CONVERSATIONS WITH DICK KNOWLES AND MEG WHEATLEY

by Laurel Bergman and Perviz Randeria

Talking with Dick Knowles

L: Dick, you've been applying a self-organizing systems approach to your work for years, both as a site manager for DuPont, then later as a consultant. We've heard this approach is a path to greater business effective­ness and productivity. How did these show up in your work at DuPont?

D: I was site manager in Belle, West Virginia for eight years and in Niagara Falls for three years before that This plant is 67 years old (so it is not a green field site) and averaged about 1,000 employees while I was there. DuPont is one of the best safety companies in the world. At Belle, we handled the second highest number of hazardous materials at a very, very high level of safety. At one point we actually went for 454 days without anybody getting a second degree bum like a blister or a cut that needed a stitch.

I was just beginning to do this kind of work in Niagara, although I didn't know what it was oiled, and I was continuing to do more of it in West Virginia. I met Meg Wheatley in 1991. I asked her to come to the plant, look at what we were doing and tell me what she saw. Which she did. She, Myron (Kellner-Rogers) and I have worked as colleagues since then. I started on this journey with them, trying to figure out and learn together about complexity, chaos, self-organized systems, and what it meant to organizations.

We at the plant all knew that we were facing very severe competitive challenges, and that we might not make it. It was taking a relatively old, deeply en­trenched culture to an innovative way of working. During the first four-year period, the injury frequency rate went down 95%, making us world class in safety.

Also, our productivity went up 45% and our earnings tripled. Our emissions to the environment went down by 87%, taking five years and quite a bit of investment.

L: What did the work look like?

D: Meg and Myron talk about the importance of information, relationships, and identity as domains around self-organizing systems. Well, we shared all information with everybody, through electronic mail, through business meetings— I held around 700 business meetings over eight years. I walked the plant and was in control rooms and shops. For five years, I tracked time I spent with people who were not direct reports. I averaged five hours a day.

Not only did we share information about what we were doing, but the work was also about building relationships and identity all across the organization. We asked, who are we? What are we doing? Why are we doing this? Why is it important? Why do we have to make all these changes? As we shared information and built relationships, people began to open up to all kinds of things.

During my time there, the plant experienced reductions of force; we went from 1,300 to 900 people. We had announced our reductions of force 18 months ahead of time, and said we would help people through it. Everybody noticed how we treated the people who left. We worked very hard with those who left; for example, we got the company to reimburse people so they could go back to school and get A.A. degrees. We helped people get jobs at other DuPont plants, or other indus­tries. This was fairly strenuous work, but it was done with open, full sharing about what was going on. Output went up; both quantity and quality of material were better at the end of that period than the beginning.

L: In so many companies, withholding this critical information about people's lives reduces trust.

D: It's important to have trusting relationships, and one way to build it is to provide people with all the information, and help them see how they fit into the picture. Ifs also critical to develop clarity about your intention — what it is you are doing, and why. You need to develop a set of principles and beliefs about who you are and how you are going to live together. Each piece has to be really credible.

And, you develop the intention together. Once you declare your intention, usually the next step is to discuss why we can't do it because of limited resources. If you first say, this is what we want to become, and develop principles and agreements on how to work together while moving toward that intention, then we can talk about resource problems in a different light. They don't become barriers.

For example, somebody's making a product at half the cost than we make it, so you sit down and share that information with everybody — not just managers. You say, folks, we've got to do something about this. We had to teach people how to read cost information, how to read competitive information - it is teaching business literacy. This wasn't just waving a magic wand over the organization. There was a lot of deep work in building business literacy. It was working together in business meetings, and building team skills, and trying experi­ments, and learning from the experiments. We didn't do risk taking. Risk taking is punishment opportunity. Experiments are learning opportunities. So we re-cast everything into experiments. One ground rule was that anybody could stop the experiment.

L: You must have invested in a great deal of education for the whole workface.

D: Yes, a great deal. Things like Covey training, conflict resolution training, and team training. (David Richie helped us here.)

We also looked at what our deep core competencies and capabilities were. What we did that is unique. At Belle, our core competency was to be able to handle, and

use highly hazardous materials safely. There aren't many who can do that. But in order to survive in the future, we've got to be more effective than our competition.

So we also worked on what I call "fitness." If we are more sensitive to me environment, if we can learn and adapt faster, if we can maintain our core competency while we are interacting with the external environment, we will be stronger and more sustainable. Those who are unable to learn quickly, when me surprises come, are going to be wondering what hit them. We'd be ahead because we had developed a much greater connection with the environment. For example, every person at Belle was interacting with the community, with customers, with business teams so everybody was sensitive to the environment, not just me as the manager. And training helped in building skills and people's confidence so they knew they could do it

Here's a story describing how that worked. One of our production operators took the initiative to schedule a visit to the plant to correct the wrong information two radio announcers had made about the plant spewing chemicals. She was on several of our environmental teams, and called to let me know the situation and how she was going to resolve it. She asked me to be present to give my part of the information during the visit. But she ran the whole show, and these people were so taken with what they saw, they spent the next several weeks on the radio talking about all the neat people they had met and all the good work they had done. Our external affairs guy just about croaked, since that's not the traditional way we interact with the media. Yet, our production operator knew what was going on and had the confidence in herself and me to follow up to get the correct information out to the public.

L:  How did your leadership role change for you?

D: We developed about 15 principles we called "People Treatment Principles." Things like manage­ment needing to pay attention to people's security needs when going through change. For example, people wanted to know what the pay system was and to be treated fairly. The leadership group went out to the plant and said. "We've worked hard on these principles and bought into them. These are the prin­ciples by which we want to lead this plant. Would you help us live up to them?" We posted them all over the plant. People first laughed at us and said, "You guys aren't going to do all that stuff." For a couple of months, they saw we were trying, and they began having a field day telling us how much we screwed up on this one or that

Within about nine months, these principles were deeply embedded. We tested everything we did against them. If we had some new initiatives, we asked how they stacked up. If we were in a discipline situation, we looked at the opposing problem. We talked about the People Principles out in the plant and in business meetings, so they were real and alive. As we did that, all of us came more and more into align­ment together around our beliefs and principles and the way we behave, and built trust.

If we've picked clear intentions, well-established principles, how we're going to be together, and dis­cussed resource limitations, people will spontaneously organize around the work. Part of the agreement that we've already made is that people will do the work. They can do the work when they see it; the door is open; they don't have to be told. As they do the work, they see better ways to do it almost immediately. It's fun.

What happens is that suddenly, the future starts to pull us; we're not having to drive change. But change is pulling us, because people have begun to thrive in it. As people learned about change, they began to thrive in it, and they began to push me very hard. Actually, I was slowing them down because I was worried we would outrun our technology. In the chemical busi­ness, if you outrun your technology, you can get huge process upsets. Like in your kitchen, when you get too far ahead in your recipe you spoil it. In a chemical plant, that spoiling is usually a fire or an environment upset of some kind—a big-time screw-up. In that situation, what we were doing is setting the conditions where .ill kinds of emerging phenomenon can take place, as people come together around the work and around each other.

I was also trying to raise the organization's conscious­ness about what we were doing in the external world. paying attention to our balance because we were far from equilibrium, and looking for opportunities for synergy. Walking around the plant, you help people make these webby kinds of connections. And creating conditions where this emergence and flexible design stuff can come out. An example was somebody forming a team around improving the safety shoes, then disbanding when they were done. Other kinds of spontaneous teams would form when people got so frustrated with the roles and procedures from the old culture, that they'd just get together and fix it I didn't try to mess with me old rules and procedures. I just waited until people got so frustrated, they would fix them themselves. That was always better.

It's very important mat the leadership try to behave with the highest level of authenticity and integrity around this. If you play games, you kill it. If people see that you as the leader don't really have commitment, they won't do it. This puts demands on the leaders to become much more open, talk much more, listen more, and be available to people. We're colleagues working together, trying to make this place healthier and stronger. We each have perspectives and gifts. And if we bring those together, we will have an immense amount of information to work with. For the most part, the information we need is already in the organization.

L: You 'd mentioned earlier that changing your leadership role was accompanied by personal change as well?

D: You may have to dean up your own act while you're doing this work. I had to clean up mine. L can lead an organization by fear. I had do a lot of personal work to change that I'm a "recovering driver", you might say!

I had my back up against the wall; the organization had its back up against the wall. I began to realize that I was dying in the old ways, and I had to do something about it. It was a very lonely and a very painful journey. I became more and more unhappy with how I was trying to lead. I was trying my best. I tried to learn from my mentors, who were all pretty tough guys, John Wayne and Vince Lombardi being our heroes. That's the environment that white boys in this country grew up in, and that's the kind of self we aspire to. You're not allowed to show your feelings unless it's anger. You're not allowed to cry. I began to discover that there was a lot in my life that was upside-down. Unfortunately, I wound up getting a divorce after 27 years, I just had to make all kinds of changes as I was going along.

I had a deep belief that we could do things better. I'd been doing some work with Charlie Krone who had worked with DuPont. He made a great deal of sense to me. As I began to become aware of complexity and chaos, I began to relate it to what Charlie was trying to teach. His tools are in many ways thinking models to help us understand chaos and complexity. When we change our view of the world, from looking at it as a machine to looking it as a living system, the way we think about the world has to shift. Some of the frame works and tools that Charlie uses, called systematics”, help you to do that.

L: Your personal change and the shift in your leadership clearly had profound effects. In this process, one effect was the emergence of people's creativity and passion in their work.

D: That's right. It's fun to see when people come alive, and they do come alive. What happens when people begin to be able to operate in this environment is that they discover that they can make a difference, and they're no longer just a pair of hands. We've tended to treat people in our factories as just pairs of hands. So they do the minimum to get by at work, then go home and do creative things, political things, be mayors, church leaders, scout leaders, all kinds of neat stuff in their community. That’s where they've found meaning; that’s where they put their effort and energy. When they discover that they're making a difference at work, some of that energy flows into the work. People begin to do things they didn't believe they could do before.

We took on things the company said you couldn't do. Some examples—we were the first site to go to manda­tory random drug testing, not required to do that by the Drug Enforcement Agency. We felt that hazardous chemicals and mind-altering drugs just weren't com­patible. Another we stopped using the building trade exclusively for doing construction and big maintenance work, so we could have more competitive costs. Another example: when we went to teams, instead of creating just two or three, we did 125 teams over a weekend! We did a lot of work to get there; it was messy. But it's part of this whole process of living systems. We set the standard for the DuPont Company on how to take an old plant and change the process control instrumentation from pneumatic to electronic. So now we get much better yields, better quality, better environmental performance. I quit setting goals because I was always setting them too low! My goal setting was limiting the organization.

A huge amount of energy goes into involvement and engaging people. The work gets done more effectively;

there's a huge amount of buy-in because they're all creating it as we go. And the commitment to make it work is just breathtaking.

L:  In the context of what you’ve learned from applying a self-organizing systems perspective, what would be your main message to consultants?

D:  I don’t say, I can fix you. I say, “Look, I’m willing to be on a journey with you looking at these things which in my experience are very powerful and important. Things will emerge that will surprise you. I don't know what the answers will look like, except that the organization's performance will be better than now. The journey won't be easy. So do you really have value for this? Are you frustrated doing the same old stuff and not getting anywhere? Are you willing to take the journey? If you are, here's what we can work on that I know will get better results faster than you think.

As a consultant, be a sounding board talking about this stuff, pointing the way, being a guide. I look at myself as a guide, and we're trying to explore some new territory together.

The idea of a bowl emerges as a metaphor for this work. This bowl exists in the domains of information, relationship and identity. The leadership creates a flexible bowl; it's not rigid. It’s kind of a network of knowledge and knowing. This bowl consists of our vision and mission, and our principles, standards and expectations. And we engage in hundreds of thou­sands of conversations over time about these things, with everybody. People begin to get that sense of this idea of a bowl down in their stomach.

Within that bowl, they have a great deal of freedom on how to do their work. They can make a difference; they can be creative. They have order and freedom simulta­neously. The bowl provides focus and a sense of direction, so you don't have everybody going in a million different ways. Probably 90% of the questions we ask our boss in our hierarchical structures, are to seek permission. And that slows you down. We already know what we need to do. If everybody had that idea of the bowl in their stomach, and could operate out of it, then they'd already have the answers to 90% of their questions.

This whole shift around leading, mind you, not only improves the business performance and the way people feel, but I think it's a competitive necessity. The old pyramid simply cannot move fast enough anymore. V/A

Talk With Meg Wheatley

L: Meg, it's been a few years since we last talked about chaos theory and its implications for organizations and our work. What land of water has gone under the bridge in your experience of working with self-organizing systems theory and organizations?

M: All the flood images we've recently seen on television, that’s what it feels like. Every few months now, we have these disasters caused by rushing water.

You know, when we started talking about "white water," we had no idea what it meant Things have accelerated so extraordinarily. My own sense of life and what I hear from people is like the great quote from Einstein: "It's as if the rug had been pulled from underneath our feet, and there was nothing to stand on." This isn't true just for me; it’s very common among the groups you and I hang out with — a sense that we are making up everything; there isn't a form, or a tradition, or a role that adequately supports us anymore. That it's all very new all the time. We don't like it.

L: It's uncomfortable. Many are struggling with the dilemmas we're discovering. For instance, many practitioners for whom planned change is their mison d’étre are now wondering whether planned change is obsolete. What is our role becoming, if change cannot really be effectively planned?

M: The whole notion of whether change can be planned in any way has shifted for me. I was in planned change also. I came out of the Change Masters School. When we first went into that field, we were trying to accomplish something. I think what we're trying to accomplish is still important. But how it comes about is very different now.

For me, the notion of planned change was very patriarchal. The place it asked us to stand, in our work, was one of helping other people, taking care of other people to do all of this change work. But now the work is much greater. It hasn't disappeared; it's much greater. Our role is much bigger. I talk with more and more consultants who realize that you can't come in as an expert on how change is going to evolve. You can't come in as an expert who can guarantee out­comes. You can't do proposals that say these are the steps, these are the timelines. Well, you can still do it, still do it to get in the door, but ifs just a smoke screen for us.

L: Planning may help us feel that we are at least better organized. Even so, the chances of things moving exactly as planned are slim.

M: It’s recognizing the value of going through that process with yourself and your clients, and not getting seduced into believing that it's actually how it will happen. And not getting seduced that your proposal specifies the real work.

But the role I see for us planned change people is we have to return to the question of what it was we were trying to accomplish through the planned change approach in the first place. What was our call? Power­ful question. If we could recall ourselves to what we were trying to accomplish when we went into planned change, we could find our new work. Because now there is even more need for a kind of mentoring and support, and holding people to what their integrity is in the organization.

The real work is in me relationships and trust we develop with our clients so that we can walk with them through this turbulent journey. I hear more and more consultants say, "If I can't have a trusting relationship with my client, if I can't say to them, 'I don't know what we're going to do next. but we'll figure it out together,' I can't work with them."

I think of the many times in my past (it's easy for anv consultant to recall), when I was in an almost adversarial relationship with a client because they wanted a contract guaranteeing certain results and performance from me. They just held you to that contract. So there wasn't any room to grow together, and no room to deal with turbulence even though there was a lot of turbulence. People got fired; companies got sold; a lot of things created terrible turbulence in those well-planned projects of yesteryear. And now, we need to understand how much we have to be in the moment together in order to decide quickly what’s the next best step. You can't do that if you don't trust each other.

L: You believe that at the core of the work we do, the quality and level of trust, between the consultant and client is the cornerstone?

M:  Absolutely. We have technical expertise; we have tools and techniques. But none of us can predict anymore three months, six months, a year out We can start a project thinking that a particular technique is perfect for this client, and then something shifts and ifs no longer perfect If you don't have a trusting relation­ship, you just look like a fool. If you don't have a relationship that gives you the freedom to redesign, to figure out something new together, you end up in one of two positions. Either you get fired or worse, you start defending a process that in your heart you know is wrong.

L: You may know it's not working but it's difficult to release what perhaps has become an investment.

M: And you are just holding on, because you can't go to that client and say, "Look, this isn't working, can we figure out something else?" So this trusting relation­ship is critical, and ifs particularly critical in the workplace these days. When trust is there, we as adults, as contributing, meaning-seeking adults in our workplaces, can handle a lot; we can deal with turbu­lence; we can be very creative very quickly. But if the trust isn't there, if the faith in one another isn't there, we're stuck. You just get into defending who we said we were in our proposal or contract. Even though it's no longer applicable to what's happening now.

L So we need to pay even more attention to building trust with our clients.  What about our blind spots?  What competencies would make it easier for us to work in the context of complexity theory, chaos theory – this whole new way of looking at the world.

M: The first warning I want to put out in the boldest letters possible—this is a neon sign: IF YOU THINK YOU UNDERSTAND COMPLEXITY THEORY. THINK AGAIN! What I observe going on, very predictably (and also very painfully), is that we take a little idea from complexity theory and put it right into a tool kit from an old way of thinking about organiza­tions. I've come to realize that when we're talking about complexity theory, we're really talking about a new world view. World views do not change quickly. We take in a new world view and try to apply it through our old world view. Someone can take an idea from complexity theory, and make it into a tool that is just part of the old mechanistic view of organization. We need to be really alert to that; ifs unavoidable. When you're changing a world view, you're embracing the new from within the old. You're going to experi­ence this dissonance of trying to think about the new world through the old view. In order to avoid that (and I think this is a gradual process of learning, punctuated by great flashes and insight), we need to be talking to one another and getting support from one another. It requires deep, serious and continuous thinking with our colleagues about what we're really doing. It’s not just a nice, new idea. It really is a new world that we're trying to notice, and then figure out how to apply. The blind spots are when we don't even notice when we're back in our old world view.

L: We slip into it unconsciously.

M:   We slip into something that we think is going to give us prediction and control. We slip into something that we think will work every time. It works great with one group; it was new and different. Our old thinking says, well, great, now I've discovered something that's going to work. Ifs a kind of "paradigm jitterbug" that I think we're all in—dancing back and forth. Just when we're really thinking bolder thoughts, whammo, we're right back there looking for an application that's quite old, looking for regularity and prediction.

There's a lot of work going on (not actually coming from the OD community) trying to use chaos and complexity for prediction and control. Those twothings don't go together, but it's happening strongly in the scientific community. So it’s the big, unavoidable blind spot for all of us. The only way out is to be in dialogue groups now, about our work and what we're trying to accomplish, so we can hold ourselves to the integrity of the new and know that we're there to help each other not slip back.

And let me link this to relationships and trust, because most of us really don't trust ourselves in this new world view yet I see this in every seminar I give, because people go immediately to worrying about how they're going to convince those who are not in the room, regardless of level Ifs just that whoever is not in the room becomes the problem. They're worried that the thought process is okay. I guess this is wonderful; this is the future, but I'll never convince them. I've always flagged this for people as an anxiety that's in you, about your ability. It’s not about their ability to understand, but your ability to understand. Let’s slow down and realize this is going to take a few years. This is not sudden insight that transforms us. It will transform us, but it takes years.

L: People are still trying to come to terms with Einstein. And I understand there's a society in England that still insists the world is flat!

M: Oh, I'd love to join them.

L: So it takes years to internalize to the degree that you live from such a world view, and approach your work from it.

M:  That's my experience, and I'm thinking about it all the time, and noticing where I didn't understand it at all. And getting past what seems to be the surface truth to something much more profound and much simpler underneath it. But that's for me a continual conversa­tion with the people I work and talk with. I think we have to trust ourselves differently; we have to trust that we are capable of learning this new world view. We are capable of integrating it, but we also have to trust that it's a process that takes time.

And time is a missing dimension in OD. Not just in OD; it's in all our organizational and management thinking. We've pretended that we can play with time and compress it and compress it and compress it. In order to produce things faster, we do a project in .six months that we know should take one war — because that's what they asked for. Or, we can turn this into a quality-intensive organization in a year, and, well, it's taken Motorola 12 years, and they're still not there. I think we've refused to look at time. I've been doing this myself. I kept believing there was a faster way — not just a simpler way — but a faster way, to move people into this new world. I don't believe that any­more. I believe these things take time. And if we trust that, then we can stand up for our need for time, rather than pretending we can be supermen and women here.

I can say to audiences now (I used to say it as a joke;

now I'm serious), "I'm just giving you some think to think about for a couple of years. Then let's see where you are we are with it." I do it to shock them, but it's also quite serious. So we trust in ourselves as learners, and trust what we know about our learning process, and how we've learned to be good consultants. This is an apprenticeship that takes years. Whenever we believe we should have "gotten" it already, I'd like us to take a deep breath and bust that these things take time, and we're not failing.

L: I've come to this profession with a lot of life experience behind me, and I’ve noticed that many believe in process as an idea, but don't always realize how long some processes can take. If you view organizations as living systems, natural processes in living systems take their own time...

M:  This pressure to ignore process is in our clients, and is a terrible waste, because we sing and dance to their tune, even though we know that’s the wrong rhythm and the wrong melody. As you get older, it's a lot easier to say, "Wait a minute. I know this takes time. I know people have to be involved. I know you, the client, have to face these hard issues." And I feel this in myself when I think about how I was a consultant in my thirties and through my late forties. I gave away a lot of what I knew to be true. I didn't know as much, but what I knew, I was willing to give away in order to get a client's approval. So there's a real benefit to being in this profession with your experience and your maturity. You give a lot to your clients just because you have been in the world differently. Whereas, younger consultants are collecting; they're creating a tool bag.

I remember a horrifying dream I had — I must have been about 34 when I had this dream. I was suddenly in front of a group giving a presentation, and I had no notes, no overheads, no materials, and therefore, I had nothing to say!  I think that in your thirties you don't have as much to say as you do later. I believe this is an apprentice profession. Younger consultants need to work with experienced consultants because it's a real craft and it's a real art. It's not just coming in with some slick, sexy tools or computer programs or software or any of that stuff. It's a question of how can I be in a relationship with a client that's open and trusting and evolving? I don't know how you create those relation­ships when you're young either, because that's really not what your work is about at that point. So I guess I'm making a plea here for aging consultants!

L:  I'd like to raise another voice here, the voice of the skeptic. Applying new science thinking to organizations sounds wonderful philosophically. But when I go into a company Monday morning, how can I help them shift, in tangible business terms, from where they are now, to working in their company from a self-organizing systems view? How do we translate it?

M:  That's actually easy. I thought you were starting to go someplace different — to the question of, how do I lead them into a series of questions that will make them question everything in their life? Their beliefs in business, their beliefs in capitalism, their beliefs in authority and hierarchy, because that is where it goes for me.

L: So let's go there instead.

M: Teaching people about chaos theory is almost a no-brainer because most people are now truly aware of the levels of turbulence in their lives and business. It takes only a few moments of reflection for people to realize that the world doesn't work in that nice, predictable way any more. They all have direct, immediate, intimate experiences with sudden disaster, surprises, being suddenly blown off-course. Life is really teaching us about chaos. Not the science, not me. It's life out there, saying —think about this again. It's not working the way you thought.  That part is really simple.

But there's something bigger. We've joked with people coming to our seminars, saying we want to put up a sign that says, "Warning! If you proceed into this seminar, everything in your life will change!" Because it you stay with it, it leaves no belief unexamined. Getting down to beliefs like, what do I believe about people? What do I believe about the human spirit? What do I believe about order in the universe? What do I believe about God? You can't avoid this path, once you really get into this, even if you approach it as a scientist.

I just got a letter from a very traditional British educator who's now a very experimental British educator, saying, "It's surprising to me, but I've now gone from looking at these world view changes, to reading deeply in philosophy and spiritual thought.  This is something I was never interested in... now here I'm finding all this nourishment"

It's true for me too. I don't find my nourishment in science anymore; I find it by looking at the great traditions of human thought.  And I realize that none of this thinking is new. There's been 300 years of blind­ers, but none of it is new.

L: Some say well, all of this stuff is great metaphor, but it's just metaphor. It has no more substance than poetry. How do we speak to that?

M: Well, here's my question for those people: "Do you mean this literally, or metaphorically?" I ask them what metaphor is. Just as most people don't know they have a world view, most people (including many scientists) have forgotten that the idea of the world as a machine, was a metaphor. And as we've examined nature through that metaphor, we've forgotten that there was an initial choice of metaphors.

But, it's all metaphor because we can never know reality directly, except through consciousness. I lead people into questioning their ideas about organization, including the question, what's the metaphor here that led to these practices? I find the metaphor is usually that the organization is a machine. Then you look at everything you do, and notice if what you're seeing in your actions really does look mechanical.

I don't believe the metaphor of organization as machine serves us well any longer. We definitely need a new imagery for explaining what goes on in human organi­zations. Self-organization has been a powerful lens of inquiry for me and many others. I find it enormously hopeful and promising. And, it can easily be "re­searched" to test its validity if people are truly inter­ested.

It's all metaphor at this level of consciousness anyway. My background is in history and English, with a focus on poetry. It will save us in the end. When you can recall great literature and thought and poetry and the human spirit, I think it's easier to let go of the dominant paradigm.

L: Letting go of paradigms you've lived with for a long time can be frightening.

M: Yes. Terrifying at times.

L: Speaking of paradigms, there are those that our professions impose. For example, given how we're trained in OD programs, how do we practitioners now move beyond being interventionists?

M:  If you want to play with the scientific statement that there is no such thing as an outside observer, you can look for all of the ways in which we hope to God that there is an outside observer, since we've put ourselves in that role. I recently came up with a little principle about this, based on the sciences.

You can look at anything you've just designed and ask, "Is there an outside observer here?" And if there is, don't do it! For example, positioning yourself as a group facilitator makes you an outside observer, so don't do it. If you write a plan for someone and are giving it to them from the outside in, stop doing it. This helps me examine whether I am proceeding as an interventionist or as a colleague, as part of the system or as the outside observer. And if you're willing to recognize that you've just created an outside observer role, that you've created something that doesn't exist in reality, and look at your history in

playing those outside observer roles, you will know they never existed; people brought you in.

Then you can ask, how do I act as if I'm part of this system? How do I work from within it? Asking these questions stops you from being an interventionist, just moving yourself in your awareness inside the system, and then designing your work from there instead of from outside. That's the only place you can be.

L: That mind set would definitely affect how we approach our work.

M:  What would I notice if I realized I was already inside the system? One way it changes our work is that we start involving the system much more in doing its own work. For me, it shows up as a lens for looking at, what am I doing here? Where am I standing when I think about doing this? Knowing that the outside position doesn't exist. For years we've thought that everything we do in an organization is an intervention. Why? Because we assumed we were standing outside as an observer, yet the system saw us as part of it, and reacted!

L: Well, this creates dilemmas. It has in my experience, because while I find it very natural to be inside the system, I find that clients' expectations of my role are varied. Clients can vacillate between wanting "objectivity" and wanting involvement.

M: Right but that's the right stuff to be thinking about. Those are the right issues to surface. I just look and ask, is this a good dilemma? Is this the one that’s worthy of the suffering it's causing? And then I decide yes or no.

L: So how do you determine client's readiness to work in a self-organizing systems context?

M:  That's not even a question I ask, because it gets me into a kind of diagnostic mode. I don't ask it, but I'm alert to it. I go in by invitation; and that's a way of saying that I fed we've both been prepared for each other. If I'm in an initial conversation with an organiza­tion, I'm listening, certainly, to whether I think a relationship is possible. But it's very intuitive and experience-based at this point. And I still get surprised.

Recently we've gone into one organization, where we were intrigued initially, but it didn't feel like there was any "readiness." Yet now, we're working with them on their most profound issues. So something was moving there that only became visible to us as the relationship developed.

L: How do you see leaders grow and develop because of understanding chaos, complexity, and self-organizing systems better? And how does this view help them run their business, when they're concerned with bottom line statistics?

M:  They have to be concerned with more than bottom line and statistics, that's the thing. There has to be more in their quest. I think the only leaders who talk to me or my partner Myron Kellner-Rogers are those who are not focused on just bottom line statistics. They're leaders who have recognized a degree of failure or a degree of failure combined with curiosity. They've remained curious about how they could make this work in spite of clear failures to change the organiza­tion. They are leaders who have never bought into the prevailing paradigm exactly. They may have played the game, but they've also had great life tragedies, great life experiences that got their attention. They think about the meaning of life.

L: Well, if I'm trying to be congruent with my client system, don’t I need to acknowledge their need to keep business viable?  That they have very real bottom-line pressures?

M:  Absolutely. And to broaden it, because you don't get bottom line results by just focusing on statistics. We know that. That’s part of what we bring. People make an immediate leap; they hear about self-organizing systems, and they assume ifs a good thing, but would cost them. They just leap to that place — it would cost the business. And it never does. Any kind of self management always increases productivity. But, there is an opposition in our thinking that goes deep in the American culture (this is something I read years ago). We believe that if something is good, like social welfare, we pay for it economically. There's a ratio that says if it's good economically, ifs bad for people. If ifs good for people, it will cost us as a society. And you can see as these issues are raised politically, publicly, ifs always, what are we giving up in order to develop a better road system? Or what will this cost us?

This is only American. This conversation doesn't go on in Europe or Japan. It doesn't go on in South America, except where people pick up our influence. Elsewhere, business is seen in a more societal context, and social welfare is not seen as a cost. It's seen as port of the fabric of doing business.

L: So, we Americans  may have evolved this thinking out of our interpretation of a Newtonian world view.  But it’s just our interpretation, because other cultures, certainly European cultures, have developed different paradigms.  Theirs may be more of a systems orientation.

M: That's right. Therefore, you realize you have choice. You could interpret it differently. The fun of this work for me is giving people choice to realize that there's a world view we're working from, and there are other world views available, and we could choose to change. Somebody said that the great comedy is that most people don't even notice they have a world view: they think this is the way it is.

L:  For most of us, our world view is on the level of unconscious assumptions.

M:  That’s right.  For us, the work always is to ask, “Okay, you just said something.  What’s the underlying belief?" And when you start listening for these and feeding them back to people, they can be shocked or repulsed by them. Well, then that gives you choice. Choose to see if you could operationalize a belief that you actually liked more, such as believing in the goodness of people rather than the evil of people.

One other thing I wanted to say about responding to clients' traditional business concerns. I have a very paradoxical place in me about it.  On one hand, I entered this field of looking at self organization and human organization because I knew it was a path to greater effectiveness and productivity in traditional business terms. That’s what we're seeing; we're

seeing enormous improvements of performance, commitment to creativity, innovation, quality. All the things that companies dreamed about are available through these highly participative, very congruent organizations. Deep values, enormous levels of participation, high trust, all those things. So nut was all to the good.

But, — I believe that at the foundation of business, there is a wall in me form of economic logic, business logic. It includes beliefs about power and status, and it includes selfishness and greed. It has bought into this false logic of ratios and how you improve performance in an organization by destroying it.  We're in a crazed period right now, where we don't think about building long-term capacity; we just roll organizations around for short-term results. I've been calling that logic an imperative lately—the business logic imperative. When that imperative meets up with self organization, they don't work together, and this is a very distressing realization for me. But the hopeful side of it is that the real work of change is not just saying, "Look, here's how to get more productivity, more creativity, more quality in your organization." The real work is asking, "What do you think the purpose of work is? What do you think your leadership is about? What are you trying to create in your life as a legacy?" Is it about quarterly returns? Is it about creating more wealth for shareholders? Is that what really what gives your life meaning? Or is there something else going on? Now, some leaders like Al Dunlop will say that's all it is. You know. Chain Saw Al! It's just about creating better numbers in the moment But I believe the purpose of business is to create sustainable enterprise where people can also work out the meaning of" their lives.

L: Both.

M: Both. And the sustainable part is the system consciousness part of it. We have to start addressing sustainability. The program head in Urban Design at University of Washington who works on sustainable communities came up with a great definition of "sustainability." Someone asked him, "What is the definition of sustainable?'" He answered, "In each community, I ask them, what is worth sustaining here?" I think this is a great question for businesses too. Our work is not just about presenting self organization as a way to satisfy business needs; our work is about actually recreating the role of business in life. Our work has become bigger, somewhat more intimidating, but much more important to me. I don't think any of the great, new things we're trying to bring into organiza­tions, like learning community, spirit and soul, will survive if we don't also change the business paradigm. This is where I only hope that more business leaders wake up.

L: How can we talk about values or a vision for change, without questioning what part business plays and what we want it to play, in society? That's a question with enormous implications.

M: Yes, and I think it’s the right question to be in. V/A

Answers from 5th & 6th grade science tests:

"The law of gravity says no fair jumping up without coming back down."