Just tell me the bad news… the good news will take care of itself.
Warren Buffet
Zeno was concerned with three problems… the problems of the infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity. To clarify the difficulties involved was to accomplish perhaps the hardest part of the philosopher’s task.
Bertrand Russell
The obstacle is the path.
Zen saying
The best question is to listen.
Ioan Tenner
We require a formal approach to raising issues because too often individuals, groups or organizations are blocked from effectively discussing a critical matter–either because it is unmentionable or because it is not visible in the light of their present level of understanding.
Bringing issues to the surface is at the same time the easiest, most difficult and most essential step to take. Easy, because all you have to do is listen. Difficult, because listening well is extraordinarily hard: messengers rightly fear being shot. Essential, because communication is not just what goes on in the mouth of the speaker, it is also what goes on in the mind of the listener.
If traditionally we believed in leadership from in front, then managing complex relationships gives a new meaning to leading from the centre. To be centered is to be calm at a very deep level, to be without agendas or predispositions as to the outcome, and to be open to experience. Centeredness is a prerequisite to truly open listening. It sets the stage for all that follows.
Set the stage
I would love to be able to pretend that I am calm and wise and can hand you half a dozen tips on raising issues that will guarantee your instant success. But I can’t. I have spent decades learning to listen, and haven’t always done it well.
I studied physics, mathematics and engineering at school and university, and took a very dim view of the social sciences which I saw as a soft-headed muddle of folklore and superstition, about as rigorous as chemistry in the time of the alchemists. For the first ten years of my career I worked as an engineer in the mining, manufacturing and construction industries. I had a flair for project planning. Approaching thirty, I applied for the job of management consultant (having no idea what they did) but was turned down because I lacked a business degree. In June 1980 (now aware of my ignorance in accounting, economics and finance) I enrolled for MIT’s Master’s Program in Management, attracted by that Institute’s technical and entrepreneurial credentials and its world-beating faculty in economics and finance. MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) changed my life. But, paradoxically, it was the course that I initially found most disappointing that made the greatest impression on me.
I do best in subjects that are well taught and therefore chose courses on the basis of the professor’s reputation with the students. Against this criterion, Dick Beckhard, who taught “The Management of Planned Change” (a subject to which I could relate from my project management days), was definitely the man to seek out. He did not make it easy. His course was called The Management of Planned Change Part II, and I first had to attend The Management of Planned Change Part I, given by another lecturer, Ed Nevis. Studying with Beckhard therefore cost two electives and, because he was so popular, I still had to put him top of my list of preferences.
Ed Nevis was a founder of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland and his course was not about planning change at all but about consulting. He talked about “the gestalt awareness process in organizational assessment” which once you cut through the jargon came down to the advice: when working with an organization, “make like a sponge”. That is, first try and soak up everything you discover without drawing conclusions. He illustrated this by comparing the directed, problem-solving style of Sherlock Holmes with the more-intuitive approach of that other fictional detective, Colombo.
Another of Nevis’s major themes was how we can use what we are to catalyze change. For him, this meant “know who one is and what one knows”. In dealing with whole systems, “you do not have to give up anything you are now; you just have to learn to do it better.” “You have to know your centre and go from there.”
Such woolly advice might have reconfirmed my unflattering view of social sciences had it not been that, to fulfill the practical requirement of Management of Planned Change Part I, I was to consult to an amazing organization.
I was assigned to The Judge Baker Guidance Centre (now called The Judge Baker Children’s Centre) in Boston. Judge Baker was the first judge of Boston’s Juvenile Court. Having seen many delinquent children come before his bench, he firmly believed that there was more to a child’s behavior than just being “a troublemaker”, and he advocated a system based on understanding and treatment, rather than punishment and incarceration.
My prejudice–that naughty children need firmer discipline–was quickly dissipated by learning of the human tragedies of poverty, violence and child abuse that lay behind the attempted suicides, eating disorders and drug-taking that the Centre dealt with daily.
Yet the Guidance Centre, as an institution, was in some ways just as dysfunctional as the children it set out to help. This was evident in the huge workload placed on trainee doctors and the difficulty of developing a sensible teaching schedule. I was shocked by the inadequacy of my scientific (and, increasingly, business) background to equip me to deal with such issues, and I am sure that I learned far more from them than they from me.
Humbled, I came to the first session of Beckhard’s Management of Planned Change II with great expectations. Today we were going to learn the secret of the great man’s success.
He was short and unimposing, with a pock-marked face. The chairs were pushed back and we were encouraged to sit cross-legged on the floor (a position in which I am never comfortable). No tiered seating for students here.
“Consultants,” he began, “rush too quickly to prescription.” He would teach us his method of diagnosis.
“Ask the client,” he said, “to visualize the constellation of their issues and then to ‘triangulate on’ an area they want to deal with today. Then ask them to imagine what success would look like if those issues were overcome, three years from now, one year from now, six months from now. Next, ask the client to describe the issues that block that success in the near term. Finally, ask the client if they have gained any insights, any further understanding, and any exclamations of ‘aha’, from this discussion. Then repeat the process again for another set of issues.”
I could not believe it. Was this the whole of his approach?
Next Beckhard divided the students up in groups of three or four. Over the remainder of the course each group would be given its own organization (one of Beckhard’s own clients) to help. On the day before each class, Beckhard would brief the small group and that evening they were to meet a client executive and have dinner with him or her. Next day, the students would sit on a low platform at one end of the classroom opposite this person and ask them questions using Beckhard’s process.
All this was videotaped and from time to time Beckhard would jump up, wring his hands, and ask “what is going on here?” If the students did not ask the client if they found the process useful then Beckhard did. Almost invariably the client said yes.
I suspected it was rigged. At the end of the session the student consultants were asked to view the video tape to see what they could learn from it.
My team met our client as planned, asked our questions and reviewed our tape. I said practically nothing. Everyone else had a background in social science. I could not believe that they took this charade so seriously.
To cap it all there was no final exam, everybody who took the course was guaranteed an A-grade. All you had to do was produce something–a short paper, a poem or even an art work–that summed up how you felt about the course, and arrange a fifteen minute one-on-one meeting with Beckhard to discuss it. One student, Beckhard said, had presented him with a balloon with a question mark on it, and if that meant something to the student then it was fine with him as the teacher. I wrote a couple of paragraphs that conveyed my confusion but not disgust (I felt the least said the better).
Dick and I had a friendly chat about nothing much and that was that… or not quite that.
As a mature student with no grants I was acutely aware of how much it cost me to be at MIT, not only directly but also in lost earnings. When I totted up the cost of two courses with (I then felt) such lightweight content I was appalled.
But looking back on that period now, these are the courses I remember best and, through the thinking they stimulated and the doubts they sowed, this was the MIT experience that changed me most. Let me explain.
Listen
Of course the real source of my discomfort was the growing sense that the matters we were dealing with were practically invisible in the light of my engineer’s knowledge of individuals, groups and organizations.
Know thyself (“Gnothi se auton”) were the words inscribed over the entrance of the Oracle’s temple at Delphi. The trouble with listening is that you might learn things about yourself that you don’t like and, even more worrying, that this knowledge might change you.
As you begin to listen you are forced to conclude that other people’s views are not only the products of different beliefs, but are also just as passionately held as yours. As you begin to reflect on the limiting assumptions in their background, you are forced to ponder the limiting assumptions in yours. This creates a problem: should you fight for your convictions or embrace theirs? Would seeking peace be selling out? Eventually you may even find that you are both small parts in a much broader system, and that your differences in views depend on each other. Truth may not reside in your dogmatism or their skepticism, or vice versa, but in the tension between the two. You both need the other’s perspective.
I decided to learn more about Beckhard. His writing was labored and uninspiring, yet his list of clients and their respect for him was unsurpassed. The Committee of Managing Directors of Royal Dutch Shell, for example, revered his advice.
Dick died in New York City on December 28, 1999. His obituaries described him as a pioneer on issues of managing change, helping organizations perform better and more humanely and helping people (like me?) to become more effective as agents of change.
Yet, despite his title of adjunct professor at MIT’s Sloan School from 1963-1984, Beckhard had almost no formal qualifications. He began his career in the theater, first as an actor and then as a Broadway stage manager. During World War II, he directed the entertainment of troops in the Pacific. In 1950, his expertise in theatrical staging brought him to the attention of founders of the National Training Laboratories (NTL), who asked him to improve the staging of NTL training sessions. The experience of participating in such “T-Groups” stimulated his thinking on the relationship between group behavior and the problems faced by managers in corporations.
In the late 1950s, he began collaborating with the famous Douglas McGregor (author of The Human Side of Enterprise), who created the Organization Studies Department at MIT’s Sloan School. With Dewey Balch, they started a project designed to aid the change process in organizations, naming it organization development.
Years later, I asked Arie de Geus, the distinguished former head of strategic planning at Shell, what difference Beckhard had made. He replied that Beckhard did almost nothing, just introduce people like Chris Argyris and Peter Senge to Shell… and thus he set the stage for all the important developments in strategic planning and organizational learning that followed.
The trouble with education is that, outside basic skills and strongly factual subjects, the end product is invisible and largely un-testable. The best bits may not bear fruit for five or ten years.
Learning is emotional, human, and organic: there is always a leap of faith involved. And faith is best exercised by those who can see what they’re doing: teachers.
This is why the British Government’s centralized and top-down obsession with grades and league tables is so destructive. “At its best the [examination] process is a check on what people have learnt” wrote the late Professor Ted Wragg, “at its worst it can comprehensively and irrevocably hammer the life out of something, however magnificent or dynamic.”
How smart of MIT to value Beckhard!
Reflect
Communication is not what we say but everything we do.
Communication is the environment we create, our Yala.
What Beckhard was doing, back in that spring of 1981, was teaching us to listen, and teaching us how to help others to listen, not in anything he said but in everything he did.
If communication is not what goes on in the mouth of the speaker but what goes on in the mind on the listener, Beckhard certainly communicated with me. Brushing aside my foolish fixation with exam success and being first in class, he invited me to think instead about what was going on in every interaction, about the patterns that emerged across successive meetings, and about the theatres in which such dramas unfold. Not least, he forced me to reflect on my own role, my strengths and weaknesses as an actor on life’s stage.
Now there are new tools to do this, not least the Internet. When you talk to moderators of successful web forums they compare their job to that of a broadcaster, stimulating and scheduling a nourishing series of discussion threads and, most importantly, preventing censure of fresh (and thus challenging) new ideas.
Beckhard taught that if you wish to raise issues you must create a space for listening, make it safe… and do no more.
Learn
You are not going to learn very much by trying to manage a complex relationship from the top down. But in striving to understand interfaces, clarify aims together and listen attentively, you will inevitably learn a great deal about the relationship as a whole and in its parts.
The issues are there already; their consequence probably inescapable unless something is done. Timely knowledge gives people the chance to act (issues that do not need to be addressed are hardly issues). Crises overcome then strengthen relationships.
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