willing to do anything for work…really?

I work for money. I have managed to find 2 careers where i love what I do, but if they stopped paying me, I’d stop doing that because I am a father with kids to feed and work for money > work for satisfaction.

until Americans are willing to do the jobs that Americans arent willing to do, the rhetoric about “I’m willing to do anything…” is simply rhetoric

my resume at age 53:
in HS:
paperboy
unskilled labor in landscaping
stockboy
unskilled machine operator in manufacturing

in college:
dishwasher
busboy
tutor
security guard (for 2 years to earn enough money to complete my education; had to take a break in undergraduate studies when i ran out of money, and wouldnt take a student loan)

after college:
HS teacher (1 year; a horrible experience: hell is other teachers in the teacher lounge)
enlisted in Army, truckdriver (3 years)
Army officer (22 years)
College professor 10 years (and ongoing)
Small business owner 15 years (and ongoing)

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A reflection on charismatic leadership

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I am naturally skeptical about charismatic leaders, but I have seen its power in action.

Just before GEN Petraeus left our college to take command in Iraq he gathered faculty and students in our large auditorium, which seats 2500.

He spoke in a very relaxed manner, hardly the tone you might expect for a guy getting ready to take on the most politically sensitive mission around, one frought with peril, and which could go wrong in a thousand different, easily imaginable ways

It was surprisingly intimate moment, as he spoke humorously with and about his aide de camp and some of the other majors in his morning running group

he spoke frankly about the challenges ahead and the values we were going to use to see our way thru the fog and danger.

after about 10 minutes there was a palpable feeling that we were in good hands at the top and that we were going to prevail, and that if there a way thru the forest we were going to find it

it was the opposite of demagoguery, yet charismatic in its own way in that it was authentic, and appropriate and somehow “fit” who we all were at that moment in time

So, I am intrigued by charisma, where it comes from, how it works, why it works, and all that jazz

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Reflecting on self-directed leadership in a military college environment (an action research approach)

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The purpose of this assignment is reflect upon my learning through this course and to describe what I am doing to provide for the development of leadership capabilities in those who look to me for direction and guidance. My professional work centers on preparing Army organizational leaders for a world of complexity and uncertainty, and specifically in designing a teachable curriculum that satisfies both the accreditation system and the needs of individual students and faculty. As a result of many cycles of action research involving a variety of stakeholders, I have been designing curriculum that seeks to maximize the opportunities for student and faculty Voice in all phases of the classroom experience, including: design, preparation, delivery, assessment and follow-through. Because the strategy represents a significant shift from the traditional methodology, I am finding many leadership challenges and opportunities throughout the program. I will explore a number of important themes and strategies in this paper.

Chaos and complexity theory point towards a need for multiple points of view and an accommodating culture and practice in order to account for uncertainty in the world. Leaders set the stage for an organization that seeks to thrive under these conditions and therefore become primary leverage points in setting the conditions for success. Because our students are not objects at a distance,  not third-party objects of study but rather thinking, feeling human beings with insights and experiences and discretion, we have shifted our design team composition to include routinely groups of students in the form of focus groups and co-researchers in the action research tradition. Incorporating students in the design of lessons that will be taught that academic year represents a paradigm shift.

I am shifting our feedback system to incorporate more qualitative assessments from both faculty and students. This is a departure from our standard practice of relying exclusively on quantitative instruments. Our new feedback system for programmatic assessment is much more from the mixed methods tradition, which seems to me to be central in going forward in our efforts to understand and appreciate complexity. My intent is that the mixed methods approaches in the classroom will expose students and faculty to this methodology as a way to prepare them with a useful tool beyond the boundaries of the college environment.

I am systematically pursuing outreach and connections with faculty and curriculum designers from other teaching departments  in order to establish a network-centric approach to integrated curriculum design. This is taking the form of a leaderless, self-directed workgroup, with group norms and processes emerging to take the place of formal assigned individual hierarchical leadership. This self-directed work group presents recommendations of consensus to the traditional leadership of the College and is proving to be more and more influential with each successful project.

Because collaborative and adaptive leadership represents a shift in the cultural and operational perspective of the college, students and faculty, it is necessary to build up a resource and reference base that can be used to justify and support our inquiries. We are building a set of wiki’s and blogs that are interactive in order to prepare for our new lineup of lessons, to support collaborative learning inside the lessons dynamically, to document the results of our in class inquiry and to expand the knowledge base both for future lessons and for the field force in general. There is evidence to show that our students and faculty are getting the hang of this technique. This is reshaping the way we approach lesson preparation and our resource base and it is carrying over into our distance learning and remote site teaching strategy. Remote site teachers now have access to our growing experience base on the wiki and blog and can use that in their classroom for air where they do not possess personal experience and expertise.

Finally, I am working with interested others in formalizing our new approaches into college policy and SOP in order to lock in our games in the college’s infrastructure. Without these changes, initiatives are only as enduring as the energy of the interested parties. By incorporating them into our explicit rules and policies, we can institutionalize changes and ratchet our way towards success.

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A reflection on Hunt’s “Leadership: A new synthesis” (1996)

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remember that Hunt is writing his synthesis in 1996, and he comes from the leadership discipline, not education or cognitive neuroscience. He is good when it comes to synthesizing existing literature, but his excursions into the future of “what-if” are not very convincing.

There has been a lot of important work done on the very issues of rationality vs intuition, on (control & prediction) vs (emergence & adaptation), but it hasnt come from the land of leadership.

I have been doing a ton of research in this area, and in fact the limitations of rationality, and the implications for leaders, leadership skills, organizations and culture, strategic planning and operational execution are precisely the reason i started this program.

my mission is to figure out what leaders need to know, be, and do to manage problems & opportunities outside of the bounds of rationality and convention, and then design and deliver a teachable curriculum that prepares students and faculty for fuzzy situations and coalitions. where goals, cultures, standards, criteria, resources, time horizons are much closer to chaos than order, and with no interest among the stakeholders to move away from the apparent chaos.

I take Heifetz as representative of the state of leadership which has apparently spent the last 2 decades trying to micro-refine the individual models of leadership, and which in my opinion have been left behind by the nature of the challenges for organizations. Even seen as a consultants handbook, Heifetz is comfortably situated inside conventional, stable organizations trying to tweak their way to success.

Back to your point.

The rationality vs intuition debate is best developed from the world of decision-making and cognition. The essential and representative authors to read are Gerd Gigerenzer & Gary Klein, on intuition and heuristic decisionmaking. William Poundstone’s “Labyrinths of Reason” is an excellent introduction to the limitations of rationality. James March on decision-making systems is foundational. Mintzberg is pretty good on recognizing the implications Tversky & Kahneman’s Nobel prize winning work on cognitive biases and behavioral finance is the top level theory basis (spanning 40 years), and all of these guys connect back to the incomparable Herb Simon’s bounded rationality from the 1940s, and which still is some of the best writing and thinking in this area.

The most promising area of current research is found in the fields of emergence, chaos and complexity theory (including complex adaptive systems) but there are miles to go to connect these ideas to the leadership disciplines

So, i think Hunt was intuiting that something else was needed, but hadn’t connected to that body of work.

There is another whole discipline that’s waiting to be incorporated: education, especially adult education, and that’s where i seem to be centered: in the preparation of leaders for these new demands/considerations, while satisfying the constraints of an accreditation system which values certainty, objectivity and standardization.

it seems to me that education lags about 20-25 years behind the cutting edge, as accreditation’s fascination with certainty, objectivity and standardization reflects what was thought to be essential in business and commerce 2 decades ago. So education is just discovering that which the rest of the world is abandoning (or at least moving well beyond)

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education, leadership, biodiversity and the limits of reason

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at the other end of the time scale from the doctoral programs, i think the right model to use is that of bio-diversity.

It’s not “survival of the fittest” in the wild, it is extinction of the unfit & toleration of the “good enough” which promotes a broad gene pool. A broad gene pool gives us the adaptive flexibility to adjust to “black swan” events, (Taleb).

well, our educational system should seek to promote that kind of diversity in outreach, methods, programs etc and not just short-sidedly focus on how to efficiently pass the next round of standardized tests which are geared for the immediate environment, but which leave us uneducated for the possibilities of an infinitely rich future

there are many skills, habits, behaviors, attitudes which dont thrive in an individual, cut throat environment, but which may be needed for  an environment that favors cooperation: such as living in a nuclear age.

I think it’s important to remember that “the failure” is in the system’s inability to provide a medium for the seed that is the person to flourish.

We know from “The Long Tail” that digitization and globalization allow for the creation of feasible 1:1 relationships. we are less constrained to find “economic” tradeoffs that satisfy the many and underserve the tails of the distribution.

We should, therefore be looking to expand the set of possible methods and resources to serve those further out on the tails of the distribution in order to  broaden our “gene pool” of human potential.. See Axelrod on “The Evolution of Cooperation” for example

Good survival strategy for the a species, all species, for life itself, is to maximize biodiversity, because of the possibility of discontinuous “shock” events to the environment, for which prior specialization is unsuited.

The examples of Branson and Gates amply illustrate the rich rewards waiting for us on the untapped wide tails of the human distribution

It is arrogant of education to presume it can forecast the future and determine what can and should be precisely taught for “success”.

If education hasn’t learned that yet, then it should attend some of its classes in the sciences and arts to discover the limits of pure rationality and control

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A reflection on leading and managing a complex Participatory Action Research curriculum project

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1. Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to examine my current leadership skills. I will describe and reflect upon a recent curriculum project that I was in charge of at the US Army command and Gen. staff College. I will use a lens of the Bolman and Deal four Frameworks to evaluate my leadership skills in each frame and look for opportunities to extend my skill set in each (Bolman and Deal, 2008). Since my project is continuing  into a second year, I will use this paper to prioritize and guide my professional development.

2. Description of the Situation

The U.S. Army Command and General  Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas is the centerpiece of the Army leadership development focusing on field grade level, organizational leaders. The year-long course is divided into approximately equal thirds. The first third is the core curriculum received by all Army majors and focuses on critical and creative thinking, leadership, history, change management and basic organizational level doctrine. The middle third, known as the Advanced Operations Course (AOC), is focused on 1500 resident officers whose career path will take them back into tactical field units in leadership positions. The final third is an elective period where students can meet their own particular educational needs based on interest and follow-on assignments.

This past year ,the middle third of the course underwent an extensive redesign and reengineering process which represents the largest single change to the curriculum since its current form was originally implemented five years ago. I was responsible for approximately 1/3 of the redesign program which focused on the addition of new material concerning the largest educational gap in the Army as identified by senior Army leaders, field unit commanders, faculty and students. I received a set of ambitious and broad design principles from the college’s senior leaders and assembled a team of students, faculty, curriculum designers, and recruited experts from Army proponent organizations in order to create a teachable block of instruction that addressed the identified gaps

3. Desired outcome for the situation:

We defined two dimensions for our endstate: organizational outcomes for the college, and curriculum outcomes to address the educational gap.  Our participatory action research design team, consisting of curriculum developers, faculty and students identified the top six desired organizational outcomes, as follows:

1. Produce a quality staff recommendation for AOC force generation  curriculum and an elective for “spillover” material
2. Produce an  interdepartmental “application- level “curriculum fully integrated through the AOC Working Group process
3. Employ an inquiry- based research process that models the principles of group-learning in real time, which can serve as an example for other inquiries in important topics
4. Establish an infrastructure that supports student learning while in attendance, and after graduation as a reachback
5. Create a knowledge base that focuses on support of our student and faculty population, and which synthesizes quality research & knowledge from Army staff and support organizations
6. Document the staff process that will support our ongoing accreditation and scholarship standards

Our desired student curriculum outcomes were:

1. Students applied the Army process map to build ready forces
2. Students are aware of concepts, challenges, and best practices
3. Students and faculty contribute to the growing body of professional knowledge
4. Students use a team oriented approach
5. College provides a reach back capability for graduates to stay current
6. Curriculum establishes linkage to lessons  in the Core  and Parallels
7. Create opportunities in electives for deeper inquiry

4.  The Bolman and Deal Four Frameworks summary: Bolman and Deal created a four framework approach to leadership situations, which enable change agents to systematically view multiple approaches to an issue. Here is a summary of the four frames and a characterization of  leaders  (Clark, 2004)

a. Structural frame: emphasizes creativity and seeks to establish clear goals and roles and coordinated activity established by authority policies and rules. The structural leader is a social architect whose leadership style is analysis and design.

b. Human resource frame: focuses on the needs and motives of individuals who live and work in social systems, and considers opportunities for participation and shared decision-making as a way to enlist commitment and involvement. The human resource leader is a catalyst and servant who looks to support advocate and empower.

c. Political frame: based on negotiated collaborative political structures aiming to find trade-offs for scarce resources, and emphasizes conflict resolution and balancing interests. Political leaders are advocates who seek coalition building and the distribution and balancing of power and interests.

d. Symbolic frame: focuses on culture, meaning, believes in faith by examining and supporting since making through symbols, metaphors, stories and other narratives. The symbolic leader is a prophet who seeks to inspire through multimedia communication and visioning.

5. Skills used:

a. Structural frame: bureaucratic structure and existing policy were important parts of my leadership strategy as I sought to leverage existing infrastructure. For changes to remain permanent and meaningful, it was clear to me that our design group had to create  infrastructure changes. In many cases this involves a carryover into the political frame as we considered how to build coalitions to gain approval for our structural changes. As much as possible we tried to make our recommendations fit within the existing formats of college policy in order to ensure we did not jeopardize our accreditation, which is an important value for the college.

b. Human resource frame: from the beginning of the program design sessions, I made sure that we kept our discussions centered on students and their educational needs and outcomes by emphasizing the concept of  student Voice. After the first meeting, it was clear that we also needed to incorporate faculty Voice in order to accommodate a variety of educational methods which in existing policy was difficult because of the needs for a standardized curriculum for accreditation. This proved to be a very difficult set of values to sustain throughout the design process because the natural tendencies of developers and faculty were to revert to traditional methods with which they were comfortable. Having students as members of the design and development teams, however, ensured that this remained visible throughout the process.

c. Political frame: this turned out to be a crucial component of the entire process. Because of initial successes with our wiki and blog, and the early incorporation of Army-staff level action officers, we got a lot more senior leadership attention than I expected. This made the project a high-stakes payoff and it quickly became an area where competing values emerged as teaching departments lobbied for time and resources to reflect their goals. At the same time, when we used a political process to negotiate the structure and content of the curriculum, there were many faculty who considered it business as usual. My opinion was that only a political process would allow us to integrate the multiple perspectives. I could have chosen to have our directorate’s position dominate the proceedings but it was clear to me that an integrated curriculum was necessary for the students. This was a position that students also shared, which helped me carry the day.

d. Symbolic frame: throughout the project I tried to emphasize the importance of the top down and bottom’s up gap analysis which pointed to this set of curriculum topics as being of central importance to the Army. By connecting the purpose to the bottom’s up and top-down vision to establish its relevance and create the energy to see us through the change. I created top-level vision diagrams in order to highlight in a visual way the broad outlines of the program and used very visible blog postings to maintain progress reports for the population at large. The senior leader in the college, the Deputy Commandant, was an important source of symbolic strength as he had committed fully to our vision and endstate.

6. Skills that could have been used:

a. Structural frame: I could have emphasized more interim written reports to lock-in procedures and SOP changes during the year-long program, instead of waiting for the conclusion to make permanent infrastructure changes. I wasn’t aggressive enough in incorporating administrative managers from the higher headquarters in our process in order to enlist them in our change program. I should have offloaded more technical work to others in order to maintain my focus on the creative and guidance processes. I could have used more faculty from different departments in building the interdepartmental curriculum .

b. Human resource frame: I should have committed more group resources to the faculty development program once we had completed the design and production of the new curriculum. I expected that the lesson plans could stand on their own and being trained in the usual way, and I was surprised at the amount of pushback. I should not have been surprised, however, knowing my peers, and more resources in this area would’ve been helpful. I could have used more student and faculty Voice in telling the story of our change program, instead of using my own personal blog and wiki reports; this would have placed the ownership for our program more in the hands of students and faculty and less in our group. I could have spent more resources on providing timely feedback to students and faculty based on their design inputs, as I’m not sure I did enough in that area to satisfy them. I could have emphasized more of the value of flexibility in our central design; we had a lot compared to our traditional methods, but I don’t think I emphasized enough what we had achieved. I should have put more effort into rubrics and examples from different faculty members of the design team in order to demonstrate our commitment to flexibility in the classroom.

c. Political frame: because I enjoy the political dimension of this program, I was too willing to frame this as individual or group winning and losing compared to the status quo; I should have put more focus on strategy and tactics and cooperative solution finding than in winning and losing. I should have planned for more interim rewards for cooperative and supportive behavior both for members of my team and from among the faculty that voluntarily supported the effort. I should have spent more energy on changing the mindset of the “warring state” to one of the cooperative tribe with respect to integrating departmental issues; the “warring states” is the default orientation of most interdepartmental programs for proposed change. I should have created a central interdepartmental design team in the form of an alliance to maintain momentum across the college. I could have spent more energy incorporating team members from other military colleges above and below us in the hierarchy in order to create a continuous wave of change.

d. Symbolic frame: I could have used more of our inside group-produced artifacts in the lesson plans themselves in order to improve the acceptance of the new lesson plans. I could have made better use of our wiki and blog sites to support collaborative design and collaborative teaching in the classroom. I should have used more strategic communications avenues and media to bring students on board with the program for change before we went into execution. I could have used more partnership programs with field units to demonstrate the relevance of our material to the students follow on assignments.

7. Lessons learned: I found this reflective exercise to be very useful in generating insights for me. Here are my ten most important takeaways.

a. In an interdepartmental, complex process it’s important to publish everything with transparency and trust everybody.

b. It’s not enough to ask for feedback from customers or in this case students and faculty, it’s important to engage in multi-loop dialogue and demonstrate a willingness to adapt to their requirements.

c. Tell the story at every opportunity to everyone that you can find, because the accumulation of small strategic communications events all add up to strategic success in the long run.

d. Leave no stone unturned in enlisting support even if you don’t think you need it or you think you have more than enough. There will come a time of surprise when you need every extra resource and it will be too late then to try to find them.

e. Reinforce the main effort in every action, even if it is only a supporting or shaping effort. Because resources are limited, everything must support the endstate.

f. Aggressively look for connections between departments, teams, resources, opportunities; in a network environment you never know where the next connection will come from that can make the difference between success and failure.

g. The moments of positive emotion and inspiration must be followed and supported by long periods of preparation and perspiration.

h. Question the boundaries that seemed reasonable early in the design, because you may find that your initial efforts have changed the game.

i. Reinforce the essential partnerships between key stakeholders in order to define success as group success.

j. Be open to unexpected opportunities to achieve unplanned successes. This is an extension of the idea of looking for connections. Sometimes the moment will show you unexpected treasures if you’re open to picking them up and making them yours.

REFERENCES

Bolman, L., & Deal, T. (2008).Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice and leadership. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Clark, D. R. (2004), Bolman and Deal’s Four Framework Approach.  Retrieved March 7, 2010

from http://nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/ahold/isd.html

Representative Army capstone documents defining the requirements for new concepts in leadership.

TRADOC, (2009). A leader development strategy for a 21^st century Army.

TRADOC Pam 525-5-500. (2008).  Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design.

Army Regulation 6-22 (2008): Army Leadership

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A reflection on meeting management and the use of silence

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Manny: I agree that when we feel connected to our purpose that our decisions and actions come naturally and easily and we can find the resources we need to break through challenges. Staying connected in a human way to our sources of strength with an appreciation of our own limits but our own potentials helps us turn the long journeys into successful ones.

Loyalty really is an important part of our decision-making, because it commits us to taking actions on the basis of incomplete information and which affect our values at the deepest level. This is why I have been arguing this term for the importance of transparency as opposed to poker playing with our deepest beliefs. I believe we owe it to our superiors but more importantly our subordinates to be as transparent as possible in order that they can have trust in our commitments and confidence in where to place their loyalties.
I agree that silence in the meeting is as important as the space between musical notes. I make sure that when I go into our important curriculum design meetings with the senior leadership I have carefully laid out the arguments I want to make with key phrases that I want to install in their minds that are supported by deep analysis which I can call upon if needed. I look at the agendas to anticipate where I can most effectively and logically make the arguments and I rehearse our meeting routines to see how and where I can best insert my insights.

I make sure that I have considered who will be at the meeting and how I can approach them before hand so that they’re not surprised by the things that I will say and to gauge their response to my ideas. I have found this to be very helpful in communicating my ideas effectively and preventing me from taking on ill considered recommendations in public. By being transparent in writing with my proposals I find that I have built trust-based relationships and a reputation for having no hidden agendas.

Expressing myself in writing demonstrates a commitment to transparency and evidence which has silenced many “he said- she said” responses to complex negotiations.I then make notes during the meeting on who I should talk to and on what topics immediately following the meeting to seal the deal. I make sure also that the person making the written notes for the meeting is on my distribution list and that the things that I thought were important are reflected in their written record of the meeting. This artifact becomes an important tool for developing the situation in the days and weeks ahead because it is the basis for taking formal action.

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Developing organizational vision

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Sometimes I think of the building of vision in an organization to be like the game of post office in which each communication transaction more of the idea just a little bit and that what we end up with is considerably different than what we started with. It seems like we need to have divergent communication in visioning in order to explore the boundaries and potentials and then some convergent group consensus, certified by leadership, in order to come up with a restated recalibrated community vision to launch us into the next round of excursions.

When you think of all the different modes of formal and informal communication and our tendency as humans to reframe and reinterpret what we see and hear it’s no wonder that our vision is a living breathing dynamic entity all of its own. I think this is what Melanie is looking at when she talks about the power of story in leadership in how the story itself can become a force and an entity all of its own

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Haiti and the little red hen

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there are some countries that are complaining about the motives that the impute to the US with respect to the military forces engaged in relief operations in Haiti. Most of those countries are not in a position to provide significant humanitarian relief to the area in that they are quite confident in denigrating the US efforts.  No one likes the US, no one is in favor of our rampant consumerism, and no one would do it exactly the way we do it. Nevertheless, we are there with overwhelming support of a humanitarian nature with as much security as seem sensible and we can fully expect to be underappreciated except by the people whom we are supporting. At the end of the day, that’s all that matters.

We are still in capable of gaining the strategic communications message environment to our damage. I suppose it comes from a natural dislike for spin and nuance and a preference for direct action. I don’t know that that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Thanks, France

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A Systems and “sense-making” perspective on leadership

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when i hear technology, i think of the “means” of exercising control, authority, communication, and i remember how easily it has become an “end” in and of itself

in practice technology has created at least as many new, unforeseen challenges as it has solved.

it has been used as a crutch,

it has gotten in the way of exercising leadership and command.

it offers “excuses” for people trying to avoid responsibility

it has held out the possibility of better information to make better decisions, with the assumption that more info = better decisions, but more often than not we get more complexity and more confidence and certainty, but not measureably better decisions. technology can be seductive in that sense

in many ways technology becomes an end in itself, and becomes the default response to new challenges

this derives from a technocratic view of the world, a belief in reality as a knowable commodity

and yet, tecvhnology, when understood as an extension of the human CAN make measureable improvements on processes and education, but as leaders and educators i think it remains our responsibility to keep our tools in the right perspective

it is a poor carpenter who blames his tools, so we must be intentional in our use of technology and remember the limits as well as the possibilities

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