Oxford Leadership Journal

The Oxford Leadership Journal is published four times a year and explores issues related to organizational and societal change from a variety of perspectives.
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OXFORD LEADERSHIP JOURNAL, VOLUME 2 ISSUE 1

JANUARY 2010

Recalibrating For Complexity

Studies show that, 85 percent of the time, mothers across cultures prefer to hold babies on their left side. The easiest explanation - the predominance of right-handedness - is not borne out by investigation - left-handed mothers also tend to cradle babies on the left side. Instead, it is more a matter of hemispheric specialisation - the right brain in most mothers is specialised for emotional information, like crying and laughter. Because the left side of the body (and the left eye) are connected to the right side of the brain, the theory suggests that the left-to-right pathway is more often the most direct and reliable for sensing the baby's needs.

Flash back a few thousand years to ancient Egypt. I am told that, in the carvings of the day, mothers are generally depicted cradling babies on the right side. Now there are many possible explanations for this fundamental shift in behaviour over a few thousand years, but here is my favourite, following on the hemispheric-specialisation line of thinking. My suspicion is that the ancient Egyptian women (and men, for that matter) were never taught to read, so the modern-day hemispheric specialisation never happened. Their brains were organised differently than ours.

Flash forward to 2011. Recent research suggests something very surprising - and this is no joke - that there are measurable and statistically significant differences in the brains of self-described conservatives and self-described progressives. Assuming the research survives scrutiny, it still leaves open the question of what causes what - does brain structure influence political choice, or do political choices affect brain structure?

Now, I am a big believer in the latter, broadly described as neural plasticity - the tendency of human brains to adapt to circumstances throughout our lifetimes. Scientific honesty obliges me to admit that neither of the above examples says much that is definitive about neural plasticity, one way or the other. Still, the likelihood that brains adapt their structure and function to conditions and training is very important to consider.

In particular, if literacy would have affected the ancient Egyptian's hemispheric specialisation, what effect is modern complexity, turbocharged by the digital revolution, having on our brains? The question is both very important and very basic - if the speed and complexity of modern work were causing changes in your brain (and mind), wouldn't you want to know about them?

No doubt, modern technology would make the ancient Egyptian's head literally spin. And my guess is that the complexity of modern life is making our heads spin. On a personal level, so much of leading, managing or simply working in today's society is about managing the complex web of interaction, communication and information flow that surrounds our lives.

So what do we mean by complexity? And is it a good thing or a bad thing? Both questions are critical for any leader or manager to address, but neither question is easy to tackle. It is for this reason that all of the articles in this issue of the Journal pick up on one or another nuance of managing complexity.

Complex systems do not behave like simple mechanical ones. In a complex system, big changes in conditions can yield negligible effects, and small changes in conditions can have transformative effects. Systems seem to have "a life of their own," often surprising us. In fact, the world is complex, but not in the way that chess is complex or an automobile is complex. One improves performance in chess or car mechanics through deeper and deeper analysis - understanding the whole through understanding the parts. Complex systems defy such analysis - we can do our best to understand them, but in the end, we have to rely on some mixture of insight, intuition, imagination, rules of thumb and values. It is a different playing field with different rules. We all need to recalibrate our understanding and sensitivities so that we are more aligned with the non-mechanical realities that surround us.

Or perhaps our brains are already recalibrating for that complexity.

Robert Ziegler, Editor

Read Robert Ziegler's profile.

	T oo Good to Fail - Ann Graham Since its founding in 1868, the Tata conglomerate has operated on the premise that a company thrives on social capital. Will the model survive being taken to multi-national scale?
	Complexity Science - Thomas Homer-Dixon Our societies' complexity has solved many problems, but complex systems can also become brittle and vulnerable to cascading failures. What's a leader to do?
	The Power of the Positive No - William Ury Saying "no" well is an art - one that can foster better outcomes in negotiations of all kinds. The secret? There are two key yeses for every no.
	Sustainability: The Outer and Inner Work - Sara Schley A truly transformative change in organisational behaviour requires reflective leaders who can hold the creative tensions involved.
	Making Sense of Strategy in an Uncertain World - Susan Szpakowski Good strategy - one that copes well with uncertainty - is elegantly simple with clear parameters, purpose and success criteria.
	Managing in the Midst of Uncertainty - Chad Storlie Like many large organisations, the US military faces considerable uncertainty. Here are some of their practices and principles for doing so.
	Understanding Negotiation Fatigue Syndrome and Its Impact - Joshua N. Weiss You can do everything right in a negotiation, only to be ambushed at the end by Negotiation Fatigue Syndrome. Here's how to prevent it.

You can read Volume 2, Issue 1 as a consolidated PDF here (2.2MB)

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OXFORD LEADERSHIP JOURNAL, VOLUME 1 ISSUE 4

OCTOBER 2010

Do we have what we need?

Many years ago, when my wife was expecting our first child, I resolved to be ready. It seemed prudent to anticipate a long period of sleep deprivation, a lot of medium-to-heavy lifting, and an on-going demand on my time the likes of which I had not yet known. So during the pregnancy, I stepped up my exercise routine figuring that being in good shape was the best preparation I could make for being a father. That was my thinking at the time, anyway.

Of course, fatherhood didn't turn out exactly as expected. yes, the demand on my time and energy was - and still is - significant. But the sleep deprivation was negligible, and as far as the heavy lifting is concerned, mother Nature doesn't give you a 25-kilo child to pick up without a few years of graduated training in advance.

So, all in all, it worked out, and I'm not sure how useful my pre-delivery training was. Just last week, I read some more news about the global climate crisis. It seems that, in the summer of 2010, the Arctic ice cap was the third smallest in recorded history. (The first and second smallest ice caps occurred in the last four years.) I'm sure many of you receive news like this almost every week. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I read that the toxic levels in dolphins are now so high that it is necessary and commonplace for the female to de-toxify herself by nursing her first calf. This first born often does not survive, but the mother is now rid of much of the fat-soluble toxins so that subsequent offspring can be nursed more safely. I don't know whether to be more alarmed or horrified.

Moreover, it seems likely to me that, over the next couple of decades, we will see a series of alarms and record-breakers - this year it's the polar ice cap, maybe next year is the hottest, the year after could bring bad news from the Greenland ice shelf or a platoon of hurricanes.

Faced with this kind of news week in and week out, we have in essence two sane responses: (1) "what can we do to slow, mitigate or stop this self-destruction?" and (2) "what do we need to do now to prepare for the kinds of collapse and failure that now seem likely?" These questions are not mutually exclusive, and both can be understood as questions of technology, economy, politics, community or leadership.

While all of these are clearly critical, I am most interested in the community and leadership dimensions. Specifically, how do we shift the trajectory of our systems (question 1) and how do we prepare for incredible change and uncertainty (question 2)? It seems that the leaders over the foreseeable future need to be flexible people who can synthesize the technical and the social, who can understand and articulate the complexities we face, and who can look in unlikely places for transformative solutions. Our future and present require people of tremendous sophistication, integrity and courage. The good news is that many such people already exist. The bad news is we really don't know if they/we are strong and numerous enough to turn this thing around.

I hope and trust that this issue of the Oxford Leadership Journal may contribute in some small way to your own leadership sophistication, integrity and courage. You may want to exercise more, as well.

Robert Ziegler, Editor

	The Solutions in our Midst - Peter Senge Real transformative change is led by people - generally on the periphery - who are relentlessly practical and deeply connected to spiritual practice. It is our task to notice, support, leverage and disseminate these efforts.
	Appreciative Inquiry is not (Just) About the Positive - Gervase Bushe Generative questions, generative conversations and generative actions form the backbone of Appreciative Inquiry, not just a mere focus on the positive have all been getting the wrong messages from our current measures of progress.
	Facilitative Leadership through Positive Deviance - Jane Lewis Positive Deviance assumes that any problematic situation includes people who surmount the problem and can share something with the rest of the affected community.
	Wicked Challenges - Lars Thuesen Even in the highly regarded Danish prison system, there are problems of stress, absenteeism, recidivism. Here is a case study which offers early evidence of the success of Positive Deviance in addressing some of these challenges.
	In Pursuit of Elegance - Matthew May Across many disciplines, elegant solutions are recognised as economical, with lasting effect. Here are four key attributes of an elegant solution: symmetry, seduction, subtraction, and sustainability.
	Emerging Worldviews - Carol Mase From a nonlinear systems perspective, transformative change often entails instability and under-performance before the new patterns stabilize outcomes at a new, and higher level. welcome to the cauldron.
	A Hidden Lever of Leadership - Supporting Meeting Interactivity - Lenny Lind & Karl Danskin Meetings can be deadly - presentations followed by go-nowhere breakout sessions. Here is an elegant technological solution to all that.

You can read Volume 1, Issue 4 as a consolidated PDF here (1.8MB)

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OXFORD LEADERSHIP JOURNAL, VOLUME 1 ISSUE 3

JUNE 2010

There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea

When I was a boy at summer camp, we sang a song that seemed to celebrate the prepositional phrase. Its first stanza had only two:
   There's a hole in the bottom of the sea.
   There's a hole in the bottom of the sea.
   There's a hole, there's a hole
   There's a hole in the bottom of the sea.

Each stanza added another, so the one-liner became:
   There's a log in the hole in the bottom of the sea

Which evolved from stanza to stanza, getting pretty elaborate:
   There's a fleck on the speck on the tail on the
   frog on the bump on the branch on the
   log in the hole in the bottom of the sea

Pretty elaborate and incredibly prophetic of course because (as I write this) there is a hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and there are flecks and specks and slicks and plumes all over the surrounding ecosystem. I will confess to being fascinated and horrified- as I assume many people are-by how such a small thing, a pipe measured in centimetres, can wreak such havoc over thousands of square kilometres of ocean, thousands of kilometres of shoreline, millions of people, and countless birds, fish and other marine life. It is as if mother earth herself was wounded, and no one can staunch the bleeding.

Also shocking is this disaster's intransigence, defying humankind's best ingenuity-ingenuity that claims, for example, to be able to get one seven inch pipe to intersect another seven-inch pipe under a mile of ocean and a mile of rock. It is easy to empathise with Mr. Obama's impatience when he said, "Just plug the damn thing."

The third fascination this monster of a disaster presents is its slow and steady unfolding. We can sense that it is only a matter of time before oil that leaves the pipe reaches the surface, before underwater plumes are carried far and wide, and before slicks make landfall in more and more places. Even if someone just plugs the damn thing soon, the aftermath will be with us for quite a while.

So these three disaster complexities-the something- small-affects-something-big dynamic, the relative inability of humans to manage it, and the necessity to see things in a bigger time frame-are going to confront us again and again. They are built into global climate change, into widespread economic inequity, and into the huge cultural schisms of our time.

I think we need to find the acupuncture points-the points of leverage-that will alleviate our biggest challenges, and we will probably need many such points. Some will no doubt happen at the level of behaviour; our everyday actions and decisions, when multiplied by the millions or billions of other people doing the same, can have profound effect. Some acupuncture points will be at the level of our thinking and assumptions-we will conceive of things differently to obtain different results. And some points will be at the deepest level of basic awareness and how we are as human beings. This issue of the Oxford Leadership Journal is all about such acupuncture points.

Given the disaster complexities mentioned above, faith in the existence of acupuncture points is necessary and the search for them, critical. The Journal, one could say, is predicated on that faith and dedicated to that search. Please let us know where your search has taken you, and what you have discovered.

Robert Ziegler, Editor

	Seven Acupuncture Points to Shifting Capitalism - Otto Scharmer What shifts are needed for capitalism to function in a regenerative fashion, accounting for the full ecosystem? A look at the history provides some clues.
	Measuring Real Progress - Ron Colman Why have we been unable to create the kind of society we genuinely want? One reason is that we have all been getting the wrong messages from our current measures of progress.
	The Yin and Yang of Creating - Robert Fritz In some ways, any creation is sequential-first vision, then current reality, then action steps. Other aspects happen simultaneously, one of which is creating's Yin to its Yang.
	Leadership: What's love got to do with it? - Tamara J. Woodbury Risky as it is, we must find ways to bring love and well-being back into our organisational cultures if we aspire to move leadership out of the domain of fear.
	Reinventing Management - Julian Birkinshaw The most spectacular failures-from Enron to GM to Lehman Brothers-are due in part to failures of management. There are many management models, and success depends on picking the right one.
	The Power of Brands to Create Better Futures -Santiago Gowland Especially when your products are consumed billions of times a day, you have an opportunity and responsibility to build sustainable values into your brand.
	Theories X and Y, Revisited - Matthew Stewart Fifty years ago, Douglas McGregor clarified some deep assumptions about the nature of human beings in his articulation of Theory X and Theory Y. Now it's time to examine assumptions about relationships.

You can read Volume 1, Issue 3 as a consolidated PDF here (1.8MB)

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OXFORD LEADERSHIP JOURNAL, VOLUME 1 ISSUE 2

MARCH 2010

Introduction from the Oxford Leadership Journal Editor, Robert Ziegler.

Avatar-not-the-movie

The recent special-effects extravaganza, Avatar, struck more than a few chords with box-office audiences. In case you are one of the few who have not yet ventured to see this 3-D science-fiction marvel, here is a quick plot summary: people from earth are hell-bent on mining a precious mineral, "un-obtainium", from the planet Pandora, no matter what the cost to the local inhabitants or the planet's ecosystem. One of earth's mercenaries, Jake, manages to infiltrate the local Na'vi tribe, fall in love with the chief's daughter, and then lead the rebellion against his fellow earthlings. Avatar is Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and The Last Samurai crossed with the best special effects money can buy (and the effects are indeed spectacular).

What I found most interesting, though, was the resonant simpatico this movie established with many of our hopes and fears. The earthlings' military-industrial complex was never more vulgar. The Na'vi's feminine leadership was never more evident and strong. The rift between cultures never more stark. And the connection to nature never more adorned with audiovisuals.

Maybe I take these things too seriously, but my concern with Avatar is its implied theory of change, which boils down to a mass uprising backed up by primitive weaponry and prayer. No criticism intended, but I think our non-Pandora world also has some pretty compelling options to offer, some of which are featured in this issue of the Oxford Leadership Journal.

For example, you don't need to get romantically tribal to discover a myriad of powerful and practical applications of feminine leadership and women as leaders. Four writers - three women and one man - pick up on four distinct threads of the Feminine.

Corporations are generally not known for their sense of social responsibility, as Avatar is quick to point out. Two case studies in this issue illustrate the responsible potential of corporations - from a multinational giant to a small Canadian biotech company.

The Avatar leadership is bold, compassionate, fierce and very sexy. Maybe, like me, you will also find the kinds of leaders and leadership development described in these articles - the down-to-earth, collaborative, unsexy, real kind - to be even sexier.

Robert Ziegler, Editor

	Developing Leaders? Developing Countries? - Henry Mintzberg Maybe the notions of development - for countries, for leaders and for the leaders of countries - need to be re-examined.
	Feminine Principle and Theory U - Arawana Hayashi Because feminine principle (not the domain of one gender) invites us to take a bigger view, it is needed in all phases of any change process, as Otto Scharmer's Theory U describes.
	Conversational Leadership - Juanita Brown and Thomas J. Hurley Organizations and communities are webs of conversation, and no leader can afford to neglect the architecture needed to foster good conversations.
	Corporation as CEO - Judy Johnson and Ella McQuinn Usually we develop people to get work done. Precision Biologic CEO Michael Scott turned this around - what if we use work to develop people?
	The Girl Effect - Tamara J. Woodbury Investing in girls - whether in the developing or developed worlds - has some incredible multiplier effects but nevertheless is rarely done.
	How Women Mean Business - Avivah Wittenberg-Cox There is no glass ceiling. The proportion of women to men drops at every level of the hierarchy, in all countries, in all sectors. Here are the steps organizations can take to achieve gender equity.
	Women and Negotiation - Andrew Cohn Women get less in negotiation in part because they ask for less. What is a man's role when faced with this kind of inequity?
	Business as Change Agent - Frank Dixon Wal-Mart is a giant corporation many people love to hate … but wait, the retail giant is pursuing ambitious and far-reaching sustainability goals. And when a giant moves …

You can read Volume 1, Issue 2 as a consolidated PDF here (1.6MB)

	Power and Love - Adam Kahane In his book by the same title, Adam Kahane argues that we will not address our tough societal challenges through powerful purposefulness alone or through loving inclusiveness alone. We need both, and not only that, we need the best of both: power that is not reckless and abusive, and love that is not sentimental.
	Taking Social Innovation To Scale - Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze Emergence - the way natural systems develop new behaviours - provides a model for supporting and magnifying the small-scale economic, environmental and social innovations we desperately need on a global scale.
	The Crisis of the Western Mind - Julio Olalla To change the direction society is headed, we must understand it deeply. Julio Olalla explores the roots of Western ways of knowing and notes the promising signs of movement beyond our self-destructive path.
	Managing With the Brain in Mind - David Rock Research shows that the brain is a social organ, and managers are well-advised to take into account the social needs of employees if they want optimum performance.
	Out-of-classroom Experiences - Mark Jenner Complement classroom-based leadership development with structured and intentional experiences outside the classroom. It's harder than attending a programme, but worth it.
	Five Ways to Misinterpret 'The Art of War' - Robert Ziegler 'The Art of War', the 2500-year-old manual on strategy, has a lot to say about leadership, character, chaos, conflict and transformative change. That said, the text can also be devilishly difficult to understand.
	The Five-Minute OLJ Survey Each issue, we ask you to share your thoughts on a few key questions, and we promise not to take more than five minutes of your time. This month we ask what do you read about leadership - books, journals, websites - and who has been most helpful and inspiring? Next issue, you get to see what readers have said.

Oxford Leadership Journal

T oo Good to Fail