Dealing with the Impossible
Jim Varghese, a brilliant executive leader in Australia, told me a story of doing something I had only dreamed should be done: he locked managers in a room until they came up with a solution. Years ago, I had thought this might get the U.S. Congress back on track but, as things deteriorated, even this seemed fanciful. Now, if left to themselves, it’d be an episode of the reality TV show Survivor. Or worse.
I worked with Jim over many years as he occupied several different senior-level leadership positions, first as director general (chief executive) of three different departments within the Queensland Australia government, and then as CEO of Springfield Land Corporation, building the largest planned city in Australia and tenth largest in the world. (I watched this city rise from empty land, using progressive principles to create health and community; it was astonishing to see it become real and made my own work, at the time focused on relationships to “build healthy communities,” seem very easy by comparison.)28
At the time he implemented the lock-down technique, Jim was director general of Main Roads in Queensland. One day, his staff of engineers approached him with terrible news. They could not complete the road because they’d run into problems with the land on which the next portion of road needed to go. There was no alternative route, the road was partially built, and already hundreds of millions had been spent on this project. But now, the engineers insisted, there was no recourse but to abandon the project.
For many years before and after this incident, Jim had a strong track record of using learning circles as a collaborative thinking process even for the most difficult issues. In later years, as director general of Primary Industries and Fisheries, he would be faced with the economic and human havoc wreaked by the Category 5 hurricane Larry that devastated the north Queensland coast. I remember seeing photos of banana trees laid on their side—the total destruction of a fruit industry. He told me that, right after the hurricane struck and they knew the extent of the devastation, their first commitment was to ensure they responded well, unlike the U.S. government had done after Katrina.
And there were many other crises that Jim had been told were impossible to solve, including how to contain the spread of equine flu virus in the horse country of Queensland (he was publicly ridiculed for thinking he could stop it. But he did.) His reliable strategy always was to bring together everybody who had a stake in the issue, make sure they came well prepared and ready to offer their data and insights, expect to enrich the information through probing exchanges, together make sense of the crisis, and then determine a response or solution. He also introduced learning circles to a remote Aboriginal community; over years of use, this collaborative thinking process has transformed their relationships and decision making.
I knew Jim to be dedicated to reflection and learning, both personally and as a leader. During a change of governments in his younger years, he’d been laid off for 3.5 months not knowing when/if he’d return to his government post. Already with considerable experience in leadership, he used that period to reflect on what he had learned. This period of deep reflection (with gardening) resulted in what I call a coherent theory of action. Jim calls it the “Three Learning Frames,” a process for aligning purpose and objectives with relationships, structures, and systems.29
No matter which leadership position he held, Jim knew what to pay attention to based on his theory of action. He also knew to engage people to solve their own problems, whether technical or social. And he had complete confidence in the power of reflection and learning.
Back to the engineers locked in a room. Jim would not take no for an answer—he might have been fired if the road ended there and the project failed, but his motivation was not based on self-protection. He believed that, under pressure, the engineers could find a solution. And they did. (Recall that scene in Apollo 13 where the mission commander dumps on the table all the parts available on the spacecraft and tells the engineers to jerry-rig a solution and get the crew home. “Failure is not an option.”)
There is another maxim, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” But even in the face of necessity, how often do we rely on bringing people together, pooling all the information, expertise, and experience they have, and trust that if we keep them together in a good collaborative process that they’ll come up with an answer? It’s one thing to refuse to take “no” for an answer, but it’s quite another to have the faith that if you hold the right people together in collaborative discovery mode, they will find a workable solution.
In my experience, in the face of imminent failure, most leaders draw inward and disappear from view.
They may be consulting a few trusted advisors or lawyers. Or moving their wealth offshore. Or deny the problem and leave us to fend for ourselves. Each of these behaviors have been well rehearsed in other civilizations in the same stage of decay.
Jim offers the alternative: Gather diverse people together, trust that they each have useful information, get the experts involved as partners, hold them together, use the pressure of time to push them, but also don’t unnecessarily rush them. And only then unlock the door. (I mean this figuratively, as Jim only did this one time. But it’s true that people have to feel the pressure of no exit.)
Most of the time, Jim’s approach results in workable solutions. And even when it doesn’t, people emerge with stronger, more trusting relationships, the ultimate resource we need in hard times.
Please note: I know you’re smart enough to see the difference, but I feel compelled to note that this strategy of insisting on a solution is nothing like and completely different from the common practice of setting unreachable sales and production goals and then, when people do reach their targets, raising the ceiling again. Then again.30
INFORMATION: NOTES
1 See http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-27/slime-mould-can-learn-even-without-brain/7363176?site=science/news.
2 Cells in our liver change every six weeks, in our brains every twelve months. Margaret Wheatley. Leadership and the New Science, 3rd ed., p. 95.
3 MIT Technology Review, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/420369/code-quest/.
4 See http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/definition/Shannons-Law
5 Leadership and the New Science, 3rd ed., p. 112.
6 In a report on British girls, “More than a third of girls aged 10 to 15 years old are unhappy with their appearance and a quarter are unhappy with their lives.” How do you help young girls feel happier? Emma Thelwell, bbc.com August 23, 2016.
7 Under the headline “infectious insanity,” the editor-in-chief of Die Welt, Stefan Aust, wonders whether social media and the Internet have helped violence become “virally transmitted like common flu”. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36882525
8 For a penetrating, scathing report on the state of journalism (with enough irony and humor to see clearly), watch John Oliver’s TV show Last Week Tonight, August 7, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq2_wSsDwkQ.
9 The Panama Papers revealed how at least twelve political leaders (including Putin) and 143 politicians hid billions of dollars in offshore accounts. How much of these funds were stolen from public coffers? https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-panama-papers. Information on the work of the reporters in the International Consortium is found here: https://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/Meet-the-Panama-Papers-Editor-Who-Handled-376-Reporters-in-80-Countries
10 Note the U.S. logo created out of emojis. Brilliant. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/magazine/inside-facebooks-totally-insane-unintentionally-gigantic-hyperpartisan-political-media-machine.html
11 Among many excellent writings about the denigration of science, see Dan Rather’s piece in Scientific American, November 2016, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/dan-rather-now-more-than-ever-we-must-stand-up-for-science/.
12 The harassment of climate scientists, from Congress, right-wing media, and conspiracy theorists has necessitated the creation of a legal defense fund for climate scientists: http://climatesciencedefensefund.org/.
13 “The Happiness Industry by William Davies, reviewed by Terry Eagleton. “Why Capitalism Has Turned Us into Narcissists.” theguardian.com August 3, 2016.
14 Margaret Wheatley, So Far from Home, p. 87.
15 Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, “It’s Digital Heroin: How Screens Turn Kids into Psychotic Junkies,” New York Post, August 27, 2016. http://nypost.com/2016/08/27/its-digital-heroin-how-screens-turn-kids-into-psychotic-junkies/.
16 Survey was done by Common Sense Media.
17 Kardaras, “It’s Digital Heroin.”
18 Ibid. This article is well worth reading, as is Kardaras’s book, Glow Kids.
19 This sudden growth is attributed to nearly infinite storage on the Cloud, exceedingly fast computing power, and lowered costs.
20 Check it out at www.emperitas.com.
21 The words algorithm and algorism come from the name al-Khwārizmī. Al-Khwārizmī (Persian: c. 780–850), a Persian mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and scholar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm.
22 In November 2016, Google reported that one of their AI systems had created its own encryption system. The humans couldn’t penetrate it.
23 http://www.andrewng.org/portfolio/deep-learning-and-unsupervised-feature-learning/.
24 “Not Even Scientists Can Easily Explain P-values.” http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/not-even-scientists-can-easily-explain-p-values/.
25 This rate of failure in change initiatives has stayed depressingly stable at about 70 percent since the first studies done in the mid-1990s. From my direct observations, I personally think the rate is even higher. See http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/162707/change-initiatives-fail-don.aspx.
26 http://www.andrewng.org/portfolio/deep-learning-and-unsupervised-feature-learning/.
27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedo.
28 Now at 32,000 residents with public transport, a university, schools, hospital, sports complex, shopping mall, and much more, designed for 138,000 residents. http://www.greaterspringfield.com.au/.
29 For more on Jim Varghese, see https://mindhive.org/people/-25.
30 A tragic example that also sheds a light on the pressures set by American corporations in India and elsewhere is “Driven to Suicide by an ‘Inhuman and Unnatural’ Pressure to Sell,” New York Times, August 11, 2016. In the United States, in September 2016, the largest American bank, Wells Fargo, was fined $185 million for the practice of faking millions of new accounts in order to meet sales targets and look good to Wall Street. At the time, before pressured by Congress, they fired no senior leaders, but the executive in charge retired with a $100 million plus retirement package. They did fire 5,300 staff who had felt they had no choice but to falsify sales. The CEO resigned when all this became public.