Creating and Sustaining Positive Organizations

By Robert E. Quinn

In the movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana is Jones makes one creative move after another as he encounters his enemies.  At one particularly critical moment, his companion asks what Indiana is going to do next?  Indiana responds that he does not know because he is making it up as he goes along.  The line is humorous.  It is also illustrative of something very important and difficult to understand.  It is about the essence of leadership.

Bridge Building

Indiana’s answer reminds me of an experience.  I once took a doctoral student to a company to write a case study.  When the student asked the CEO for an explanation of the company’s success, the CEO spoke of his strategic vision and how he executed the vision with discipline.  It was an impressive story of brilliant thinking and hard work.  The doctoral student was impressed.

Knowing the history of the firm, I challenged the CEO.  I reviewed his history of trial and error experiments, and I described an evolutional journey of creative learning.  The CEO scowled as he thought about my challenge.  Then he smiled and said, “The truth is, we built the bridge as we walked on it.”

People tend to tell stories just as did this CEO.  Success in most any endeavor is later explained, as a function of knowing rather than learning.  Such a story is an account of being in control, of being self-sufficient.  This suggests that successful people know what they want and how to get it.  The truth is that successful people do envision a desired end-state, the thing they think they want, but they do not know how to get it.  If they had the knowledge, they would already have the outcome.  Success is the function of a learning process that requires “building the bridge as we walk on it.”

The Generative Relationship

I found the “building the bridge” sentence so useful that I used it as the title of one of my books.  The sentence captures a truth that is usually not available to us.  Because of the stories we tell each other, we do not understand how we actually create our own lives.  The quality of our lives depends on how we pay attention to something, how we interact with it, and how we learn from the interaction.  In any given realm, the more masterful we become, the more quality we are able to create.  The more quality we create, the more abundant our life becomes in that given realm.

Robert Pirsig captures this process.  He compares a novice and a master craftsman.

Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you’ll see the difference. The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he is doing even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn’t following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind is at rest at the same time the material is right. [1]

An Experiment

This paragraph may seem a little mysterious.  Try an experiment.  Select the life process that is you best strength.  It might be in music, sports, writing, teaching, leading or any other process.  Now reread the above paragraph substituting yourself and your process in the paragraph.

This experiment may be instructional.  It may help you see yourself doing something that many people do not understand that they do.  It is the process of “building the bridge” as you walk on it.  It is how you best create quality on this planet.  It is also a seedling for helping you think about how to create quality in other life processes, such a leading people.

Leadership

Otto Scharmer recently published a book called, Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges (2009).  He indicates that almost all theories of learning are based in the past.  He suggests that operating in the generative realm requires learning from the future.  He writes:

By grounding the learning process in this way, the learning cycles are based on learning from the experiences of the past.  The distinction of Harvard and MIT’s Chris Argyris and Don Schon between single-loop and double–loop learning refers to learning from experiences of the past.  Single loop learning is reflected in the levels of reacting and restructuring, while reframing is an example of double-loop learning (which includes a reflection on ones deep assumptions and governing variables).  However the deepest level of the U graphic – referred to as regenerating – goes beyond double-loop learning.  It accesses a different stream of time – the future that wants to emerge… [2]

This perspective suggests that we create the future by interacting with it as it emerges.  Our ability to do this depends on our own inner state.  We have to live from our own highest future possibility, do so with authenticity, empathy and openness.

We have to be able to “change the inner condition from which we operate.”  If we pay attention to how we pay attention, we change it.  If we change how we observe, we change how we interact, and we become generative.  We contribute quality because it is a function of how we attend to the world.

Leadership, then, is about being able to lift ourselves into this heightened state and it is also about attracting others into this heightened state.  It is then that a group becomes truly generative.

Like Indiana Jones, we need to more fully understand the process of “making it up” as we go along.  Like the CEO we need to recognize that our greatest contributions are a function of “building the bridge as we walk on it.”  Like Otto Scharmer, we need to pay deeper attention to the generative process of “leading from the future as it emerges.”  To understand these things is to become a master at any given process, particularly the process of leading others.
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References

[1] Page 148 of Robert Pirsig’s (1974) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. Bantam Books.

[2]  Page 30 of Otto Scharmer’s (2009) Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges. Society for Organizational Learning.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 10:27 am and is filed under Agility / Adaptation, Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.