Navigate the Swirl. Richard Hawkes
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arisen to accomplish all kinds of things together—to create and innovate, to build and scale, to produce and sell. Today's organizational entities go beyond business of course—there are many other examples of large and impressive organizations today, like nonprofits or educational institutions. But even so, business has truly been at the leading edge, and sometimes bleeding edge, of learning how to make human organization adaptive and dynamic even as it grows larger and more complex. Indeed, understanding how to make large organizations work in a dynamic way is still a relatively new science, and there is so much to learn. But make no mistake, our ability to solve tomorrow's great challenges will, in no small way, depend on our ability to effectively organize and accomplish things together at scale, in complex adaptive social systems.
In my experience, many business leaders don't think about any of this when they start a company, or even take over an established one. They focus their attention on creating or refining their value proposition, developing their product or services, finding customers, marketing, sales, and so forth. Then one day, they wake up and realize that they are in charge of much more than profit and loss statements. It dawns on them that they are holding the reins of a strange, unpredictable beast that has its own ideas, its own seeming agency, and can be quite resistant to outside input and to demands for change. Occasionally, the necessary leadership skills come naturally, and an entrepreneur or executive manages to navigate this task with instinct and intuition. But even the best instincts in the world only get you so far when it comes to something as complex as human systems.
I remember one painful situation in which thinking of teams and companies as mechanical systems, rather than social systems, led to a near disaster for a company, and a professional setback for me personally. The context was a recent merger of three large consumer products companies. The opportunity, as envisioned by the board of directors who had engineered the merger, was to increase the market potential of the enterprise and to reduce its overall costs by combining and streamlining the sales capabilities across the three companies.
After the transaction had been completed, they moved quickly to change the organizational structure, so that all the sales capabilities from across the three companies now reported to a single functional leader. I remember they gave that person the title of “Global Head of Sales” and he was appointed as the new enterprise leader. The board then directed the three former CEOs, who still had their CEO titles, and the new Global Head of Sales, to work as a team and align on a path forward for the company. As you might imagine, it easily turned into a battle zone, as the three CEOs competed for access to sales resources.
The board had been approaching the issue in mechanical terms, not social system ones. Thinking they could plug and play various leaders from a distance, they'd given little thought to what would make the social system of the combined businesses thrive. And in my role as consultant, I was tasked with aligning this team. Unfortunately, I had not yet embraced a deeper view of organizational life, nor fully understood the nature of the system I was working with. I wasn't yet approaching these issues from a social systems perspective. So I tried to simply convince the competing CEOs that I had a great plan. They resisted. I failed to recognize the social dynamics that were setting them on a path of conflict, and even more importantly, I failed to work with them to build relationships, understand their needs, and co-develop an organic path forward that could actually achieve alignment from the inside out. I was offering a monologue when a deeper dialogue was needed. But in those days, I didn't yet appreciate the transformative power of authentic conversations to influence social systems. As a result, I lost influence, and failed in my mission.
I've seen many business leaders reach the point when they begin to realize that leading an organizational social system is much more complex and difficult than they had bargained for. At that point, they sometimes start wishing that they could simply replace their team. Hire a new group of super-talented, easy-to-manage, uncomplicated team members who already work perfectly well together, and all the problems will simply vanish! But of course, that's not possible. Sometimes bringing in new blood is helpful, but the idea that the problems are rooted in having the wrong people as opposed to inadequate leadership and a dysfunctional organizational regime is the unfortunate root of many problems in today's workplace. I promise you, there is no perfect team out there on LinkedIn waiting to answer your email. Sooner or later, every successful leader has to grapple with a terrible but liberating truth—they can't solve their problems through hiring and firing. They have to find ways to develop their own leadership intelligence, which will then allow them to develop their team and ultimately influence their company. Thus begins the journey, and the real work of organizational transformation.
In most cases, the unpredictability of a complex adaptive social system only reveals itself under the pressures of change. The company may have been ticking along just fine for its first couple of years—small but profitable. It has systems and structures in place; established ways of working; and a well-developed business model for delivering its services. The team is tight, and they've been together since the beginning. They know how things work, and they know who has power and influence. They've learned how to get what they need to do their jobs. But then, one day, everything has to change.
The pressure of change can take many forms. Sometimes, it's good news, like a new market opportunity. Demand for the company's products or services takes off, and it suddenly needs to grow from a quirky startup into a larger enterprise. Sometimes, it's bad news. Competitive pressures in the industry render an existing business model ineffective, and the company realizes it needs to innovate new offerings or risk going out of business. Perhaps it acquires another company or is acquired. As the company begins to grapple with the demand for dramatic transformation, it quickly becomes clear that its old ways of doing things are not going to get it where it needs to go.
The particulars can vary, but it begins to become clear that the existing culture of the organization is faltering. Changes are needed, but aren't happening. Strategic shifts seem impossible. Cultural confusion escalates. People start acting strangely. They seem to agree with what's said in the meeting but then go away and do something different than what was agreed. The Swirl accelerates even as the need to transcend it becomes acute. Frustration grows. Indeed, it can feel as if the system itself is resisting the change. And the leader needs to figure out how to lead the system itself on the journey to higher performance.
Leadership is the art and the science of inspiring and guiding groups of people in a complex adaptive social system to align and navigate the uncertainty of changing and learning together, toward a shared purpose.
Making the type of changes that can lead the organization out of the Swirl is never quick and easy. But here is the good news. It's not just about escaping what's wrong; it's also about discovering what's possible. And this requires a deeper understanding of how we view the organization we're trying to change. Indeed, if you truly want your business to reach its higher potentials, you're going to need to learn how to wield influence not just over individuals but over complex adaptive social systems. Change, in a complex adaptive social system, cannot really be “managed,” whatever consultants would like you to believe. It must be led, first through the development of team and company leaders, and then through the development of teams. But leadership of a social system is not a one-way street. As I learned with those three companies in the merger I mentioned earlier, it requires much more than a monologue, however uplifting or inspiring. It's a dialogue, a conversation—in fact, it requires a series of ongoing intentional conversations that have the power to align, reimagine, and consciously upgrade the social system. I've worked hard to refine these conversations into a series of Seven Crucial Conversations, a Growth River methodology that is essential to this upgrade and to building high-performing teams. They also inspired the title of this book. But before exploring these conversations in the second half of the book, there is much I need to convey about social systems, the nature of a business, growth and transformation, the evolutionary stages of an enterprise, and the latent potentials that are embedded in organizational social systems, even those that are mired in the Swirl.
I used the word consciously earlier, and it's an important term to pause and reflect on. There comes a point in the evolution of an enterprise when change must be consciously engaged. And that requires leadership. Otherwise, the inertia, good or bad, of the existing