EIGHT
Transforming Meetings, Teams, and Organizations

In Chapters 4 through 7, we have been talking about taking an action inquiry approach to transforming the action-logics guiding our own practice. Of course, our own practice in an organization involves us with other co-workers, so a large part of what we have discussed so far has concerned how to diagnose colleagues as well as ourselves and how to experiment with acting differently with our superiors and subordinates. But the focus has fallen consistently on how each of us can improve our own practice through action inquiry.

In this section of the book, we shift our focus to the questions of how to lead teams and organizations through developmental transformations. This shift in focus is subtle but important because we are not shifting the focus away from the individual to the group and we are not shifting the focus simply because we think it’s a good idea to cover these topics. We are shifting the focus to the group and organizational scales because that is what you and any other individual who goes very far in your own practice of action inquiry will want and need to do. In fact, as we have seen in a general way at the end of Chapter 7, Strategist CEOs become highly effective at leading organizational transformation, in part because they are less attached to their own frames and, therefore, more aware of how people, organizations, and societies journey through different frames and action-logics over time.

In other words, by turning to the development of learning teams, learning organizations, and the learning society, we are continuing to focus on how you, the individual, can conduct action inquiry. But now the arena of your action inquiry can begin to expand beyond your exercise of leadership in changing your own practice to include your exercise of leadership in transforming a group’s or organization’s practice. You begin to appreciate how people and organizations are either transforming toward greater integrity, mutuality, and sustainability or not. As you become increasingly aware of incongruities among your (or their) principles and your (or their) practice, you become increasingly committed to the moment-to-moment action inquiry of reentering the four territories of experience whether on the personal, the team, or the organizational level. Through observing the many points of view and action-logics at work in any given situation, you cease to cling to your own initial point of view.122

Just as people who evolve toward the later action-logics become more and more skilled at exercising action inquiry in the present, so also groups and organizations can be helped to transform toward becoming “learning organizations.” Learning organizations, like the Strategist at the individual level, intentionally and explicitly seek out single- and double-, and, eventually, triple-loop feedback and change. But, just as the movement to the postconventional action-logics is no simple, onetime transfer for a person, the same is true for organizations. Multiple transformations are necessary before an organization’s action-logic intentionally supports the personal transformation of its own members, as well as the ongoing transformation of its teams, its new divisions, its strategic partnerships, and so on.

Moreover, there is a sense in which organizational transformation is more fragile than personal transformation. Short of an extraordinary accident or illness, individual persons tend to maintain an action-logic once they win through to it. But an organization’s board can oust its CEO and senior management team, or sell the company to a competitor. In such cases, the governing action-logic of the organization may regress virtually overnight. (Strategic mergers can also be intended to help the core organization transform culturally in a progressive developmental direction, as in the case of Carly Fiorina’s HP/Compaq merger, but progressive transformation requires more than one night!)

In learning organizations, openness to questioning exists, assumptions are tested, seeming mistakes are rarely punished but are a basis for further learning, new knowledge is shared, and new knowledge is gained collaboratively. In short, inquiry, and specifically developmental action inquiry, becomes an activity of the organization. Sometimes, this begins with a small group of inquirers operating within a larger organization that is not initially friendly to this open-ended learning process. We have seen a number of cases where these “learning cells” (sometimes no more than three people meeting for lunch every other week) have come in time to influence the larger organization. (What organizational institutions support collaborative inquiry in very large organizations is a major mystery that the world as a whole faces today. The U.S. Constitution, with its supposed “balance of powers” among a principled, reflective branch [the judiciary], a diverse, proposing branch [the congress], and an action-oriented, performing branch [the executive], is a rare example of a large and long-lasting organized collaborative inquiry.)123

One of the largest organizations in the world began from the humble beginning of a small group of devoted inquirers. We are referring to Alcoholics Anonymous and all the other 12-step groups that the AA approach has since spawned. Alcoholics Anonymous began as a conversation between two people who wished to change their behavior.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a learning organization in the sense that it supports individual people in reforming their lives when they are down and out. It is a good example of a learning organization in that it demonstrates how eager the individual member must be for transformation in order for developmental change to occur. Granted, we cannot directly generalize from Alcoholics Anonymous to the organizational situations most of us inhabit at work and in our leisure. We rarely inhabit organizations where everyone shares the same intense motivation to transform in a particular direction, and where there is no other order of business but personal transformation.

We also recognize that Alcoholics Anonymous is not focused on organizational learning and transformation—on creating a learning organization—but, rather, on individual learning and transformation. However, this very mission made its early leadership extraordinarily vigilant in guarding against bureaucratization as it grew. So, for our present purposes, the example of Alcoholics Anonymous is very useful as a pointer toward a kind of organizing that encourages both personal and organizational transformations along the path toward personal development and a learning organization. Indeed, Alcoholics Anonymous exemplifies the Social-Network type of organization that parallels the Individualist frame at the personal scale (see Table 8-1). Like a large international conglomerate that allows its subsidiaries to retain their corporate identities and individual strategies, Alcoholics Anonymous allows its thousands upon thousands of separate meeting places wide autonomy.

More generally, the key to effectual action inquiry, as we have so far described it, is developing a personal attention and interpersonal conversations that interweave the four territories of experience. In the same way, becoming a learning organization entails interweaving action and inquiry throughout the four territories of organizational experience: visioning, strategizing, performing, and assessing. Some readers will remember SAS airlines, vision/motto “Moments of Truth.” “Moments of Truth” meant that the presence and openness to inquiry of all SAS personnel in each live encounter with a customer or colleague determined whether the encounter was successful and effective. This vision potentially generated triple-loop feedback for its employees, transforming their attention each time they remembered it as they interacted with the public.124

In the realm of strategy, for many years 3M set a strategy of increasing a division’s funding if it increased the percentage of its return on investment from recent innovations. This approach made 3M a hub for combining inquiry and action in productive innovation. At the operational level, the case of a small software company that we examine in Chapter 9 will illustrate how meetings can simultaneously encourage frank inquiry and dialogue along with decisiveness. Finally, assessment processes such as 360-degree performance feedback, or triple bottom-line measures of companies’ financial, social, and environmental effects, document personal and organizational outcomes in complex, diverse ways that support single-, double-, and triple-loop inquiry and change, and, thus, sustainable improvements in productivity.

Our question is, how does any particular organization evolve to the point of interweaving action and inquiry across all four territories of visioning, strategizing, performing, and assessing?

Parallels Between Personal and Organizational Development

In answer to this question, we present in this chapter a way of understanding organizational development as a sequence of transforming action-logics, analogous to personal development. As with individual persons, a given action-logic may characterize a given meeting or project, or a whole organization over many years. Within the overall organization, particular projects or divisions may represent leading or lagging developmental tendencies. Similarly, your own department or a team or task force may transform from one stage of development to another during a single meeting or over the course of several meetings.

Table 8-1 indicates how the two theories of development at the individual and the organizational scale are directly analogous to one another. (You will note that we show an early childhood action-logic—the Impulsive—that we did not mention in earlier chapters, since we found no managers in our large samples at either of these.) Table 8-2 describes the unique characteristics of the first seven organizational development action-logics in a little more detail. (We defer discussion of the eighth action-logic at both the personal and organizational scales until Chapters 12 and 13.)125

Now we offer a few comments on each stage, in order to highlight the personal–organizational parallels in Table 8-1. Then, we give some concrete illustrations of particular meetings and of whole organizations moving from one organizational action-logic to another.

Let us start with a brief comment on the parallel relationship between the Impulsive stage of personal development and the Conception stage of organizational development. Just as very young children are highly imaginative and express many impulses (e.g., to become an artist, or a nurse, or a professional athlete) that they do not necessarily follow up on in their later life, so do adults frequently fantasize with friends about organizations they would like to create (e.g., to market a baby stroller that can be folded up and would have made today’s visit to the city easier), but then do not necessarily follow up on. In retrospect, when one in every ten thousand or so such conversations eventually evolves into a major organization, as Alcoholics Anonymous did, the founding of the organization can be traced back to such incidental or passionate or calculating conversations.

The parallels between the next three personal and organizational development action-logics is less obvious. When we described the Opportunist, the Diplomat, and the Expert in Chapters 4 and 5, we were describing not children in the normal process of development but, rather, adults in organizations who are still motivated by relatively early action-logics. Therefore, we can see the rigidities and limitations in their effectiveness quite easily. By contrast, when we discuss organizations at these three early action-logics (in this chapter and in Chapter 9, see also Table 8-2), we describe them in their natural developmental process (i.e., in their “childhood”), so the positive attributes of each action-logic will be more obvious than its shortcomings (Investments, Incorporation, Experiments).

Let us now, therefore, track the similarities between people and organizations at each of these three action-logics. Both the 8- to 12-year-old child at the Opportunist action-logic and the organization at the parallel Investments action-logic seek resources from the environment and capabilities with which to manipulate the environment. At best, the child has a bike to learn to ride and parents who are also making inspirational and social network investments in him or her (e.g., offering the child support of some kind and exposure to good teachers). Similarly, wise organizational founders and wise venture capitalists will be concerned with the inspirational resonance and profundity of the organization’s mission and mentors, as well as the social, professional, and business alliances that can support the organization during its passage through the Investments action-logic. However, if the organizational founders are themselves still arrested at the Opportunistic action-logic of development, they will act as though tangible financial resources are the only significant investments needed. Such an organization may appear very successful in terms of financial backing in the short term, but the lack of network resources and inspiration will result in lower commitment by all stakeholders and will stunt its development in the longer term. Many dot-com companies with significant venture financing during the late 1990s never reached the break-even point.

Table 8-1 Parallels Between Personal and Organizational Developmental Action-Logics

Given some resources and natural abilities, a person who transforms to the Diplomat action-logic during the early teenage years and the organization that transforms to the equivalent Incorporation action-logic are both learning how to operate successfully according to the rules of their social milieus. We call these “peer groups” in the case of teenagers and “markets” in the case of for-profit companies. In both cases, there are many difficult moments, and neither the young teenager nor the young company may have the persistence to succeed. Or, both may lose their honor (sense of self-respect based on loyalty to a constructive mission) in their eagerness to conform to the demands of their milieu.128

Table 8-2 Characteristics of Each Organizational Developmental Action-Logic

Failure to meet the demands of the larger milieu may result in a person’s lifelong membership in a dependent and possibly illegitimate underclass. For example, a disproportionate percentage of people in jail measure as Opportunists. In the case of an organization at this stage, failure usually means outright economic failure or else a very contingent survival in a small local niche. Success in meeting the demands of the milieu at the price of one’s honor also has a significant dark side: it makes development to further stages much less likely.129

Chapter 8 Tabel 3

Young people who are able to break the (Diplomat) mold of their immediate social milieu (which sometimes happens by leaving home and high school peers for college) begin to seek out something more consistent to subordinate themselves to than the helter-skelter, conflicting demands of their significant others. They are seeking a more purposeful, skill-based way of organizing their lives and a more objective way of measuring their relative success at doing so. The teenager who says, “I like track better than soccer because in track you are measured by your actual time in the event, whereas in soccer it’s whether the coach likes you” is expressing her growing attraction to the Expert action-logic of doing well in terms of objectively measured standards and her rejection of the Diplomat stage logic of doing well what will gain another person’s approval.130

This movement from Diplomat to Expert action-logic parallels an organization’s movement from Incorporation to Experiments. The Expert’s experiments toward excellence in any given skill involve a series of semidisciplined stabs in the dark. An organization transforming toward the Experiments stage at best conducts such experiments in all realms of its business, from the way in which it conducts its accounting (typically moving from the cash to the accrual method at this point and from manual, paper records to computer systems), to the very fact of engaging in proactive marketing rather than simply servicing clients who come through the door.

Like people, organizations very often halt along the path to becoming learning organizations when they reach what could be transformational opportunities and challenges. Instead of transforming, they defend their current culture and structure and become rigid, lose their identity in a merger, or go out of business. Paradoxically, huge and highly successful companies, like Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), are as much subject to this threat as less successful ones, because successful companies are more likely to remain proudly identified with their current procedures. But each developmental transformation of a company’s culture requires learning the opposite skills from the previous action-logic. (For example, the odd-numbered organizational action-logics in Tables 8-1 and 8-2 demand relative centralization, whereas the even-numbered action-logics demand relative decentralization.) Thus, DEC exemplifies a company that, guided by its powerful, scientifically oriented, Achiever action-logic founder/CEO Ken Olsen, remained at the decentralized Experiments organizational action-logic even after it had become the second-largest computer company in the world and died for its loyalty to its principles (Schein 2003).

Understanding and Leading Meetings as Developmental Processes

We can view each new project or new product, each new team or task force, each new agenda item, meeting, or series of meetings as a developmental process. Microspirals of development in single meetings nest within wider project, departmental, and organizational cycles. To get a more lifelike picture of how even a single meeting can transform through several organizational action-logics, let’s listen to a top management team member of a Fortune 100 company who, without ever having thought of himself as using developmental theory, in fact manages team meetings in a manner that parallels the early stages of organizational development we have just been reviewing.

This senior vice president has an undergraduate mathematics background, with an interest in the Pythagorean theory of the octave as the organizing structure for color (the seven colors of the rainbow), for sound (the musical octave), and for human activities such as meetings (his own application). Of business meetings, he says (with our organizational action-logic names added in brackets):

He goes on to discuss the rest of the meeting octave and concludes:

This final paragraph of the executive’s vision of how meetings are best conducted illustrates the notion of overlapping or nested developmental processes that we mentioned earlier. You are welcome to compare back and forth between Table 8-2 and the executive’s description of each musical note in a well-run meeting to see to what degree they parallel one another. But our point is less that there is a perfectly precise parallel and more that this illustration brings to life the general sense of how a meeting can be viewed developmentally.

Imagine how much more interesting and productive business meetings in general would be if more executives were this creative in managing them!

Conclusion

The very brief references to well-known organizations offered in this chapter, along with the slightly more detailed notion of how to sequence a particular meeting that we have just examined, illustrate the parallel relationship that exists between personal and organizational development. In Chapter 9, we will look at several detailed examples of small companies transforming from one organizational action-logic to another. This examination will give us a more lifelike picture of these early organizational action-logics and of how an organization can transform from one to another. Gradually, we will begin to develop the capacity to read meetings, teams, and organizations developmentally, along with a sense for what kind of intervention at what time can play a catalytic leadership role in supporting organizational transformation.