How do you know when a system is broken? Not an easy question.
We invest a lot of ourselves in the systems by which we organize our lives, whether they are social systems, organizational systems or household systems. For a long time they may have served us well. When they break or no longer make sense, we may be blind to the fact.
Systems may stop working for any number of reasons. It may be that the specific context for which these systems were created has changed, perhaps because the external operating environment has shifted or because some new dynamic has taken shape inside the organization. We may sense this, even if we can’t put our finger on exactly what’s changed or what that change implies.
For most of us the reflex is to go on asking familiar questions, working to make sense of new phenomena. Meanwhile the new phenomena go on shaping our fate whether we have figured out their meaning or not.
Looking to future sources of change is essential. Asking whether change is already occurring is a harder question.
It is not easy to step out of our own shadow and see the present clearly. But if we do not recognize change while it is occurring the crash can feel awfully abrupt when systems finally break.
Thinking critically all the time
A big problem with life is that it never stops moving. The changes this creates are seldom binary, neither this nor that.
A few years ago, for example, brick-and-mortar stores were being given last rites. Online shopping was eating the world. Now local stores are coming back. Only this time they are different. They are back in a “phygital” format — smaller spaces less for buying and more for supporting online retail. The operating context changed. To make sense of the change the system needed to be reimagined.
In any moment of change it is hard to know if the change is existential or merely a difference from what we have known before, just some new wrinkle. The difference in urgency matters to the kinds of questions we ask ourselves.
What never changes is that if we are coming from a place of fear — or worse, panic — we will have a hard time asking honest questions and accepting the answers. As the noted rabbi, family therapist and leadership consultant Edwin Friedman observed, “…when anxiety reaches certain thresholds, ‘reasonableness and honesty’ no longer defend against illusion.”
The goal is thinking critically, and all the time.
How to challenge assumptions
Change to a system in which we have invested ourselves can be an emotional thing. If we are any good we strongly identify with the jobs we perform and with the systems that support us.
Even in situations requiring drastic change there is time to ask teams what they think. In fact, in situations requiring urgent action the ability to question the organization’s implicit beliefs and unconscious assumptions —biases, by any other name — is especially important.
Challenging system biases is hard. The reason is that we mostly do not view them as biases but as assessments of fact. But there are ways to surface biases and hold them up to the light.
An organization’s capacity to step out of its own shadow and observe the present for what it is begins with good leadership, the kind that makes it safe to ask questions and challenge assumptions. Edgar Schein, the great MIT organizational theorist, called this “humble inquiry”.
Start with naming your purpose. Does the system built for pursuing your purpose feel broken? Why might that be? How urgent does the break feel to your team? Ask for simple descriptors of the break. Becoming overly detailed will have the unintended effect of making us reach for familiar language and familiar references, obscuring what may be new.
There may be a tendency for a certain kind of leader to ask these questions alone, as if solitary responsibility was the burden of leadership. This is a misconception (and kind of egotistical). The investigation of change needs to be a group effort, with multiple kinds of representatives from the operation. Another tendency may be to rely only on representatives who are “change advocates.” Change “resisters” need to be heard too.
The requirement of every participant is imagination and curiosity. Can they be open-minded? Can they look at facts squarely? Can they look beyond their current concerns to consider the longer-term interests of the organization? Can they step out of their own shadows?
Good leaders enable their organizations to think about the unthinkable— not necessarily the horrible but the brand new. Not because the results of such thinking are necessarily going to be applied but because developing that skill builds a muscle for imagining what could upend our systems.
We will never be able to fully understand what all the ripples of change mean for our operations. But we can get used to the idea that there is no stopping them.
This essay is written in collaboration with Kevin McDermott of Collective Intelligence in New York
