Leadership for Change
Programme
Residential 2
Tuesday 4th November – Thursday 6th November, 2014
Welcome!
Since we last met, what has been going well?
What have been the significant changes and
pressures?
• For you, personally?
• In your work?
• In your wider system?
Pay attention to the way you are listening to your
partner.
Reflect together:
Given the above, what will help us to be as ‘present’ as
we can over the next three days? What might we need
to acknowledge and handle as a group?
Overall Purpose of the programme
• To develop systems leadership skills and capacity
amongst public leaders
• To support public leaders to make progress on
complex systems challenges in their places
• To make tangible improvements for the people and
communities we serve, and in which we live and
work
What is systems leaderhip?
Systems Leadership:
Exceptional leadership for
exceptional times
Ways of feeling
Personal core values
Commitment
Ways of being
Courage to take risks
Resilience & Patience
Drive, energy, optimism
Humility
Ways of perceiving
Balcony & dance-floor
The unseen & unpredicted
Diverse views
Sensitivity to narratives
Improving
outcomes for
service users
Ways of doing
Narrative
Enabling & Supporting
Repurposing &
Reframing
Ways of thinking
Curiosity
Synthesising
complexity
Sense-making
Ways of relating
Mutuality & Empathy
Honesty & Authenticity
Reflection
Self Awareness
Aims for Residential 2
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
to create space for reflection and learning arising from your safe-fail
experiment(s) in relation to your systems leadership practice and the
systems leadership challenge you are addressing
to deepen your understanding and ability to work with multiple
sources of power in your system
to develop a systemic approach to working with teams of leaders from
across your system
to develop your capacity to use narrative as a systems leadership
practice for mobilizing actors from across your system to take action
to deepen your appreciation of the impact of culture in your system
and how to work with it
to increase your own self-awareness as a systems leader through
opportunities for peer feedback
to identify areas where you want to further develop in your systems
leadership practice and to design a personal safe fail experiment to
help you do so.
Expectations and aspirations
• Given the aims of this residential and where you are
at, what questions and expectations are you
bringing?
• How can we best use these three days together?
• Discuss in fours
7
Cycle of Learning
1.
Practical experience
Acting in the world,
experimenting and
experiencing
results
ACTIVIST
4. Application
Translating ideas and insights into
action/ways forward
PRAGMATIST
Adapted from
David Kolb’s work
2.
Observation and reflection
Reviewing and
reflecting on experience
REFLECTOR
3. Conceptualisation
Developing understanding through
deepening/challenging assumptions,
using models and concepts
THEORIST
Today’s outline
Timing
09:30 – 10:00
10:00 – 11:15
11:15 – 13:00
Activity
Arrival and registration
Check in and re-connecting – acknowledging changes since we
last met. Aims and expectations for next 3 days.
Learning from our safe/fail experiments. Where are we now?
What are we learning about our systems leadership?
In place teams and home groups (including break)
13:00-13:45
Buffet lunch
13:45-14:00
Reflection
14:00-15:45
Understanding and working with power
15:45-16:00
Break
16:00-18:00
Understanding and working across cultures
18:00-18:30
Free time
18:30-19:30
Evening speaker
From 19:30
Dinner in the restaurant
Tomorrow’s outline
Timing
Activity
07:30 – 08:30
Breakfast
08:30 – 09:00
Check in
09:00-10:45
Narrative as a systems leadership practice & reframing your
systems leadership challenge
10:45-11:00
Break
11:00-13:00
Introducing public narrative and story of self
13:00-14:00
Lunch
14:00-16:00
Story of us
16:00-16:15
Break
16:15-18:00
Story of now and linking your public narrative
18:00 – 19:00
Free time
19:00 – 20:30
Dinner
Day 3 outline
Timing
Activity
07:30 – 08:30
Breakfast
08:30 – 09:00
Check in
09:00 – 10:45
Consolidation, moving forward and ‘messy solutions’- place teams
and home groups
10:45- 11:00
break
11:00 – 12:30
Who do you need to draw on and how might you work together?
Working with multi-stakeholder leadership teams and networks
12:30 – 13:15
Lunch
13:15 – 14:45
What do you need to do to sustain learning and change?
14:45 – 15:00
Break
15:00 – 16:30
What do we need from each other and ourselves? Giving/ receiving
feedback- designing a personal ‘safe-fail’ experiment
16:30 – 16:45
Review and reflection
16:45
Depart
Reflecting on progress and learning from
your ‘safe-fail experiment
In Place Teams:
• Individually reflect out loud on the progress you
think have been made in relation to your safe-fail
experiment and your part in it
• What challenges have you faced and how have you
handled them?
• What have you learnt about your own systems
leadership?
One person speaks, one acts as ‘listener’, others as
‘observers’. Take it in turns and rotate roles.
Deep listening
Facts
Behaviours
Personal
Feeling
Assumption
Values /
Motivational
Roots
Reflection as a team
As a team:
• What did you notice? What was common, what was
different amongst you?
• How do you interpret your experience now?
• What impact did the listener and observer roles
have on the quality of your reflection when you
were the speaker?
Home group exercise:
Reflecting
on ‘safe-fail’with
experiment
Exercise
: experimenting
perceptualusing
positions
deep listening
• ‘Clients’ talk together to the group about their experience of running
their safe-fail experiment(s) – what happened, what they noticed,
how they are starting to interpret the experience and what they are
learning about systems leadership
• Consultants listen in silence – paying attention to the different levels.
Are differing aspects of the system being represented beyond
personal positions/perspectives?
• Clients then ‘turn their back’ on the group. The consultants discuss
their observations about the interpretations being made and any
assumptions, biases or feelings that are beginning to show up. What
is this telling them about the system?
• Clients come back into the group and reflect on what they have
heard, sharing any new perspectives , insights or ideas that have
opened up for them.
Reflect on what it is like to have ‘a good listening to’. How did the
listeners impact on the conversation?
Leadership for Change
Programme
Residential 2
Lunch
Power
1
Sources of Power
Personal Power
expert power
personality power
Organisation Power
position power
coercive power
reward power
Other?
Adapted from French and Raven
Political Power
network power
information power
Identity power – Cultural, social,
Professional
Mapping power in your system
• In Place Teams illustrate the power relationships and
types of power in your system
• Use ‘Lego’ to represent yourselves and the most
relevant players – organisations, people and
constituencies
• Build your system on the paper provided. Discuss
how you see the power relationships
• Use coloured pens to show the types of power and
arrows to show the direction of the power
relationship.
How do we understand organisational
culture?
….. how things are done around here.
Ouchi and Johnson, 1978
….. the collection of traditions, values, policies, beliefs and
attitudes that constitute a pervasive context for everything we
do and think in an organisation.
McLean and Marshall, 1983
‘values and basic assumptions which organisational members come to
share’.
Van Maanen and Schein, 1979
‘ Culture is the result of all the everyday conversations and
negotiations between members of an organisation’ Seel 2000
By kind permission of Bill Crooks
Levels of culture (Hawkins and Smith)
Artefacts
Outward manifestations, buildings, furnishings, objects, settings, PR, high profile
symbols. Rituals. Stated values. Policies, procedures and systems.
Behaviour
Spontaneous actions, routine responses, enacted realities and values. Repeated
patterns/norms of behaviour. Often absorbed via role models.
Mind set
Basic assumptions and world view that underpin thinking and behaviour.
Mostly unconscious. Paradigms.
Emotional ground
The passions, aspirations, motivations and projections that represent the
emotional energy within a culture. Often well camouflaged, muted or
expressed in distorted forms.
The
CULTURAL
WEB (Johnson
and Scholes)
Rituals &
routines
Stories &
myths
Symbols
Mind-sets/
paradigm
Control
systems
Power
structures
Organisational
structures
Culture and change (Seel)
• Unless the paradigm is at the heart of culture
change, there will be no lasting change
• Paradigms are not imposed by CEO’s or invented by
consultants, rather
‘they emerge from a multiplicity of interactions
between individuals within the community’
• Therefore, change needs to move away from
‘planning change’ onto ‘facilitating emergence’
Inquiring into culture – being creative
• Using metaphors/pictures
• Heroes and Villains
• Find an object
• Complete the sentence..
‘our organisation always….’
‘our organisation never….’
‘our organisation loves…’
‘our organisation hates..’
• Tell stories
• Unofficial induction
• Amateur anthropologist/alien visitor/journalist
Culture inquiry
• Use one of the creative exercises to inquire into the culture of
another organisation/sector/professional background etc that
you are curious about
• Use this and the cultural web hand-out as a guide to draw out
the underlying mind-sets/paradigms that really inform
behaviour, from the perspective of the interviewee. How do
these mind-sets show up? How do they impact on relationships
with others in the system?
• What do they think might be needed to work well with others
coming from different cultures?
• Any new insights/discoveries? Any assumptions confirmed or
challenged?
Some implications for systems
leadership
• Be curious and appreciative– seek to understand
and share underlying mind-sets
• Work with informal processes and conversations
• Encourage greater connectivity between people
from across different organisational cultures
• Support spaces for thinking/talking differently
together “a talent for speaking differently, rather
than arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural
change” Rorty
• Nurture and model new behaviours- develop
‘simple rules’
Leadership for Change
Programme
Residential 2 Day 2
Welcome!
Day 2 agenda
Timing
Activity
07:30 – 08:30
Breakfast
08:30 – 09:00
Check in
09:00-10:45
Narrative as a systems leadership practice & reframing your
systems leadership challenge
10:45-11:00
Break
11:00-13:00
Introducing public narrative and story of self
13:00-14:00
Lunch
14:00-16:00
Story of us
16:00-16:15
Break
16:15-18:00
Story of now and linking your public narrative
18:00 – 19:00
Free time
19:00 – 20:30
Dinner
Leadership for Change
Programme
Residential 2
- Day 3
Day 3 agenda
Timing
Activity
07:30 – 08:30
Breakfast
08:30 – 09:00
Check in
09:00 – 10:45
Session 1: Working with multi-stakeholder leadership teams and
networks & Sustaining learning and change
10:45- 11:00
Break
11:00-12:00
Session 1 continued & An island of sanity
12:00-13:00
Session 2: Consolidation, moving forward and ‘clumsy solutions’
13:00-13:30
Lunch
13:30-14:15
Session 2 continued: Home Groups
14:15-16:00
Session 3: What do we need from each other and ourselves? Fast
feedback & your personal safe/fail experiment
16:15
Depart
Who do you need to draw on/connect
with?
Working with multi-stakeholder teams &
networks
Leading change in a new era
Dominant approach
Emerging direction
Leading change in a new era
Dominant
approach
Emerging direction
Most
transformation
efforts are driven
from this side
Unleashing the spirit of the volunteer
‘‘
You may be able to ‘buy’ a person’s back with a
paycheck, position, power or fear but a human being’s
genius, loyalty and tenacious creativity are
volunteered only.
The world’s greatest problems will be solved by
passionate, unleashed ‘volunteers’
’’
Stephen Covey, Turn the ship around,
via @MarkGraban
Source of image: www.volunteerweekly.org
The Network Secrets of Great Change Agents
Julie Battilana &Tiziana Casciaro
1. As a change agent, my centrality in the informal network is
more important than my position in the formal hierarchy
2. If you want to create small scale change, work through a
cohesive network
If you want to create big change, create
bridge networks between disconnected groups
Hierarchy & Networks
John P. Kotter, ‘Accelerate’, HBR November 2012
Strong ties vs. weak ties
Are we structured to lead in this way?
What would it take?
Teams and networks
‘you can’t really think about teams independent of
their networks, sub-groups, and integrated leadership
systems’
Katzenbach 2012
Networks and teams
3 conditions for successful teams (Wageman
and Hackman)
Enabling
Structure
The Right
People
Compelling
Shared
Purpose
• Interdependent Roles
• Norms of conduct
• Real work to do
•Able to work interdependently
• Well networked and diverse
•System thinkers
• Challenging
• Clear direction
• Consequential
Five disciplines of high performing teams
Clarifying
Task
‘Authorising’/mandate
Ensuring a clear commission/mandate
from its ‘authorising’ environment/wider
system
• Primary purpose
• Goals
• Roles
Core Learning
Inside
(within boundary)
• Co-ordinating and
consolidating
• Reflecting,
learning, integrating
Co-creating
Outside
(across
boundary)
Connecting
• Interpersonal and team dynamics
• and engaging all the critical
stakeholders
• Team culture
Process
Adapted from Hawkins (2011)
Actions for building a great leadership
team/group
•
Treat the beginning with great attentiveness:
- Begin with personal stories and identify shared values/interests to support
shared purpose
- Assess individual capabilities
- Get constructive norms in place from the beginning – and revisit them on an
iterative basis. Hold each other to account!
• Craft agendas that allow for conversations on those issues that matter
most- focus on meaningful activities that involves interdependent work
in-between meetings
• Identify and recruit the “right people” to lead the work
• Ensure regular opportunities are built in for reflection and learning
• Keep connected with key stakeholders/constituency groups/strong and
weak ties
• Ensure appropriate skilled support is made use of eg team coaching
• Pay attention to the above in any turnover/reconfiguration of the team
Application
•
Use the diagnostic framework to help you reflect on a
systems leadership team/network you are part of, one
you would like to grow or one you would like to create.
•
What role might you play in supporting a positive shiftwhat might your first step be?
Leadership for Change
Programme
Residential 2
Lunch
What do you need to sustain learning
and change?
Islands of Sanity: The Role of Leadership
• foster thinking and learning from
experience
• pay exquisite attention to relationships
• Navigate/hold your ground against
bureaucratic and political demands
• strategies for self-care for the long term
Adapted from Margaret Wheatley
Islands of Sanity: The Role of Leadership
• foster thinking and learning from experience
Question: Where is thinking taking place in your organization?
Are you learning from experience or repeating mistakes?
• pay exquisite attention to relationships
Question: What’s the level of trust, support, teamwork among
staff? Getting better or worse?
•
Navigate/hold your ground against bureaucratic and political demands
Question: Where have you pushed back or said no? What have
you learned from these experiences?
• strategies for self-care for the long term
Margaret Wheatley-use
Restoring Thinking
• Regular times for staff reflection, sacrosanct
• Open agenda: discuss needs of the moment
• Not added on to regular staff meetings
• Relaxed, hospitable atmosphere
Margaret wheatley
10 conditions for a Thinking Environment
(Nancy Kline)
1) Attention
2) Incisive questions
3) Equality
4) Appreciation
5) Ease
6) Encouragement
7) Feelings
8) Information
9) Place
10)Diversity
Measures for assessing
impact of thinking
• Are problems getting solved by our solutions?
• Are we applying what we learn from mistakes?
• Are we quicker to identify problematic behaviours or
old patterns that no longer serve us?
• Are we taking more risks? Experimenting more?
•
Do we truly feel “We’re all in this together”
• Are we behaving better with each other?
• Are we handling stress better?
Margaret Wheatley
We need boatrockers!
•
Rock the boat but manage to stay in it
•
Walk the fine line between difference and
fit, inside and outside
•
Able to challenge the status quo when we
see that there could be a better way
Conform AND rebel
•
•
Capable of working with others to create
success NOT a destructive troublemaker
Source: Debra Meyerson
Source: @NHSChangeDay
What is the issue here?
“permission” ?
(externally generated)
or
Self efficacy ?
(internally generated)
Building self-efficacy: some tactics
1. Create change one small step at a time
2. Reframe your thinking:
failed attempts are learning opportunities
uncertainty becomes curiousity
3. Make change routine rather than
an exceptional activity
4. Get social support
5. Learn from the best
Source: Helan Bevan
Consolidation, moving forward and
clumsy solutions
Source: Keith Grint @ http://www.dajf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Keith-Grint-presentation.pdf
Group Orientation
Adapted from ‘Wicked problems and clumsy solutions: the role of leadership’, Keith Grint, Clinical Leader, Vol I Number II, Dec 2008
Clumsy Solutions
Adapted from ‘Wicked problems and clumsy solutions: the role of leadership’, Keith Grint, Clinical Leader, Vol I Number II, Dec 2008
The Bricoleur’s approach to wicked problems
approach to wicked problems
From ‘Wicked problems and clumsy solutions: the role of leadership’, Keith Grint, Clinical Leader, Vol I Number II, Dec 2008
Eschew the elegance of the architect’s
approach to problems…..
…and adopt the world of the Bricoleur - the do-ityourself craftworker.
Accept that imperfection and making do with what is
available is not just the best way forward but the
only way forward.
Avoid alienating significant constituencies –
but progress does not depend on consensus.
No man is an island entire of itself;
Every man is a is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were,
As well as if a a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me.
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
John Donne (1572-1631)
Assume no one has the answer in isolation.
Assume that the problem is a system problem not
caused by or solved by a single aspect of the system.
Systems leadership in action
• In Place Teams – revisit your systems
leadership challenge.
• Taking account of power, culture, identity,
and messy solutions what action/behaviour
might need to shift, change or continue?
• What interventions in your system are you
going to make when you go back?
• Test your actions with your Home Group.
Giving and receiving fast feedback
68
System 1 - Gut
•
•
•
•
•
•
Automatic
Unconscious
Lightning
Intuitive
Emotional
Resemblance
6
System 2 - Head
•
•
•
•
•
•
Reason
Conscious
Slow
Effortful
Calculating
Explaining
Fast feedback (1 min per person)
“What impresses me about you is…”
“What I imagine about your leadership edge
is….”
Fast Feedback
• What did you notice about the feedback you gave?
• What did you notice about the feedback you received?
• What did you notice about doing the exercise for yourself?
The Group?
• Any new insights/discoveries
Highly
uncontrollable
CONTROLLABLE
Unsafe uncertainty
(Danger)
Highly
controllable
Safe uncertainty
(Stretch)
Safe Certainty
(Stuckness)
Highly predictable
PREDICTABLE
Highly unpredictable
Adapted from the work of Mason, Stacey, Critchley and Vanstone by Steve Chapman (2014)
Developing a personal safe-fail
experiment
•
Explore your relationship with ‘safe uncertainty’.
How might you stretch your habitual ‘no’ and find
your ‘yes’
•
Reflecting on your feedback and your learning
about systems leadership, design your personal
safe-fail experiment between now and the final
residential
•
Share this in co-coaching trios
Review and evaluation
Leadership for Change
Programme
Residential 2
Safe journey home!