Do You Hear the Phone Ringing?

Is there any real work value to this stuff about beauty and front porches? I am sure some members of our Group are asking this question, so in this and coming posts I will address it. Let’s start here with an application example —

Years ago Dick Daft and I were asked to help a very successful entrepreneur in Nashville help uncover a dynamic in his organization that he felt was threatening their future success. His company managed parking lots and commercial real estate around them. Starting with essentially no resources, he had grown his company to be global, with property management contracts in Rome, Paris and other major cities including San Antonio. He showed us profit and sales growth rates of just over twenty percent annually for the last five years and projections that this growth would continue. His personal net worth had grown to over one hundred million in the process. Give all this he tells us that he had a gut feeling that there was something wrong. From our perspective, we were presented with an apparently healthy patient with no complaints to find an asymptomatic cancer that might or might not be present.

He hired us to bring the leaders of his disperse properties together on our front porch for a one day dialogue. His team was composed of 25 executives all in their forties and all but one without a college education. The president of the company along with this founder-owner wanted to be present for the entire day. During the morning we focused on typical discursive languages and intellectual exchanges to surface information that might provide insight into the owner’s gut level concerns. We administered an instrument called the Organization Culture Inventory (OCI) that presents 100 organization behaviors and asks respondents to tell us on a number scale ranging from 1, never happens, to seven, happens all the time, whether they observe these behaviors in their company. Individuals score their own responses and we help them aggregate them across the entire group. The end result is an identification of work culture characteristics described on twelve dimensions. They scored very high on two dimensions – perfectionist and competitive. When presented with these results their was no disagreement and in fact they expressed pride in who they were. Remember the founder-owner and president were sitting in the back of the room during this exercise. Our morning work revealed nothing negative that might validate the founder’s concerns.

After lunch we shifted from the intellectual language of the OCI to the expressive language of image. We presented a conceptual lens that viewed their organization through four windows. One window was a ‘machine’ frame that captures the rational organization in terms of plans, goals etc. like MBA programs typically teach. The second window was a ‘family’ frame that addresses the organization in terms of relationships and community. The third window reveals the organization as a ‘political jungle’ in which games of power and status play out. The final window focuses on the organization as ‘ theater’ or culture that sets the stage for role plays and the symbolic meaning of work. Window by window we asked individuals to draw how they felt about their organization – shift their language of expression from typical prose grounded in their logic and reason to image in which their logic and reason was irrelevant. We have a process where they share their images and engage in dialogue to eventually produce four window images representing the common view of the entire group. Remember again the founder and the president were still sitting in the back of the room. We asked them to draw their own images privately and not participate with the group.

Now came the grand reveal. The group selected a spokesperson to present their images to Dick and me and their corporate bosses. The ‘machine’ image they create was a meat grinder with a man whose head was covered with a bag turning the crank that converted diverse pieces of dough entering the grinder to cookie cutter images that all looked the same . The ‘family’ image was curious because the entire group changed the focus from the organization to their private family situation. The image showed a station wagon with luggage on the roof in a drive way outside a home. There was a father pulling a resistant son out of the front door and a mother forcing a resistant daughter into the back seat of the car. It turns out that these executives were with the company at its founding and had grown their salaries with the growth of the company. Without college degrees, their salaries trapped them in the company because they could not find similar compensation elsewhere. Recognizing this hold on their management team, the bosses often transferred them to other locations with little warning and in one cases twice in one year. The result was family stress that resulted in many divorces and maladjusted children with drug problems or other behavioral issues. The ‘political jungle’ showed the man with the bag over his head again, this time pulling strings that made the people below hm dance like puppets. All these images where powerful and you can imagine the kinds of conversations they might invite. But it was the ‘theater ‘ image that was the final straw that exposed their reality. That image showed a railroad tie across the top of their picture with spikes driven through them exposing sharp edges on the underside. There were balloons rising towards those sharp spikes with words on them such as dreams and hopes.

Look at the differences between the reality revealed in the morning intellectual exchange and the reality exposed in the afternoon after the language shift. There was silence after the presentation of their images as they waited to see the response of the founder -owner still sitting in the back of the room. They could not believe what they had revealed in front of him and wondered what price they would pay for their honesty. Dick and I had the same worry as consultants hoping to be paid for opening this wound. Finally the boss crumbled the images he had privately drawn into a ball and threw them violently against the wall. Then he turned to us and asked if he could go to the blackboard and draw a new image. He drew a picture of himself on a beach with his head buried in the sand and a phone ringing on the surface that he could not hear. The cancer was revealed and they were able to work together to address it before a terminal diagnosis.

I know when I talk about beauty and front porches, some practitioners roll their eyes unable to imagine how this stuff would play put in their organization and work. It was Einstein who once defined insanity as doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. I would ask these practitioners if they are satisfied with the level of trust and the quality of communications in their organizations. Are change initiatives and the launching of new products achieving expectations? Are company politics getting into the way of constructive work? Does their work culture sustain high levels of moral? Is the spirit of innovation alive? Are strategic retreats nourishing and do they produce plans that are actually infused into day to day work? Are meetings satisfying and useful? If the answers to these or other similar questions are ‘problematic, then why continue trying to meet your leadership challenges meeting the same way you always have and expecting different results? This ‘front porch’ stuff works, particularly in the special kinds of applications that are causing the most difficult and perplexing challenges in contemporary organizations.

If you want different results, then try something new. Front porch approaches to leader work are not going to produce magic results in every circumstance, but by bringing people more fully present with their reality, I believe they certainly increase the odds of success. The underlying problem is that typical business meetings trap participants in the discursive languages of logic and reason that hide the deeper reality of their situation. It is not that these intellectual languages and the traditional meeting formats they support with agendas and takeaways have no purpose. It is just that they are not conducive to opening front porch dialogue necessary to set the stage for non routine conversations where change or a new order of things is sought and progress is, or has not been, satisfactory. Front porch meetings engaging this language shift catalyze creativity and learning, constructively work through strongly held diverse opinions and dysfunctional relationships, naturally build trust and improve communications, and dramatically improve the odds of achieving real and sustainable change and buy-in.

After surfacing the window images in the case I presented here, we had access to previously hidden information that allowed a more grounded, meaningful and productive exchange. Next time you sit in a meeting around a complex topic where there are differences of opinion and common vision is needed, think about the images that are in participants’ minds that you are not seeing. Think about how those images might be afffecting the surface conversation you are hearing.