5. THE RED BOOK
LEADERS HAVE TO DEVELOP A NEW COGNITIVE CAPABILITY – THE CAPACITY TO SENSE AND ACTUALIZE EMERGING FUTURES.
– The Red Book
The Red Book was written early in May 2000, just after the Alliance Lab had concluded. It is the first published paper documenting the uncovering and development of the U-process. Writing this paper, like conducting the interview process and leading the first Lab, was a time of enormous excitement and opening for me. The very fact of gathering, organizing, and documenting the essence of our work over the past year was an act of deep devotion.
During the entire design process, after the meeting with Brian at Xerox PARC, Otto and I must have had a hundred conversations in coffee houses all over the country as we completed our interviews. During those hours of conversation, we would remain in deep dialogue about every word that would be inserted around the U figure; the guiding principles behind each element of the U; and what the process as a whole could mean for society. We considered the implications for leadership generally and for organizational leadership in particular.
Throughout those months, we spoke often of the lessons learned and chronicled in Synchronicity; how those lessons about sensing and actualizing emerging futures provided a foundation for our current work; and how we had, in fact, been living that very process while uncovering the balance of the knowledge needed to complete the circle. In these conversations, the field present during the dialogue with Brian was also present with us and enabled us to continue to learn at a deeper level. We were living the process as we created it.
We saw we were helping to give birth to something fragile and new, something that must be nurtured and cared for from the depths of our being. I recalled what I had learned from Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving about the elements of love: care, which is the active concern for the life and development of the one we love; responsibility, which is the caring for the loved one’s physical needs as well as the loved one’s higher needs; and respect, which is allowing the loved one to grow as they need to, on their own terms. Above all, to love this way must be our supreme concern. I prayed that I would always devote this quality of concern for what we were being asked to develop and grow.
It was in this state of intensely focused creativity that we wrote The Red Book. It took only a week to draft. In its final form, the paper is about fifty pages long. As I look back over what we wrote ten years ago, I see we were, ourselves, sensing the vital nature of the gift we had been given:
We live in a time of profound change. Leaders across the globe are wrestling with similar challenges in a world that is becoming increasingly unfamiliar. In order to succeed in such an environment, leaders have to develop a new cognitive capability – the capacity to sense and actualize emerging futures. This capacity constitutes a new form of knowledge creation. For organizations, it also poses a fundamental question: How can this capacity be reliably reproduced or applied, particularly in larger organizations and institutions … ? The answer to this question will constitute the core process around which organizations, industries, and institutions will organize their activities in the future.
At the same time, we acknowledged that many mysteries surrounded the whole process. Chief among them, for me, was: What happens at the “bottom” of the U?
We hardly know how to begin to describe this process, to give voice to its essence. In what domain does it reside? Is it simply about knowledge creation? Is it about the formation of awareness and will? Is it about mobilizing collective energy, will, and action? Is it all of these? What are the fundamental activities and stages of the process? And what are the qualities that enable this process to take place? The more we probe into the deeper questions of leadership in the context of the emerging new world, the more we realize how little we really know, in terms of actionable knowledge.
We acknowledged that the paper represented only a first effort to respond to an enormously important and complex set of questions, that we were exploring vast frontiers of human knowledge, and that whatever we said in the paper was only a beginning. We said, however, that we believed we had identified at least some of the critical components that would represent an answer to at least some of these questions.
We also wrote that we believed the essence of the new leadership would involve building three types of organizational spaces outlined in the design of the laboratory. These spaces enable entrepreneurial leaders to move through all three stages of observing (connecting to the world outside), going to that place of deeper knowing (connecting to the world within), and enacting (bringing forth new ventures and new realities) as aspects of a single core process of large-scale innovation and change.
We concluded:
In moving through these three spaces and stages, leaders and communities of leaders become the vehicle and conduit through which this emerging new dynamic becomes reality. This is the way true innovators have always worked. Placing these principles and processes at the heart of organizing in the future would revolutionize business, social architectures, and society as a whole.
It would be over eight years later, after three experiments applying the process at scale, that I would begin to understand how delicate the process actually was – and how much hard work, sacrifice, and selflessness were required to enable a team to reliably deliver on its promise. I did not yet understand the depth of preparation required for those leading and participating in the process.
Soon after completing The Red Book, we decided to hold a “salon” – a three-day dialogue to explore the implications of all we had uncovered and to consider next steps. Peter Senge and Otto had been involved in a global interview project with twenty-five “Thinkers of Knowledge and Leadership” sponsored jointly by McKinsey & Company and SoL. Our Alliance interview project overlapped and dovetailed with the McKinsey/SoL project. Peter and Otto shared the progress of their project regularly with Michael Jung and Jonathan Day, the two McKinsey partners acting as sponsors for their project and who, themselves, were in the midst of exploring the further reaches of generative leadership. This salon would be a perfect opportunity to learn from them and to establish guiding principles, or “rules for the road,” for the next stage of development of the U-process – employing it in more diverse applications.
In addition to the two McKinsey partners, we decided to invite Brian Arthur and Ikujiro Nonaka, whom Otto had interviewed earlier, to the salon. Nonaka was highly respected within US management circles. His work first became known through an influential Harvard Business Review article titled “The New Product Development Game,” coauthored with Hirotaka Takeuchi, who is dean emeritus of the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University and a professor at Harvard Business School.
The article, Nonaka’s first to explore organizational knowledge creation, was followed in 1991 with another Takeuchi-coauthored HBR article, “The Knowledge-Creating Company.” Their 1995 book, The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation, laid out a comprehensive theory of the development of collective intellectual capability. By 2000, Nonaka was becoming known as “the father of knowledge management.” His research over the years had opened up an entirely new field that intersected directly with all that I had been exploring since the establishment of the American Leadership Forum in the 1980s.
As it turned out, these three days with Brian and Nonaka were instrumental in my subsequent resolutions of many of the remaining mysteries surrounding the U. During one of the breaks, Nonaka and I had a long conversation about his work, particularly his notions of tacit knowing, based on the work of a highly respected physical chemist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, who argued that human beings create breakthrough knowledge through what he called “indwelling,” resulting in sudden illumination.
That conversation planted the seeds that – along with the help of my partner, Kazimierz (Kaz) Gozdz – enabled my later understanding of the enigma lying at the bottom of the U.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the salon also marked the beginning of the divergence of my work from Otto’s – ironically, because of a transcript of an interview Otto had conducted with Eleanor Rosch, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of California in Berkeley and coauthor, along with Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson, of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. I began to read Rosch’s work and discovered that what she calls “primary knowing” was a profound description of experiencing connection with the Source at the bottom of the U.
Rosch said that primary knowing arises “by means of interconnected wholes (rather than isolated contingent parts) and by means of timeless, direct presentation (rather than through stored representations):
Such knowing is “open” rather than determinate; and a sense of unconditional value, rather than conditional usefulness, is an inherent part of the act of knowing itself. Action from awareness is claimed to be spontaneous, rather than the result of decision making; it is compassionate since it is based on wholes larger than the self; and it can be shockingly effective.
From that moment, I was consumed with a passion to explore what I began to call “the bottom of the U” while Otto began his development of what he called “Theory U.” It was this passion that led me to open the salon by telling about the Waco tornado and all the other experiences of dialogue with what I now call “the Source.”
At dinner that first night of the salon, just as I sat down next to Brian, he turned to me and said, “You need to come to Baja, Mexico, in February to join John Milton and me on a two-week Sacred Passage.” His words were not so much an inquiry or invitation as an instruction.
Years later, Brian told me he had been surprised to hear himself saying this – that his “invitation” came out of nowhere, without conscious forethought or even without the sense of “me” doing it. I had a similar experience in response – without even thinking or checking my calendar, I replied, “I’ll be there.”