Navigate the Swirl. Richard Hawkes
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Indeed, one way to think about the culture is that it's what people do when no one is telling them what to do. That's unconscious or natural culture—the natural pattern of the social system when it is undirected, when people are filling the void and choosing how to behave in the absence of leadership. That may be positive, negative, or otherwise, but when you reach a point where you need to upgrade, shift, or evolve the complex adaptive social system of your organizations, make no mistake, leadership will be essential. It takes leadership to create a more conscious or intentional culture, one in which the ways of thinking and acting are purposefully aligned at a higher level of performance.
Leading Social Systems versus Leading Mechanical Systems
Again, a leadership style is shaped by how the leader sees the system they are working in. If you view your organization as a mechanical system made up of parts, inputs, and outputs, you'll lead it one way. If you view it as a social system composed of people playing their roles, forming relationships with others, exercising their agency to negotiate shared purpose and ways of working in the context of those relationships, you'll lead it another way. The social systems view includes the process flow of inputs and outputs between roles in the system but goes beyond it to take into consideration the human aspect of those interdependencies as well.
In the mechanical systems view, solutions are designed top-down and team members are expected to follow the directives set forth as tasks, processes, and project plans. In this view, some roles are assigned strategic planning responsibilities, and others are expected to execute. Conversely, when operating from the social systems view, all roles are expected to engage and contribute their perspective to the overall strategy. Solutions may still be designed top-down but validated and updated based on bottom-up feedback, and in the context of aligning purpose, roles, and ways of working. In this view, all players are empowered to exercise their agency and choice, and leaders need to align team members around their decisions through communication and consultation.
Although both perspectives have their advantages, the journey of growth and transformation that I'm describing in these pages can only occur if all team members fully embrace the implications of a social systems perspective, as a necessary condition for reaching higher levels of team and organizational performance.
The following are a few key characteristics of the social system mindset as contrasted with the mechanical system mindset:
Interpersonal, not impersonal: Leaders focus on influencing others and creating alignment through conversation, rather than relying on the weight of hierarchical authority.
Relational, not transactional: Leaders focus on building and maintaining strong mutual relationships, rather than supervising outputs.
Inclusive, not exclusive: Leaders focus on ensuring everyone on the team has agency and choice and is fully engaged in the transformation process.
The Art of Alignment
Let's return to that swirling, tumbling river we were navigating earlier in these pages. As you steer your team and organizational watercraft through the rapids of changing markets, around your competitors, avoiding the rocks, and riding the currents, the last thing you need is for all the people on board to be rowing in different directions. You need them to be aligned. You need them to be working for a common purpose, pointing in the same direction—the direction of growth and higher performance.
If the river is calm and the current steady, it can feel like it is less important for everyone to work in a closely aligned way. Some might be rowing faster, some slower. Some might be taking a break and watching the scenery pass by. A few strong arms can keep the boat on course. But as the river gets rougher, with more obstacles, rapids, and eddies, you need all hands on deck. The more complex a system becomes, the more critical alignment is. In any system, there are multiple parts that are in motion, and the overall success of the system is the sum total of those parts aligning in the same direction. In a simple system with just a few parts, some semblance of alignment might be achieved with top-down authority, but it's really just compliance. Once the system grows in complexity, that simply doesn't work. A top-down controlled system will never be able to adapt quickly enough to the changing environment, nor will it harness the creativity and potential that is inherent in its many parts. You're treating people like parts in a machine, and the best that mechanical parts can do is not break down. They can't transform, evolve, or innovate. But if you respect that the parts are free-thinking, creative human beings who make their own choices about how to use their time and energy, you have to take a different approach. Sure, you could enforce compliance, but you recognize that that will never add up to truly high performance. The job of leadership is to create alignment, which is different than creating agreement. That difference is critical. Alignment requires that the individuals choose to move in the direction of growth. People can agree, disagree, or anything in between, but they can still independently align and move forward, and that makes all the difference. They don't simply go through the motions; they actively contribute. People who are merely complying feel victimized, and that state of mind is never conducive to high performance. Alignment is a free choice that liberates innovation and intelligence. See Figure 1.1.
FIGURE 1.1 The Art of Aligning People as Vectors
Alignment occurs in a social system, like a team or company, when the individuals come together and adopt shared ways of working toward a common goal. It is not necessary for each person to agree, but they must choose to align out of a recognition that it is for the common good of the team or organization.
To achieve alignment in a complex adaptive social system, leaders must become skilled at breaking complex issues down to the key choice points. These are the moments when people need to consciously choose to come along on the journey together, and the leader's job is to initiate the conversations that lead to those choices. These are the seven “crucial conversations” that we will delve into more deeply in the third section of this book. They are an essential part of the Growth River Operating System. Out of these conversations, people can come to a choice about what's right for the team and decide upon and implement shared ways of working. There is no subterfuge or sleight of hand involved in obtaining alignment. That would defeat the purpose. These are conversations that are held transparently and openly. Suffice to say again that we're not talking about requiring every individual to perfectly agree with or even like the decisions that are made, but we are talking about every individual recognizing those decisions to be in the best interests of the team or organization. Therefore, they'll choose to put that above their own preferences or opinions.
Unless a leader respects people's agency, and skillfully creates the choice points at which they can align, the result will never be transformation in the team or organization. But this way of thinking is counterintuitive. People often think that they can grow faster if they drive choice out of the system. When you're caught in the Swirl, the last thing you feel like doing is inviting more input, opinions, and perspectives into the conversation. That brings about a level of complexity that some leaders find unbearable. They want to “nail and scale” their business models and their systems, so that they run like a well-oiled machine. It may even work for a period of time, so long as the waters are calm and the currents predictable. It may even be appropriate at certain points in the organization's journey. But here's the issue. Without knowing it, they have created a culture with so little tolerance for diversity that it can't handle complexity. As soon as they hit a certain level of complexity, or unexpected events throw them off balance, it becomes difficult to function. By driving choice and agency out of the system for all but the top leadership, they have lowered their own potential as an organization to adapt, to be creative, to pivot, and ultimately to grow and thrive over the long term. If you want to get out of the Swirl, you don't do so by shutting