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Key contributors to our own insights, philosophy and practice include:
Some perspectives on their work are outlined below. You might find it useful - as we do - to approach books, authors and ‘gurus’ with three caveats:
 Knowing isn’t doing.
Too much information is a burden. Read with the aim of informing your own insights into experiments you can try. Real learning comes from doing, which also helps others learn and
everyone to avoid analysis paralysis: read a bit, then experiment; reflect; connect; act.
 Doing isn’t being.
Adopting a technique wholesale is not the same as using one to develop insights and awareness. A focus on awareness develops your internal compass; increasingly vital in
continuous and never ending turbulent change where external signals often conflict with each other.
 When a sage points at the moon, all the fool sees is the finger.
Whilst advisors, authors and ‘gurus’ can provide valuable pointers, it is best to use these to inform your own insights. Leadership is about following your own path and leaving a trail;
not adopting someone else’s concepts ‘lock, stock and barrel’.
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Chris Argyris
Chris Argyris is a Professor at Harvard University and has been a central figure in the organisational learning (OL) movement for the past fifty years. His major focus has been on
the challenge of turning knowledge into action and he is highly critical of those who offer advice that he regards as ‘non-actionable’
From our perspective, his particularly useful contributions include:
- The Ladder of Inference. A useful tool for demonstrating how people see reality differently (think ‘elephant’) and how this leads to misunderstandings. Very useful in
supporting dialogue and encouraging people to be more attentive to their self and context awareness.
- Single and Double loop learning.
Single loop learning occurs when someone learns something to add to their existing knowledge, but the new learning fails to change the learner’s own perceptions, values and assumptions. Double loop learning occurs when these underlying aspects are tested and challenged, usually in interaction with others. From our perspective, double loop learning results in shifts in awareness, whereas single loop doesn’t.
- Espoused and In-use theories of action.
Argyris points out that people don’t always behave in ways that match what they say they believe. Ask someone what they believe and they will tell you their Espoused theory. Watch them in action and you may well conclude that their ‘In-use’ theory differs from the one they espoused. Since awareness is the ground from which actions arise this dictates the in-use theory; whilst the espoused theory is just a concept that the espouser espouses for some reason (often to impress others). So whilst someone might profess certain beliefs they will behave in ways dictated by their awareness of themselves in the context. Each of us is pretty good at deluding ourselves into believing in our espoused theories. However, when it comes to understanding other people, we are usually less interested in what they preach than in what they practice - hence the expression ‘actions speak louder than words’. A focus on awareness helps to encourage greater objectivity in our self assessment and greater authenticity in our interactions with others (also known as ‘walking the talk’).
- Skilled Incompetence.
Argyris’ term for the way people avoid resolving important issues for fear that raising them would likely cause embarrassment, including to themselves. The fact that ‘undiscussables’ exist is covered up, then the cover-up is covered up. Organisations then go ‘round the houses’ skilfully avoiding addressing the issues that they must if they are to improve. From an awareness centred perspective, skilled incompetence occurs when people identify themselves closely with the image associated with their role. This means they don’t say what they really think, but instead say what they think they are supposed to as the occupant of their role. For the manager role this often revolves around sustaining the illusion that ‘managers have all the answers’ and that ‘managers should make all the decisions’.
Argyris is an insightful and scholarly pioneer but as an academic often seems less accessible in terms of practical application than those who have built on his ideas in the field
such as Peter Senge.
Recommended reading: Overcoming Organizational Defenses; Knowledge for Action; Flawed Advice and the Management Trap.
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Arie de Geus
Arie de Geus spent most of his professional career working for Royal Dutch/Shell, most notably in the Group Planning function where the practice of scenario planning was developed.
Throughout his career, de Geus developed a novel awareness of organisations based on his long term inquiry into the question: ‘What if we thought about a company as a living
being?’. Although quite a divergent path to the beaten track of conventional management thinking, the fact that de Geus held senior executive positions in a respected organisation has made his writings more
palatable to a wider readership of organisational leaders.
His perspective provides an in-depth exploration of an alternative metaphor to the normal ‘organisation as machine’, namely ‘organisation as living organism’.
He is also credited with coining the term ‘learning organization’ and that ‘the only sustainable business advantage is the ability to learn faster than your competitors’.
Recommended reading: The Living Company.
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Daniel Goleman
Although not the originator of the concept, Daniel Goleman is the figurehead of the Emotional Intelligence movement.
Goleman argues that the higher up an organisation someone ascends, the less his or her performance depends on classical (analytical) intelligence or IQ, and the more on emotional
intelligence - or ‘EQ’.
Goleman cites contemporary brain research that adds additional scientific credence to the concepts. His EQ framework comprises five areas: - Self Awareness, Self Regulation, Self
Motivation, Empathy and Social Skills. The first three he groups into ‘Personal Competence’ and the last two ‘Social Competence’. Note that compared to the specific meaning of ‘awareness of the self in the
context’ that we attach to the term ‘self awareness’, Goleman’s use is rather more general - “knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions”. We have found the specific awareness
centred leadership usage to be more practical in actual use.
Interest in Emotional Intelligence based training and management development coaching has been strong since the late 1990’s and continues to grow. The willingness and
interest amongst managers and leaders to develop the inner qualities and skills they will need if they are to be more effective leaders of both themselves and others can only be a good thing.
Recommended reading: Emotional Intelligence; Working with Emotional Intelligence.
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Gary Hamel
A charismatic and insightful professor of strategy at London Business School, Hamel has been called “the world’s reigning strategy guru” by the Economist. He is co-author with
C.K. Prahalad of the seminal 1994 book “Competing for the Future”, originator of the concept of ‘core competencies’ and in recent years has become a vocal critic of classical organisational strategy
formulation approaches.
His 2000 book ‘Leading the Revolution’ argues a powerful case for transformational change as we enter the era of enterprise, which he terms “the Age of Revolution” (he calls
the era of organisation “the Age of Progress”). Hamel paints a very clear picture of the macro changes and offers useful insights into the deeper changes required. For example he persuasively argues that
it is insight rather than knowledge that creates wealth in the new era. He then points out that such insight comes from developing your own unique point of view and that it cannot be bought form ‘ some rent
a guru’ or ‘some boring consulting company’. He (in our view correctly) identifies that leadership means becoming your own seer, which from an awareness centred leadership perspective means developing your own
unique self-awareness.
Hamel’s confrontational style offers a powerful wake-up call to managers who have unconsciously confined themselves to their old organisational comfort zones.
Recommended reading: Leading the Revolution.
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Charles Handy
Charles Handy is perhaps the best known and most admired UK based business writer. Although less provocative and confrontational in style than Hamel, Handy has similarly foreseen the
enterprise era, which he refers to as the “Age of Unreason” (his term for the organisation era is the “Age of Certainty”).
Handy’s writing is not exclusively business focused, and he is widely respected as a social philosopher with broad insights into the changing nature of society in general.
A powerfully thought provoking author, his ideas and insights include specific concepts such as the Shamrock Organisation, The Portfolio Life and the ‘Sigmoid’ or ‘S’ curve.
Recommended reading: The Age of Unreason; The Empty Raincoat (published as The Age of Paradox in the USA); Beyond Certainty; The Hungry Spirit.
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Robert Levering
Co-author of the book “The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America” Robert Levering developed the ‘Levering Trust Index’ based on five dimensions: Credibility,
Respect and Fairness (these three combine to form Trust in Leadership), Pride in the Firm and Camaraderie with colleagues.
Levering’s ‘Great Place to Work Institute’ does assessments of individual companies (not just in USA). Fortune Magazine uses the GPTWI questionnaire to publish league tables of
great places to work (mostly in USA) as does the UK’s Financial Times for UK based companies.
From the awareness centred leadership perspective, the GPTWI approach does provide some insight into context awareness although we use a different instrument to address this more
explicitly and comprehensively. The interest generated by the publication of league tables is something of a double edged sword. Whilst it may incentivise organisation managers to think more about trust, pride and
camaraderie there is a risk of people becoming fixated with comparisons and rankings rather than tackling the underlying issues of self awareness.
Recommended reading: The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America
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Gareth Morgan
Gareth Morgan is a Professor at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto. He has published widely on the topic of metaphor in organisations and fundamental role that
metaphor plays in influencing how we see the world.
The traditional organisation era metaphor is of ‘organisation as machine’. In a machine, each component (e.g. unit, division or department) is designed to carry out specific
specialised functions with defined inputs and outputs. When we use organisational terms such as operations, functions, mechanisms and manpower we consciously or unconsciously imply a machine metaphor. Organisation
managers reveal the machine metaphor when they describe their roles as being to regulate, govern or control operations.
The fact is that although some aspects of the machine metaphor can be usefully applied to aspects of organisations, organisations are not machines. Organisations involve people, and
people have feelings, hopes and aspirations that the machine metaphor does not admit. If part of a machine is not functioning well or breaks down then the obvious corrective action is fix the part or replace it.
Does the same logic work if the ‘part’ in question happens to be a human being? If we follow this line of thinking then we may be surprised to find that the functioning of other ‘components’ of the machine
depends on how we ‘fix’ or ‘replace’ the malfunctioning ones.
Other metaphors that are applied to organisations include: Military - with terminology such as strategies, tactics, officers, campaigns, the front line etc; Social Science – with
its cultures, subcultures, rules and norms; Politics – with its councils, corporate citizens, labour relations and propagandists (or ‘spin doctors’); Religions – with holy texts, commandments, rituals,
ceremonies, priests, mantras, sacred cows and gurus; Living Organisms – that survive and thrive in environmental conditions that are conducive to their health, vitality and growth; Networks – with intelligent
nodes, communications links, flexible architectures and dynamic reconfiguration; Conscious Beings – with the ability to think, learn, adapt and make choices as well as harbour subconscious limiting perceptions
that can lead to self-harm or even untimely death; and as Chaotic Systems – where order exists but in a emergent and unpredictable form around ‘strange attractors’. The range of available metaphors suggests
that rather than seeing change as ‘restructuring’, organisations might benefit from a redeployment of forces, a healthier diet or lifestyle, or perhaps even a light sprinkling of leaf mould…
From an awareness centred leadership perspective, metaphor is a cornerstone concept in context awareness with associated implications for self-awareness.
Recommended reading: Images of Organization.
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Edwin Nevis
Edwin Nevis (with co-authors Joan Lancourt and Helen Vassalo) published what we regard as the seminal book on organisational transformation and why it works and fails. Nevis et al
identified seven methods of influence that are always in operation all the time. These are often unaligned and cause mixed messages to be sent and received; resulting at best in confusion and at worst in paralysis:
- Persuasive communication;
- Participation;
- Role Modelling;
- Expectancy;
- Structural Rearrangement;
- Extrinsic Rewards; and
- Coercion.
From an awareness centred leadership perspective, these seven methods map onto the four modes of influence: Instructing and Inducing (favoured in the organisation era) and Inspiring
and Involving (favoured in the enterprise era).
The self and context awareness of the organisation era results in overuse of methods 5), 6) and 7). Although many organisations consciously attempt to use methods 1) and 2) they
often do so poorly. Enterprise era leadership requires far greater mastery of methods 3) and 4), which are rarely found in organisation era environments. This is because effective use of these two methods requires
shifts in the self awareness, particularly amongst senior people who set the example of accepted leadership attitudes and behaviours.
Recommended reading: Intentional Revolutions.
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Jeffrey Pfeffer & Robert Sutton
Stanford Professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton researched into what they call the ‘Knowing - Doing Gap’. They concluded that ‘most organisations tend to place too much
value on people who seem smart’ and that ‘this is exacerbated by the way MBA’s and executives are taught and by the methods used in most management consulting firms’. The consequence is that most
organisations overemphasise ‘knowing’ and underemphasise the challenge of turning it into ‘doing’.
From an awareness centred leadership perspective, the lack of doing is a result of the lack of shifts in their ‘being’ i.e. their awareness of themselves and their context.
Recommended reading: The Knowing - Doing Gap
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Jerry Porras & Jim Collins
Jerry Porras and Jim Collins investigated how companies achieve longevity by preserving their core whilst renewing everything else. The ‘core’ comprises a deep sense of values
(which the authors term ‘ideology’) and purpose of the organisation that both transcends and supports day to day activities. Some organisations in their study have survived and thrived over several hundred years
by changing between quite different industries, products and service offerings, but still maintaining their core ideology.
From an awareness centred leadership perspective, the core ideology is itself grounded in the context awareness which both sustains and is sustained by the self awareness of
the key people in the firm. The core that stays the same whilst the rest changes also suggests the caterpillar-butterfly analogy (see Philosophy).
Recommended reading: Built to Last.
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Peter Scott-Morgan
Like many figures in the organisational change and transformation movement over the years, Peter Scott-Morgan’s career began in control engineering. He developed his insights into
transformational change whilst working at a leading management consulting firm and created a powerful method for assessing organisational culture based on what he calls the ‘Unwritten Rules of the Game’.
From an awareness centred leadership perspective, the ‘Unwritten Rules’ approach provides useful insights into the underlying motivations of people and to the undercurrents that
may cause well-meaning but less insightful interventions to backfire.
Like Hamel and Handy, Scott-Morgan envisages a future where transitional change is no longer valid and continuous transformational change has become part of day to day organisational
life.
Recommended reading: The Unwritten Rules of the Game; The End of Change.
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Ricardo Semler
At the age of 21, Ricardo Semler took over Semco - the family engineering business that his Austrian father had founded in Brazil in 1959. Over the next few years, Semler took apart
the traditional hierarchical organisation and recreated it around enterprise practices that even twenty years later still seem radically leading edge. Workers make decisions previously made by their bosses, staff
set their own salaries and bonuses, everyone has access to the company books and shop floor workers set their own productivity targets and schedules. Between 1990 and 2000, Semco turnover increased from $35M to
$160M, profits increased and Semco moved into Internet services ‘without a strategy’.
Whilst not advocating that anyone copy all or any of the specific innovations introduced at Semco, Semler shows what can be achieved when you don’t allow how things have always
been done in the past to be an obstacle to how things might be done in future.
From an awareness centred leadership perspective, it’s hard to imagine a more powerful example of shifts in awareness of context and self in the context than those undergone by
people at all levels and in all roles within Semco.
Recommended reading: Maverick !
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Peter Senge
Although last in our list, by no means least, Peter Senge (pronounced sen-ghee) was the head of the organization learning center (OLC) at MIT from 1989 to 1997. The
publication in 1990 of his best selling book ‘The Fifth Discipline’ established Senge as figurehead leader of the learning organisation movement. In 1975 Senge co-founded the consulting firm Innovation
Associates (IA) with Charlie Kiefer that was later acquired by the Arthur D. Little management consulting firm in 1995.
Senge’s five disciplines: Shared Vision, Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Team Learning and Systems Thinking (the ‘fifth discipline’ that integrates the other four) - are
simple enough in theory, but putting them into practice depends on a significant major shift in awareness from the traditional organisation era.
Senge and his colleagues both at OLC and IA developed many of practical tools and methods that allow the disciplines to be brought to life in organisations.
The Ladder of Inference (adapted from Argyris), Left Hand Column and Productive Conversation are some of the most useful basic tools for helping people create and sustain awareness
shifts.
Recommended reading: The Fifth Discipline; The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook; The Dance of Change
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If you made it this far, you must be serious.
So why not Contact Us to discuss your perspective?
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