Hack:
Holignment: Enacting Leaders Everywhere

Because the impetus for my research was literally the pain of witnessing what the troublesome 70% failure rates in change management, organization development, and growth initiatives (CMODGIs) really means, and of witnessing some of the human tragedy of what I regard as similar failure rates in the psychiatric system, I set out to generate a model of human-system learning to be scientifically valid across all levels and types of human system and human-system activity.  The result is a normative, scientific, step-by-step model of change, development, learning and growth that lends itself to diagnosis and can lead human systems to levels of functioning described as Sustainable Leadership.  I propose that the wider its adoption in organizations and in the broader world, the greater will be the capacity for Leadership Everywhere.

The model owes its theoretical origins to an emphasis in Psychology in the 1950s on levels of learning that simply became neglected with the shift to the Cognitive paradigm in the 60s.  However, these levels of learning, when informed and fleshed out by Complexity Theory and other advances in the many branches of Psychology, Organizational Science, etc., elicit the basis of the natural progression of learning for human systems, as well as patterns of habituation or stalling at stages along the progression, or reverting back to lower levels as a result of shock to the system or some lapse in integrative functioning, loss of capacity, etc.

The first graphic is presented in the attached document as Fig. 1 and is the Organizational Dashboard. What is measured are the dimensions of organizations that affect growth and as such, they are called Dynamics and they are read across the diagonal lines on the Diagnostic Graphic.  They each comprise of five or more Dynamic Constructs, e.g., Emotion covers Stress, Morale, Empowerment, etc.  The validity of the model can be assessed from the paper presented at the International Conference in Business Research, London, 2012: http://www.wbiconpro.com/405-Myles.pdf

In the following table are presented on the right, the normative phases of development for an organization, and on the left, what its like when the organization has habituated at any of those phases as displayed on the diagnostic graphic.  The term “stage” is used when describing where a system habituates, and the term “phase” is used for transitions of development.

The model makes it clear that Sustainable Leadership is the highest level of learning and that what defines the levels of learning through which it is achieved are the same whether it is relating to being the organizing centre for a family, a community, a team, an organization or a nation.  The science of this model was presented in London last July to a room of organizational scientists and economists, and the latter from countries such as Nigeria, Malaysia, etc., were more than typically animated at the applicability of the modelling for sustainable socio-economic development.  There is recent interest also in its applicability to Recovery in Mental Health, but although I will only briefly relate to these applications, the focus of this paper will be on organizations.  However, the vision is a world of systems operating at Leadership levels and offering Leadership Advantage to all its people and a sustainable global system.  Because the model is derived from natural human learning, the systems of that world are human-friendly, and because it is an intrinsic growth model, that leadership is not a badge of honour from frictional destructive contest, but of sustainable internally-driven competitiveness.

The table shows the phases of learning that organizations must traverse for sustainable change, development and growth.  Also, they describe where organizational functioning tends to habituate, leaving deficits in capacity for change that cause the high failure rates because as the graphics show, there is no traction for interventions that seek complex functioning which is typically their goal whether it is empowerment, self-directed teams, collaboration, complex structure, innovation, etc.  This is what happened in the organizational collapse that was one of the two spurs for my research.  In that instance, a consultant introduced Self-Directed Teams into a culture that was characterised by bullying at floor level and embezzlement at management level.  The new learning model defines what the consultant did as looking for traction in an organization operating at the very lowest levels, for a Phase-9 intervention and that is impossible.  The outcome of the intervention was that whatever discipline the supervisors had exerted simply dissipated; accidents happened, a big accident happened and the plant was shut with a regionally significant economic loss and disruptive social consequences.  Note in the models that the diagnostic graphic is halved into Integrative and Disintegrative levels of functioning.  Any Dynamic or Construct measured in the Disintegrative half cannot possible offer traction to an intervention.  Change for those dimensions must begin at the bottom with Turnaround so that there is a collective decision of critical mass to change and commit to growing the Construct through the phases.  For such organizations, Leadership Everywhere is going nowhere!  This offers a new way of understanding why so many change interventions fail.

Fig. 2 in the attachment is the second diagnostic sample that I offer is a graphic that represents the functioning of a multi-national firm who were getting no real economic return from their expensive collaborative software.  The titles of the model’s stages/phases can be customised from their scientific titles for each application so that this graphic showed clearly the level of use that the software was getting.  It also showed the gaps that needed to be bridged for it to achieve its potential and what that potential looked like in terms of achieving Leadership Advantage in Collaboration.

The model has now been enabled online.  Diagnosis is by way of questionnaires that engage the organizational population confidentially, and the automatically generated reports and graphics provide a step-by-step guidance for progress along each Construct.  As shown in the table, each stage of the model both describes habituation at each level, but also the behaviour required to traverse that phase of growth.  The result is a pattern of growth that should offer resilience to shock, insofar as it should only degrade one level at a time.  In other words, if an organization, should lose an outright competitive advantage, it should still function at a competitive level in the marketplace with all the customer-care culture and connectedness that mark this level of functionality.  In the drive of many innovative start-ups, such levels are often not adequately completed across the organization, and there is a potential for catastrophic degradation rather than what systems theory refers to as graceful degradation in response to shock.

That is the deal of Leadership Everywhere for an organization.  But here is a trick in not yielding to arrogance that precedes a fall to Tropism that has dogged many leading organizations in the past that starts at the the height of their powers as Autopoiesis as outlined in the scientific paper.  The phases must be regularly re-invigorated.  For behavioural constructs, this means disconnecting from destructive patterns, affirming strategic fit, leader commitment, etc. and in this way, the organization retains vitality and systemic responsiveness at Leadership levels yielding true Leadership Advantage.

Another activity for which the model has been successfully adapted is the guidance of integration in M&A activity (see Fig. 3 of attachment).  This is a graphic that shows the gap to be traversed and the reports show the step-by-step process to not only bridge the gap but engage both in an integrated growth strategy.

Although the dashboards presented might suggest a relatively onerous developmental process, the growth model really comprises only of 10 growth phases while the rest is embedding the strategic changes as they occur, so at its most basic, the model yields the simple change process presented in Fig. 4.

Naturally, the model can be applied to the development of the leader, individuals, teams, etc., in all kinds of formats such as 360°, Coaching, etc. as well as assessing the degree of market fit and strategy, and the levels of customer relations, etc.

Integrative Learning offers systemic responsiveness with people, processes, structures, and all aspects of the organization sensitive to the prospects of change, flexible to respond if not anticipate, and ideally, leading the changes, while retaining competitiveness, quality and loyalty.

APPLYING THE MODEL OUTSIDE ORGANIZATIONS

Very briefly I will introduce how the model addresses the broader world.  Fig. 5 of the attachment is a diagnostic graphic for a relatively modern nation based on preliminary research.

For a nation, Tropism is a dictatorship, but even if it is a good dictatorship, as with Groupthink which is the equivalent in organizations, the system becomes inert, simply because the functional stage of a system becomes its performance ceiling, and people and processes habituate over time at best, at the stage directly below that of the host system - or they leave.  If the dictator becomes an organizing centre for self-gratification as many do, then the nation becomes a Black-Hole or in other words, a self-absorbing socio-economic system. 

Very briefly also the attachment presents in Table 2 the construct validity of the model of learning at the level of the individual and it is immediately interesting that models of organizational behaviour neglect the disintegrative division, while models of individual behaviour neglect the integrative division.

For all human systems however, the path to Leadership is the same – through the phases as nature intended, to a better world that is able to manage complexity and thereby enable a sustainable future through leadership-levels of functioning and LEADERS EVERYWHERE.