Archive for Government

The Supreme Court: No Place for Sarcasm

April 11, 2012 Rebecca Reynolds Government, History, Law, Leadership

Courtesy of The Christian Science Monitor

There’s been a lot of talk about the recent Supreme Court case on the Affordable Care Act, and good thing, too. The Court seems to be on an unhappy trajectory of proactive decisions that upend long-standing legal precedent or chart entirely new territory under the guise of judicial restraint. It’s a puzzling sleight of hand, which we have to thank for Bush v. Gore, Citizen’s United, Wal-Mart v. Dukes, and others.

But there’s another trend that concerns me – the broader one of the Court’s diminishing credibility.

As this country’s supreme arbiter of what’s legal or not, the Court represents the gold standard on decision-making. It is, interestingly, the closest thing we have to a monarchy: life appointment to sit in final judgment over the most complex and challenging legal issues of our time. But, unlike a sovereign, the Court is comprised of
nine of these would-be monarchs, who collectively share the mantle “Supreme.”
It’s an interesting set-up.

Interesting in particular to me since I’m in the business of collective leadership and decision-making. I support clients of all kinds to develop governance, process, and behavior by which they’re able to achieve big things together. The courtroom has long been, for me, a model for the importance of process, as well as a source of fascination for its rhetoric and code of ethics. Ever since I first sat in on a trial as a teenager (my mother was a juror and brought me along to learn about our justice system), I’ve been addicted to courtrooms.

Not only, then, is the Supreme Court our highest example of shared decision-making, it’s also the courtroom of all courtrooms. For this reason, I follow with great interest the Court’s proceedings and decisions. But for a while now, my intense interest has been tainted by something alarming. In case after case, sarcasm seems to be an increasingly prevalent actor*. And that’s the problem. The Supreme Court is just no place for sarcasm.

I’m adamant on this and here’s why.

First, as the final decision-maker of our nation’s most challenging legal issues, the Supreme Court is, by definition, a serious institution. By the time a case arrives there,
it’s been through years (sometimes decades) of trials, expense and extreme
hardship for the parties involved. A case before the Supreme Court has earned –
as have its parties, attorneys, and the American public at large, since we foot the bill – the right to an audience before the Justices. This audience has, in fact, been granted by the Justices themselves in agreeing to hear it. The Court’s business then is serious business, the most serious, deserving of a level of sincerity and gravity possibly without parallel in this country. Sarcasm, used to mock and ridicule, to convey scorn or insult, is a clear nonstarter in such an environment.

Second, the charge of the Court is to seek understanding of issues so complex that many courts and judges have been tested in their review. If such understanding and decision-making were easily come by, the Supreme Court wouldn’t be needed. Therefore, again, I see no place for sarcasm, which takes as its premise that the person wielding it is of superior intellect to those to whom the remarks are delivered.

The Justices have been given (and we hope have earned), a life appointment on the bench. Nine justices together have the awesome authority (and responsibility) to finally decide these cases. Therefore, no one Justice can presume him/herself above anyone else, and in fact, should endeavor, we would hope, to listen to the many learned colleagues on the bench (not to mention in the role of advocate), with the intent of arriving at a right and just decision. I see no utility in smugness or sarcasm with such a sacred trust shared among such esteemed peers.

Finally, sarcasm is defined as an attack – a cruel and malicious one with a single intent: to harm another. Not only is this type of behavior inimical to truth-seeking and the serious business of reaching shared understanding of deeply complex issues, it’s also dishonorable. It is especially so in a Supreme Court Justice.

The reason is simple: due to long-established rules of procedure, the individuals to whom the sarcasm is directed - generally, the attorneys arguing the case – are constrained from responding in kind. It is the very position of Supreme Court Justice, referred to, as if to remind us, as “Your Honor,” that should preclude attack, (including the verbal flaying of sarcasm) – for who with honor attacks someone who is both at your mercy and without the means of retaliation? We usually refer to such people as tyrants.

Sarcasm on the Court, although it may seem to liven up the complicated and at times ponderous discussion, undermines the very role the Court exists to serve. We need to believe in the superior experience, capability, wisdom, and dare I say it, restraint (personal, if not judicial) of the Court to fulfill its role of deciding the nation’s most serious legal issues on our behalf. We depend on this belief because without it we teeter on the perilous edge of anarchy. But if the Court persists in demeaning itself to the level of Judge Judy for the sake of popularity, entertainment value, or worse, to feed the egos of a few Justices, it will lose the credibility on which it and we depend.

I have written before of my concerns about the Court’s diminishing credibility at the hand of its too-often politicized decisions (those signaled by the 5-4 split).  But perhaps graver still and certainly more insidious than the issues represented by these cases is the idea that the Court is becoming nothing more than a platform for a few bullies. If this is acceptable behavior on the Court, what separates it from the commons? What indeed.

Remember what happens when people lose confidence in their monarch? Heads roll. Let us all be warned.

 

*For examples, please click here.

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Days of Black: A Juxtaposition

December 28, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Government, Law, Leadership

I spent Thanksgiving in South Africa this year. Of course, it wasn’t Thanksgiving there. In fact, it was early summer and didn’t feel a bit like Thanksgiving.

On Monday of Thanksgiving week, when normally I would’ve been buying turkey, making final decisions about table setting and menu and otherwise preparing for the family feast, instead I was exploring Cape Town with my guide, Jackie. We topped Table Mountain in a rotating gondola and drove the coastal road down to Penguin Beach and Cape Point. We lunched at an out of the way seafood place in Kalk Bay, with catch so fresh I could see the women de-boning it on the docks below. And as we drove, walked, and dined, we talked of South African politics. It wasn’t really an option – everyone was.

You see, the following day, Tuesday, a vote was to take place on the Protection of State Information, commonly referred to as the Secrecy Bill. The African National Congress (ANC) was the key proponent of the bill, which would, according to many, roll back freedom of information to intolerable levels. According to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the bill threatened to outlaw whistle blowing and investigative journalism, and, as the bill states, subject “offenders” to up to 25 years in prison.

People I spoke with characterized the bill as another step farther from the dream of the Apartheid-era ANC, Nelson Mandela’s party, the one that led passage of one of the most progressive Constitutions in the world – which, by the way, includes a Bill of Rights that says: “Everyone has the right of access to any information held by the state.”

South Africans against the bill had named the vote day “Black Tuesday” and planned to don the color to symbolize their protest. When Jackie and I went out again on Tuesday, sure enough, shop keepers, students, people dining and more were decked out head to toe in black. But, even with the dour dress code and opposition from such luminaries as Mandela, Tutu, and Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer, the bill still passed.

This was a hard moment in South Africa. It was one of a people’s profound disappointment after the promise of democracy was chiseled down by a vote of 229 to 107.

When I went on Facebook that evening, posts about Thanksgiving dominated the space. So much glee about food preparation, family gathering and general thankfulness was tainted by my experience that day of a people’s anguish. I felt it, too. I felt it for them – a long-suffering country’s dashed hopes by the party of so much hope it had inspired the world.

And then I saw it. A post about Black Friday. I’d forgotten all about it until that moment. And the contrast hit me hard. In South Africa, a country is fighting for freedom of information against a corrupt and opaque government and is using the black moniker to gather solidarity for the cause. In the US, we too use the “black” to rally the masses, but the rallying cry is not for freedom, not for democracy, not against the powerful hiding their secrets. No. Black Friday is a call to shop. To get up early and get in line to be the first across the threshold to buy whatever.

I then felt my melancholy closer to home. For our US democracy, flagging under the weight of too much – too much privilege, too much complacency, too much information – a gluttony that Thanksgiving brought into stark relief.

We Americans enjoy unprecedented freedoms, comforts and convenience. We have been the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. We have reveled in the fruits of our innovation and our ambition, and our ability to speak our minds and do as we please.

But we are poised at a precipice – the precipice of choice. We can gather ourselves up and look beyond our borders at what the world is becoming, and choose a course more hospitable to it. Or we can continue to shuffle along the way we have, in the fog of our own undoing. An undoing symbolized, in my mind, by Black Friday – a term of dubious origin, of misplaced priority, of misguided intent.

How long will we continue to lull ourselves to sleep in the rapture of consumerism? When will we awaken to our awesome potential as members of the burgeoning global community? And begin to use the tremendous power of our freedom for great good rather than, say, to pillory Coca-Cola for changing the color of its Coke can?

Or will we wait until we are crushed under the heels of our own Black Friday mobs, while the rest of the world takes its freedom seriously?

 

 

 

 

 

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What’s Hospitality Got to Do with It?

August 16, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, Collaboration, Facilitation, governance, Government, Leadership, Nonprofit Organizations, Technology

Collaboration’s time has come. And it’s time to get everyone, not just talking about it,
but really good at doing it. Collaboration isn’t a set of tech tools or an ideal. It’s a verb – something we do. And we can do it well or really poorly. What makes the difference? The answer might surprise you: hospitality.

What’s hospitality got to do with it, you may wonder. Everything.

The simple concept of hospitality is the foundation of collaboration. By “collaboration” I mean convening – whether in government, business, or community, in person, on the phone or online – a group of people, diverse in background and perspective, toward a common purpose. The supposition is that the people being convened are in some way unknown to each other: either actual strangers meeting for the first time or at least people who have among them unknown, foreign or differing perspectives. It is to this meeting of strangers that hospitality speaks.

Abraham Offering Hospitality

The concept of hospitality comes to us from ancient times when people depended on each other in a way we don’t as much today, at least not in the developed world. There were far fewer of us then and there were great distances between our encampments. Travel was arduous, dirty and dangerous, making hospitality not merely a matter of kindness, but also of survival.

Strangers arriving at your door was not an uncommon event, and hospitality dictated how you treated them. Welcome with a bath, food, and drink, a place to sleep – this kind of hospitality seems extreme and is unthinkable for most of us today. And yet, its vestiges still hold as our protocol for overnight company and in hotels the world over.

Although the concept of hospitality has equivalents in all ancient languages, the English word comes from the Latin hospes. Interestingly, hospes refers both to the host and to the guest, as does the Greek counterpart xenos. This ambiguity of the term still exists in modern derivatives of Latin, for example, the Italian word ospite. I remember when I first lived in Italy 20 years ago this confused me plenty: was I invited to the party or to host the party? The root of my confusion was, of course, my mother tongue, which divides the concept: host (from hospes) and guest (from the German gast, meaning stranger). I remember vaguely wondering why the Italians suffered under this confusion, thinking that they must somehow be bereft of vocabulary.

Today, hospitality has come to signify more of a nicety than a necessity. And yet, there is a renewed need for it. The technology of travel means that we can get anywhere pretty much any time, and the technology of information means we can do so virtually in seconds. The borders of our encampments, both geographical and ideological, constantly bump up against each other now, bringing new resonance to the notion of hospitality. We are being called to apply hospitality to the entryways, not just of our homes, but of our hearts and minds. Collaboration begins here.

Collaboration is hospitality on steroids. If you’re the convener, it’s as if a caravan of travelers has descended on your doorstep, and what’s more, you invited them. And there’s something you need from them, so making sure they feel welcome, they’re clear about the purpose of the visit, and how they’re going to get their needs met are all essential to a genial, productive relationship. The adept collaboration convener plans for these logistics well before any of the participant guests arrive (see more on this here).

In the same way ancient hospitality ritualized the treatment of strangers in the
home, collaboration calls for ritual that welcomes strange opinions and foreign modes of self-expression in the conversation. The ritual itself signals the participant that “strangers” are indeed welcome. And like all ritual, it is the attitude behind it that endows its meaning. Anyone can go through the motions of hospitality, but it is the feeling of the open heart that makes us know we are welcome. Collaboration is ultimately defined by this.

But there’s another important dimension of hospitality at work today that takes us further into territory useful for collaboration. The Latin hospes is formed
from hostis, which meant “to have power,” and the Online Etymology Dictionary gives the literal translation of “host” as “lord of strangers.” Where the ancients took for granted the roles of guest and host as sacrosanct in the ritual of hospitality, today we push against such conventional relationships.

Jacques Derrida, originator of deconstruction, put this hospitality power dynamic into sharp relief for us. What Derrida saw was that hospitality is a paradox: what makes hospitality possible is ultimately what makes it impossible. If being hospitable requires that someone has the power to host, which means, in some measure, the ability to control the guest, then, says Derrida, this control is, in fact, inhospitable. On the other hand, if hospitality means the host is obligated to welcome without rules or boundaries whoever arrives (say, a complainer, or worse, a thief or harm doer), then the host is stripped of the very power and control that makes hospitality possible.

Derrida’s reasoning is, I think, instructive for collaboration as well. If I convene a
collaborative process and act as host by creating the rules and protocols by which the “guests” will participate, haven’t I taken control, thereby constricting the participants and undermining the very goal of collaboration itself? The goal being an interaction of equals toward a shared creation. And if, on the other hand, the convener does not act as host, does not develop and maintain process rules and governance, thereby causing chaos or a survival-of-the-fittest contest of wills among the participants, won’t many feel disenfranchised and leave? And again, the goal of collaboration is unrealized.

Derrida’s hospitality paradox – and the peril of collaboration - lies in the apparent power struggle between the host and guest (convener and participant, in collaboration). It’s as if these roles sit opposite each other on a set of scales, with things weighted all on one side or the other. But the key to their balance is, for me, found in the, well, ambidextrousness of the ancients’ language.

The fact that the same word (hospes, xenos) represents both roles may not signify a dearth of vocabulary as I once thought, but rather a deep understanding of the very nature of hospitality itself. The ambiguity instructs me that guest and host are but two sides of the same coin, interchangeable among us. No one is always host and no one is always guest, no one always in control and no one always compliant.

Hospitality is the proscribed ritual for bringing strangers together well. The roles of host and guest are part of this ritual, but they are simply a means to the ultimate end of what hospitality intends. The key again comes from the ancients’ language. Hospes is the root of, not only hospitality, but also hospital and hospice. What these have in common, more than tending to the ill or a protocol for doing so, is the way that’s done. This is the essence of hospes: Caring for people.

It is the caring then that enlivens the ritual created for bringing people together
well and that acts as the fulcrum for the role of host on one side and that of
guest on the other, tempering the extremes of each. Caring is the both the underlying method and the intended outcome of hospitality.

The same is true for collaboration. Caring for each other in the process of collaboration, and caring for the higher purpose to which we all are invited as the ultimate outcome of it is the foundation of collaboration done well. As conveners, if we will remember this and let it guide our role as host, our participant guests will do what humans do in a hospitable environment: enjoy and learn from each other. Great things come from this and it is within our grasp.

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The Supremes: Why We Do What They Say (and Should We?)

July 13, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Facilitation, governance, Government, History, Law, Leadership

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer spoke last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival. It was a stirring speech. He’s an eloquent and passionate speaker, and like all good orators, he got me to thinking.

Justice Breyer’s point was the importance of the Court to democracy. The Court serves the vital and essential function of a neutral actor in the mix to play referee, to stand in the fray and call foul, to stop the action and consider what really is fair, no matter the size or skill of the players. That sounds right. Without this role, games and democracies easily devolve to chaos or bullying. With this role, we can all relax into our own – whether as player or spectator.

I recognize the referee role only too well since I play a similar one. As a facilitator of process, I design and then monitor the way something gets done. The larger and more diverse the group, the more contentious the issues, the more important this work is — if I hold the space and monitor the established rules of engagement, the people participating can relax into dealing with the subject at hand. It can take a while to establish trust in this role, there may even be tests – people pushing the limits of the “rules” to see if they can be bent or broken, to see if I will notice, if I will act. But if I play it fairly, applying the same rules to everyone, people will stop worrying over process and really start attending to the issues.

So, when Justice Breyer recounted his story of this country’s test of the Supreme Court’s authority, I listened with great interest. The heart of the story involved two moments in American history. The first was in the 1830s, from when our democracy was still young. At the time, the state of Georgia, having found gold on Cherokee Indian land, wanted the Indians out. In a series of cases, known as the Marshall Trilogy, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote decisions that set precedent for tribal sovereignty. Breyer then referred to President Jackson’s response “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” Although this quotation is disputed, it is undoubtedly representative of Jackson’s sentiments. He sent federal troops into Georgia to move the Cherokee off their lands, disregarding the Marshall Court and inciting what would result in the Trail of Tears.

Breyer’s point was, early in our nation’s history, the Court was still establishing the authority of its supreme arbiter role. And clearly, that power was dubious at best if the President so readily flouted it.

Breyer then turned to a case much more familiar: Brown v. Board of Education. Although the landmark case ruled segregation unconstitutional in 1954, it took three more years for it to be tested. As we all know, the test happened in the fall of 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Little Rock’s school board and the NAACP planned to have nine carefully chosen students enroll at Central High. Governor Orval Faubus wouldn’t hear of it and called out the Arkansas National Guard to block the students. Like Jackson, according to Breyer, President Eisenhower sent in federal troops – and his choice of the 101st Airborne was brilliant strategy since the 101st was beloved for its role in Normandy. This time the troops backed the Supreme Court’s decision.

Breyer’s argument was that, even if we disagree with a decision, Bush v. Gore for example, or Roe v. Wade, the fact is that we, as a country, as a democracy, depend on the authority of the Court as our supreme arbiter, as the final say. And, what’s more, we adhere to it. For those of us who think we want the Court’s decisions challenged, Justice Breyer urged us to look carefully at the images of anarchy coming from places around the globe. Do we really want to live in a country where the role of referee is tenuous, even nonexistent?

His question is a good one. But then a fellow from the audience asked another.

“Would the cynicism toward the Court be reduced if the decisions could be 6-3 instead of 5-4?” Justice Breyer responded to this question by talking about our desire for a Court more in agreement with itself, citing Europe’s policy not to publish dissenting opinions as a way of solidifying the rule of law. This surprised me. What I heard in the fellow’s question was not a desire for more agreement, but for less partisanship among the Justices.

Too many of the major decisions (e.g., Citizens United and Wal-Mart v. Dukes) being made by the Court are being decided 5-4, with the conservative Justices (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito) on one side and the liberal ones (Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) on the other. It is this, more than what the actual decisions are, that is so inimical to our trust in the Court as the neutral actor we need it to be. This partisanship is what is eroding our confidence in the Court as the ultimate power of judicial review in this country. If the Court can do no better than Congress in deciding the issues that threaten to tear us apart, if the Court is no more than a reflection of the rancor and polarity that run through our public discourse, then the Court is no longer deserving of the role of supreme arbiter and the ensuing powers that role commands.

Like any leader, I am only able to function as an effective facilitator as long as the people I serve perceive me as such. When I start to show bias, when I begin to take sides, especially if I do so under the guise of fairness, I am no longer useful in my role. If I do not correct my behavior, or step aside, the people will (and should) take care of it themselves. This too is inherent to democracy. In fact, it is the very idea upon which this country was founded: equal justice under the law.

For a related blog from Aspen Institute: http://www.aspeninstitute.org/about/blog/does-supreme-court-follow-people

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Give Me Relevance or Give Me Death

June 17, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, Featured, Government, Leadership, Nonprofit Organizations

Lately, I’ve had a few conversations with people whose organizations are going through a not uncommon, but often painful and sometimes even terminal, phenomenon: questioning their relevance, their place in the world.

Even as I type those words they feel heavy. There is weight to the idea that a thing, once useful and full of life and purpose, is now struggling. The warning signs are clear: fewer dollars, programs that aren’t working, staff attrition and low morale, confusion over mission and leadership apathy. Look around. Things may even look dreary: piles of boxes and papers strewn about, too much furniture crowding the space, faded posters hanging askew.

The weight may have to do with grief over the loss of something once great; it may be about the lack of energy to face the situation; it may be because this time in organizations is metaphorical for something we also experience as individuals.

Think of Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s 1949 play. It epitomizes the sheer torture of what losing relevance, one’s place in life can mean. It is one of the most brutal plays I know, and everyone should see it. Once. For my part, I will never, ever see it again because I am too afraid I’ll jump up on stage and shake the living daylights out of Willy Loman. Yell at him to wake up, to get him to see that he has choices, and they are way beyond what he has known. Poor Willy. There weren’t any coaches or transition consultants in his day.

Enter the good news: today we know that the phenomenon of declining relevance is part of a natural cycle, like the seasons. All living things, including people and organizations – for profit, nonprofit, and governments - traverse through stages in life. These stages of growth, maturity, harvest and repose may take place over different time spans (months, years, even eons – remember the dinosaurs?), but they are inevitable. And seasoned leaders are seasoned because they have learned to watch for the symptoms, the harbingers of each, and to act in accord.

Without such seasoned leadership, the first of these stages is usually the most uncomfortable in an organization. Each stage comes as a surprise, throwing people into a reactive mode rather than a responsive one. On one end of the cycle are start-ups. Many more start-ups fail than make it because the people running the start-up fail to recognize and anticipate the symptoms, have no plan for addressing them, and otherwise are as spring green as their organizations are.

On the other end of the seasonal spectrum, an organization (or an industry, a sector or even a nation) that’s been around for a substantial amount of time and achieved relative success, even major success, may begin to experience signs of decline. If this is the first time this has happened, leadership is often confused by what’s going on and may or may not even be willing to name it. The more seasoned leaders utter the word “relevance.” The bold ones look it square in the eye and start getting creative (Steve Jobs is the stunning example of this kind of bold creativity at work).

Relevance is a great word. It stands for currency in the world. Does the organization do something, make something, serve something that is currently recognized and needed? Does it do this in a way that people respond to, that works now? Relevance is not about resting on our laurels. We once could have been the greatest thing since sliced bread (or Polaroid or Blockbuster), but now is what counts.

The key to relevance is knowing that it is all about currency, all about the NOW. And for this reason, everything, every organization has a shelf life. The question then becomes, how do we recognize the signs before we are obsolete? And what will we decide to do when those signs are in our sights?

How do we recognize the signs? Should we wait until the catastrophic ones like apathy, attrition and bankruptcy are looming? Of course not. The best way to see the signs is to develop a regular process for taking a look, for assessing institutional viability in the marketplace. Most organizations do this to some degree. Combine this with a regular process for looking out into the world, to watch for shifting trends that may affect your business, and now leadership can effectively maintain a course for continued relevance.

Then, when the signs are in our sights, what are we willing to do? Is leadership willing to act on the signs, swiftly and decisively? Are they willing to do what it takes, to reinvent the organization, if called for? This could mean shutting down a major part of the business or opening a new one on the other side of town or the other side of the world. It might mean giving away a whole line of products to ensure the continued vibrancy of the core business. (Sound familiar? Google does this.) It might even mean shutting things down altogether. If relevance is so threatened, is it better to choose death or to go down by increments, painfully, publicly, perhaps even infamously? (Circuit City comes to mind.)

I suggest choosing death, remembering that death too, is part of the cycle. Willy Loman killed himself, and maybe, in the end, it was his best choice. I like to think that, with a little (ok, a lot) of coaching and perhaps some skills development, Willy could have reinvented himself. But unlike Willy, in the case of organizations, even death isn’t final. It can result in rebirth, in a new beginning toward relevance, even greatness.

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How’s Your Relationship with Risk?

June 10, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, Government, Leadership, Nonprofit Organizations

At a conference I attended last month (blog post on it here), the keynote contained this nugget: the need for leadership to transform the relationship with risk. My ears pricked up as I wrote it down. I wondered how many other people heard it, registered it, wondered what it might mean? I noticed it because it gets right at how I think about leadership.

A leader without a vision is like a carpenter without wood. And we all know, having the wood doesn’t make a carpenter, making something from the wood does. For someone to be a leader, he or she must first have a vision, and then, make substantial progress toward it, if not achieve it in full. That progress is made by leading others to join in, to see the glory the vision holds, to believe it is possible and to make it so.

A vision is (or should be) something grand, luminous, audacious, perhaps even seemingly impossible. In fact, many of the very best visions teeter on the edge of insanity (and some even topple right off!) “Are you crazy? That will never happen.” A vision stands in the face of the naysayers, taunting them and inspiring others to do the extraordinary.

How about the dream of a country where race didn’t separate people at a time when schools, restaurants, buses, every facet of daily life was drawn by this line? Or the vision of a sovereign France and leading her countrymen to win it at a time when England ruled handily over the land, and men didn’t take orders from girls?  And centuries before, the idea of a round earth when everyone else’s world was, and would remain for a very long time, flat. These visions were “out there.” And an interesting paradox is that the more out there a vision is – in other words, the more it differs from what currently exists – the more likely it is to inspire us.

What makes such vision possible? What enables some people to reach way beyond conventional wisdom, the norm, see far into future time, into what humanity will become, and lead us there? One important part of the equation is their relationship with risk.

This relationship is both an essential element of leadership’s ability to conceive a worthy vision and the ingredient that makes for how far leadership will get in achieving it. Too much risk aversion makes for lousy, uninspiring vision, or for overly cautious steps that take forever. Too little attention to risk, on the other hand, makes for flying blindly into the fire and being burned before anything much happens.

So, what is the meaning  of “transforming leadership’s relationship with risk?” Transform it how?

  • Does it mean get over risk? Stop being stymied by it? We have big problems in this world; we need big visions to address them and an aversion to risk results in winnowing vision down to so many tiresome to do lists.
  • Does it mean pay more heed to risk? Use it to curb our impulsive activity? We are so busy and so apt to leap to solution before we truly understand the scope of the problem, let’s use risk as an assessment tool to focus our action on what is truly important.
  • Does it mean get really good at identifying and managing it? “The times they are a changing” is the new normal, and we need experts at identifying risk and managing the unexpected as a matter of routine.

The answer is it means all of them.

The thing about risk is that it’s relative. One person’s risk is another’s walk in the park. If your leadership is lackluster, tending more toward a commute than a discovery of the unknown, you may be too risk averse, and your transformation is to move toward risk with more congeniality, even appetite. If your leadership style drives you toward many exciting opportunities all at once, while driving your team to distraction, your challenge may be to learn to use risk as an assessment tool that focuses activity with laser-like precision. And if you find yourself hanging solo and rope-less from a cliff, sweat loosening your grip, your work may be to stop dismissing risk and learn its value in developing strategy.

There are also different kinds of risk: risk of life and limb, risk of failure, of public ridicule, of wasted time and energy, of someone else getting there first. When you travel abroad, are you more concerned about getting sick, spending more than you budgeted, or not having as good a time as your friends who went last year? Knowing your risk awareness (what you consider risky and what you do not) and your risk tolerance (the level or amount of risk you can endure without compromising effective functioning), provides a valuable starting point for transforming your relationship with risk.

And risk changes according to context. Not only are there different kinds of risk, there are situations in which some risk is higher or more threatening than in others. An Everest summit expedition presents different types of risk than opening a new division overseas or developing national policy on climate change. This is one of the reasons why leadership can be off-the-charts amazing in one situation and a dismal failure in another. Are you considering the right risks given the context in which you are leading?

Whatever your particular relationship with risk, know that it is a defining factor in your ability to lead. It determines the scale of your vision and how far you’ll get in achieving it. It affects how you see and deal with those you lead (people more risk averse than you seem timid, and people less so, crazy). And the same principles hold true for leadership teams and organizations.

So, if you’re headed into leadership, learning about your relationship with risk and working to transform it to full advantage is really a darn good idea.

Sincere thanks to Dr. Jorge Haddock for putting the idea into his keynote.

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Collaboration: What to do about Politics and Power Plays?

June 3, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, Collaboration, Facilitation, Government, Leadership, Nonprofit Organizations, Policy

What makes the difference between a collaboration that results in brilliant, new thinking and the ugly opposite: more entrenched, polarized, stuck thinking? One of my readers asked me recently, how do you deal with politics and power plays in collaboration? This is such a great question because it gets at the heart of exactly what makes the difference.

Let’s start by looking at what “politics and power plays” are. Simply put, they are some of the ways people get what they want. They are the way some people work when a clear, open process to get what they want doesn’t exist.

The more vested someone is, the more important it is to them to know how to influence decisions that affect them. And the more extreme their behavior will become in contexts where this is unclear, inaccessible or both. We want to be heard, and if it’s important enough, you and I will go to extreme lengths to be so, even if we look manipulative, rude or downright crazy to everyone else.

Every one of us has experienced areas of life where the way things work is murky, overly complex, and badly (if at all) communicated. Think neighborhoods, schools, municipalities, banking, the office, the tax code, even the produce section at your local grocery store – who is deciding produce selection and what criteria are they using, anyway? Do you take what you can get, or try to influence the process through the suggestion box or a visit to the manager? And if that doesn’t work, do you take your business elsewhere, throw your weight around, or jump up on your soap box?

So, if we all have the capability of extreme tactics to get what we want, what hope is there for collaboration? When we want to use collaboration to get something important done, like develop a plan for sustainable water use, or design and implement a major fundraising event, or develop new office policy around flex time? Won’t these efforts be killed every time by politics, power plays or people just giving up?

The hope comes from understanding these dynamics, what causes them and what to do about them. First, those managing the collaborative process need to remember that people come to the table because they care. They want something. And that’s a good thing. Second, since we want and need vested people in the room, we should anticipate that for them to participate in a productive, effective way (instead of resorting to more extreme behaviors like power plays) they need to understand a few key things:

  1. the scope of the collaboration – what is being addressed and, just as important, what is not?
  2. the role of those involved in the collaboration – is it to frame the issue, to develop recommendations on it, to provide expert knowledge, or…?
  3. the governance process – how will the issue(s) ultimately be decided (what, who, when)?

So, at the beginning, these questions are carefully considered and decided. Let me emphasize: this work happens well in advance of the start of the collaborative effort. These are NOT issues to “wing it” on or to address as you go! Then, communicate the decisions (referred to a “process parameters” or “rules of engagement” or whatever term best fits your situation) as an explicit part of the invitation to participants. Surprisingly, most people are pleased to see that this has been thought through.

Next, re-emphasize the process parameters at the first session, and at all subsequent sessions as needed (e.g., when the collaboration is open and new people come each time, review at each meeting is essential). And all while the collaboration process is underway, it must adhere to the scope, role and governance process as decided. This may seem terribly obvious, but the number of times I have seen people transgress their own process (scope of work, bylaws, charters, job descriptions, etc.) is both stunning and remarkably self-defeating.

People can accept rules and parameters, which are essential to well-functioning group process, but not if they change without warning or reason. And disregarding them wholesale is even worse.  Managing the collaborative process in a way that honors agreements is exactly like a personal relationship: people trust people who do what they say they will.

And this trust is fundamental to achieving great things from collaboration. It’s simple: if people are always worrying about how something is getting done (process), they have less energy to focus on what is being done (content). In collaboration, the goal is to get the collaboration participants fully engaged in the content so that great outcomes can result. The more participants distrust or don’t understand the process, the more they will focus on it – with some people resorting to those negative behaviors that cause collaboration to fail. In countless such efforts, I have experienced the most seemingly aggressive and manipulative participants shift to invaluable members of the team simply because they come to trust the process.

By the way, this is not to say that process parameters can’t change – in multi-year collaborations, there is often a need to re-think them: scope may need to expand or contract, roles shift, governance change. When this occurs, giving participants the heads up well before changes are made and the opportunity to give input is the way to maintain credibility.

In summary, politics and power plays, as well as other challenging behaviors, show up in collaborative processes when there is:

  1. lack of clarity about the scope and intent of the collaboration
  2. lack of clarity about the roles and other process parameters of the collaboration
  3. weak or ineffective adherence to process parameters during collaboration

The good news is that, understanding this, you can see unwanted behavior not as a threat or failure, but as a terrific signal that it is time to re-look at and/or re-clarify these. And remember, basic sincerity about all of this goes a long way in repairing any mis-steps.

For a follow-up piece to this one on addressing challenging behavior in collaborative process, see The Gift of the Skeptic.

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Expiration Date on Governance

May 27, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, governance, Government, Leadership, Nonprofit Organizations

Ever noticed that governance only lasts so long before it shows signs of aging? Those signs that governance has lost its luster, its relevance, its meaning, some of which include:

1) Decisions don’t hold in the organization – they are second-guessed or ignored.

2) Decisions seem to made willy-nilly, in a duplicative manner, or take forever.

3) Governing bodies are apathetic, contentious, or both.

4) People complain about not knowing how decisions are made or how they can affect them.

Governance reaching its expiration date is a routine happenstance in organizations. What isn’t so routine is the ability to recognize the early symptoms of past-due governance and do something about them before the organization experiences what can result: low productivity, morale problems, and leadership turnover. The odd thing about governance is how little explicit attention is paid to it when, in fact, it drives one of the key assets of any organization: the ability to crank out robust, well understood, actionable decisions.

For this reason, at the outset of a consultancy, one of the first questions I ask is how well does the organization make decisions? Fortunately, people don’t need governance expertise to answer; everyone in an organization is usually aware of how well decision-making works. Think about your own. If your response is a grimace or a roll of the eyes, governance is likely at its expiration date.

One board I worked with complained bitterly that things weren’t getting done, board membership was down, and meetings were poorly attended. Staff pointed to board and board to staff as the source of the problem. When I asked if the board had committees and how they were working, the reply was they had them, and they used to work well, but now they rarely met and produced little. Why doesn’t a solid set of committees, with clear charters and a roster of able members last? Why does governance have an expiration date? The answer is simple: things change.

For instance, say you and I are going to dinner. The decision about where to go will be made fairly easily and will not require much governance, in other words, we won’t need formalized process, roles, responsibilities, or authority to make the decision. However, if you and I need to meet for dinner once each month, the decision about where to go may need a bit more governance. That is, if I always choose the restaurant, without an explicit agreement about this role giving me the authority to do it, you may become unhappy and after a few months, revolt. Or worse, you stop showing up for dinner.

Then let’s say we ask ten others to join us in our monthly dinner – now the governance needs to be designed in such a way as to consider all involved, be transparent to them, and perhaps even be written down to ensure adherence to what was agreed. People like clarity about how decisions are made; the more complex the organization and its decisions, the more important governance becomes.

And, no matter how well it is designed, just like planning and leadership, governance  needs to be reviewed and refreshed from time to time. This is because there are many factors in play affecting governance that are in a constant state of flux. For instance, world forces change (e.g. new restaurants open), internal culture shifts (people with food allergies join in), people move about (some of us come from the suburbs), and skills develop (a few of us take a cooking class).

The more an organization understands that decision-making is one of its most prized assets, the more attentive it should be to governance. An organization’s ability to see its governance as simply the mechanism that produces efficient decision-making, and then to analyze governance effectiveness and redesign it when indicated, is an organization well-suited to today’s pace of change.

If governance seems like a bureaucratic annoyance, consider how decisions are made in your organization. Without clear, relevant governance, chaos reigns and people get cranky. Great governance, on the other hand, operates invisibly, all the while creating trust inside an organization and inspiring confidence outside it.

Is it time to check the expiration date where you are?

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Change and Transformation

May 21, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, Government, Leadership, Nonprofit Organizations

"Transformation" Escher

I attended a terrific conference in Hot Springs, Virginia this past week. The title was Management of Change. Those are three powerful words. Management of Change. They are what attracted me to the conference in the first place, and I’ve been contemplating them since.

Both the words “management” and “change” signify a range of possibilities of meaning. Let’s take change first. I generally think about change as something pretty big, substantial, but clearly, it can refer to something as minor as changing one’s socks. The range of what change refers to is vast, including personal or individual changes, corporate or organization changes, and even global change. So, change is a tricky term with its significance gliding between the insignificant (sock change) to the momentous (climate change).

Surely, our attention is needed more toward the momentous scale. And if so, there’s another word that comes to mind: transformation. Although often a synonym for change, transformation sounds bigger. It implies something more desirable, in a way. There’s a sense of evolution in it and something more proactive. It’s as if change is always occurring and transformation is how we (hopefully) deal with it. I was talking with a coach a few weeks ago, and he said that change is temporary, whereas transformation is permanent. Then, conference keynote speaker, Dr. Jorge Haddock (Dean of George Mason University’s School of Management), deftly explained that change signifies something different in what we are doing, while transformation refers to something new in how we are being.

The distinction intrigues me. I work with my clients on the being part of the equation, while the client is generally more focused on the doing part. They want to do something they haven’t, for some reason, been able to – build a building, open a new line of business, turn around lagging morale, identify innovative solutions to air quality problems, collaborate across traditional boundaries, etc., etc. In all these cases, I am much less concerned with what the client decides to do since I know whatever that is will come clear after the being part is transformed. The doing is actually the easier part. As Louise Hay says, “I don’t fix problems, I fix thinking. Then problems fix themselves.”

No one changes anything of any significance without the will to do it. And will is comprised of understanding, motivation, values alignment, and the aha! that means things have chinked into place. When this happens, get ready for mind-blowing leaps in thinking, making way for life altering transformation, explosions of realization from which spring entirely new plateaus of awareness, service, compassion and impact.  Innovation in what we do becomes possible by what we open our minds and hearts to in who we are.

The experience of this, what we call epiphany or revelation or quantum leap, is far too rare and precious in this world. How many groups do I start out with who come to the process skeptical, with the expectation that all they will get in our process is something insignificant, if not downright negligible? That nothing will change and certainly not anything on the scale of transformation. It’s as if we are so used to disappointment, we walk around taking what we can get as a matter of course.

The biggest challenge I have is helping people believe that something else is possible – that perhaps, this time, we can dare to dream, to go for something bigger than we’ve seen before, something we might describe as our heart’s desire. The moment when the group begins to transform their stance of “take what I can get and protect it like hell” to “imagine what could be possible” is magic indeed, because then I know we will get to the brilliance.

This kind of transformation is my life’s work. Helping people, groups, organizations, communities reach for the impossible, imagine the unbelievable, design strategy, map new territory, and track discovery of worlds unknown. I watch as the individuals in these groups come alive again, inspired by renewed meaning and the promise of returning the infinite’s investment in humanity.

So, while at the conference, I listened carefully for how the barriers to change were described. What keeps us from realizing greatness, the extraordinary?

  • Is it technology? Do our mind’s imaginings outpace what our engineering can build? Surely, but that is only a matter of time.
  • Is it imagination? Does the complexity of the issues test the limits of our imaginations? Definitely, but that is exactly what drives us to innovate.
  • Is it what we believe? Does our culture of beliefs and values, dare I say, our maturity, keep us from doing what we know to be right? Yes. And this one will stop us dead in our tracks every time until we face it head on.

The Peter Drucker quote, “culture eats strategy for lunch,” came up in a couple of different contexts at the conference as a way of naming exactly this: all the best strategy in the world will come to nil if the culture is not in alignment with it. Throughout the conference, I heard culture as the main barrier to implementing real change. So what’s to be done in the face of the big “it’s just the way we are” or “that’s how we do it here”? The inertia of the old cow path? That’s where the “management” part of the conference name comes in.

By definition, if we are managing something, we know what we are doing and are making sure it happens. But in large-scale change, in areas where we need transformation, we don’t know. That’s the whole point. We aren’t ready yet to turn things over to managers; what we need is leadership. As Dr. Haddock said, we need leaders who listen for the culture, for the context of an issue and help people hear the stories they tell themselves that are no longer useful. Not more information, more content on the issue, but more attentiveness to its context. And to the process by which people can come together, develop shared understanding predicated on shared language, transform their understanding at a cellular level, see something new, bigger than they have before, all of which enables doing something brilliant.

As our issues grow in number, complexity and scope – in our organizations, our communities and our world, and the pace of change continues to increase, it is leadership of transformation that will pave the way for successful management of change.

A hearty thanks to the ACT/IAC team for such a well-run and thought-provoking conference, and to all the attendees for making the conversation so rich.

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Teamwork, Collaboration and Accountabilty: We’re Talking Governance

May 12, 2011 Rebecca Reynolds Business, governance, Government, Leadership, Nonprofit Organizations, Technology

Harvard Business School professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s recent blog post, Cisco and a Cautionary Tale about Teams, deftly correlates several key factors challenging organizational leadership today. Kanter says: “With buzz about self-organizing social networks increasingly dominating the world, and organizations of all sizes in all fields seeking more collaboration, it is worth pausing to revisit exactly what teamwork means.” Exactly. Leadership must consider the kind of “teamwork” that is desired in their organizations and then build the structure and process to foster it.

First though, let’s consider what Kanter means by “teamwork.” She is talking about how groups of people are organized to make decision-making and work efficient and effective. And different organizations desire and require different types of teamwork: some more collaborative, some less, some more integrative, some more specialized. And what kind of teamwork is needed in different organizations, and even in different parts of the same organization, is what is being called into question.

The traditional models of organizational structure (top down, command and control, silos of activity) that operated as the gold standard are being challenged on a variety of fronts, and that means it’s time for innovation. But for this to happen, leadership needs first to increase their capability in discussing organizational structure, and see doing so as answering a set of strategic questions. What decisions are made and where, with what input, in what timeframe, with what impacts on the particular “product” and with what tolerance by the specific organizational culture are all fundamentals of the governance conversation. Indeed, governance lies at the heart of much institutional angst right now.

The types of governance that have worked in the past, in areas well-known and understood (like financial management, HR, etc.), are being called into question in the newer arenas of technology and knowledge management. And this development coincides with the democratization of information (24/7 access to just about anything) that technology is pushing, as well as the demand for greater transparency and involvement in decision-making, that is itself a product of access. Because of these forces, governance in all our institutions is in a state of upheaval, with leadership being pushed to transform it. But if leadership is not fluent in the language of governance and the questions that need to be asked, with a solid understanding of the forces at work that are applying the pressure, leadership will find itself repeatedly designing and redesigning its governance to little effect.

And we see this in the preponderance of reorganizations. But governance redesign is much, much more than a reorg. Governance redesign means asking and answering basic questions about the type of decision-making the organization desires – overall and in specific areas within it. For example, as Kanter points out, a technology company by definition needs to be more agile in its decision-making than, say, an academic institution, in order to remain competitive and relevant in the rapidly evolving marketplace. At the same time, innovation is often the product of collaboration and so both agility and a collaborative environment may be desired. But since agile decision-making is generally at odds with the pace of more collaborative decision-making involving varied groups of people, this inherent tension will need to be reconciled in the governance structure that is created. Finding this balance will require innovative thinking about and design of governance, so leadership needs to get much more agile itself in governance stewardship acumen.

Kanter also brings up the notion of accountability. One of the reasons for command and control is that both authority and accountability are clear - in fact, one client of mine went so far as to say that only an individual can be accountable, never a group. To the contrary, I have worked with highly successful nonprofit boards where both collaboration and shared authority are givens. As Kanter says, leadership still exists in collaborative governance structures, but only if it is well designed and communicated. Where the governance model includes broader input and increased transparency, the charter, in which clear lines of authority and responsibility are described – even if in entirely new ways, gains renewed prominence. Unfortunately, many charters sit on dusty shelves because they are verbose, unclear, and considered just a formality.

And this is perhaps the state of governance overall: dusty, verbose, unclear and considered a formality. When in fact, clear governance, whatever the particular model, is the very fiber of teamwork, the foundation of organizational culture, the catapult to greatness or to a stunning lack thereof.

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