Story:
Growing People: The Heart of the Organizational Transformation

An Experiment in “Beginner’s Mind”

We took on PEP as an experiment, recognizing that we needed to keep our eyes and ears wide open—to be willing to be influenced and to adapt—as we went along. As Todd put it: “'Experiment’ is a state of mind.” Throughout the journey of creating PEP, our approach was to maintain our own “beginner’s mind” as we asked others to do the same.

Pam describes: “What I saw repeatedly in working as an executive coach was that organizations were paying a lot of money for assessment, but very little for real development. Frequently, in my first coaching session with an executive, they'd hand me a 3-inch binder filled with results from all the personality tests and profiles they had received. The whole process was chock full of data, data, data. But then the company would follow up with only a handful of coaching sessions. I thought—this is backwards! In many ways, PEP was created to help balance the traditional organizational orientation toward human development that was data/assessment-heavy and people/process-light.”

When we started out, we asked ourselves: what’s the best possible process we could create to inspire accelerated human development? By accelerated, we didn’t mean to “speed up,” but rather to deepen; to ensure that the growth and development opportunities we offered would be both profound and enduring.

PEP is based on the exploration of two questions: what is a human being? And how do you grow one? While we don’t pretend to have definitive answers, we do believe that the questions we begin with are critical in shaping what we ultimately create.

Do we start from the premise that people are innately wired to learn and grow? Or do we assume they are fundamentally lazy—that they need to be poked and prodded to produce? Do we hold people as basically well-intentioned and trustworthy? Or do we imagine we need to keep them on a short leash to ensure they behave appropriately? How we answer these questions has everything to do with the shape and tone of how we engage—with ourselves, with others and with the world.

Key Principles

Our PEP experiment began in earnest one evening, with three of us huddled in a conference room over Chinese food for a 3-hour brainstorming session. We asked ourselves lots of questions, came up with loads of ideas, and ultimately teased out a set of principles:

•       Training and development is often approached an event, rather than a process. But sustained development requires engagement over time.

•       A lot of training and development is about transferring content, models, ideas, information. It focuses on people only from the neck up. But lasting growth and change requires focusing on the whole person—head, heart, and body.

•       Attending a class, reading a book, or getting online training is useful, but limited. People grow best in community. There's an exponential impact when people have an opportunity to grow and learn with and from one another.

“As a Buddhist meditation teacher,” Pam explains, “I knew (from my own experience and from seeing it in hundreds of others) that mindfulness—a 2,600 year old technology for helping alleviate human suffering and bringing out our extraordinary potential as human beings—was a critical element to success. Todd agreed, and specifically asked me to integrate mindfulness practices into PEP in practical, non-dogmatic ways that were palatable and useful within the workplace. So mindfulness was another cornerstone of PEP.”

Finally, Todd felt strongly that he wanted PEP to be available to all employees, across the board. In many organizations the focus is on the "high-potentials," but Todd had observed that the best ideas often come from the bottom of the organization, and so he wanted PEP to be available to everybody. We also felt that it needed to be voluntary. The first year, we drafted an initial 32 people into PEP. But every year after that, admission into the program was by application rather than recruitment.

The first year, we kept a very low profile, intentionally flying under the radar. We were afraid that if we made too much of a splash at the beginning, we'd have traditional HR/leadership development people breathing down our necks saying: you can't do that. We wanted to give our fledgling experiment a chance, and to give ourselves an opportunity to gather data and make adjustments.

Mid-year, Todd met with the initial draftee participants and was blown away by their feedback. People were engaged; they were lit up and inspired; they wanted more.

By the second year, the word was out. We didn't need to draft anyone. Instead, Todd sent out a letter, inviting anybody who wanted to participate to apply. And every year since, applications have poured in based on word-of-mouth.

In subsequent years, we created a PEP graduate curriculum and trained internal facilitators (called “PEPtators”) to keep the momentum going. By 2011, a total of over 800 people (in the IT, Manufacturing, Research and Engineering departments) have participated in the program. For 2012, Roche has taken interest in PEP and is funding a series of global “PEP experiments” in Asia, South America and Western Europe.

The Structure of PEP

PEP unfolds over the course of ten months, including three large group workshops, eight facilitated small group (8-10 people) meetings, three individual coaching sessions and monthly peer coaching.

Participants choose a topic of focus, observe themselves in real time to gain insight/self-awareness, and then practice new behaviors to establish new habits and develop mastery.

At the center of the process is our aim to develop the whole person—head, heart and body—intentionally integrating all “three centers” of intelligence: cognitive, emotional and somatic. 

Step One of the process begins with tapping into the heart, asking participants to select a skill (for example: listening, giving feedback, delegation, work-life balance) and a quality (for example: courage, calm, receptivity, decisiveness) they care deeply about and which will support their long-tem satisfaction and excellence. By asking people to choose (rather than be told) what to work on, PEP ignites the personal passion needed to sustain them through the ups and downs of the development journey.

"Starting with heart” taps into internal motivation. In his book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us,” best-selling author, Daniel Pink describes “intrinsic motivation” as the key to fueling sustained passion and meaning.  Often PEP participants worry whether they have selected the “right” development topics. But the secret is this: it doesn’t really matter what people choose; what matters is that they pick something they really care about that will inspire their ongoing inspiration and passion.

Step Two involves teaching participants to engage their mind in new ways through self-observation. After selecting a skill and quality, PEP participants are eager to jump into quick fixes. But we ask them to pause before moving into action. Specifically, we ask people to actively observe themselves in real time through the lens of their topic. For example, say you chose patience as the quality you want to develop. As you move through the day, you would periodically pause and to reflect and consider: how patient was I (during that meeting or presentation or negotiation)? And what did I notice about what was happening—in my mind, in my emotions, in my body?

This step cultivates applied mindfulness. Mindfulness is about paying attention, learning to observe ourselves in the context of day-to-day life, so we have new insights and begin to see ourselves more clearly. Based on our clear-seeing, we can then make wiser choices. By increasing self-awareness, mindfulness cultivates the capacity to act rather than react, enabling us to become response-able—even in the midst of complex, high stress situations.

Step Three moves from the head down into the body, taking the insights gained in step two and turning them into new capacities. How? Through practice, practice, practice.

This is the hardest step for many people, especially smart people, who imagine that insight and understanding are enough to change behavior. But that is rarely the case. As the renowned psychologist Anders Ericsson reported in his studies on mastery (described in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers), “deliberate practice” is consistently more significant as an indicator of success than any kind of inherent genius. Deliberate practice requires steady, consistent repetition over time, until new behaviors take root in the body as new habit. As Aristotle put it: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act but a habit.”

Because PEP is structured as a group coaching program, where participants share honestly with one another, the quality of the relationships developed in the group allows them to support one another in sticking with this final step. 

Although we say that PEP follows these three linear steps—select, observe and practice—in reality, the process does not unfold in such a neat, linear way. But our aim was not to insist that participants follow our map. Our intention was to set up a simple, elegant latticework to provide sufficient structure to support people's full engagement in their learning. Instead of filling them with the latest models, theories and ideas, we wanted to create just enough form and content to reorient and inspire them, giving each person a chance to step in and take charge of their own development.