Connecting the Dots with Phil LawsonIt was an Inc. article I read 11 years ago that solidified my passion to study and identify the new business model now emerging today -- one that favors “creativity” over “operational effectiveness” and over even “dedication.”
I discovered the article in 1999, the same year I dropped out of the corporate world and moved to a mountain cabin to finish writing a business book with a friend of mine named Rob, an award-winning journalist, whose work had appeared on the pages of the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Business Week and Fortune.
We were certain, back then, we were on to something big, having already studied the roots of the 20th Century Industrial Age -- an era that championed the “efficiency movement” and the principles of scientific management.
“Why, when I only want to hire a pair of hands, do I get a whole person?” American Industrialist and auto-maker Henry Ford, once said, during that era, when manufacturing and production operations were suddenly being scrutinized for inefficiencies and waste. And so were the complex people who operated those machines.
Not surprisingly, those principles became a fixed part of management practices and management consulting strategies for the next century -- until people began to sense the limits of their training towards the end of the 20th Century.
And editors of business magazines began to question those outdated mindsets, as in the aforementioned Inc. article that I discovered the spring of 1999.
In that issue, the Inc. editor described his habit, over the years, of asking CEOs he interviewed to draw diagrams of their organizations. For example, in the early 80s, the CEO's diagrams featured the classic pyramid, with key managerial positions represented by boxes at the top and with workers at the bottom.
Then, he explained the provocative changes in their artwork that he witnessed by the mid-1980s. “There were gyroscopic concentric wheels; complex molecular forms that turned in on themselves, helix-like; [and] elaborate solar systems. Most striking was the originality of the drawings—no two were alike,” the Inc. editor wrote. In fact, one CEO suggested the name of the diagrams be changed to disorganization charts.
When I shared that editorial piece with my writing partner, Rob, both he and I were inspired to kick our book-writing project into high gear.
“They feel it. They sense it. They awkwardly try to define it... visually! And yet, they all depict it in different, useless forms,” was Rob’s response to the Inc. commentary. “…There is no communal vision. No central, guiding form ... No way for execs or anyone else to comprehend ... GEOMENTALLY,” he said, before adding: “He's tacked a big sign on our door! God help us if we miss the chance to pass on the message.”
By then, I had already been drawing organizational diagrams using a “sphere” as model. One of my drafts offered insights into a person’s health, and a second, addressed “business equilibrium.” At first glance, my diagrams resembled a radar chart, but the underlying process and components produced incomparable results.
The Sphere, it occurred to me, could be an “awareness” tool that, if developed properly, would display the condition of a person, a department, or entire company. It could reveal the interconnected, interdependent “whole.”
The Sphere would eventually become the theme and metaphor of our book, published in 2004, titled: Being Spherical—Reshaping Our Lives and Our World for the 21st Century.
And that theme would permeate my consulting work, client projects and speaking engagements in the years to follow. It was a useful way to help business leaders shift from a centuries-old mechanistic metaphor -- defined by 17th century philosopher, René Descartes, as a masterful machine -- to a metaphor that helps everyone understand the multifaceted, interrelated world in which we now live -- a world being redefined by emerging systems sciences -- the science of chaos; complex adaptive systems; self-organization and networking.
The Sphere, as metaphor, became even more valuable when the U.S. Patent Office granted a patent in 2008, for the Spherical Modeling Tool, that was first introduced in our book. And that’s why I have been invited to write this column. To add support, and hopefully, provide valuable insights, for you, readers, who are also sensing, feeling, that the world in which you do business has fundamentally and permanently changed.
Now, let me assure you, I’m not the first to extol the values of seeing the “whole” of our lives and companies as a way to better navigate our way through uncharted waters. My writing partner and I discovered others during the research process of our book that had talked around the theme for years. For instance, the ability to flex, bend and rebound is analogous to the forces at work in the geodesic dome structures invented by Buckminster Fuller in the late 1940s.
Then there’s psychologist Abraham Maslow, who, in 1962, detected a discrepancy between commonly accepted practices of business organization and the natural organizational tendencies of people.
And, in her 1999 book, Leadership and the New Science, respected organizational theorist Margaret Wheatley observed, “We have broken the world into parts and fragments for so long now that we are ill-prepared to see that a different order is moving the whole... one of our greatest challenges, after so many centuries of separation and fragmentation, is to discover new ways of thinking and sensing that allow us to comprehend the whole.”
Bringing this message home, did any of you read the CEO report released by IBM on May 19, 2010? The one titled, “What Chief Executives Really Want,” that featured the results of a CEO study from IBM’s Institute for Business Value?
According to Frank Kern, senior vice-president of IBM's Global Business Services, who authored the article, "much has happened in the past two years to shake the historical assumptions held by the women and men who are in charge."
“In short, CEOs have experienced the realities of global integration,” writes Kern. “The world is massively interconnected—economically, socially, and politically—and operating as a system of systems,” he said, later adding: “Against that backdrop of interconnection, interdependency, and complexity, business leaders around the world are declaring that success requires fresh thinking and continuous innovation at all levels of the organization.”
On that note, I will wrap this up by saying, it’s time to connect the dots of our world. And I intend to do my part in this monthly column.
For more information, please visit Phil's TNNWC Bio.
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