During the Wisdom Lab on November 5, we demonstrated our method of “coming alongside” (to use a nautical term) in order to partner with individuals and organizations in the discovery and guidance of what is already in progress. First, we looked at “how” the individual or organization responded to questions and dilemmas that resist easy answers.
We looked closely at the varied responses which allowed us to see otherwise hidden possibilities. We introduced the term gesture as a way to identify underlying impulses. It was through gesture that we started to uncover what is happening now and then to work with adaptive responses.
A number of you asked for examples. Please download our paper and chart describing the characteristics of life-cycle stages of organizations showing gestures appropriate to each stage: Gestures, the key to emergence
7 comments ↓
Mitch -
I appreciate the way you mapped out the responses in the lifecycle grid (in the attachment). This explains some of the ways I’ve noticed you orienting when we’ve worked with individuals and groups. Thanks for making it explicit.
By the way, I think it would be good to actually define “gesture” more explicitly, too. At the conference, we worked with the individual’s gestures as the recurring movements a person makes in response to their situation — that resolve for them whatever tension is in the setting. If that works, then perhaps we can define an organizational gesture as the essential common qualities of whatever solutions are being proposed or actions taken — which are expected to resolve whatever tension the organization is facing.
What do you think of those definitions? How might they be refined to fit your thinking better?
Fantastic!
Mitch, I love the form and evolution this paper is taking. I think the clarity of the principles and examples help move the approach we are working with out of the esoteric and into a more easily discussed and concrete set of steps and actions. To Elizabeth’s point, “gesture” is defined in the paper as “instinctual efforts”, which in my mind says a lot. In an individual, it shows up as a physical movement and so can be tracked fairly easily - with enough trained attention. What is the organizational coorelary for a “gesture”? Elizabeth, you suggest it is the “essential common qualities of whatever solutions are being proposed or actions taken…”, I like that as a potential definition and I also want to take it further. If a gesture is an “instinctual effort” by the organization to address whatever tension or challenge is confronting the system, then it is likely to show up again and again whenever the tension or challenge does. In this way, it should show up as recurring patterns of behavior or actions in the organization. Is there a conversation that keeps getting repeated again and again in different settings? Do people react similarly to a proposed idea or strategy (like going silent, shaking their head or looking down)?
In a client system I am currently working in, no matter where I go and whomever I meet with, the same comment gets made - there is a disconnect between the big vision of the organization and the work that people are doing on a day to day basis. They don’t see the connection wonder how they will ever get there. The next response is either, “I’ll just go on doing what I am doing until someone tells me different” or “I’ll sit back and wait until someone points me in the right direction because it is doing no good just to spin my wheels doing the old stuff - that will never get us there!” These are clearly organizations gestures (or responses, are we using those terms interchangeably?) that are dealing with a current tension and challenge in the organization. They are instinctual responses that are indicating what is next for the organization. Everyone, by the way, desperately wants the organization to be successful.
Finally, it was asked in our session, how do you separate “noise” in the system from the true organizational gesture that is pointing in the direction of what is happening next? I think this is a great question and not an easy one to answer. From one point of view, there is no such thing as “noise” in a system, because it could all be valuable information depending on the perspective you are looking from. Any repeating pattern or behavior in an organization may yield important information about where a system is currently, how it may be stuck and what it is trying to do to unstick or maintain that stuckness. Mitch’s point in the paper about the tension between being adaptive and being stable is very important here. Sometimes an organization needs to focus more on stability for a period of time, particularly when they are in the “Growth and Expansion” phase of their lifecycle. It is very difficult for any organization to continue to adapt on a constant basis. At some point, (stable)systems need to be established for the adaptations happen around. Otherwise you will have unyielding chaos.
On the other hand, when there is an immense effort in the organization to adapt - break out of a habitual or frozen mode of operation or response to the outside world, often caused by an “inflection point”, then we might consider “noise” in that case, to be responses or gestures that are desperately trying to maintain the status quo. It is not that these responses do not have value and tell us information about the organization that we need - it is just less useful at that point than the gestures that are trying to express a form of the adaptation - a new or different approach to the challenge or dilemma.
I would be interested to hear if these thoughts stir up any further ideas. I am also very interested in starting a conversation about the complexity of multiple lifecycles in operation at once in an organization. How do we hold that? What do we need to be aware of when we have nested groups of departments and teams all at different places in their lifecycles, etc.? How can we help teams be successful in that context?
Elizabeth,
Thanks for joining the conversation and adding your view.
I like your definitions of a “gesture”. Both your individual and organizational versions offer a behavioral indicator and a contextual component. What to watch for and when (or in which situations) are crucial distinctions for dealing with the potential confusion that Craig alludes to.
Craig,
Thanks for adding your perspective, example and for pushing the envelope.
I wonder if we could use your case to practice? For example, what might be suggested by the gestures you named? What could these tell us about what might be emerging or needed next? What additional information would we need (besides whether the response seems to solve for stability or adaptation)?
Hello Mitch and Craig! Thanks to a seminar invitation from Mitch, I happened across this blog while perusing the site - hope it’s OK to come along side and jump aboard this conversation.
Craig, thanks for the situation description. Not hard to imagine at all. Reasoning with the metaphors, one way to see the two responses you describe is that they are actually perfectly on track, and speak of what the missing gesture is. Doing what I am (have been) doing is continuing to orient to the old vision. Sitting back is seeing no clear vision, so stop! Both make sense if you cannot see from where you are to where you are “supposed” to be going. The missing gesture in fact is orienting to the new vision. So, what’s missing – At one level it may be as you describe – literally that people simply do not have in their minds or conversation a series of pictures between their tasks and the big vision. In our work we call that set of images a “Line of Sight to the Vision”. Making it a verb, it involves articulating the series of nested ends and means between the two for each person (going from the Big Vision, the iterated question is “cool, and how do we do that?”, going from the task towards the vision it is “and why is THAT important?” One way to do this locally (as opposed to building a map for the whole organization, which may be useful yet complex) is to adopt a discipline we call Leader’s Intent, which comes from our studies of highly effective leaders in the US Army – in their world people need to understand the link between the task and the higher purpose well enough to be able to “read the mind” of that leader during execution if communication is interrupted or impossible, because it is a given in their world (“No plan survives first contact with the enemy” “Plans are useless, planning is essential”, etc) that things will NOT go exactly as planned, so a robust shared understanding is powerful. This often happens as an almost physical conversation, by the way – it is common practice to lay our a “sand map” of an action and literally walk through the key steps to the objective checking for understanding and misalignments before going into action on it.
The deeper question perhaps is “How is it that people who desperately want the organization to succeed do not take it upon themselves to create a conversation that will produce that line of sight?” or, what will it take for them to do so. Here we get into deeper postures (more than gestures, I think) – habits regarding (not) being accountable parts of a larger system. This is something that broadly speaking humans are not (yet) good at. We get caught between individual objectives/ orienting and organizational orienting. So here’s a place where organizational gestures and leader gestures have a lot of impact. When there are regular disciplined forums where intent and actual are compared BY THOSE INVOLVED, it’s a quickening of the pulse. This is the genius of the AAR as the Action Review Cycle. Every AAR meeting is a gesture toward alignment and leader accountability.
Many years ago Craig and I developed a Life Purpose Project together – a set of methods for working with individuals wanting to articulate and evoke their own Life Purpose. One theory we had, which bore out in practice, is that many problematic “automatic” repeating patterns (such as a phobia) could be usefully seen as a locally adaptive response that had lost its context, so it kept doing what it has done, even if at the whole person (organizational) level, it seemed to make no sense. Theory was that one’s life purpose is a powerful and ecological context for an individual’s behaviors (physical, perceptual and emotional), so “restoring” that would lead to such patterns dissolving. I can think of many examples of that happening. So the purpose and vision of an organization are much like that in the larger level of system, individuals are analogous to constituent behaviors. So repeating out-of-date patterns can be dissolved by bringing the experiential connection to the mission and vision into all parts of the “body” of that organization – an “update”.
Charles,
Great to hear from you! Your points have stirred quite a lot in me so I think I will try to address them a bit at a time. Your description and analysis of what the gestures link to and mean in the context of the organization are right on track - the gap you so aptly describe as an issue with “line of sight” with the vision. This was also the way we described it at GE - the further down in the organization, the further away from the vision you were and the harder it was to “see the target” and understand how your contribution/work was helping to get the organization to that vision. Helping to solve for this via a connection to the “Leader’s Intent” is a very important notion and opens up an entirely different consideration - to what degree is a fixed vision a beneficial or even useful practice? Especially in a business environment where complexity and change are not only the norm by default, but also desireable in terms of creating an organization that is adaptable, resilient and generative. My experience of organizations now is that they are continually in the state of emerging and constructing themselves. The once stable frame that the tension between current reality and vision gave them is gone. The vision is often, at best, quickly obsolete and at worse a fixed direction that can dismiss or disable new understanding that emerges to contradict the validity of the vision. What does this imply about the practices that might best serve organizations now, as opposed to our well worn models of strategic planning and visioning?
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