Integral Scenarios and First Tier
Russ Volckmann
“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
-- Mark Twain
(This
will be my final article on scenarios for a while (unless something exciting happens that I just can’t sit on).
I recently had a talk with someone in leadership development in one of the mid-range oil companies (any of those still around?). I was interested in their use of scenarios for leadership development. I discovered that they are used primarily with middle level individuals mainly from engineering and science backgrounds. Not surprising—the backgrounds, that is! But I could hear the frustration in the voice of this individual that their introduction of scenario thinking was pretty fundamental. Their audience just wouldn’t engage in any developmental activity beyond the intellectual exercise of developing stories from scenarios and exploring actions in those contexts. Pushing this activity beyond what is “likely” was a stretch. Pushing the analysis of the results to one of introspection to a third level of self-discovery was out of the question. Linking all of this to any questions of leadership would take a while.
Again, there is no surprise here. When we are exploring integral leadership development we are really talking about working with people at the stages of development where we find them. One reason for focusing on executive development might be that here we may find a broader perspective—an openness to questioning assumptions and learning about self, an ability to conceive of systems and meta-systems, and an ability to appreciate that people with different worldviews need to find ways of understand, appreciating and working with each other for change to happen with us, rather than without us.
Excuse that long sentence, but it does highlight a bunch of assumptions we make about leadership. Many of us come to integral leadership with assumptions like these:
- Those in leader roles who are more highly developed (particularly second tier) will be more effective.
- The increasing complexity of global systems require more highly developed individuals in leader roles — or, well, it just won’t work; it will be the end of us; it will be even more painful; we will destroy the environment, etc.
- In the face of increasing complexity of ALL systems, those in leader roles will be more effective if they are more highly developed.
- We have a lot to learn about all of this; at this point we have assumptions and beliefs and very little useful evidence that we know what we are talking about.
I sometimes find myself caught in the tension between history and the future when I try to think about these things. Historically, I think, we have had multiple levels of systems with very different requirements for leadership. But the pull of technical, political and social innovation is toward a time when these different levels can no longer be thought of separately. In fact, they never were separate, but time and space allowed us to treat them that way and be quite glib, self-satisfied and comfortable in so doing. What a luxury! But the future will hold little of such luxuries. They will be the preserve of cloistered vacations and meditations.
The truth is we know very little about what makes an enterprise successful, no matter what the scale, nor the time or space. So much of our organizational and leadership literature is based on a form off benchmarking that distorts the findings so badly as to allow us to go down our paths of assumptions with confidence—unless we discover the distortions. For example, every statistician worth her salt is aware that many of the things we think we know are seriously flawed as a result of selection bias. For a really good discussion of this see Jerker Denrell in the April 2005 Harvard Business Review. Here he demonstrates this by comparing the kinds of factors identified from such benchmarking (e.g., much of the popular leadership issues regarding traits and practices of entrepreneurs or leaders of successful companies) with and without factoring in failures along with successes. The results are striking and tell very different stories. For example, we find that the success rate of using strategies like risky b business practices is considerably lower when failures are factored in with successes.
John Antonaikis, International Leadership Association Board Member, Professor of Organizational Behavior at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de l'Université de Lausanne (Suise), co-editor of The Nature of Leadership (in another words, a guy who has been around a bit) uses Denrell’s lens to critique the findings of such classics as the work of Tom Peters, Kouzes and Poster, etc., whose work is focused on studying those organizations and their leaders who are “successful.” None of their studies include data about failures—failures by leaders who used the same practices advocated by these authors.
Susan Whiting, CEO of Nielsen Media Research wrote, “In a weird way, being CEO is a lot like being in a management-training program…Both jobs require you to take a very broad view of the company…” It seems to me that this is the approach to developing leadership that makes a lot of sense. It is like being in training—management training, maybe, but definitely leadership training. Again, no new message here! It is about learning. It is about ongoing, lifelong learning. Peter Senge, Bill Torbert, Chris Argyris and many others have got it right, after all.
To the degree that we are able to create a learning context and process, to that degree we can foster and develop leaders and leadership in our challenged businesses and organizations. And the people who are going to be doing this learning? By far, they are first tier—at least if we are to believe our developmentalist gurus or proportions of the population between first and second tier. They will be overwhelmingly first tier!
And frankly, I think those of us who design and deliver programs and interventions (coaching or consulting) to business leaders are largely in first tier, as well. Now, I don’t mean to insult anyone here. Given that there are multiple lines of development (intellectual, emotional, physical, relational, etc.), and that development does not parallel from one line to another, then I would suspect that each and everyone of us has some anchors in first tier and very few second tier achievements. And this is one of the things that are so exciting about adopting an integral approach—it helps us learn, it helps us discover what we don’t know, and (as Mike Jay might say) it helps us discover what we don’t know that we don’t know.
We have lots of different ways of doing leadership development. I have been writing about scenarios as one of those ways for the last year. But that doesn’t mean that other ways aren’t useful, too—as long as they promote the kind of learning and reflecting (way beyond the three day workshop or the offsite). The uses of scenarios that lend themselves to promoting reflection hold great promise here. And we need to use these in a way that keeps in mind that we are all dancing around (at least in part) in first tier.
The integral approach and developmental models like Kegan’s, Cook-Greuter’s, William James and Spiral Dynamics help us begin to understand what we know, don’t know and don’t know that we don’t know. They provide a window on worlds and worldviews that we don’t share. Smartly facilitated, we have a chance of reflecting on and learning about others and ourselves. We have a chance to look at what might be a second tier response, even if we are not yet ready to make that response. And—one day—who knows? We may find ourselves better able to factor in those perspectives and reconsider our own, thereby learning more effectively. By taking a scenario approach we increase that possibility.