Complex relationships and patternsare more easily seen on a map than on a list. Exploratory maps that lay out thewhole territory of the challenge can be crafted into formal models for creatingnew structures and action plans. Shared maps can be constructed and maintainedin common work areas (including virtual spaces) and during group retreats.

The simplest mapping techniques uses “sticlcy notes” to capture ideas generated by brainstorming, which are then clustered into groups with commonthemes. For example, leaders at Orion Research Center create spreadsheet diagram cutouts, which they call “star maps,” for each project in their pipeline, andthen experiment with ways of mapping these projects against their strategy Creating and rearranging these maps is a form of collaborative inquiry into the adequacy of their project portfolio as well as their strategy Outliers in the maps, forexample, sometimes point to holes in the strategy ripe for debate.

Various software tools allow mapping to be done on a shared digital display(Conklin, 2002; Kirschner, Shum, and Can; 2003; Selvin and others, 2001). Theadvantages of using software versus paper-based mapping include the ability toarchive and recycle information for future use and to translate the maps into Webpages and text reports.

Storymaking and Storytelling. Stories are ways of creating shared meaningaround some basic questions: Who are we? What happened and why? Who cares?Where are we going? (see Gargiulo, 2001; Simmons, 2000; Tichy, 1997). Storiesare good ways of supporting shared sensemaking across boundaries. Peter Orton,a manager at IBM and former Hollywood scriptwriter, explains why stories area powerful mechanism for teaching and learning: “Stories enhance attention, create anticipation, and increase retention. Stories use plot and character to generate conflict. They provide a familiar set of hooks that allow us to process theinformation that we hang on them. . a protagonist the audience can empathizewith, something important at stake, mountingjeopardy, a formidable antagonist”(Weil, 1998, pp. 38—39).

There are two basic kinds of stories to deliberately foster when a group conducts exploration for development: stories of the past and stories of the future.

Stories of the past deal with questions such as Who are we? What are we madeof? How and why are we here? The past provides templates for the present andfuture—but the templates first need to be made visible as stories. The assumptionsand perspectives of the past need to be honored but examined in fresh light.


Orion Research Center is a Pacific Rim organization whose one hundred employees speak thirty different languages or dialects. It turns out that, not surprisingly, many people on the leadership team did not know each other very well andwere reluctant to contribute from their own work and life experiences on leadership questions. So they spent some time telling stories about critical learning experiences. Afterward there was more willingness in the group to speak up withopinions and culturally based points of view.

A technique we often use that elicits quite powerful stories of the past ratherquickly follows these instructions: “Remember a situation or event with strong personal meaning that you experienced. Write the story in the present tense, from theperspective of a character or object within the situation other than yourself. Youhave just thirty minutes to write.” The writing technique that supports this processis calledfreewriting (Goldberg, 1986). Freewriting is a process for writing quicklyeven in the face of writer’s block. So we say, “Simply put your pen to paper, beginwriting, and continue writing without stopping or editing—even if all you writeat first is ‘I can’t think. . . I don’t know. . . this stinks. . . .‘ Forget about rules likespelling. You will be surprised to find gems of ideas amid the gravel. With thosegems as starting places, freewrite again: more gems, more gravel. Soon you willhave a great deal of material that you can edit into a story.” After freewriting, people tell their stories thus written. Almost always they are surprisingly compelling.The device of “through a character or object other than yourself” gives the writerimaginative license to take perspectives and make reflections that are otherwisedifficult to talk about.

Imaginative stories about possible futures are commonly known as scenarios(Schwartz, 1991; van der Heijden, 1996). They can be used in support of strategic planning and creating shared vision. The exploration for development framework suggests that when deliberately facing complex challenges, it is important forgroups and even whole communities to create their own scenarios.

Traditionally in organizations, only a few leaders imagined the future andturned those images into actions. In the face of complex challenges, the imaginations of a diverse array of people need to be tapped into. Tools for collaboratively making stories of the future are designed to involve more of the organizationin the process of leadership. In doing so, critical differences in assumptions andperspectives can be surfaced and examined, greater awareness of the forces forand against positive change is fostered, and metaphors and symbols standingfor a desirable future often emerge. Such stories then become a navigational aidfor moving together into the future.

There are a variety of ways to seed the material for the scenarios. It is important to have high input of both facts and imagination. There are a variety ofways to accomplish this. You can ask the group to write headlines about their project or organization as it might appear five years in the future. You might have a


number of industry experts, futurists, and mavericks talk to the group about trendsand possibilities.

According to futuristJohn Petersen (1997), president of the Arlington Institute, “wild cards” are potential future events or circumstances with very low probability but extremely high impact that could drastically alter the way we live, dobusiness, and think. As examples, Petersen lists human cloning, a large asteroidhitting the earth, and time travel. He believes that in the coming years, wild cardswill be more frequent and unexpected and that people who recognize and learnto make sense of them will have a real advantage. Petersen offers several wild cardquestions for leaders:

What are the most important wild cards for my organization,my customers, and me?

What would really wipe us out?

How can I anticipate these things?

What are the early indicators?

What can I do about my wild cards?

A technique we use to have groups create and explore scenarios using allthis variety of input is called moviemalcing. The “movie” is a wall-sized collage ofimages and words that tell an imaginative story about where an organization mightbe headed or how certain challenges might worsen or resolve “someday in a placenot too distant from here.” The movie goes into the middle of a dialogue aboutpossible futures as well as the nature of challenges currently being faced.

Engaging Artistry. Good leadership is infused with artistry An understanding ofthis has recently moved beyond simple truism to yield robust insights, applications(De Ciantis, 1995; Mintzberg, 1989; Richards, 1995; Vaill, 1989), and theoreticalframeworks (Edwards, 1986; Nissley, 2002). We have observed that shared sense-making is at least partly aesthetic in nature (Palus and Horth, 1996). Practicallyeveryone has some advanced capacity for the artistic aspect of shared sensemaking, but it tends to be expressed as what Booth (1997) calls “everyday art,” moreso than “fine art” or “genius art” (Bayles and Orland, 1993; Dewey, 1934). Thissort of everyday art can be a strong basis for the creative work needed to face complex challenges.

In our own research and practice, we have spent considerable time with professionals, technologists, managers, and leaders—that is, artists of many descriptions. Here are some rules we have gleaned from them about engaging people’sartistry:


• Creative potential increases when borders are crossed. Many artists thrivenear the edge of chaotic borders. Others make their way by exploring niches infamiliar territory Artists make fresh connections.

• Art is social, “that solitary work we can only do together.” Most artists workin a context of intense connections to others, even if some phases of the work aresilent and solitary People are different, yet potentially complementary in their creative preferences.

• Artists are hot-wired to their passions. Call it your core, your genius, theMuse, inspiration, yearning, the Spirit, the live wire, or the uncensored source.Artists are connected to deeper wells, which they are seldom able to describe. Beware of uprooting your passion and replacing it with someone else’s, to paraphrasethe poet David Whyte (1996), beware of sleepwalking your way into someone else’slife and mistaking it for your own.

• Artists move in the direction of discomfort. Artists engage in creative destruction, both within themselves and in their communities. Bateson (1994) describes“the double rhythm of pattern violation and pattern creation in the arts that mustcharacterize any society undergoing change” (p. 224). Pattern violation can be incredibly disruptive; sugarcoating the dislocations of change is a shallow form of art.

• Artists practice the aesthetics of imperfection. Jazz musicians are adept attaking a mistake and building something interesting. Scientists have an “eye forthe awry” and capitalize on experiments gone wrong.

• Art can take you far, fast. To grasp complexity often means slowing downfor a bit, avoiding habitual shortcuts. But the reverse is also true: Art is hot. It strikesquickly Imagination flies. The practiced artist or group can work at a white heat,with a high level of aesthetic competence.

• Artists see with fresh eyes and help others do the same (Perkins, 1994). Afunction of art is to help oneself and others break habits of seeing, thereby seeingsomething as if it were new A corollary is that artists help people sustain improvedhabits of perception, seeing what has before been subtle or invisible.

Connectivity

Tools and techniques for connectivity are those that enrich the connections between entities within a system (individuals, teams, groups, or communities) asthe system engages with its complex challenges. The idea is to create connectivity among people that can serve as what Sally Helgesen (1995) calls a “web ofindusion,” a kind of flexible and evolving container for the complexities at hand.

Dialogue. Conversation is conducted atop layers of meaning. What people meanwhen they communicate, and what they think they understand of others, is both


enriched and confounded by unspoken assumptions and the private textures ofprior experiences. The more nonstandard and complex a topic is, the more confusion between organizational members is likely. When different people view thesame situation, they may start with different assumptions, pay attention to different things, and form different interpretations. Dialogue occurs when people are ableto temporarily suspend their certainties with each other, explore basic assumptions, and ask questions for which they do not already know the answers (Dixon,1998; Isaacs, 1999). Dialogue in this sense can be understood as “meaning flowing through” a comn±ted group of people (Bohm, 1996).

Dialogue is a form of skilled, searching, critical, supportive, open, and honestconversation that is sustained over time. It is not uncommon in high-performinggroups such as scientific research teams or championship athletic teams; however,we have observed that it is rare in business organizations. Dialogue is particularlyimportant in times of chaos and complexity because during these times organizations become more fragmented, and the fragments become disconnected. Thesefragments—split by function, role, geography, and culture—develop their ownpractices, languages, and assumptions. Specialization and focus are desirable, butleadership of the larger organization requires connection, awareness and appreciation of similarities and differences, and cultivation of shared understandings.These can be approached through dialogue.

Each group develops its own assortment of techniques and styles for engaging in dialogue. We encourage groups to experiment, improvise, and invent theirown forms of dialogue—and to call it what they want. Others have called it skilledconversation, leadership council, forum, vision sessions, town meetings, “open kimono meetings,” and Work Out (at GE). Effective dialogue incorporates feedbackfrom organization members about both the process and the results. It takes practice to ensure that dialogue does not slip down into “discussion by percussion”—the usual verbal sparring. The following are guidelines and suggestions for startinga dialogue.

• Designate a time. Opportune times for dialogue are group retreats or whena team faces a new challenge. Make explicit your intention to have a different kindof conversation. Set a start time and an end time for returning to conversationas usual.

• Create a space. Rearrange the space to rearrange behavior. If you skin the samechairs around the same table in the same room, you will have the same conversation. Sit in a circle without a table so that people can make eye contact without having to move. Not having a table decreases distance and enables the perception ofbody language.

• Agree to norms. Keep them simple. Post them. Agree to what kinds of information arising from the dialogue can be shared outside the room. If a norm is


broken, point out the violation and then decide whether to keep that norm orchange it.

• Consider using an outsidefacilitator The first few times a group tries to talk inthese new ways, having an experienced facilitator can be helpful. Dialogue can beuncomfortable at first; a facilitator can keep people from simply reverting to old,comfortable habits.

• Keep an open and curious mind. Examine conflicting or polarized points of viewthat arise during the dialogue. Ask questions to surface the facts, assumptions,and emotions surrounding the various views. Don’t smooth over differences; explore them.

• Respect silences and softer voices. Pauses in the talk, even long ones, can be constructive. At the same time, “quiet voices” should be given a chance to speak. “Inand out chairs” is a move that we find works well: the dominant voices (“you knowwho you are”) move their chairs one step back for ten or fifteen minutes while thequiet voices (“and you know who you are”) have their say

• Let one person speak at a time. Discourage interruptions, talking over others,and side conversations. Each speaker should have time to finish a thought.

• Remember the intent State the purpose of the dialogue at the beginning of thesession. Remind participants of this purpose if they stray. Check at the end to seeif the intent was realized, and if not, determine why not.

• Balance advocacy and inquiry. Statements of advocacy and opinion should bebalanced with searching questions. Sometimes it is effective to ask the group as awhole to alternate opinions and questions.

• Affirm everyone’s personal competence. Disagree with ideas, not people. Create anenviromnent in which people feel secure expressing unpopular thoughts.

• Practice loyal skepticism. Treat all points of view as hypotheses open to testing.Cynicism is poisonous, but doubt combined with commitment is healthy. At thesame time, skepticism should not be used to undermine the inquiry One managerwe worked with expressed healthy skepticism with a simple statement: “Not proven, but carry on.”

• I.egithnize intuition and emotion. Hunches are valid. So are “what if” excursionsof thought. Passion for the issues is positive. Interpersonal conflict should be acknowledged but taken ofiline.

• Express chains of reasoning. Inquire about the explicit reasoning that leadssomeone from the data to a conclusion.

• Avoid the mechanics of problem solving. Moving too quickly to problem solvingand the giving of prescriptive advice are frequently symptoms of running awayfrom the root issues.

• Build shared meaning As the dialogue continues, try to integrate the various pointsof view into meaningftil wholes. Often someone who stands apart from two opposing points of view is able to glimpse their synthesis. Sometimes the integration first


appears in terms of an image or metaphor or a vision of how things could lookin the future.

• Shift attention. Look at things from unusual perspectives. Pay attention to theperiphery (Gryskiewicz, 1999). Pay attention to what is missing. Pay attention tothe weak signals (Brown and Duguid, 2000).

• Provide positive turbulence. rnvite the occasional guest in to stir the pot—a customer, partner, or someone with a radical point of view

• Debñef the dialogue. Spend five minutes or so reflecting on how well the normswere kept, whether the process needs changing, and so forth.

• Consider appointing a group reporter. A nonparticipant reporter can be asked totake notes during the dialogue and write them up afterward. Make sure the groupagrees to this first, however; individuals must have veto power over the recordingand dissemination of their comments.

• Continue the dialogue over time. Reconvene on a regular basis. Improve theprocess. Assess the dialogue for progress on shared understanding of the challenges at hand. Supplement face-to-face dialogue with electronic forums such ase-mail, listservs, and intranet discussion rooms.

“Putting something in the middle” is a powerthl way to learn dialogue and in-crease its effectiveness. The technique is simple: you place a tangible object in themiddle of your group and focus dialogue on it. The object may stand for an ideabut is something you can actually look at and touch. Objects we have used in ourwork include a video of a visit to a customer site, Visual Explorer images, a product prototype, a Web she projected on a large screen, and a competitor’s product.

Why an object? Objects focus attention in a positive way. By describing theirobservations of an object rather than an abstraction, people become less polarized and argumentative. Objects also help people make personal connections.They provide images and invite metaphors and stories. They can be appreciated,played with, recrafted. The object “in the middle” becomes a symbolic vessel forholding the truths spoken by the group and transforms these into a collectivemeaning. Because the objects serve as media, we call this mediated dialogue (Palus andDrath, 2001). Techniques in this chapter that support mediated dialogue includeVisual Explorer, collage, and moviemalting.

Dialogue can be risky if people are not prepared for it. For example, lack ofmutual trust can result in heightened cynicism or abuse of openly shared feelings.Favorable conditions before conducting dialogue include the following:

• Prior team building with a self-and-others awareness component.• Leadership development as individuals and as a group.• The cultivation of well-founded trust.


• Analytical knowledge.• Immersion in high-quality data appropriate to the challenge.• A voiced challenge—the articulation of a shared and compelling challenge and

the sense that it maybe complex or chaotic.• Maturity—if the group on the whole is emotionally young, then it is important

that at least several of the members are mature and confident enough to serveas role models and anchor points.

After the dialogue, the following actions are beneficial:

Come to explicit closure, If closure on the issues is not possible, be explicit abouthow you will continue to address them within or outside of the dialogue process.

• Thk.e action based on the meaning the group creates. If the entire process ends withno tangible outcomes, your group may feel cynical—even though it may well bebeneficial to defer action until considerable exploration of the issues has been accomplished.

• Communicate salient parts of’ the dialogue to constituencies. Beware of the appearance of being an elite group meeting secretly. But don’t violate the trust of the groupby going public with information and opinions expressed under assumptions ofconfidentiality

Building Networks. Notable challenges in many organizations have to do withforming relationships across boundaries—of functions, cultures, nations, locations,merged entities, and so on. It can be hard to connect with other people. Digitalmeans of connection do facilitate certain kinds of connection across boundaries,and improvement in their use is a positive part of this story; but digital toolshave proved insufficient by themselves and even to stand in the way of trustful andopen relationships. Fragmentation in relationships means fragmentation of connectivity

Strengthening the web of interpersonal relationships across boundaries iscalled networking. No longerjust an individual concern, building an organizationalcapacity for successful networking is a way of building connected leadership. Thissort of capacity is built by actually designing repeated opportunities for boundary-spanning, dialogue-rich relationships into and around the work of the organization. A result of this kind of purposeful boundary-spanning networking can be a“web of inclusion” (Helgesen, 1995) in which leadership may emerge wherever itis needed in the network (Barabasi, 2002).

We worked with a group of peers in a division that had recently been involvedin a merger. Most of these directors were near-strangers to each other at the outset of the program. One of the objectives was to network people around shared


challenges they faced. Near the end of the program we conducted a “networkingfair.” Each person covered an easel sheet with his or her name, an updated thailenge statement, a list of capabilities and resources the person could offer peers inthe program, and a list of capabilities and resources the person might like to borrow from peers in facing and solving their mutual challenges. These sheets wereposted on the wall. The group then spent about an hour networking amid thisgallery, offering help, soliciting advice, writing their names as resources next toneeds they might be able to fill, and generally building on the relationships startedin the prior two days.

Sharing Powerful Questions. An important shift for leaders in recent years hasbeen to broaden their role of answer finder to include that of question asker. Onemanager we worked with said, “For a long time, my whole frame of reference wasthat I had to have all the answers. Now I’m finding out that it’s better to havethe good questions.” The next big shift is to move an inquiry mind-set into the organization at large.

How groups ask and answer questions together says a lot about how theyare connected to each other and how well these connections function. Broaderparticipation in leadership means inviting powerful questions from more peoplein the organization, as well as from customers, partners, competitors, and evenchance encounters on the fringes of your usual business (Gryskiewicz, 1999).

Powerful questions typically have three characteristics: they invite exploration,they resist easy answers, and they provoke strong passions.

• Powerfisl questions invite exploration. They pull attention to unnoticed places.Powerful questions aim at the root of assumptions. Asking such questions can disrupt perceptual shortcuts to help people notice details, patterns, or movementsthat they have overlooked.

• Powerfil questions resist easy answers. They slow down people’s attention at cmcial times so that they notice more. Such questions do not seek a final answer immediately but resonate over time in a way that feeds collaborative inquiry

• Powerful questions can callforth passionate responses. They invite attention throughour emotions. Heartfelt questions that take time to answer fully are at the core oflearning communities.

As a community or organization, the key is to create contexts that invite andsupport both asking and responding to powerfUl questions. We see this being donein a variety of ways, including strategy retreats, peer coaching sessions, conversations with invited controversial experts, and impromptu brainstorming meetings. It can also be as simple as consistently asking, “Where could our work get


blindsided?” and consistently listening to the responses as well as the negativespaces in the responses. One leader we know keeps a short list of the best, mostprovocative questions his team is grappling with and refers to these questions toget things moving when thinking gets stuck. It has become a point of honor on histeam to be the first to pose a question that makes this list.

Here are some examples of powerful questions:

What are the patterns?

What is interesting, unique, beautiful, or unusual about this?

What is one hope we have going into this? What is one fear we have goinginto this?

What does our intuition tell us?

What is a metaphor for this?

What is the story behind this?

What questions are we neglecting to ask? What are we missing? What couldblindside us?

How would a Martian describe this?

What if we deliberately tried to make this problem worse?

What would be the negatives if our dream came true? What would be thepositives if we failed?

Navigation

In this section, we look at tools and techniques for developing the third capabilityof the exploration for development framework, navigation. We examine severaluseful domains of research and practice on the topics of creative problem solving, experiential learning, and action learning. Let’s look at how these can be usedwithin the broader objectives of resolving complex challenges and developing leadership at the community level.

Creative Problem Solving. At the messy day-to-day level of complexity, work (likethe rest of life) is a tangle of problems in need of creative solutions. There is adanger, as we have discussed, of being trapped in technical problems, one at atime, and missing the leadership implications. Nonetheless, we have found greatvalue for navigating messy landscapes of related problems in a set of theories andpractices known as creative problem solving (CPS). CPS is ultimately based in theOsborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Model (Osborn, 1953; Parnes, 1992).


Creative problem solving embraces a set of useful principles, namely:

• All people have creative ability probably much more than they think.• Widely varying types of creative ability are nonetheless complementary• Creative problem solving consists of cycles of divergence (casting a wide net)

and convergence (judging and focusing).

The basic model has six steps, each of which has a divergent phase and a convergent phase:

1. Messfinding—looking at the “mess” of interrelated issues and opportunities2. Factfindizg—exploring knowns and unknowns and looking for missing or needed

information3. Problemfinding—identifying a specific problem on which to focus4. Ideafinding—generating diverse ideas relating to the problem5. Solutionftnding—converging on a subset of ideas in preparation for synthesiz

ing them into potentially useful solutions6. Actionfinding—generating and refining action steps through acceptance and

into implementation

Brainstorming, the nonjudgmental generation of a copious number and variety of ideas, is a standard tool of CPS. Often misused and then maligned, it ismost effective when coupled with convergent techniques in the context of the restof the model.

Another useful CPS-based technique is refiaming. Reframing means asking,“Have we drawn the right boundary (frame) around this challenge or problem? Arewe solving the right problem? What is the most advantageous way to frame this challenge?” People frequently spend enormous energy trying to solve the wrong prob1cm. Facing complexity is partly a matter of applying a variety of frames: zoomingin, zooming out, seeing this aspect or that aspect, and tying the smaller frames intoa larger one. Some leaders have told us that the problematic part of their challenge “disappeared” upon shifting frames—what seemed to be an intractable problem was rendered either insignificant or temporary when placed in a different frame.

Here are basic steps we suggest in conducting reframing as part of small groupdialogues. First, brainstorm alternative challenge statements. Use invitational question stems such as “How should we.. . ?“ or “In what ways might we ... ?“ Theoffer of new challenge statements is a staccato conversation in which new perceptions and assumptions emerge about what the “real” problem is. The groupwill move toward consensus, selecting what participants view as the most advan


tageous one. One technique for isolating the refrained statement is for the groupto gradually eliminate candidate statements, first by finding statements thatrephrase or are covered by other statements. Some statements may be set aside ascriteria or metrics (‘We will know we have resolved the challenge when these statements are true”). At this point, realpolitik kicks in: Is someone in charge of addressing the challenge? If so, this person may well have the final vote. Are there anumber of constituencies? Can they agree to one refrained statement?

Two important lessons for the leadership capability of navigating are to belearned from creative problem solving. The first is that challenges shift as you workon them and gain new insights. Working on challenges is a series of iterations andapproximations. Don’t work forever solving what turns out to be the wrong problem. The second lesson is that divergence of thinking and acting usefully followsconvergence, and vice versa.

Challenges have a social landscape—”owners” of the various subproblems,champions, constituencies, and so on—that also must be mapped and navigated.

Experiential Learning. Successfully learning from experience, as well as learninghow to learn from experience, is an important part of navigating complex challenges and, more broadly, human development (Bunker and Webb, 1992). Thereare many useful approaches and models for helping people individually and collectively learn how to learn in complex situations.

One model we have found to be especially helpful in designing challenge-based learning experiences is Bernice McCarthy’s 4MAT learning model (McCarthy and Keene, 1996; see Table 15.1), which is in turn based in David KoIb’sexperiential learning cycle (1984). Four of the 4MAT steps invoke L-mode cognition, and four invoke R-mode cognition. L-mode is that part of thinking relatedto language, logic, sequential analysis, and stepping back from the flow of experience. R-modc is related to patterns (rather than symbols), nonverbal intuition,emotional and physical intelligence, and being immersed in the flow of direct experience (Springer and Deutsch, 1981). Both modes need to work in an integratedway for people to experience optimal learning. L-mode is typically dominant whenorgathatiom solve technical challenges. The developmental work in facing complexity thus often lies in surfacing and integrating the R-mode among leaders andleadership processes (Mintzberg, 1989). Visual sensemaldng, for example, is heavily R-mode-oriented.

Consider the cycles of experiential learning in the Orion case introduced atthe beginning of this chapter. This team of scientists and technologists had the taskof picking “winners”—high-return projects that matched corporate strategy andcapabilities. Strategic planning was integrated into the company’s community of


TABLE 15,1. THE 4MAT LEARNING CYCLE.

PrimaryStep Mode Description

1. Connect R Make personal connections to the challenge by tappinginto direct personal experience and by focusing andsustaining attention in a gut-level, intimate, andintuitive way.

2. Reflect L Step back and analyze what you see and the connectionsyou have made.

3. Image R Create and explore images (metaphors, stories, pictures,scenarios) of the challenge based on your connectionsand reflections. Imagine future desirable states and thepaths for getting there.

4. Conceptualize L Build (or borrow) and apply formal conceptualframeworks. Convert the metaphors to formal models.

5. Practice L Test the conceptual frameworks in a logical way.

6. Extend R Modify the frameworks and extend them into newrealms by making imaginative connections, playfulmodifications, and intuitive leaps. This is the startof internalizing the new conceptual framework.

7. Refine L Refine the new knowledge by analyzing, assessing,critiquing, tightening, and formally expressing whathas been learned.

8. Integrate R Incorporate the new knowledge into the broader systemsof collective knowledge and practices (the organization)and personal knowledge and practices (self-identity).

Now repeat the cycle The 4MAT cycle keeps repeating. It works simultaneouslystarting at 1 with this at different scales. It may, for example, be completednew level of during a single meeting for one aspect of a challengeintegration, while taking a year for the whole of the challenge.

Note: For more information about 4MAT, go to http://www.aboutlearning.com

practice by inventing its own method of strategic mapping. Integration of thismethod into company practice started a round of fresh observation of the environment using the new, malleable “star maps” as foils to be revised in light ofnew learning. Documented results of these and related efforts included the halving of product development cycle time, a substantial increase in the value of completed projects, and a measured improvement in the climate for creative work.

What worked? Their deliberate practice of it-mode aspects of learning wasone key (see Table 15.1). Some members of the Orion team remarked that theyknew the value of it-mode from their work as inventive scientists, and this famil

ExploraUon for Development 461

iarity helped them use it in their work as strategists. Also, some team members sawtheir shared work at Orion as overwhelmingly analytical in nature but still welcomed it-mode for its complementary value, in what one called “a welcomesynergy between science and artistry”

Of course, they had heard about R-mode, artistry and shared sensemakingfrom us in a customized leadership development program we did collaborativelywith them. Then they went back to work and uniquely adapted salient aspects ofthat experience to their strategy process. Thus they navigated their challenges byusing the latter four steps of the 4MAT experiential learning cycle (see Table 15.1):testing and practicing; exploring and extending into new realms, analytical critiquesand refinements, and integration of all kinds of new learnings into what they called“the big picture.” The team members most acutely felt the leadership ramificationsin their discernment of this big picture. What, for them, was in this picture? Theirown culture, their corporate identity their whole strategic portfolio of projects andresources, the picture of the changing markets, their own changing careers, andeven, as a constant shade in the picture, their love of science.

Action Learning. Action learning is a set of organization development practicesin which supported groups tackle important real-work projects with three kinds ofobjectives: delivering measurable results in service of the organization’s work,learning and communicating lessons specific to a particular context, and developing individual and collective capabilities for learning and leadership more generally. The impressively broad scale of action learning usefully ranges from tacit,unfacilitated learning at work to focused and facilitated high-impact learning proj..ects (including deliberately learning how to learn from experience and experiment)to transformations of people and organizations (Marsick, 2002). As a set of navigational tools, action learning taps the transformative possibilities inherent in thecomplex challenges now on the table. Action learning uses deliberate experimentscoupled with reflection to facilitate moving from “where we are” to “where we aregoing.” Action learning methodologies are well documented in theory and practice and are still evolving (see, for example, Argyris and Schon, 1978; Dotlich andNoel, 1998; Pedler, 1997; Revans, 1982; Rohlin, Billing, Lindberg, and ~Nickelgren, 2002).

Let’s look at four important aspects of a facilitated action learning initiative—challenge, sponsorship, coaching, and integration—by continuing with the caseof peers at Telco, who formed action learning teams during their leadership development program.

Exploration for development calls for the direct engagement of complex challenges rather than staying at the level of technical problems. The program at Telcospent time exploring the complex challenges the participants faced individuallyand collectively, including the current perspectives of the company’s president.


Out of their own critical synthesis and mapping of the challenges, the programparticipants self-selected into teams, each focused on a project that was both practical and linked to higher-order challenges related to postmerger integration.

The participants were motivated by the potential to initiate profound changesin the ways they did their work. Any smaller challenge they denigrated as make-work in their already too-busy work lives. Each team was sponsored by a memberof the senior leadership team of the division. The sponsor’s role was to guide theteam and provide cover and feedback as members got out of their usual rolesand started crossing boundaries within the company. Each team had a CCL coach,who helped as needed with issues as they emerged, including everything from basicteam building to thinking through the political ramifications of the participants’activities. A main task of coaching, especially at first, was to help the team balanceits action orientation with reflection in order to facilitate learning. Each team mitially had two months to pursue the project before reporting its findings and resultsface-to-face to the senior leadership team of the division. The senior team triedto assimilate the most compelling of these findings into the work of the division.

The fullest use of action learning, however, is possible only with further integration of learning activities and strategic leadership initiatives. A powerfulquestion for Telco is therefore “How can we make the peer network of directorsan ongoing, strategic learning resource, rather than constraining it to special eventslike this leadership program?”

Cautions

Exploration for development is no silver bullet. In this or any form of humandevelopment there are pitfalls. Here is a summary of the main cautions we offer.

Exploration for development can degrade to merely unearthing problemsand placing blame. A fix-it mentality will preserve the status quo rather than transform it. A relentless focus on problems may yield short-term operational results,but it will stifle leadership development. An overly problem-focused mentality canbe balanced by attention, dialogue, and inquiry into the strengths and dreams heldin common within the organization (Cooperrider and Srivastva, 1987).

Organizations are full of things that are rarely discussed in public: uncomfortable truths, deep-rooted conflict, maverick points of view Chris Argyris (1990)calls these “undiscussables.” People can interpret powerful questions as betrayalif there is not an honest commitment to open inquiry. It is too easy to interpretconcern as resistance and doubt as betrayal. Protect the people who are payingattention and courting dialogue. Create safe places and methods to explore divergent perceptions.


resolving these specific challenges, appropriate transformations of the organization itself; and the development of new leadership capabilities at the communitylevel. Exploration for development cultivates and applies three specific leadershipcapabilities: shared sensemaking, connectivit~ç and navigation. Exploration for development at its best enables a community-based artistry of leadership by coupling the analytical powers of an organization to its latent powers of synthesis andintegration.

exploration for development

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