38. SCAFFOLDING STAGE IV
ORGANIZATIONS

AS THE ORGANIZATION ADVANCES AND GROWS, CERTAIN CORE PRACTICES BEGIN TO DEFINE THE CULTURE OF THE ENTERPRISE, BECOMING ITS “WAY OF BEING.”

Our institutions are facing profound change and rising complexity, accelerating at a scale, intensity, and speed never experienced before. As the economic foundations of our world are transformed from more stable to dynamic patterns, the nature of leadership must change as well. To succeed in this new environment, institutional leadership must pay attention to the tacit Source of knowledge, the deep Source from which profound innovation occurs.

Organizations led by people with this quality of knowing, from line leaders to the very top, will flourish in the decades to come. Because of their success, they will become “living examples” of what is possible in the face of accelerating complexity and high turbulence. These Stage IV organizations will play a leading role in establishing a more comprehensive worldview, a belief system adequate for civilization to rise above the challenges of our time.

Those organizations advancing to Stage IV must develop core practices that inspire innovation and action and enable advanced decision-making, breakthrough strategy formation, operational excellence, and profound innovation. To develop such practices and use them successfully requires an organization to grow and develop through stages, just as humans do. Recall Lievegoed’s insight that the phases and the development of the human being are themselves an archetype for the development of organizations.

Organizations can be systematically developed through stages of maturity. The decision by the chief executive and the top management team to commit to Stage IV renewal is not dissimilar from the decision Polanyi describes in his structure of knowledge creation – the voyage of discovery the innovator in any field travels in the process of advancement of knowledge. It is a sacred undertaking on the part of the top team, driven by a sense of responsibility for advancing the growth of the organization’s capacity to flourish in the face of rising complexity and rapid change. This is a commitment to pursue a path of maturation that departs in a deep sense from what went before.

Developing a whole organization to a Stage IV level requires a number of actions:

• Focusing on the growth of the senior team and a critical mass of change leaders to demonstrate commitment and trigger multiplier effects.

• Refining and reaffirming the organization’s guiding ideas and basic assumptions (similar to those reflected in the Four Principles and the three features outlined in Chapter 36).

• Focusing on the critical three-to-five shifts needed to unlock the potential of the organization. Focusing first on a critical few elements gives coherence to the undertaking.

• Magnifying the positive attitudes, behaviors, and practices that already exist and facilitating an expanded view of individual and organizational potential to do more of those. Later-stage organizations have a greater capacity to self-correct and learn from their mistakes than do those in earlier stages of development.

• Cascading opportunities for personal growth and development throughout the organization.

The most critical principle for success is one less well known: scaffolding the organization’s developmental growth. The term “scaffolding” is associated with a Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, who used it to refer to structuring participation in learning encounters in order to foster a child’s emerging growth and development to reach his or her fullest potential as a mature human being. In organizations, scaffolding is the practice of matching employee development with operational work, providing a daily opportunity for business transactions to be used as a learning vehicle. Each operation and each transaction is performed with the consciousness and awareness accompanying the more comprehensive worldview embraced by the Four Principles.

Scaffolding is the infrastructure the organization establishes to ensure that each person is dedicated to teaching others what he or she has learned while at the same time learning something new from others. This is the method by which Stage IV practices become embedded in the fabric of the day-to-day life of the enterprise.

A changing quality of support takes place over time. A more skilled partner adjusts the assistance he or she provides to fit the other’s level of development and current level of performance. More support is offered when a task is new and less when the other’s development and competence increases, thereby encouraging the other’s autonomy and independent mastery.

The chief executive and the senior team develop the enterprise into a teaching and learning community, a system that matures everyone through daily work. Work becomes a pedagogy – the science of teaching. Kaz is a pioneer of this practice and calls this the “Nothing Extra” approach to developing a Stage IV organization.

As the organization advances and grows, certain core practices begin to define the culture of the enterprise, becoming its “way of being.” Every organization has its own culture – its pattern of shared basic assumptions, guiding ideas, operating principles, and core practices. When appropriately introduced and applied throughout the organization, these core elements enable the organization to perform at exceptional levels.

The seven core practices of the new U-process, which we call Generative Discovery, when performed with the worldview embraced by the Four Principles, are paramount:

1. Preparation: Undertaking a disciplined path of inner self-management.

2. Igniting Passion: Making a firm commitment to pursue the inquiry, being guided by the intensely personal foreknowledge that the solution being sought exists as a hidden possibility.

3. Observing and Immersing: Seeing reality with fresh eyes, suspending judgment and immersion in the existing data.

4. Letting Go: Releasing currently held mental models, mindsets, and worldviews; beginning a period of incubation.

5. Indwelling and Illumination: Living in the undertaking, surrendering oneself to the work, absorbed in the experience; retreating, using the generative processes of nature as a portal to learning and new knowledge; and receiving illumination – the perception of a new reality, discovering the hidden solution.

6. Crystallizing and Prototyping: Moving through a period of crystallization and prototyping, making manifest what was discovered.

7. Testing and Verifying: Transforming the new knowledge into usable products, decisions, or strategies.

These seven practices embody a single experience – that of actualizing potentials lying dormant in the universe and discovering orders of reality beyond our rational understanding and cocreating with that which is ready to emerge. This process of Generative Discovery – the advanced version of the U-process – embraces the views that Bohm, Brian Arthur, the scientists at Pari and Princeton, and Polanyi expressed and is key to the advancement of an organization to Stage IV as well as to the creation of knowledge that enables the enterprise to perform at exceptional levels.

There is a critical distinction between the process of Generative Discovery and that which was used in the less successful Demonstration Project (Partnership for Child Nutrition). The practitioners of the original U-process emphasized intelligence and years of experience in organizational development and facilitation; but the essence of the process of Generative Discovery is (1) being open to alternative worldviews; (2) operating from the stance of human possibility; and (3) tapping into the generative orders of the universe, the field of active information – the Source.

Indwelling and Illumination

The seven practices can also be used as an Innovation Lab in discrete projects, such as we did with the Alliance and in the Demonstration Projects. In these instances, the selection of the Lab team is vital. The team must be a “microcosm,” representative of the organization or divisions affected. The importance of this was stressed in Pari by Henri Bortoft, when he spoke of “having the whole system in the room” and in the final conversation about the critical role that the team’s purpose and values play in the successful outcome of the Innovation Lab.

The whole process of Generative Discovery is infused with meaning. Truth and love are at its core. The collective “intention and way of being” on the part of the Lab team – the respect and deep caring for the whole system under investigation – enables the collapse of boundaries Bohm spoke of and allows the team to operate as a single intelligence for the good of the enterprise. At this moment of oneness, the participants act out of the unfolding generative order, the unbroken wholeness from which seemingly discrete discoveries take place. It is at this moment that striking new realities are enacted for the benefit of the whole enterprise and the whole system.

Innovation Retreat

The key to the process is that it is designed to bring forth the emerging reality as it desires. To act on behalf of the future in this way requires a deep sense of responsibility and selflessness. I think that’s one reason Polanyi used the term fiduciary act for this kind of undertaking. The term fiduciary is deeply meaningful to me because it’s a legal term that’s used when you’re talked about a trustee’s responsibility or the responsibility of a lawyer when acting for a client. My father, also a lawyer, infused his whole life with this kind of responsibility and ethic of selfless service, and he raised me to aspire to this credo. When I took the professional oath in becoming a lawyer, I promised to act for my client, taking my own personal interests completely out of the picture.

So when I came across Polanyi’s insistence that originality is guided by a sense of responsibility for advancing the growth of truth “in men’s minds,” I understood, deep in my heart, what he meant by saying of originality that “its freedom lies in this perfect service.”