When Egos & Lives are at Stake

I recently sat down for a fireside chat with Dr. Otto Scharmer, who had just received the inaugural Organization Development (OD) Network Elevating Humanity Award for his dedication to transforming organizations around the world. One of Otto's requests was that academics get their butts (my words) out of the ivory tower and into the trenches, as there is no greater teacher about organizational change than real life. As both an independent consultant for the Transformative Learning Institute and an Assistant Professor at Penn State, this really struck a chord with me. Rather than blogging or reposting articles about how change should take place - I'm sure you've seen quite a few of these - what about sharing the way organizational change does take place?

For instance, how does a consultant navigate big egos, real-life setbacks, daily politics, fiefdoms, and toxic leadership?

So... inspired by this idea, I decided to launch a new LinkedIn series, called Towers to Trenches, where I'll share the gritty and adaptive side of organizational consulting, by drawing upon stories I've accrued from over twenty years of consulting experience, four continents, and clients in healthcare, technology, government, finance, non-profit, and higher education. Because life is short, and I love you all, I'm going to keep things real and brief! That's the hook, you see?

Now before I get started I must share that a theme present in virtually all of my client interactions includes the power of Innovation & Inclusion, which are.....wait for it... interdependent! Whether a client asks me to focus on strategic planning, team building, change management, or training and development, these two features are critical to the revitalization of any organization that hopes to succeed in an era marked by continuous uncertainty! I hope you enjoy these tales, learn from them, share your thoughts, and reach out to me with questions.

Whether you're are considering a transition into a consulting career or leadership role, are a new or experienced change agent, or someone looking for a consultant and wants to know what they can expect, I think you're going to like these short stories. Now without further ado...

When Egos & Lives are at Stake

As a consultant, the challenge I faced in this first case vignette was nothing less than daunting. The prospective client was a large organization responsible for detecting and containing the rapid spread of viruses, including Ebola, throughout Africa. The goal was to bring this group of 23 infectious disease investigators together in Nairobi, Kenya, for strategic dialogue about how to capture and share vital information faster than their already impressive response time.

According to my initial discussion with senior leaders, I discovered that this group had experienced its greatest advances by focusing on external resources and process improvement. They had already addressed funding, limited space, and lack of professional development. They analyzed efficiencies, breakdowns, handoffs, and just about everything else that could be measured and thought through. Room for improvement - at least through the current operating paradigm - seemed to be quite limited. To be honest, I could not think of a suitable intervention, and in this sense had nothing to lose by suggesting something a bit unorthodox.

Rather than coming together to transform external processes through tools like Kaizen, Agile, or Scrum, I would help leaders turn inward to examine the way their own attachments, anxieties, and assumptions may be causing process breakdowns and getting in the way of genuine innovation.

Thankfully, the group had an authentic, open-minded, and innovative leader. Together we devised a creative experience for a highly educated group that had built its previous success and distinction upon its ability to analyze the world through controls and experiments. Through a variety of intuition-based activities, we discovered that the greatest obstacles to speed originated not from the external environment, but rather from pride of expertise shared amongst senior scientists. This was a group that was no doubt passionate about saving lives, but by being human had unintentionally established a psychological power distance between themselves and junior investigators, which resulted in unnecessary blind spots and lost opportunities for innovation. Junior investigators had learned the hard way that while sharing information was necessary, sharing informal observations, new patterns between information, and creative solutions were not necessary - and in fact, the shared expectation is that it was not "their place" or "in their best interests" to speak up.

We identified numerous ways in which investigators, who were responsible for ‘menial’ tasks like drawing and testing blood samples, were discouraged from sharing informal, albeit insightful observations. Through some brutally honest dialogue with senior scientists, it became clear that the quiet role of expertise and ego had to be addressed. I helped them accomplish this in a practical way by helping them map where and how either ego or existing expertise had created bottlenecks and breakdowns in critical processes; a variation on the classic SIPOC technique, which analyzes processes at various stages (e.g. Suppliers, Inputs, Processes, Outputs, and Clients).

Next, we asked ourselves how many of these breakdowns were necessary, given that lives are at stake. Facilitating a basic cost-benefit comparison compelled leaders to replace, revise, or combine processes in ways that reduced ego motivations, decreased psychological power distance, and increased vulnerability that made idea-sharing more likely to occur. The result of testing these novel processes included some very simple but powerful strategic insights. After a few iterations, we had reached critical mass in acceptance amongst stakeholders, who would continue to promote these processes as an efficient and sustainable path forward.

This was no easy feat, and frankly, the generative nature of this intervention felt a little hairy at times. Rather than complicating the matter, leaders began to view conflict as a creative opportunity. Speaking with many of my clients afterward, it seemed that the trick was to simply point to the debilitating nature of ego and expertise when it comes to innovation. Much like creating and making ground rules visible, ego and expertise became a valuable, explicit object for reflection in dialogue and formal analysis.

I'll be releasing one Towers to Trenches article every month. In the meantime, if you are curious to learn more about my approach, shoot me an email at [email protected].

Now dear reader, what do you think about this intervention? Please leave your questions and comments below!