Leading Effectively Series
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How do we develop leadership for public service?
A number of us at CCL have the pleasure of collaborating with colleagues at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University. One question we have explored together is, How do we develop leadership for public service? Wagner sees its relationship to student through this lens of leadership development. Dean Ellen Schall's addressed this year's graduating class and talked about this relationship:
"We have always understood at Wagner that it mattered how we started to engage you, even as prospective students, that we were beginning a conversation, perhaps a relationship--one that could last for years. Two years ago, when many of you applied, we decided to add a particular twist to our application, in part to get your attention, in part to signal we were after a different level of engagement. We gave you the possibility of responding to a photo, a visual image, from a collection of images developed by colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership. As you may remember, we use Visual Explorer, which is what CCL calls this approach, at orientation as well. The basic idea is that it’s easier to get the conversation started when you have an object in the middle. And we wanted to get a conversation started."This "twist" has worked well.
“It allows us to get a deeper sense of the applicant’s passion for/commitment to an issue, and unlocks the depth of interest in a way that is not always achievable in a standard admissions essay,” says Tracey Gardner, Wagner’s chief of staff.
This Sunday's New York Times published a slide show of the most compelling images and themes.
What does a swimming tiger suggest about public policy, or a pricked finger say about your goals?
Development of leadership in public service begins with engagement. How do you attract and engage students so that learning can be deeper? It can start with a simple question: What do you see?
"Too often," notes Ellen Schall, "applying to graduate school is transactional. We added Visual Explorer because we wanted to signal that the Wagner experience is transformational. Visual Explorer calls for people to slow down enough to reflect on their own experiences, connect their passion for public service to their professional goals, and offer their own perspectives on how to change the world."
Contact Chuck Palus at CCL Labs for more information on using Explorer Tools to create more effective and engaging surveys, and for visual support for collaborative conversations.For more information on this work at NYU Wagner click here.
We're fascinated by the reasons that things go wrong. And they go wrong quite often. Sometimes in spectacularly unpleasant ways; sometimes in a slow slide into irrelevance. Whole industries are devoted to the diagnosis of failure and there are some lovely, detailed models of organizational disaster. I'm persuaded that in many cases there is a simple, accessible common factor that affects us as individuals and as organizations. It's anxiety. Actually, it's rather the difficulty individuals and organizations have managing their anxiety. This lens has been helpful to me as I've watched smart, talented people and organizations drive themselves into the ground.
It happens when the whole focus of attention is on the risks and dangers of living in this difficult world. While I'm not so pollyanna that I think we should only focus on our strengths and opportunities, it isn't difficult to get into an obsessive preoccupation with managing risks, real and imagined. I used to think it was something we could blame on the corporate legal department, because it's their job to identify and hedge the organization against excessive risk. But now I think it has more to do with the way we react to potential risk: we let it control our business choices.
It manifests in a couple of ways in organizational life. One occurs when organizations begin to multiply their policies and rules to cover every potential problem. The paradox is that contracts and policies that build in protections from every type of malfeasance or negligence define the relationship as fundamentally absent of trust. That is, they communicate more than limits or boundaries; they also communicate an implicit expression of the relationship itself. Perhaps more importantly, the multiplication of rules and policies has a chilling effect on creativity and innovation. When there are many rules, it becomes the first responsibility of employees to check to make sure that they are not violating them.
Then comes the documentation. While documentation is important to preserve records of actions and ensure reporting, the need to document everything can mean that 20 to 30% of the creative energy of the organization is diverted from customer service, product development, or business strategy. Some businesses find that filling out forms is their new business model. New rules and requirements in HR policy or in contracts should be subject to their own rigorous risk assessment: do they add sufficient incremental safety to justify the additional negative impact on climate and workload?
Last week I met a consultant whose firm focuses on performance improvement through people policies and practices. She told me several stories of companies who had accelerated the aggregation of HR policies, thereby clearly communicating to the workforce that none of them could be trusted and they were expected to attempt to steal everything possible from the company. She said something that CCL believes most fervently: you can't change performance if you don't address the culture. She has proposed a single sentence HR policy: Every employee is expected to work for the best interests of the company and its customers and employees.
A culture of distrust (and its cousin: control) cannot spawn an organization where everyone gives their best. That kind of culture only comes where leaders believe in the capability and generosity of their follows. Unfortunately, when the market is down and the strategy isn't working all that well, it becomes easy to blame the attitudes of the workforce. Or when someone goes off the track, it's easy to clamp down on everyone. The multiplication of "zero tolerance" policies shows how quickly we accede to the hierarchical solution; even if the result is the arrest of 5-year-olds for carrying camping utensils for show-and-tell.
Compliance is not creativity.
Control is not commitment.
Passion, creativity, commitment: these are all freely given or they are not given at all.
Our culture is flailing in a sea of anxiety...about the economy, about jobs, about competing on the world stage. This is the time to reinforce our commitment to collaboration, to mutual trust, to shared goals. When anxious, our best escape is in a return to core values. We need to line up with people who are leading the way to positive environments, inspiring innovation, making high performance a pleasure.
Find them. Shine a light on their energy and grant others the freedom to do it, too.
Doug
 One of the remarkable capabilities of humans is boredom. I call it remarkable because I think it must require a special level of passivity to experience it. When my kids were adolescents they assured me that many situations were incredibly boring, but all it did was confirm my suspicion that boredom is a notable achievement. It requires containing the mind in an unnatural way. To get bored, it is necessary to tie the brain down and prevent it from wandering, which I think is not an easy thing to accomplish. Of course, that is what some education is: the attempt to harness the expansive reach of the mind and keep it focused on some small subset of knowledge that hasn't the capacity to keep it involved. "Pay attention to this slide!" we order, but there's nothing there but a few sentences that everyone read in the first 3 seconds the slide appeared on the screen.
The mind wants to explore and wander...wants to be bewildered briefly, confused by new information and challenged to bring order out of new information. The mind is beguiled by novelty and implication, by unexpected permutations and paradoxical messages. Puzzles are dessert in the brain's diet.
This doesn't mean that boredom should be celebrated, only that it's amazing that so many people force themselves into ruts that they experience as boredom. I think boring others is one of the great interpersonal sins and I have a horror of doing it myself. That's why I love getting (safely) lost in a new city and why I'm fascinated by things not easily categorized.
I found one this afternoon on the gel website. The GEL conference is put on by Mark Hurst and his cronies in their quest for creating the "Good Experience" and takes place every year. I haven't been able to afford to go, but they kindly share some of the presentations from the conference. A great one is up today of the presentation by a couple called Lelavision. I can't figure out what they're doing (music? dance? abuse of vegetables? home-made cool stuff? parenting tips?). Whatever they're doing, it demonstrates that boredom and sameness is easily avoided if one doesn't feel compelled to live in a box.
Check out this 18 minute video and let me know what it inspires for you.
Compulsively entertained,
Doug
 We had a small walnut tree in our back yard. I guess the squirrels loved the nuts, because we never got very many of them. Finally the tree just died. My husband carefully saved all of the pieces and made beautiful handles for things—knives, axes, hammers. They would just show up under the Christmas tree as exquisite gifts for several years. He also made several walking sticks and finally an elegant highly polished sculpture for me this year, I guess from the trunk. It was like “the giving tree.” Never hugely noticeable in its life, the tree had been gracious and generous in its death.
Just when I thought all the gifts from the tree and my creative husband were finished, this week Richard dug up the root of the tree, which was rather remarkably big. He couldn’t get it all, because a piece of it had already made its way under the fence and into the neighbor’s yard. I wondered if they mightn’t have been willing for him to get it, but he said he had already poured concrete over it to make the foundation for the fence he is building. So, no.
So now he has taken several pictures of that big root and he studies it on his computer to see what he might do with it. He looks at it from different angles, perspectives; considers different opportunities for it. What a shame we as leaders don’t get to consider our problems from so many perspectives. He can do anything with that root. All possibilities are open. Base for a table. Another sculpture. Base for a lamp. A bowl, a dish, a clock. He wanders back by the computer screen and investigates it again and again, patiently, like a predator gaining on its prey.
What a blessing it would be if we had time to examine our colleagues and our clients with such consideration. Everyone and everything is in much too much a hurry. No time to come back and look again. Decisions must be made. Projects must be planned. People must be assigned. Budgets must be developed.
Such a hurry and rush approach does limit us, though. It’s hard to do really creative things without giving our “right brains” time to work. Our right brains are very efficient, but they do not operate in a linear fashion like our left brains. We must have some time available so we can come back to something patiently, consider it over time. Put it up on our computer screen and look at it casually as we walk by. Like a stealthy predator: “I don’t see you. You’re safe over there.” And all the time our minds are working. All the time, we’re gaining on it.
The wonderful thing about the way the right brain works is that we do not have to be conscious of what it’s doing for it to be effective. We can be deeply involved in other things. We have all experienced an “aha!” while we were showering, driving the interstate, or drifting off to sleep.
Good creative leadership allows such thought processes, and is ready to take advantage of them. We must acknowledge the efficacy of such workings of our brains and be ready to claim the harvest. We must find ways to inspire such thinking. Sometimes “sleeping on it” really is the best idea.
We used to have a course at CCL called "Leading Creatively," for which I was a lead instructor. It was a course that used art as a metaphor for leadership. It wasn’t easy. It was a difficult five-day journey, and its graduates were immensely grateful, tremendously loyal. They learned a huge amount about themselves, about others, and about leadership. We haven’t offered it as an open enrollment program for several years, although is it still sometimes requested as a custom program. I still think nostalgically about it from time to time because it was one of the most powerful programs I have ever had the privilege to lead, even though it was a dragon to market. We just couldn’t talk people into it ahead of time. I can’t tell you about the entire course in one little blog, but I can introduce you into one small part—the art of drawing.
One of my opportunities as a trainer was to lead our participants, over the course of several days, to the place where they finally drew their own beautiful hands. The results were without exception astonishing. Breathtaking. Leaders who accomplished this after thinking for three days that they could not were thunderstruck at the results. We used Dr. Betty Edwards’ technology and gave out copies of her flagship text, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The reason we used it was not only for its successful drawing instruction but also because it was connected with Dr. Edwards’ extensive research into how the brain works at Cal State Long Beach.
 
Dr. Edwards was involved in split-brain research from an early day. She had a vivid understanding about the two different ways in which the brain thinks, and developed a brilliant vision about how to integrate both ways into whole-brain thinking, actually making people smarter by using the “two sides” of their brains together. Most of us use our so-called left brains very effectively. (Linear, rational, verbal, logical, symbolic, and so on.) It’s our right side of the brain that needs a bit of work. (Aesthetic, emotional, musical, imaginative, visual, and so on.) And then some work on integrating the two. The very best in science, art, business and leadership always integrates the two.
Everything we do at CCL has to do with leadership. Always. Even if it also has to do with creativity, or with how the brain works, or with making people smarter. So how does drawing relate to leadership?
Making a drawing is very like solving a difficult problem. The best way to start is to examine the problem very closely, like a serious detective solving a tough cold case. Not looking for short cuts that will only lead one down the path of what’s already been seen, but down the more difficult path of what’s been missed. Draw what you actually see before you, not what you think you see, we said emphatically over and over. Our expectations can so mislead us, not only in drawing, but also in problem-solving and certainly in leadership—especially when they mislead us into missing what is actually there. The results in drawing can be disappointing or amusing. The results in leadership can be disastrous.
The technology of excellent drawing requires us to slow down so we can see. Once we have learned to do this, paradoxically, we can learn to do it quickly. As leaders, being able to slow ourselves down quickly keeps us from going off half-cocked, half-ready, half-aimed. It’s too soon to fire before we can actually see what’s before us. Police officers have to slow themselves down quickly in simulated shooting tests so they don’t shoot the little girl with the puppy. The same on the street, with higher stakes. In drawing, the stakes are low. We practice with a sketchbook instead of a pistol or a nuclear weapon.
When we draw, we learn to look at the boundaries. What part of this is my hand and what part of it is a shadow? Sometimes we can see more effectively if we change the light, or look at the empty spaces. Drawing forces us too look at the edges of the “problem,” because we are drawing with a line. There are no “lines,” in nature, just as nature does not always create actual “boundaries” between countries. They are artificial boundaries, just like pencil lines. Knowing the difference between what’s “real” and what’s contrived can make the difference between strong and weak leadership. As leaders we have to learn not to be deceived by our own press, or any other contrivance of our own leadership. We have to know what part of the problem is real.
As drawing artists, we also have to look at the whole picture, not just the one line we are drawing. We have to check the fit of the line with the other lines that are already there. We have to look at the gestalt. Check the entire picture and rely on our sharpened intuition to tell us if it looks right. In leadership, we must be aware of the whole system. Those reporting to us rely on us to be aware of the things that they cannot see. That’s why we’re the leader, after all. We have that vision. We have that insight.
In drawing, as in leadership, we have to develop our ability to see things accurately and represent them effectively. We have to learn to not be deceived by our own expectations and our hopes and fears. We have to learn to put everything into perspective, including our own leadership.
 Earlier this year I spent some time with key HR leaders in a global healthcare firm who were interested in increasing innovation throughout the organization. There was one small problem: I was not to use the word "creative" or "creativity" in the day of learning experiences we were creating. You can imagine this could pose some small difficulty, seeing as the firm who employs me is the Center for Creative Leadership and there are some who might suspect that innovation could be related to creativity in some way.
"What's wrong with creativity?" I wanted to know. "We don't need a lot of off-the-wall ideas that don't give any business value," was the answer. That seemed legitimate to me. Although I'm a great fan of all kinds of creativity for aesthetic reasons, you might want it connected to the purposes of the organization after all.
Perhaps it would be helpful to think of creativity as one dimension of a process of innovation. If innovation is "converting ideas to numbers" (attributed to Ram Charan) or "people implementing ideas to create value" (from innovation network co-founder, Joyce Wycoff) creativity is the individual component of innovation. In that case we can track the trajectory of creative ideas this way: individuals come up with creative ideas, but they have only emotional appeal ("wow! I sure have interesting ideas!") until the person takes initiative to communicate the ideas. Even then, they have only aesthetic value. I mean by that others admire them or may retreat into their own thinking as it is stimulated by the idea. However, it is still a long way to innovation from there. The flood of ideas from centrifugal thinkers (you know who you are) can be overwhelming. The key is the investment someone or a group of someones makes in a new idea to carry through the waves of resistance or to make it stand out from the din in the marketplace of ideas.
Warren Bennis put it this way: "Innovation— any new idea—by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience." If an organization has no way of encouraging and nurturing ideas that can bring high value (and conversely, no way of killing ideas that are parasites for the organization's energy and attention), then creativity is dangerous. It is dangerous precisely because it is like have a billion dollars on a desert island. It can't be turned into something you can eat.
We can help business leaders reduce their fear of creativity to the extent that they have help developing systems and cultures that can handle the foment of creative leaders. A nurturing leadership culture and strict processes of accountability are not contradictory, but necessary for the long-term success of our organizations.
Doug
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