A New Kind of Home

What are we doing there, in this circle on the top floor of a building? The simplest answer: we’re helping the leaders begin to create a new kind of home at XYZ, Inc., a community where employees can see and value each other as individual human beings and can hold the greater degree of vulnerability that will be necessary for the company to meet its adaptive challenge. We’re starting with the leaders at the very top. We’re going to take each of them through the experience of creating their own immunity to change maps, and they’re going to have the chance to share them with each other.

Weeks later, the HR head will begin to spread home beyond the C-suite. He will introduce us to the first of four groups of 150 leaders we will work with at XYZ—the 600 senior managers of the company, each of whom is running a business unit. He will set the stage for an invitation to greater vulnerability in this large, publicly traded, multinational corporation.

“I’ve gone through the same experience you are about to go through,” he will say. “And so has every member of the top team. We wouldn’t be asking you to do this if we hadn’t experienced the power of it firsthand.”

The HR head will continue, “I’ll give you a little taste of how I experienced this. You know that thing that can sometimes happen with your iPhone, where all the icons start to jiggle? Well, that’s what this was like for me. So let me introduce you to Dr. Lisa Lahey. She’s here to jiggle your icons.”

XYZ employees’ concept of home will continue to widen when, months later, the head of leadership development will introduce us to about a thousand employees in twelve countries connected via webinar. Each of the six hundred senior managers has a top team of eight to ten. Home will eventually spread to the more than five thousand team members of these six hundred senior managers via four such webinars, each guiding more than a thousand employees through their own ITC maps, over three or four hours, in the company of their team members and team leader.

As we prepare this book, XYZ is making plans to spread home beyond the top six thousand to tens of thousands, via a highly engaging, highly interactive digital space we have cocreated that will provide several months of online support to XYZ employees who will test and overturn their big assumptions through experiments they will run at work—and, apparently, at home as well. (An XYZ employee came up to one of us during a recent visit to headquarters. “I know you don’t know me,” he said, “but I recognize you from the videos on that ‘immunity’ stuff. I just want to tell you, I’m frankly not sure yet how much better this is making me at work, but my wife wants me to thank you for making me a much better husband!”)

Early Indications

Will XYZ become a DDO? Will a 100,000-person company ever become an everyone culture? Who knows. Decurion, Bridgewater, and Next Jump are all privately held companies, owned (at least in part) by their leaders, with no more than about a thousand employees each. It is natural to wonder whether a DDO must fit these characteristics. But with XYZ as an example, it’s possible to imagine how a huge, publicly traded, multinational corporation begins to create an expanding home that can host the vulnerable-making groove of a practice like ITC, helping thousands of people, out on their edge, meet individual and collective adaptive challenges.

What we do know is that the work pays off. The company conducted an interim assessment of the impact and value after about a year and a half, comparing a group of senior managers with whom we worked with a comparably positioned group with whom we had not yet worked. XYZ decided the internally respected metrics for determining end-of-year bonus—metrics tightly tied to the performance of the units these managers were running—would be a good proxy for assessing impact. “In the aggregate,” they asked, “does the group that has been participating in the personal-change work receive a higher end-of-year bonus than the group that has not?”

The conclusion: the group with whom we worked, in comparison to the group with whom we did not, added slightly more than a billion dollars to the company’s revenues.

Why Become a DDO?

McDaniel explains how he decided to move toward a more deliberately developmental culture:

Note that McDaniel’s picture of F&D’s change story begins squarely in the upper-left box (organizational exterior): a clear business problem that needs addressing. And note that his story, beginning here, naturally moves to the upper-right (individual exterior), because collective needs implicate individual capabilities. McDaniel explains:

For F&D, development begins at the beginning:

The DDO model works well with the industry in which F&D operates:

“Growing our people” for McDaniel, is not only a means of fulfilling the first business objective of creating a new generation of senior business drivers but also an end in itself—in effect, a second business objective: to make development itself an important part of the value proposition of working at F&D. This is the classic, expected profile for early adopters of the DDO idea—leaders and organizations that see people development as both means and ends of the business.

Then What?

McDaniel and his fellow partners collectively agreed that they needed to focus on developing younger people. The agenda was firmed up, but McDaniel knew he couldn’t simply mandate that the firm move forward with it.

So McDaniel asked one of us to make a presentation at F&D’s partners’ retreat on adult development (something McDaniel could have done himself and done it well, but he wanted to participate in the conversation and focus on his partners’ responses). He next decided to vet the immunity to change (ITC) method with the few select people who he knew would need to be advocates for the DDO approach if it were to take hold. McDaniel had one of us conduct an ITC workshop with those five people so that they could gain a better sense of what it would mean for the firm to become a DDO.

In other words, McDaniel took actions to build a home for the work to take place: discussing with partners whether to focus on growing younger people; exposing partners to adult development; participating in the retreat; and vetting the ITC method with a few people.

This is also where McDaniel’s story begins to move into the lower half of the four-box model. It is not only that he identifies a business problem, or that he sees that the business problem will make new demands on individual members, or even that he has a dual conception of the business problem that includes people development as an end in itself. He could do all these things and still envisage that the road from here to there is essentially a technical one, in which his central need is a good plan to get people on board to shift their behaviors in the desired direction.

But McDaniel’s earlier critique of the industry is, in essence, a diagnosis that his business objectives have an adaptive dimension, and this means that focusing on behavior without also focusing on the mind-sets that drive the behavior is not likely to succeed. This move from a focus on the visible behavior alone to the invisible interior is what moves him into the lower half of the model.

A Word on the ITC Map

We would never suggest that McDaniel’s chosen means—the ITC approach—is the only tool or must even be one among the various tools an organization will use. The immunity to change approach does play a prominent role, in one way or another, in many of the examples in this chapter, so perhaps a quick word is due as to why. The answer is not pride of ownership (two of the authors invented the approach), nor is it a matter of going with what you know best (collectively the authors might have a hundred years’ worth of experience with the method). We like the ITC approach because it is the most focused, most functional, fastest, and least costly way (psychically, for the individual and the organization) we have seen to get everyone engaged with her growing edge, in a fashion that links gut, mind, and hand (how you feel, how you think, and what you can do when you make that connection).

What is the most familiar alternative? It’s waiting until people screw up and then mining the valuable lessons therein. With the proper support, intentions, and focus on the interior (instead of mere problem solving), the mistakes people make can be a gold mine for a DDO. But as the central engine for producing internal learning opportunities, it has serious limitations.

First, it takes a long time for everyone to have a rich, working curriculum (you have to wait for everyone to screw up). Second, it costs the organization a lot to build such a curriculum. (Each person’s lesson plan is purchased at the cost of some kind of damage.) And for most people, the moment after they’ve done something wrong is not the optimal moment for learning. In contrast, the ITC approach quickly gets everyone out on his growing edge (aware of at least some of the demons he’s fighting and understanding how his way of fighting is producing his ineffectiveness) and without his having to do any damage.

So let’s return to McDaniel’s story. The outcome of the ITC session was that the group of five agreed to the firm moving further in its exploration to be a DDO; the yearlong pilot was hatched. The subcommittee next created a process to answer questions about whom to involve. In the end, the hope was that the ten people chosen would serve as a best case to test whether it was possible for F&D to accelerate people development in a way that would serve the firm.

The First DDO Practice

The program centered on ten selected professionals, representing many areas and levels, forming a developmental community to work on improving themselves, each other, and the firm. For the first four months, through the height of the busy season for accounting firms, participants focused mainly on developing themselves and each other by conducting and interpreting small, ITC-based experiments related to improvement goals in the context of their regular work. They met weekly in peer coaching pairs, and they talked regularly with an external ITC coach as well as a partner in the firm who served as an ongoing mentor.

In March 2015 (three months into the project), and then later in the summer, Andy Fleming interviewed McDaniel and three other firm members engaged with the initiative to hear their thoughts and observations on their experience so far. Collectively, the ten participants in the initiative reported more than a hundred experiments and twenty-five peer coaching meetings conducted in the first six weeks.

Why was there such engagement? What were they learning? Where did they see things going? Let’s hear from McDaniel and also from Beth Newton (director of people and culture), Susan Koschewa (senior manager, audit), and Charli Traylor (manager, tax). McDaniel and Newton are the primary overseers of the initiative—they’re the ones who have put their necks on the line to make it happen—and Koschewa and Traylor applied and were chosen to be participants in the group of ten.

The Journey So Far: McDaniel

In McDaniel’s words, “My big assumption is that I always have to have the answer, and I’ve done some experiments telling folks, ‘I’ve thought it through and don’t have an answer.’” He describes what happened when he acted against that assumption.

As an internal coach in the initiative, McDaniel has also learned about others’ big assumptions. One in particular is shared across the culture and has a direct relationship to the development of future business drivers. Here’s what he says about it:

Beth Newton, Director of People and Culture

In August 2013, Frazier & Deeter hired Newton as director of learning and development, a visible expression of the firm’s deep commitment to develop its people and culture. Newton says she joined F&D because she wanted to work on the DDO initiative, which, she acknowledges, presents a challenge.

Susan Koschewa, Senior Manager, Audit

Charli Traylor, Manager, Tax

The Way Forward

You can imagine that each of these people (as well as the other participants, if we were to hear from them) would say “yes” to our three characteristics that point toward a DDO culture: yes, they each have an edge—a personal growth goal or one big thing they’re working on right now; yes, they have a home—a community of people who are aware of what they’re working on and who care about whether they make progress on it; and yes, they have groove—a practice they are engaged in that allows them to be at work on their edge during their work activities. And because they have these three elements, they have begun to become the change they want to see.

Compared to XYZ, Inc., Frazier & Deeter is taking a slower approach to expanding its edge, groove, and home by using a pilot program. Whereas XYZ is using a top-down approach, starting with the CEO and the top six hundred leaders, F&D is using more of what we would call a middle-out approach.

What is similar, though, is that the two organizations’ choice to turn toward becoming a DDO does not mean committing themselves to moving all the way down the path to become a full-fledged DDO; nor does it mean that the entire company culture will one day resemble the developmental intensity of a Decurion, a Bridgewater, or a Next Jump. It does mean that F&D’s leaders are committed to enacting certain DDO principles and practices (and to creating some of their own) in a bounded way and to seeing what they might learn and what might emerge as the best next steps. They’re building their bridge as they walk on it, and several members of our team have been fortunate to accompany them.

Returning to the four-box heuristic and keeping ourselves honest, this example may bring to life both the upper and lower halves of the box, and the relationship between them, but with respect to the lower half, the emphasis is on the individual interior. Perhaps our next example can correct this a bit.

All about the Risk

To meet these goals, members of SI think about risk in unusual ways. Rather than focus only on reducing risk, people at SI consider how a given risk may usher in a new opportunity. In an earlier project, people from across the business began to imagine a series of possible futures that would have a disruptive impact on personal insurance. SI’s central task is to uncover and manage options for the company to consider in the event that one of those future scenarios occurs.

This means that members of the team must immerse themselves in future worlds that don’t exist—take the perspective of these future customers, imagine their future lives—and then create new possibilities in the present that might provide a bridge to those futures.

This taxing mental and emotional exercise requires capacities most people don’t develop in the course of their regular lives. They must deal with many competing perspectives simultaneously, constantly challenge their deepest assumptions, and use diversity and conflict as tools to unlock new ideas. They constantly work together to increase their capacity to make a different kind of sense. As a result, the team is trying to make its work, its structure, and its culture deliberately developmental.

As with the more fully realized DDOs at the heart of this book, the SI team members believe that there is no difference between developing themselves as people and getting their work done. Kirsten Dunlop, executive general manager of strategic innovation, had never heard the term deliberately developmental organization when the team was formed. But she was steeped in developmental theory, and she knew she wanted her team not only to think about new things but also to think in new ways. She didn’t know exactly how to do this; she calls what team members are doing “leadership in the nude,” as they practice on the edges of their own competence and comfort level.

Team members see their own ability to break out of the confines of their previous perspectives as core to thinking about the future of insurance (by thinking about the future in general) in new ways. They believe that the thinking and being patterns they brought with them are too constrained to offer something innovative. This means that development is imperative. Their theory is that a socialized perspective might be too locked in the confines of the current context to do the innovative work that’s required. Even a self-authored perspective is likely to be constrained in a single (albeit self-authored) set of beliefs about the world. At SI, workers lean into the self-transforming mind in their work and conversations. And given how unusual such minds are, they know they must support people to develop them.

Regular Reflection

On one early autumn April morning (we are in Australia, remember), the team members gather for a regular reflection day. The twenty-four of them sit in a large circle, with all the whiteboards pushed aside to make the biggest possible work space. In the circle are the core team—the twelve members of the division who are permanent members—as well as a group called the principals—twelve people who come from the business and are posted to SI for a year. (The latter arrive in groups of three every quarter, and so there are always a few people who are new and a few who are about to cycle off.)

The topic today is the burgeoning tension between the core team and the principals. No one is quite clear what causes this tension, but it’s beginning to get in the way of the work and slow the pace of the group. Rather than guess what the issue is or have a vague “team building” session, the SI team employs common practice here (as in other DDOs you’ve seen): members unpack their understanding by holding a series of fishbowl conversations.

First in the inner circle is a subset of three of the principals, talking about their experience of the difference in the two roles. They talk about their delight that they are getting to do this exciting and innovative work, their attention to the departure of several among them in the next few weeks, and their own anxiety about returning to their previous jobs.

When they pause, those in the outer circle express appreciation for the process of the conversation; they point to particularly good questions, particularly good listening. Some people point out what looks like an area of tension or discomfort.

The next round begins, with a few core team members joining the middle circle and some people pulling back to the outer circle to gain a different vantage point. The conversation deepens, and now people begin to talk about the power differential, about their confusion concerning who gets chosen to be on which so-called option teams, about how they’re finding themselves changing so fast that they’re dizzy with the effort. Now the tension that previously had been underground begins to bubble to the surface, and the participants turn it around in their conversation so that they can understand it.

In the first round, members in the outer circle were explicitly appreciative; in this round they cast a more critical eye. They ask about the way the inner circle members are enacting their values: How much have they been asking curious questions rather than making points? How much have they been listening to one another? How much have they been uncovering the real conflict? The issue of the option teams fades away as the central issue emerges: some people have a nagging fear that others are selfishly pursuing their own interests instead of doing what the team collectively needs.

This shows up in a topic that one principal calls “the dance between our roles and our personal development.” There is widespread agreement that the members are growing and changing, and their previous assumptions about the world are falling away before new assumptions are developed: “We’re growing so fast here, with little time to reflect on who we’re becoming.” They talk about how they’re more aware of themselves, of their weaknesses, of their strengths. They are redefining work, redefining leadership. “Now I see leadership is about how attuned you are to the people around you and the context in which you’re working,” one person says. “It’s less about deliverables—which I used to think was the whole point. It’s about the journey and not just the destination. I’m noticing what it’s like to really notice.”

There is widespread agreement that people are changing, but a disagreement emerges between, on the one hand, those who have a sense that the team and its work are primary and, on the other hand, those principals who sense that their own individual growth over the past twelve months is the most important piece. A relatively new member of the team says, “It has to be about me first. I have to slash my floaties [i.e., give up my inflatable swim aids], become more independent in my thinking and action than I’ve ever been before. I need to feel like I can’t swim, so that I have to keep my head up by myself. I have to focus on my own individual development before I think about what’s best for the group. I only have a year! First I need to swim before I can think of going back into my team and teaching them to swim.”

But someone else counters, “The point of the development is what we’re doing for the business. We’re getting better on behalf of what the business needs of us—we can’t focus just on ourselves.”

“That’s the point,” another member adds. “We’re paying attention to our own growth and development for the purpose of doing our work better. If the world were remaining the same, we could remain the same. If the world is changing and the business is changing, we need to change too, or we can’t take it forward.”

Reflecting on Reflecting

In the first round of the fishbowl, the conversation is fast and furious, and people seem to ricochet off the ideas of their colleagues rather than build on them. By the third round, the conversation has become slower and more reflective, and people listen more carefully. Even though the conversation is impassioned, they reach into the perspectives of those they don’t agree with, seeking to understand. They probe and ask clarifying questions: “Have I got that wrong?” “Am I misinterpreting what you said?” They watch the process of the conversation itself, with one member wondering aloud, “Hmmm. Am I just trying to deflect the conversation from a place that makes me uncomfortable?” And they track the changes in themselves, noting, “I could not have thought like this three months ago!” They are aware of the process and the content simultaneously, aware of their own reactions but less captured by them, able to deeply understand and consider the perspective of someone who disagrees.

Vital—and somewhat dangerous—issues are raised. “I’m really reacting to all this self-focus,” a member of the core team says. “Professional development isn’t for the self, isn’t supposed to be self-focused. It’s so I can do my job better!”

Someone cries. Someone else gets angry. But these strong emotions are not verboten here, and the group hands around a tissue or steps back to laugh together before pushing deeper into this important and difficult conversation. The ones who have been here for six months or longer find their rhythm relatively easily, even through the tension; the newer ones see what they will be able to do before their time in the group is up.

The conversation begins to weave together the individual and team development ideas, the personal and the organizational. The members close the fishbowl with a conversation about their purpose—individually and collectively, as members of families, communities, and this organization. They reconnect with the idea that insurance is ultimately about creating a sense of hope and security in an uncertain world—a concern they deeply share with their customers. They talk about the way insurance supports growth and risk-taking to create a better future—and it is sometimes the only space of comfort after a disaster. They share their belief in the organization and in the need to find new ways to protect what people most value.

The core team members wonder aloud what they can do to help amplify this shared sense of purpose; the principals talk about their need for personal support and reflection time as well as the stretch the job demands.

By the end of the ninety minutes, the people in the inner circle physically lean in to one another, their tone reflective, searching. The people in the outer circle have pulled their chairs tightly around the middle. They learn that none of their concerns is totally right, and none is unwarranted. They make a new pathway forward, together. The room almost vibrates with the new meaning being created there.

Later in the day the questions raised in the reflection meeting are deepened when the team members learn from their consultant insights from theory and research about power, development, and purpose, and the team experiences and creates developmental practices. They discuss the hidden assumptions that their ITC process has uncovered, and they unpack the team’s collective assumptions. They look at the various ways power and connection interact, and they practice listening deeply to the sense their colleagues make instead of the more common practice of listening to build an argument for what should happen next.

A Theory of Practice

This practice of mixing content with developmental practices on the team’s reflection days goes back to the beginning. As the team formed, the first off-site wove together ideas of complexity, an uncertain future, and adult development; the members’ first practices were about deep listening and honest sharing of feedback. Like the other fledgling DDOs in this chapter, the SI team members used the immunity to change process to discover their personal big assumptions and to find their edge. They also explored the edges of their own development using an individual developmental assessment, as they talked about what they were discovering about the benefits and limitations of their particular developmental stage.

Over time the team has created ongoing practices to strengthen its communities and support its development. Team members have created rituals to welcome new members and to wish farewell to those who are going. They think hard about the theory and practice of transitions, a practice that’s vital for a team always in transition. New members take the developmental assessment and learn about adult development—at the theory level and at the personal level. They create art pieces together to externalize the interior.

The principals who leave and head back into the business (now called pioneers) are supported with ongoing action learning groups, where they make sense of what it means to think about the world in new ways as they encounter old colleagues and challenges.

Spreading the Word

The strategic innovation team is a tiny island of twenty-four people in a sea of fifteen thousand in the larger company. And yet the SI team is beginning to see some of its practices and ways of thinking move into the mainstream as it transitions from a fringe group to a vital part of the capacity of Personal Insurance to create future offerings and expand its vision of the world.

In SI’s short life, it has influenced the larger ecosystem of Personal Insurance to make significant changes in the way people work. For example, the company has experimented with innovative approaches to employees working from home, with resulting extraordinary customer satisfaction, unprecedentedly low levels of absenteeism, and high sales performance. The SI team also led the company to create vital new partnerships (for example, with start-ups to codevelop pioneering and disruptive business models for insurance) and to adapt the model of the core insurance business to prepare for change. Increasingly, the SI team is called on to support innovative thinking throughout the business.

The team stands now at a crossroads as demand for its perspectives and time outstrips its current resources, and its next moves (should it grow? should it create little cells that live inside each area of the business?) will shape not only the developmental nature of the team but also, quite possibly, the developmental nature of the entire business. Will Personal Insurance become a DDO? Will all of Suncorp try this new approach? Perhaps we will learn the ways in which DDO practices create contagious effects that reshape an entire organization.

Or, indeed, perhaps many organizations will follow, as this next glimpse suggests—organizations as big and venerable as Coca-Cola, or as new as a freshly launched start-up.

Building Your Home

For organizations taking early steps in the DDO direction, and for our own ways of being helpful to them, what might it look like to more fully engage and elaborate the lower-left quadrant, the organizational interior?

As we have said, every one of the five examples satisfies some threshold requirement on the upper-left side; there is a clear, motivating business aspiration each organization wants or needs to accomplish. Equally clear is the way these aspirations impose new demands and definitions on individual roles (the upper-right quadrant). Recognizing that we are in the presence here of adaptive challenges, it is then our natural bent to move down, into the interior, on the individual side. There may be nothing wrong with this, but if the organization wants to create a culture that will internally, organically meet these challenges (rather than rely on external help and “something extra”), it will need to work on the element of home.

Even the richest set of practices will not be organizationally self-sustaining unless there is a safe, dependable, collectively-ascribed-to “container” in which those practices will operate.

Safe means, for example, that when someone reveals her weaknesses and struggles publicly, she experiences an enhancement of her place in the organization rather than a diminishment. Safe does not mean people can expect to be accepted who are not working to improve.

Dependable means, for example, that workers can count on the practices and the ethos behind them to be a regular, daily experience of how things are done. It does not suggest that workers are never surprised, nor that they can depend on the security gained through mutual collusions and traded-on loyalties (“I can depend on your being on my side”).

Collectively ascribed to means that we have all made an uncoerced agreement to operate in this way. It is what we want to do, what each person has decided to do, what everyone wants to do. It does not mean “we all share one mind”; it does not mean a culture of groupthink. It does not mean there are no disagreements, but it means agreeing about what is up for disagreement.

For example, in a discussion trying to get to the root cause of a person’s poor decision, there can be all kinds of disagreement as to whether we have really gotten to pay dirt, or whether the person conducting the exploration is doing an effective and respectful job. But there will not be disagreements as to the value of our spending time like this, on what other organizations might consider mere personnel issues. There won’t be this kind of disagreement, because this is what we all collectively signed on for.

To be fair to our fledgling DDOs, you can see signs of this kind of evolution already in the Flashpoint and SI examples. No one at Flashpoint is surprised by the kind of grilling to which their business plans will be subjected. The newbies at SI get schooled by the veterans in “how we do things here,” and how we do things has a lot to do with cultivating processes that will better enable people to speak honestly, pushing beyond accepted wisdom and due deference. It is probably easier for SI to move quickly in this direction, being smaller, less complex, and more in the nature of a program than a company, but that doesn’t make its process less instructive.

One way or another, a safe, dependable, collectively-ascribed-to container for interior work needs to be built by any group, team, division, or whole enterprise that wants to cross crucial thresholds moving in the DDO direction.

Shared Norms, Agreements, and Rules

To our way of thinking, the necessary step in crossing this threshold is the creation of shared norms, agreements, or rules of the road oriented to the work of development.

It’s possible for an executive coach or a powerful leadership development program to create shared norms oriented to development that are sufficiently robust to sponsor powerful practices. This is a kind of home, but it doesn’t live within the organization. It is what we call a twentieth-century answer. It is also possible for the team or organization to create a strong culture with widely understood and agreed-to norms that have nothing to do with development (for example, a high-reliability organization, a combat unit, a surgical team, a group of air-traffic controllers). And people development can certainly take place in such organizations, but they are not DDOs. They are not deliberately constructed to make an organization and its people each other’s greatest resource for development.

For any group wanting to move in the DDO direction, it’s helpful to develop these kinds of norms by asking, “What agreements do we, as a collective, need to make in order to provide the conditions for each other to do this kind of interior work? What agreements will enable us, at once, to work ongoingly on our own development (a Better Me), and to support the ongoing development of our colleagues (a Better You)?” Looking at the typical features of a DDO in chapter 3 can be one kind of prompt for such considerations. For example, you might ask, “Do we agree that rank will not have its usual privileges?” This means that subordinates should feel responsibility to push back on their bosses when they do not agree or understand, and bosses will welcome, rather than take umbrage at, such behavior.

Nor should a group wanting to move further in the DDO direction consider that, in merely making these agreements, it is successfully banishing counter-normative behaviors. Will higher-ups ever get defensive about the push-back they will receive, or critical of their subordinates who deliver it? Of course! Recall the Bridgewater disagreement about the consultants managing consultants.

And when this happens, there should be no head-hanging and self-condemnation (“We aren’t a very good DDO,” “We don’t have what it takes to be a DDO”). The work of building, preserving, and enhancing home is not solely about making the agreements. It is about expecting their continuous violation and then deploying practices (themselves safe, dependable, and collectively ascribed to) to convert those violations into the organization’s curriculum. Then violations become opportunities for everyone, in an everyone culture, to learn (as the issue log serves, in the same Bridgewater example).

Unsurprisingly, we think one of the most effective ways for the wayward individual to use the opportunity for learning is to deploy the immunity to change map. For example, if I regularly have a hard time giving or receiving upward feedback despite agreeing to do so, it doesn’t have to live long as a source of self-recrimination. I can struggle well with it by acknowledging it is an adaptive challenge and engaging my hidden commitments and big assumptions. Recall the Bob Prince and Nora Dashwood examples from chapter 6; each of their collections of column 2 behaviors (“I don’t listen to others” and so on) can be taken as not only counters to their improvement goals but also as violations of shared norms or agreements.

To take our own medicine, in our own evolution in helping organizations moving in the DDO direction, it’s fair to say that we have overexercised our forehand (defaulting to our natural bent to lead with the individual interior). In this way we unintentionally have cast ourselves (and the organizations) back into the twentieth-century answer. If we don’t help the organizations build their own container for the interior practices, such as ITC and others, we become the “something extra”—good consultants on whom the organization depends. Should we withdraw, the likelihood the organizations will continue in their groove is slim (although individuals may), because we haven’t helped them build their own home.

Nor should we beat ourselves up about our (current) limitations. Everyone—the three DDO exemplars, the fledgling DDOs, and ourselves—should be given the chance to grow; and in return for that gift, each of us has the responsibility to struggle well, to work on breaking the earthy crust above so that our new green shoots can find the light of day. In our case, this could involve figuring out our own fear and loathing (the worry box in the ITC map) associated with exercising our backhand, identifying the self-protective commitments (column 3) that make our tendency to prioritize the individual interior over the collective interior (column 2) so “sensible” and “brilliant,” and, finally, uncovering and testing the limiting assumptions (column 4).