Three Sub-Systems

This post is the third in a series on Leading in Complex Human Systems. In my last two posts, we began our review of The Butterfly Model of Human Systems. The Model suggests that larger human systems are composed of three major subsystems:

1. The Face to Face System–what happens “in the room,” in our face-to-face interactions
2. The External System–our larger world
3. The Internal System—our thoughts, assumptions feelings, and deeper stories

To view the butterfly model, click here.

In Human Systems 1=3

At any given time we may focus our efforts primarily on one of the three subsystems, e.g. on how a team works together (face to face system), but all three subsystems are always interacting and influencing the team’s effectiveness. For example, how team members interact (face to face system) certainly influences their productivity. The organizational context of the team (the external system) and thoughts and feelings of team members (internal system) also exert significant influence.

Visible, Less Visible, Least Visible

We experience the forces at play from these three sub systems as visible, less visible, and least visible. For many people:

• The face-to-face forces are most visible in that we can see a behavior, hear what is said, and observe interactions.
• The external forces are less visible. For example, you can talk about the economy and see its impact, e.g. people lose their jobs, but you can’t actually see the economy.
• The internal forces are the least visible, in that you can’t literally see a thought or a feeling.

We first thought the above would be true for everyone, but what we have found in working with people over time is that which forces are most, less, and least visible can vary for different people. How we experience a system tends to be a reflection of where we sit in the system and of what we pay most attention to. For example, I once worked with a market analyst who said, “What do you mean the external forces are less visible? To me, they are the most visible.”

Seeing Systems More Fully

Whatever our primary focus, we sometimes feel pushed and pulled by forces we can’t see and don’t understand. We feel tugs, but we don’t know what’s tugging us; we have a headache, but we don’t know what is causing it; we find ourselves responding in less than optimal ways, but we aren’t sure why.

So the questions for you as a leader are:

• What forces are most and least visible to you?
• What are the forces you pay the most attention to? The least attention?
• How can you broaden and deepen your view of a system so that you are able to see and understand the range of forces at play, and increase your impact?

My work as a human systems coach and consultant is about helping leaders clarify the visible and make the less visible and least visible more visible by, in each case, creating pictures, a language, and tools that help leaders see, understand, and behave in clearer, more intentional ways in complex systems. By so doing, leaders can help a system morph itself from a caterpillar (what it is) into a butterfly (what it wants to be).

Where Do We Go From Here?

In future posts, we will continue our “dance with the butterfly”—our journey through human systems–by looking further at how we experience systems; by exploring in more depth the face to face world, the external world, the internal world, and how the three worlds interact to produce results; and by identifying how we can increase our ability to help systems create desired outcomes.

If you want to explore leading and working in humans systems further, feel free to contact me.

Meanwhile, good journey…

———————————————————————————————————————

Steven P. Ober EdD
President: Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Partner: Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office: PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home: 278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O: 508.882.1025 M: 978.590.4219
Email: www.ChrysalisCoaching.org

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant. He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectiveness in short periods of time. He and a group of partners have created a breakthrough educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective, in which you can significantly enhance your abilities as a systemic leadership coach. See http://SystemsPerspectivesLLC.com

Working with Human Systems

In my last post, I emphasized the importance of complex human systems–we live and work for our whole lives in and as part of them. I suggested model building, practice, and reflection on our practice as effective ways to understand them more effectively. Finally I described how the model we will be reviewing here evolved.

Our framing questions are: What are human systems? How do they tend to behave? What are their key elements and how do these elements tend to interact? How can we work in and with human systems to increase their business and human effectiveness?

We will now begin to address these questions by reviewing The Butterfly Model of Complex Human Systems, walking through its various sections, and referencing associated approaches and tools.

The Never Ending Story

Before we begin this journey however, one cautionary note: Models are helpful, but they are only models. They are helpful in that they enable us to clarify and communicate our thinking and focus our acting. They are “only models” in that all models are incomplete. So, in thinking about human systems, we are on a journey that will never end. We will never reach a state of fully understanding the complex systems around us. The work is about the ongoing learning journey and never about finding “the final answer.” To paraphrase Sisyphus, “the journey itself is enough to fill a person’s heart.” If we forget this cautionary note, we start to engage in creating doctrines and continually justifying them rather than in learning. To put it another way, “The problem is not in having models. They can be very helpful. The problem occurs when we forget that our models aren’t true!”

The Butterfly Model

Click on this link to see the Butterfly Model.

Figure 1 is a graphic of The Butterfly Model of Complex Human Systems. What does it suggest about them?

The Butterfly:

First and most obvious, the overall model is shaped like a butterfly. We shaped it that way to symbolize that, through our work with systems, there is always the possibility for them to transform themselves from what they are to something better, something more beautiful, as the caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. What we do as systems consultants is be with a system and help it see itself and how it is currently working/not working. In so doing we create a container (analogous to the chrysalis in which the caterpillar transforms) in which the system can transform itself.

Three Major Sub Systems:

Secondly, note that the model has three major sections–the two wings and the body. Each of these depicts one of the major sub-systems that comprise a human system. Those are the Face-to-Face System, the External System and the Internal System.

• The Face to Face System consists of what happens in the room, in face-to-face interactions, for example, the conversations we have, the actions we take, the way we organize our work, and how we manage ourselves as teams.
• The External System is our larger outer world—our organization, the business we do, and our environment (marketplace, economy, etc.)
• The Internal System includes the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and deeper stories we all have inside us.

The algorithm for leading in human systems is 1=3. In any human system, all three of these sub-systems are in constant interaction. When you are working in a human system, be it leading, coaching, or consulting, although you are usually focusing primarily on one sub-system, aspects of all three are present, interacting, and exerting influence on what happens and upon the outcomes the you and the system create.

In my next post, we will talk about ways we experience these three subsystems and how we can learn to “see” them more clearly.

If you want to explore leading and working in humans systems further, feel free to contact me.

Meanwhile, good journey…

———————————————————————————————————————

Steven P. Ober EdD
President: Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Partner: Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office: PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home: 278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O: 508.882.1025 M: 978.590.4219
Email: Steve@ChrysalisCoaching.org
www.ChrysalisCoaching.org

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant. He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectiveness in short periods of time. He and a group of partners have created a breakthrough educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective, in which you can significantly enhance your abilities as a systemic leadership coach. See http://SystemsPerspectivesLLC.com

Leading and Working in Complex Human Systems

-For Diane Hetherington-

The importance of human systems: We spend much of our lives as part of human systems. Examples include the organizations in which we work, the teams and groups of which we are members, our families, our communities, and our world. In fact, I would argue that we as individual human beings are part of larger human systems, and we as individuals are human systems. Each of us is a human system we call an individual, and we are part of larger human systems that comprise our arenas of activity.

Model Building as a Route to Mastery: Are there ways we as leaders, coaches, and consultants can understand more fully and work more effectively with human systems? I believe so. Three of those ways are:

• Create an explicit model depicting how we think about human systems
• Create approaches and tools that help us work with those systems
• Continue refining the model, the approaches, and the tools by reflecting on our practice over time.

We all have more or less implicit/explicit models of ourselves and of other systems. Model building is the work of making our implicit models explicit and continually testing them.

Learning through Practice and Reflection: For the better part of the last 20 years, I have been engaged in such an endeavor. In the early 90s, David Kantor1, Joel Yanowitz2 and I, with input from many others in Innovation Associates3, began to focus on team learning. In doing so we worked with these questions:

• “What are the forces at play in and around teams that impact their productivity, i.e. their ability to produce desired, and hopefully, outstanding results?”
• “How can we, as leaders, team members, and team coaches, interact with these forces so that we help teams perform at higher levels?”

In doing this work, we soon realized that what we were really about was building a model of a human system–a model of the system itself, of how it changes, and of how we work with it so that it changes in fruitful ways.

In the mid to late 90s and early 2000s at Innovation Associates and Arthur D. Little4, I worked with Kantor, Michael Shanahan5 and many others in large systems change projects. Examples of our work included shepherding company turn-arounds, designing and implementing new business models, implementing new strategies, and improving total quality. In these projects, I continued to apply and grow/refine the above human systems model and accompanying approaches.

In the mid 2000s, I continued to enhance the model in my practice and conducted workshops with other practitioners and executives on how to apply it.

From 2008 to the present, I have been working with a group of colleagues from the Society for Organizational Learning6 on developing a systems approach to leadership coaching. We call ourselves Systems Perspectives, LLC7, and we have developed an educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective8, that we are offering to coaches and companies around the world. This work has presented yet another opportunity to further refine the model of human systems and the practice of working with them. As we focused on teams in the early 90s, the work of our Systems Perspectives group today includes the same questions applied to the coaching relationship:

• “What are the forces at play in and around a coach, client, and their relationship that impact their ability to produce desired, and hopefully, outstanding results?
• How can we, as coaches and leaders, interact with these forces so that we increase our effectiveness?”

In doing all the above, hopefully I have learned a few things about how human systems behave and how we can work with them. My next few posts will be about this territory: What are human systems? How do they tend to behave? What are their key elements and how do these elements tend to interact? How can we work in and with Human Systems to help them increase both their business and humanistic impact? I will address these questions by reviewing what we now call The Butterfly Model of Complex Human Systems, walking us through its various sections, and referencing associated approaches and tools.9 In my next post, we will continue our “dance with the Butterfly” by beginning to look at the specifics of the model and what it suggests to us about the behavior of human systems.

If you would like to learn more about leading in complex systems, feel to call or email me. My contact information is below.

Meanwhile, good journey…

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1. David Kantor is one of the world’s leading family systems therapists and systems consultants. He has written numerous books and articles about families and other human systems and has developed an elegant theory and practice of face-to-face interactions called Structural Dynamics. David has been my mentor in the work I describe here. His first book, Inside the Family, is a classic in the fields of family and human systems. David currently leads The Kantor Institute in Cambridge, MA.
2. Joel Yanowitz was the Director of Consulting at Innovation Associates. Under his leadership, we built a substantial consulting practice that complemented IA’s already flourishing training business. Joel currently lives in California with his family, manages an investment firm, and continues his consulting work.
3. Innovation Associates was founded by Charlie Kiefer, Robert Fritz, and Peter Senge. IA pioneered transformational leadership development with its groundbreaking program Leadership and Mastery, which has influenced literally hundreds of leaders in almost every field—from banking, to insurance, to high tech, to heavy industry to education. In the 80s and 90’s, Innovation Associates was the leading learning organization consulting firm in the world.
4. The original Arthur D. Little was the oldest consulting firm in the world. Founded by Dr. Little in the late 1800s, its work encompassed scientific, technical, environmental, and organizational/strategy consulting.
5. Michael Shanahan was a Director at Arthur D. Little, where he led many highly successful large systems change consultations. Along with the author (Steven Ober) Michael did pioneering work in bringing together human and technical, expert and process consulting in ways that had never been done before. Michael is currently a director at Boston Consulting Group in Boston, MA
6. The Society for Organizational Learning, founded by Peter Senge, is a global network of practitioners, researchers, and organizational leaders who focus on helping organizations learn to transform themselves.
7. Systems Perspectives, LLC is a group of senior coaches from the Society for Organizational Learning’s Coaching Community of Practice. The group has consisted of Jeff Clanon, Miriam Hawley, Richard Karash, Carol Mase, Jeffrey McIntyre, Steven Ober, Heidi Sarkes-Guber, and the late Diane Hetherington.
8. Coaching from a Systems Perspectives is a breakthrough educational program for practicing coaches that we have developed and are offering worldwide.
9. Many thanks to my Systems Perspectives partners, and, in particular, to Dr. Carol Mase, for helping evolve the model to its current iteration. Dr. Mase’s areas of expertise include living, self-organizing systems. Her headquarters are in Doylestown, PA.

===============================================

Steven P. Ober EdD

President: Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Partner: Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office: PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home: 278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O: 508.882.1025 M: 978.590.4219
Email: Steve@ChrysalisCoaching.org
www.ChrysalisCoaching.org

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant. He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectiveness in short periods of time. He and a group of partners have created a breakthrough educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective, in which you can significantly enhance your abilities as a systemic leadership coach. See http://SystemsPerspectivesLLC.com

The Essence of Story work

This post is the last in a series about Creating your Leadership Story—how you can learn to see your original systemic story; how, particularly in high stakes situations, it inserts itself into your present day leadership behavior; and how, if desired, you can change your story. The fundamental premise is that you as a leader can learn to see your story—how you have learned to operate in systems–identify ways that it inhibits and ways that it helps you reach your goals, and create a new leadership story that is more aligned with the kind of leader you want to be.

In some ways story work is very complex. It involves learning to see patterns that have reverberated throughout your life and learning to understand the essence of how you have interpreted your experience of the human condition. In other ways it is very simple—there is an identifiable, straightforward set of steps you can engage in to discover and change your story. I call these steps “the essence of story work.” Here they are:

1. Identify and Clarify an important present EVENT: Identify a present situation with which you are having difficulty. A good place to start is with the question: “What is the most challenging leadership situation I am dealing with right now?” Clarify what is happening and how you are responding to it—your behaviors, your thoughts, and your feelings. You might say something like (this is a real example), “My biggest challenge is dealing with all the diverse constituencies in my organization and surrounding community. I try to keep them all happy so that I can hold the system together. That is my job as leader.”

2. Identify the PATTERN: Ask yourself “Is this the first time I have had this kind of experience and responded this way, or have I behaved in this way before?” Invariably, if the event is truly a significant, challenging, high stakes one for you, you will find yourself saying something like, “Oh I’ve been in situations like this several times before,” or, ”I’ve always done this,” (as the leader above said) or, “I have responded this way since my first job—no I did it in college too…well, now that I think about it, I also had this kind of experience in high school and Jr. High.” Now you have identified a pattern of behavior, and accompanying assumptions and feelings, that you have repeated many times throughout your life. The chances are very high that the pattern you see and your deep systemic story are mirrors of one another (mirrors not in content but in structure—the plot line, the character structure, your implicit assumptions, and what you tend to do).

3. Explore your Story (the STRUCTURE): Ask yourself, “What role did this pattern play in my original systemic story?” Or, “How did this story line play out in the first system of which I was a part?” Think through examples that occurred as you were growing up. Identify the major players and their roles, including the role you played. Identify the “story you told yourself” about what was happening—your thoughts, assumptions, actions, and feelings. By this time in your reflection process, who will have a very good picture of the difficulty part of your systemic story–the part which, when activated in present day situations, holds you back. At this level, the leader above said, “I was the youngest child. I had several brothers and sisters who had already moved away. I felt it was my job to hold the family together so they would come back. I did that by keeping everyone happy. Oh! That’s the same way I’m trying to lead in difficult situations today!”

4. Explore alternatives: When you see your patterns and your story, you can identify clearly the behavior you have engaged in and the assumptions you have been making. For example, one of the assumptions of our leader above was, “It is my job to hold the system together.” Another one was, “the way to keep people together is to keep them happy, to please them.” Usually we make these kinds of assumptions without even realizing we are doing so; they are implicit. Through story work, our implicit assumptions become explicit and, therefore, more easily changed. Ask yourself, “do these behaviors, thoughts and feelings I learned early on really fit my present day situation?” Usually the answer is no. Usually you see that there are other behaviors, assumptions, and feelings that will serve you better in your current circumstances. For example, our leader above may adopt a behavior of putting issues squarely on the table and an underlying assumption that working through tough issues is good for an organization.

5. Choose your new story: At this point, you have a good picture of your systemic story, how it has contributed to patterns of behavior over time, and how it plays out in present day high stakes situations. Let’s say your difficulty story is something like: “I never say no to new opportunities and challenges because I don’t want to be seen as inadequate. As a result, I get incredibly overloaded and stressed.” The story you choose is, “I say yes when I truly want to, I say no when that is called for, and I negotiate when I think appropriate. My life is in balance.” Then identify behaviors and assumptions that will support your new story, for example, sometimes saying no to authority and assuming that people will respect you rather than think less of you for standing up for yourself.

6. Practice, Practice, Practice: To bring your new story into being, identify specific behavioral experiments in which you will try out your new behaviors and assumptions. For example, “In our upcoming budget meeting, I am going to state my position very clearly and not cave in when people question me.” You might begin your experiments in situations that are lower risk and later try them in situations that are higher risk. For example, holding your own in the budget meeting may be less risky for you than opposing your boss in a 1/1 stand off. Try your experiments and notice what comes up—what you think, what you feel, what you say to yourself. Chances are you will feel some satisfaction at having tried something new and some anxiety in having tried something unfamiliar. Though we wish that it did, seeing the old story is, in and of itself, not enough to make it “go away.” The old story is apt to raise its head in the form of feelings of anxiety or sadness, thoughts like, “Oh my, what am I doing. They are going to think I’m not a team player!” Pay attention to what comes up, and notice the thoughts and feelings from the old story. Notice them but don’t get tangled up in them. Metaphorically step back from them, see them, and recognize that they can be part of the normal mix of things but that they don’t have to be in the driver’s seat. When you choose and practice a new story, your choice is in the driver’s seat. Just because you feel those old things and think those old thoughts doesn’t mean that you have to follow them. Rather, you can over time, notice them, learn from them, and continue to make choices in favor of what you want to create.

Using the media of stories, we have looked in some depth over the last several weeks at one aspect of human systems—the internal system—the things we think and feel that influence what happens. In coming posts we will look at a model for the Whole System, and then at the two remaining arenas in human systems—the face to face system, i.e. the world of direct interaction with others, and the larger external system—our organizations, businesses, and their environment. All of these arenas are parts of the greater systemic whole in which we live our lives.

Until then, good journey…

———————–

If you would like to learn more about story work and/or consider story coaching, feel free to call or email me at:

Steven P. Ober EdD
President: Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Partner: Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office: PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home: 278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O: 508.882.1025 M: 978.590.4219
Email: Steve@ChrysalisCoaching.org
www.ChrysalisCoaching.org

Moses, Dorothy, and the Hero’s journey

We have been focusing on leaders’ deep systemic stories–how they were formed, how they shape your leadership behavior, and how you can learn to see, and if you desire, change them. In this post, we will look at the larger cultural context for our individual stories.

Making Meaning through Stories

We as human beings are meaning making creatures. One of the ways we make meaning for ourselves as individuals is through our own systemic stories. One of the ways we make meaning of our larger world and our place in it is through the stories we create about life and about our relationships with each other, with our planet, and with the heavens. Examples of these cultural stories include creation stories; flood stories; Eden stories; stories of exodus and deliverance; wandering in the wilderness; stories of light and hope; fairy tales; and stories about birth, death, and regeneration.

Our individual stories are narratives we have told ourselves about our own experiences in our life journeys. Our larger cultural stories are narratives we have created about our broader human experience. All of these stories, our personal ones and our larger myths, are interconnected. Understanding one group of stories helps us learn from the others.

Where do our stories come from?

What are our broader cultural myths really about? Where do they come from? I suggested above that they are about our human experience and our desire to make meaning of that experience. Specifically, I believe our cultural myths emerge from three interrelated arenas:

• Our cycle of life from birth through childhood, adulthood, mid-life, maturity, and death.
• Our relationship with the earth and the seasons
• Our relationships with others—our parents, our families, our friends, and our larger communities.

The Hero’s Journey

Joseph Campbell found that, while there are indeed differences, there are also remarkable parallels among the archetypal stories, or myths, across all cultures. These parallels reflect commonalities in the human condition.

Campbell also indentified a powerful prototypical story he called The Hero’s Journey. Hero’s journey stories appear in all cultures, and their underlying structures are much the same. The basic sequence of a hero’s journey story is:

• The hero begins in a “stable” state.
• Something breaks her loose.
• He goes into a difficult period, the pit, a trauma.
• She emerges from that dark night of the soul and goes on a journey, a quest to accomplish some great thing, meet some great challenge, and/or get to a desired place.
• The hero experiences several tests along the way
• If the hero is successful in his journey, he achieves his goal, meets his great challenge, and reaches his desired destination.

Moses and the Exodus

The account of Moses and the Exodus is a mid-life hero’s journey. Moses left Egypt as a young man and for many years had a stable life and family in the desert. The burning bush experience—through which he was commissioned by Yahweh to lead his people to freedom and into the Promised Land–broke him loose from that comfortable place. He re-entered Egypt and faced the threat of the Pharaoh and his minions. He became the vehicle for the plagues visited upon Egypt. He led the Children of Israel through the climactic trauma of crossing the Red Sea, the closing of which destroyed Pharaoh’s pursuing armies. Moses then led his people in a 40-year journey through the desert looking for the Promised Land.

Dorothy and the Yellow Brick Road

The story of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz is a coming of age hero’s journey. Though the content is totally different, there are many thematic similarities to Moses’ story. Dorothy was in Kansas on the farm (a stable place). The cyclone broke her loose from that space, and she experienced the storm’s powerful trauma. As Moses had Pharaoh as a nemesis, Dorothy had the Wicked Witches. As going through the Red Sea destroyed Pharaoh’s armies, when Dorothy came through the tornado, the house she was in killed the Wicked Witch of the East. Moses and the Children of Israel came through the Red Sea to a strange desert with a long journey and desired destination ahead of them. Dorothy came through the tornado, landed in the strange Land of Oz, and soon began her journey back home. On his journey, Moses experienced many tests—tests of his leadership; a sometimes rebellious, idolatrous group of followers; the lack of food; and the summons to Mount Sinai. Dorothy was also tested—the plants that made her and her friends fall asleep; getting access to the Wizard; the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West; the fact that the Wizard was hokum. To pass these tests, both Moses and Dorothy needed to use the best resources of their hearts, their minds, and their courage.

Your own Hero’s Journey

With careful examination, you will find that your story is also a quest that has a sequence similar to Moses’ and Dorothy’s. We start in what we initially experience as a safe protected place, at home with our parents. We feel loved. Over time, we learn that our situation, and the love we receive are not perfect (not necessarily due to the fact that anyone is s bad person—most often simply due to the imperfection of the human condition). We experience our first great test, the first great question of life: “Am I worthy, am I loved? Am I loveable?” We begin our life journey in search of the answer to that question and in search of the love we believe we have lost.

Our next test comes in young adulthood, when we find ourselves answering the second great question of life: “What am I going to do with my life on the planet? Who is the best person I can be in the world?”

During mid-life we face our third great challenge. We look back on our lives, and ask ourselves the third great question: “Have I been the best person I can be?” Have I led a life of worth and meaning?”

And finally, in maturity, we experience our fourth great test. We look both backward and forward and ask ourselves, “How can I leave the planet a better place than I found it? What is the legacy I want to leave behind?”

If we answer these four great questions of life successfully, we reach our “promised land”—the knowledge that we have led a life of worth and meaning.

The Tapestry of Life

Your leadership journey, your overall life journey, and your journey in your current phase of life are intricately intertwined. They are all variations of your own hero’s journey. You reach a plateau and are comfortable there—for a while. Something occurs to break you loose. You are no longer as comfortable; you experience a period of transition. You set out on the next phase of your journey to achieve a certain goal and reach a desired point—to become a powerful leader, to guide your organization through a period of major change, to make your mark, or to establish your legacy–to show yourself, others, and your world that you ARE worthy, loved, loveable, and successful, that you are indeed a good human being. Such is the nature of your life journey; such is your hero’s journey; such is your leadership story; and such is the human condition. They are all part of one whole cloth.

What you can do

To help yourself learn your own present and desired story, ask yourself, “Where am I in my life journey, right now? What was my last plateau? What shook me loose? What is my destination, my goal? And, how do I proceed effectively and humanely to achieve my goal?” The answers to these questions will begin paint the picture of your own hero’s journey.

Where do we go from here?

My next post will the last in this series on Unleashing the Power of your Story. I will end the series by summarizing the steps you can take, the specific questions you can ask and answer for yourself, to identify your present and desired leadership stories and take the steps to move yourself powerfully from one to the other.

Meanwhile, Good Journey…

———————–

If you would like to learn more about story work and/or consider story coaching, feel free to call or email me at:

Steven P. Ober EdD
President: Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Partner: Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office: PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home: 278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O: 508.882.1025 M: 978.590.4219
Email: Steve@ChrysalisCoaching.org
www.ChrysalisCoaching.org

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant. He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectives in short periods of time. He and a group of partners have created a breakthrough educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective, in which you can significantly enhance your abilities as a systemic leadership coach. See http://SystemsPerspectivesLLC.com.

Three ways to understand yourself in systems

Events, Patterns, and, Structure

There are three ways to think about yourself and your behavior in complex systems. To increase your effectiveness as a leader, it is useful to understand all three and how they interconnect. You can understand yourself in systems through the lens of Events, through the lens of Patterns, and/or through the lens of Structure.

When you look at yourself in systems at the Event level, you can answer the question, “What just happened?” For a leader looking at her own performance, an event is a particular leadership incident and how she handles it.

When you look at yourself through the lens of Patterns, you can answer the question, “What’s been happening?” As a leader, you can learn to see your patterns of behavior over time in response to significant leadership challenges.

When you look at yourself through the lens of Structure, you can answer the question, “What is the cause?” What is the root cause of my behaving in repetitive ways in response to difficult challenges?

How you as a leader respond to one high stakes, particularly difficult leadership situation represents an event in your life as a leader. When you notice that you have reacted in very similar ways before in other high stakes situations, you are seeing your patterns of behavior.

When you see particular events, and a repeating pattern in your leadership behavior, you can find the root cause, the underlying structure that shapes your reactions, in your deep systemic story. Your deep systemic story is the place from which your entrenched patterns of behavior emerge. That deep story is the narrative—with discernible plot-line and character structure—you have created about your experience in systems.

Your leverage for change increases as you understand events, then patterns, and then structure. At the event level, you may change your reaction so that the outcome of a particular situation is a bit more desirable. As the pattern level, you can work on changing your patterns of behavior over time. At the structural level, the level of story, you can shift your underlying assumptions, change how you see yourself as a person and as a leader in the world, and make deeper, long-lasting changes. You can learn to transform your story and, thereby, transform your leadership.

Examples

Here are some examples of Events, Patterns, and Structure from people I have worked with. As I mentioned in the last post, I have kept the essence of these examples true to the stories; I have fictionalized them so that the sources remain anonymous.

Coaching Employees who aren’t Committed

Event: A marketing company executive started coaching four of her employees. She experienced two of them as fast, bright, and motivated, and the other two as slow, not as bright, and not very motivated. She was still coaching the two motivated employees but had stopped working with the other two.

Pattern: In further conversation, the executive stated that this was not a new behavior for. She said, “Oh, I’ve always done this. I always stop working with the people who aren’t fast, smart and motivated. I don’t know what causes me to do it, but I always do.”

Structure: The executive asked to explore her pattern of behavior at the story level. She saw the connection almost immediately. Her father was a very successful, well-known person in his field. When he worked with her and her sister, he experienced her as quick, bright, and motivated. He experienced her sister as slow, not as bright, and not as motivated, and he stopped working with the sister.

This executive saw that her assumptions and behavior were exactly the same as her father’s assumptions and behavior toward her sister. “Because I experienced them as slow, I have been assuming, without even realizing it, that they were not as bright and not as motivated.” She immediately explored other possible assumptions and changed her behavior. She created a new story in which she worked successfully with all her reports.. Now she is coaching all of them.

Deep Ambivalence about New Challenges

Event: I recently got very happy and excited about a big new project at work. The opportunity to take on something big energized me. Then, a sense foreboding came over me—I had a deep fear that I would do something to make the project go wrong.

Pattern: Over my career, it seems that every time I am have a significant new opportunity, I first get excited about it and then experience a deep sense of dread.

Structure: My father’s musician colleague, Bill, came by to visit. He had just returned from a trip to New York where he had purchased a hot new jazz album for my dad. I came out to say hello to Uncle Bill. In my excitement I ran into the room, jumped up on the couch, and broke the record Bill had given Dad. I felt horrible. I had greatly displeased my Dad, my hero; he was disappointed that I broke something he valued. I learned to fear that I would mess up things I get I get excited about.

Needing Affirmation to Feel Good

Event: In Q1 I felt great. My group and I were at the top of our game. We were exceeding all our numbers and getting rave reviews from the organization. Now, here we are in Q2 with a big slowdown, and we don’t hear anything from anyone. I feel terrible about myself and very guilty about not achieving.

Pattern: For as long as I can remember, I have felt great when I was accomplishing great things and getting recognition for it. Then, even a short time later, when I am not achieving the best and getting praise, I feel terrible. I’ve wondered for years why I need recognition to feel good about myself.

Structure: My father is a very bright, but reserved, intellectual. He relates to other people, including me, almost solely on the head level. As his son, I learned I could get his attention by doing great things like making perfect grades, which I did. My father noticed me and gave me lots of praise for my achievements, but he never praised me for just being an all around good guy.

What you can do

If you want to understand and enhance your leadership capabilities, pay attention to important events and how you handle them—what you think, what you feel, what you do.

Then, look at your patterns of behavior over time. What responses have you tended to repeat when reacting to challenging events?

Then, ask yourself, how/when did I experience these feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in my first system? How did I learn to respond in this way? What is the story I am telling myself about these significant experiences? What implicit assumptions am I making that support this story? What are my feelings? My behaviors?

Then ask, what are other assumptions, feelings, and behaviors that would better fit my current leadership challenges?

If you can answer the above questions clearly, you are learning to see your leadership story and create a new one.

Future Posts

In ensuing posts, we will look at broader, archetypal cultural stories, why we create them, and how they shed light on our own leadership stories. Then we will summarize the process, the steps, the key questions you need to answer to see your systemic story and, if desired, to change it. Finally, we will examine the underlying transformation that often occurs when a leader truly sees her deep story and begins to create a new one.

Good journey, and to be continued….

——————

If you would like to learn more about story work and/or consider story coaching, feel free to call or email me at:

Steven P. Ober EdD
President: Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Partner: Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office: PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home: 278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O: 508.882.1025 M: 978.590.4219
Email: Steve@ChrysalisCoaching.org
www.ChrysalisCoaching.org

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant. He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectiveness in short periods of time. He and a group of partners have created a breakthrough educational program, Coaching from a Systems Perspective, in which you can significantly enhance your abilities as a systemic leadership coach. See http://SystemsPerspectivesLLC.com.

Premises that Shape Leadership Story Work

Stories and Story Work

This post is the third in a series about a breakthrough Leadership Coaching approach: Creating your Leadership Story. I have suggested that one of the most powerful ways for leaders to see how you lead, understand the reasons you lead as you do, and make significant improvements in your leadership effectiveness, is through understanding and learning to work with your deep systemic story. In the first two posts, I described the territory of stories and story work, outlined some of the key ideas that underlie the approach, and suggested ways you can begin to see your own story. In this post, I will describe the premises, or working hypotheses, that shape story coaching and mention how these premises can help guide you on your journey.

Premises Underlying Story Work

1. We each have a few core, systemic stories.

Your stories are deeply held, because you have been creating and living them out for a long time. They have identifiable plot lines and character structures, including the roles you tend to play. They are fully systemic in nature. Your core stories are systemic in that they reflect how you have learned to operate, survive, and be successful in systems. They are systemic in that they are about your relationships and interactions with other systems—key individuals, groups, and communities–and with other key forces at play in your life. One colleague suggested that we call them relationship stories.

2. We formed the basic structure of our stories—plot lines, character structure, and roles we tend to play—in the first system of which we were a part.

In that first system, which for most of you was your original family, you learned who you are, how to be, and how to behave in systems. Certainly, over your life you have, by living, embellished and expanded your story. But, you created the core plotline during your early experiences, and that core tends to remain relatively intact unless you do specific work to modify it.

3. Our systemic stories have a significant impact on our behavior in the present, especially as the stakes go up.

Your stories are not just about the past. They are part of who you are, today. (See last weeks post about reframing our model of time.) They form the lenses through which you see and interact with your world. And, the higher the stakes are for you, the more likely your systemic stories are to become engaged and play themselves out in your present day thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

Your stories are always operating to some degree. But, when the stakes are high, you tend to experience their impact much more clearly. Sometimes, in very high stakes situations, you may feel almost compelled to behave in certain ways, even though on some level you know those behaviors won’t get the results you want.

Usually, when you have this kind of experience, your deep systemic story has become fully engaged and is, metaphorically, “telling” you how to behave in order to protect yourself and deal effectively with real or imagined risks in situations you experience as high stakes.

4. Seeing your systemic story, being aware of how it influences your leadership behavior, and learning to work with it, is very high leverage for you as a leader.

You hold your stories very deeply, and you are sometimes so close to them that you can’t see them (like trying to see your own face without a mirror). But your deep stories do not have to be permanently embedded, invisible cages. In fact, they can become sources of energy and growth. You can learn to see your stories and how they both help and constrain you. As Peter Block once said, “The first step in getting out of the cage you are in is to see the cage you are in.”

And, you can learn to reframe your stories, see them anew, and use them as a source of wisdom about living in a complex world. Remember that these are the stories you have told yourself about your experiences, not just things that have happened to you. (See last week’s post about how we create our individual and social reality.) You are not a victim here. If you created the stories, you can change them. It is a learnable skill to see your story and reframe it–see it anew, as a source of grace, strength, forgiveness and wisdom rather than as a source of hurt and constraint. Then. you can modify the parts that hold you back and create a new leadership story that is more aligned with desired results and higher leadership performance.

Where do we go from here?

What you can do:

In earlier posts, I have suggested that you

• Practice observing yourself doing what you are doing, particularly in important, high stakes situations. As David Kantor says, “learn to use 15% of your mind to observe yourself and let the other 85% deal with content.”
• Learn to pay attention to your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in these situations.
• Then, ask yourself, “What is the story I am telling myself about this situation?” Notice the storyline that tends to emerge

Now, add to the above:

• Ask “is this way of thinking, behaving, and feeling a new experience for me, or have I experienced it before? Most people respond to this question with an answer like, “Oh, I’ve always done that; I’ve always been this way.” If that is your answer, you can be almost certain that you are beginning to see the plotline of your deep story.

Next Post

As I have written these posts, I realize that I have talked mostly about the model, the ideas, and the frameworks we use in story work. I have not provided real examples of people’s stories, how the stories impact them, and how people have learned to see, reframe and change their stories. Providing examples is difficult to do without violating confidentiality, because most of the examples are from people I have worked with. In the next post, I will try to accomplish both—provide a few examples that stay true to the essence of the stories and also preserve confidentiality by fictionalizing the examples so that their sources remain anonymous.

Good journey, and to be continued….

—————————————————————–

If you would like to learn more about story work and/or consider story coaching, feel free to call or email me at:

Steven P. Ober EdD
President: Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Partner: Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office: PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home: 278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O: 508.882.1025 M: 978.590.4219
Email: Steve@ChrysalisCoaching.org
www.ChrysalisCoaching.org http://SystemsPerspectivesLLC.com

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant. He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectives in short periods of time.

Key Ideas Underlying Story Work

“There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” Kurt Lewin

In last week’s post, I suggested that one of the most powerful ways to understand yourself as a leader and as a human being, and to align your energy to create the results you want in life, is to understand your systemic story. I defined systemic story as the story you have told yourself about your experience in systems–your internal narrative about your experience of the human condition.

Key Ideas

Today, I will outline a few of the key ideas that underlie this approach to stories. These ideas fall into two groups

• Ideas about how we create our social reality: Social Constructionism, Symbolic Interactionism, and the Ladder of Inference
• Ideas about how we experience time, the past, and the present: Reframing our Model of Time

Social Constructionism, Symbolic Interactionism, and the Ladder of Inference

Social Constructionism

Story work is based on Social Constructionism, which suggests that we largely, some would even say wholly, construct our individual and social reality through the internal narratives (stories) we tell ourselves about our experiences. What is our individual and social reality? Is it something objective and “out there”, or is it something we create? Is it what actually happens to us or is it our interpretation of what happens to us? And what is our past—what occurred, or our memory, our stories, our internal narrative about what occurred? Social consructionism suggests that, in terms of our experienced past, and in terms of what most influences our behavior, the stories we have told ourselves about our past, and the ones we tell ourselves about what happens today, are more real than what “actually happened.”

Symbolic Interactionism

To put it another way, we are not simply stimulus-response creatures. We are stimulus-interpretation-response creatures. This idea is sometimes referred to as symbolic interactionism. We are meaning making creatures. Our experience of reality and our response to it has as much or more to do with our interpretation of events (stimuli), and the meaning we give to them, as it does with the events themselves.

The Ladder of Inference

As Chris Argyris’ Ladder of Inference suggests, we are bombarded by stimuli, by things happening all around us. Instantaneously, we screen out some of the stimuli and take in some of it, because we can’t effectively process everything. Next, we add meaning to, make interpretations of, make attributions about what we have taken in. Then, we reach a conclusion and decide what to do. Most often our conclusions and actions are several steps removed from the actual data—they are based more on the meaning we have added to the data than on the events, data, and stimuli themselves.

Putting the Ideas Together

Where do our screening frameworks, interpretations, ascribed meanings, and attributions come from? Social Constructionism suggests that they come from our internal narrative–from our stories. Put another way, our interpretations of events, and the meaning we give to them, are as much information about ourselves and about our stories as they are information about what actually occurred. So, if you want to learn something about your inner self, pay attention to how you interpret difficult situations.

In the last post, I suggested that you begin learning your story by noticing how you handle situations, particularly tough and challenging ones. Now, go another level and pay attention to what you are telling yourself about those situations and what you are telling yourself they mean. Ask yourself, “What is the story I am telling myself about this situation?” What you are telling yourself, particularly in very challenging, high stakes situations is a window into your systemic story.

Reframing how we think about time

Secondly, story work reflects a different model of time. How we think about and experience time is really shaped by our mental model of time, or our theory of time, not just by the “objective reality” we call time. As Charlie Kiefer would say, the way we experience time is “between our ears”, that is, our experience of time is a function of the way we think about time.

We usually talk and think about time using a linear model—the past, and our past experiences, were a long time ago, we are very distant from them now, and we will get more and more distant from them as “time passes.” We think about a linear sequence of events that makes up our lives to this point. We talk about timelines—straight lines depicting the passage time from one point to another.

A different and more systemic way to think about time and our past is that they are like rings in a tree. We start with a core and grow around it; we build on what we experience rather than moving away from it.* Key experiences, and the stories we have created about them, are always with us—they are very much a part of our present. They are, in a very real sense, as much a part of the present as an event that is happening right now, because we are experiencing and interpreting today’s event through lenses we have created—through the lenses of our stories. Like Jesus said about the poor, “our stories we always have with us.” They are part of what makes us who we are. Perhaps people who say, “we deal with the present, not the past” or, “We don’t talk about the past” are drawing a false dichotomy. Our life experiences are part of one organic, systemic whole rather than being “what was in the past // what is in the present.”

*I learned this model of time in a conversation with Paul Bennett, author of the powerful book Loving Grief.

Next Steps

So, in the journey of learning to see your own systemic story, pay attention to how you handle challenging situations—what you think about them, how you feel about them, and what you do about them. Then, ask yourself “What is the story I am telling myself about this situation?” As you practice observing and reflecting, you will find that your thoughts, feelings and behaviors do indeed fit into a storyline that reflects how you have learned to survive and succeed in systems.

In our next post, we will talk about the premises, or working hypotheses, that shape story work; they will help you see how you created your story, how it plays out in your work and life, and how you can make desired changes.

To be continued….

———————————————–

If you would like to learn more about story work and/or consider story coaching, feel free to call or email me at:

Steven P. Ober EdD
President: Chrysalis Executive Coaching & Consulting
Partner: Systems Perspectives, LLC
Office: PO Box 278, Oakham, MA 01068
Home: 278 Crocker Nye Rd., Oakham, MA 01068
O: 508.882.1025 M: 978.590.4219
Email: Steve@ChrysalisCoaching.org
www.ChrysalisCoaching.org http://SystemsPerspectivesLLC.com

Steve is a senior executive coach and consultant. He has developed and successfully uses a powerful approach to leadership coaching, Creating your Leadership Story, which enables leaders to make deep, lasting improvements in their leadership effectives in short periods of time.

“When we know the facts about people, we know what they are. When we know their stories, we know who they are.” John Quincy Adams

Leadership, Systems, and Stories

One of the most powerful ways to understand your leadership, and the reasons you behave and lead as you do, is to understand your systemic story.

Out of my work over the past 25 years with individual executives, executive teams, and large organizational change projects–and from my work with David Kantor, one of the leading family systems therapists and systems consultants in the U.S.–I have developed a powerful leadership coaching process, Creating your Leadership Story. Story work helps leaders make major improvements in their performance in short periods of time. Clients report that, in 2-3 hours of coaching, they create significant positive changes that stay with them over the long haul.

Leaders who choose to do story work learn to see Events–how they respond to particularly difficult leadership challenges. They come to recognize their Patterns of behavior and implicit assumptions, both those that have helped them create desired results and those that have gotten in their way. And, they discover Structure–how Patterns are rooted in their systemic story, the story that reflects how they initially learned to operate in systems.

Many clients describe seeing the connection between their present day leadership and their deep story as transformational. They make a fundamental shift in how they view themselves in the world and as leaders. But the work does not stop there. They then create a new story that is aligned with the results they want to create and the kind of leader they want to be; they identify new behaviors and assumptions; and they practice their new approaches to produce quantum leaps in their leadership effectiveness.

This post is the first of a series in which I will discuss what I mean by “story”, why your deep story is central to how you lead, why seeing your deep story is a powerful way to make desired changes in your leadership, and how you can go about doing that. Also, I will review the broader context for our stories—the theory underlying story work; stories in the context of our life cycle; and our individual and cultural myths, where these mythic stories come from, why we tell them, and what we can learn about ourselves and our world by paying more attention to them.

Questions to Ponder

Have you ever been in the middle of a leadership situation and felt, “I’ve been here before”? The content of the situation may be new, but you still have an underlying “deja vu all over again” experience.

Have you ever experienced a tough, high-pressure situation that was important for you to deal with effectively, but you felt stuck? You may have experienced yourself trying the same things over and over again, each time trying a little harder, and each time feeling more stuck. As in the proverbial tar baby story, the harder you pushed, the more you got entangled.

Conversely, you have probably experienced leadership situations that came out wonderfully despite huge challenges; you were successful and felt great, you performed to the max, and your energy flowed naturally and organically. You may or may not have known why things went so well, but you knew that they did, and you knew you felt great.

Most often, these kinds of instances reflect your deep systemic story.

What is a Systemic Story?

Your systemic story is the story you have told yourself about your experience in systems, particularly the first system of which you were a part. It reflects how you learned to survive and operate in systems; for example, your deep story reflects how you learned to:

• Relate to key players in your life
• Be successful
• Get noticed, or avoid getting noticed
• Take risks, and protect yourself
• Respond to authority, and exert your own authority
• Give and receive love

At its core, your deep story is the internal narrative you have created about your experience of the human condition. As such, it is central to who you are as a human being and as a leader.

What you can do—a first step

If you want to learn to see your story and how it influences your present day leadership behavior, to learn how to keep the parts of your story that serve you well and change the parts that do not, start observing yourself. As a first step, “stand on your own shoulder”, or “on the balcony” and watch yourself doing what you do. Pay particular attention to how you handle the toughest leadership challenges. Notice your thoughts, your feelings, and your behavior. In our next post, you will start to learn what to do with the things you have observed. Eventually, you will learn how to unleash the power of your story and make your life as a leader more consistent with who you truly want to be and what you deeply yearn to accomplish.

To be continued…

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If you have questions and would like more information about story work, feel free to contact me:

Steven P. Ober EdD

Office: 508.882.1025 Mobile: 978.590.4219
Steve@ChrysalisCoaching.org