Hohensalzburg — Salzburg, Austria

A couple of interesting stories came across my FB feed, courtesy of Professor AG Rud, of the College of Education.  AG is the former Dean of the College, and writes about a variety of subjects, including the role of Reverence in Education.  This is of particular interest to me, as I view Reverence as an empathetic ladder, particularly applicable to elevating those in Authoritarian systems toward a more appropriate, kinder Legalism.

The headlines of the two stories were:  Sexual Harassment Case Shines Light on Science’s Dark Secret, and University of Miami Sued Over the Handling of Colin McGinn Harassment Claims.  In both stories, a professor (both male) is featured that severely sexually harassed a female student.  The protagonist in the first story is an astronomer — Geoffrey Marcy.  In the second, a philosopher — Colin McGinn.  After reading (or listening) to either story, you’ll likely easily conclude that they are guilty of the behavior described.  It’s just nuts.  Both are, in academia-land, very famous — Marcy has been touted for the Nobel Prize.  McGinn, a famous philosopher, was even courted for a position, after his resignation at the University of Miami for ostensible sexual harassment, at East Carolina University.

Journalists (and other academics as well) hunt for answers referencing the discipline.  “It’s the sciences that have the problem,” or something special about the liberal arts.  What in science, per se, is so unique that would cause this kind of pathology?  On the surface, even this type of hypothesis is enough to make one blush.

What these people could use is a big dose of ole timey v-Meme theory.  People in academia are largely organized in Authoritarian power structures.  As part of our job, we are PAID to be an authority.  It should come as no surprise that a certain percentage of us display the pathologies of the v-Meme, including corruption, and an assumption of the right to impose our will on those beneath us.  So many aspects of academia are constructed to facilitate such acts of abuse.  Remember that Principle of Reinforcement stuff way back when on the blog? There’s virtually none of us that share office space, for example.    And our offices are lined up, with closed doors that have the privacy and social order of the solitary confinement section of a prison.  Fine if you’re healthy, and integrally constrained.  But for those with an empathy disorder?  Eh, not so much.

The definitive study hasn’t been done, but it’s hardly surprising if male-> female sexual harassment is more common in the sciences.  The statistics of the distributions of people in power (science obviously has more men in power than women — it’s a well-known problem) vs. the people not in power lend itself to this kind of manifestation.  Add in the factor of how a pathological Authoritarian male would view sexual domination as a privilege of elevated status, and, well, it’s not too hard to figure out how things work.  Authoritarian males have had concubines for literal ages.  Old habits die hard — including those of the younger women, even at the outset, not questioning why they are receiving special access and privilege.  Both victims in both cases noted that from the beginning, they were receiving special treatment.  Didn’t they stop for a minute to question why?  And this isn’t blaming the victim.  They are NOT responsible for the professors’ behavior.  It’s merely a point that we all play into the dance inside our social structure.  Self-awareness is key.

Nothing I’ve said above would be any surprise to someone studying power dynamics in social systems.  But what’s even more interesting to me, though, is why the woman highlighted for investigating sexual harassment in the sciences in the NPR piece, Katie Hinde, an assistant professor at Harvard, contextualizes her analysis to women in the sciences.  As part of a fragmented, authoritarian social structure herself, she reaches out to pin things on men in the sciences — it’s where she has her data, after all — and practices some level of egocentricity.  It’s HER v-Meme set as well.  Instead of generalizing and contextualizing the issue in a larger frame of non-empathetic power structures, it must be worse where she is.   To be fair, I haven’t tabulated any numbers myself.  But maybe what we fundamentally need is to confront how we’re organized, and evolve our communities.  Note to readers — consider the v-Meme set of any given observer.

On a personal note, I can understand how this works.  A while back, I heard a piece on NPR talking about how overweight people had a problem with disconnection and loneliness.  The thesis was that ‘because we’re fat, no one will look at us or greet us.’  The thesis seemed reasonable, and feeling like this was something I could make a small dent in with an act of kindness, on my bike rides, I started saying ‘Hello’ to all overweight people I saw walking on the trail.  But what I noticed was that on the Chipman Trail, most people didn’t reply.  It didn’t make any difference what they looked like.  I was the only one saying ‘hi’!  I still say ‘hi’ to everyone on the trail.  But I also understand a little better the nature of egocentric analysis.  It’s not that people don’t greet overweight people.  According to my very limited experiment — no one was greeting anyone.

What’s the moral to the story?  Instead of looking at surface-level reasons, we might look a little deeper at the fundamental empathetic dynamics of the social/relational systems we set up.  It might yield more profound solutions than pinning things on a discipline, or an assumed code of ethics that are not reinforced by either the environment, or the empathetic evolution of the people in the system.

Further Reading:  This is an interesting table on the statistics of sexual harassment.  The majority of complaints are by women, not surprisingly.  But note the relatively constant, monolithic increase over time of men’s complaints.  Have things really changed, or are we starting to see a larger receptivity toward men feeling culturally comfortable to file a complaint?  Or is this a manifestation of women moving up in power positions in society?

Olympic mascots, outside the Birdcage Olympic Stadium, Beijing, China

One of the points Don Beck, one of the primary innovators of Spiral Dynamics has made (so frustrating that I can’t reference this correctly!!!) is that leaders of organizations can be at a given v-Meme level, or one above.  This kind of makes sense — a leader at a level above pushes evolution of the dominant v-Memes his or her group possesses, and helps them along their way.

All this sounds fine.  And if you go back and read about my various posts on v-Meme conflict, it makes sense.  There’s no guaranteed conflict between folks only one step on the Spiral apart.  So, in an Authoritarian society, a Legalist could be the leader, and help the Authoritarians evolve up a step to realize that a system that didn’t just depend on the judgment and favor of the Top Dog, but instead,a scaffolded system of laws guaranteeing everyone’s rights.  They would also be forfeiting their privilege in the process, in getting others to evolve.  Confucius’ edict, ‘A good emperor doesn’t kill his own people,’ definitely falls into that category.  By removing the Emperor’s authority over life and death of his subjects, and hopefully subjecting such decisions to a process, the society evolves up a notch.

But how did Don Beck conceive of this, and how do I think that would make me believe this is a reasonable notion?  And what does this have to do with Servant Leadership 2.0?

Thinking about this led me to this seemingly simply edict about this fundamental meta-property of leaders.  Evolutionary leaders help their people evolve, on average, up the Spiral.  It applies no matter what level you’re at.  So, in a Tribal/Magical society, an evolutionary leader would be someone who would move a loose grouping of tribes into an Authoritarian system.  Genghis Khan would be a great example.  Not surprisingly, he did this with incredible, pathological violence in the process — but he also establish the beginnings of an empire that provided stability — and established the contiguous nature of the Silk Road, which led to permanent ties between East and West.  Talk about an empathetic ladder, from one of the most violent tyrants in history!

It doesn’t stop there.  One of the points I make in a paper I’ve written about evolutionary entrepreneurship is that entrepreneurs at one v-Meme level typically leave a lasting legacy at the level one up.  Authoritarians like James Buchanan Duke, and Andrew Carnegie left behind the Legalistic institutions of Duke University, and Carnegie-Mellon University.

So this seems to make sense on the surface.  But what’s really going on?

One of the things that hit me with my own epiphany is that as an American, I have been inculcated with the cultural attitude that things are always getting better.  If we’re Legalistic/Performance-based in ‘Murica, then we must be moving on up into Performance-based/Communitarian.  And we should attempt to influence those around us, if we are leaders, in the ostensible values that go along with a more Communitarian society.  All that sounds good, and it may be true.  But it puts a fundamental gap in our thinking.  What if we’re not getting so much better all the time?  What if we’re actually going downhill?

What this thought forced me to recognize is that societies are either evolving, or devolving at any given time.  Remember — the Spiral is not a hierarchy.  It’s not always onward and upward.  Leaders are either evolutionary leaders, or devolutionary leaders.  And they’re either evolving the empathy in their communities, or they’re devolving the empathy in their communities.

But what does THAT mean?  What does empathetic development, which follows the Spiral, tell us?  As we move up the Spiral, we evolve the ability to have more, and more complex relationships with more people.  So that means implicitly that a leader at a level above his or her society, will be creating an environment where people can be having more, and more complex relationships with people around them.

The recent legalization of gay marriage is an excellent example of a Legalistic v-Meme evolution in American society.  There was a widespread recognition that gay couples were given the agency to a.) define their sexual orientation, and b.) receive the rights, responsibilities and protection of the state for their choices in a single-partner situation.

This led to my development of a fundamental Evolutionary Empathetic Principle of Leadership:  a leader who is Evolutionary and Empathetic will work in the context of their community to help grow more healthy, appropriate, diversified and differentiated relationships among members in that community.  And someone who practices Servant Leadership 2.0 will do so in a self-aware fashion — that they recognize why they’re doing it, and will have some idea what the outcome will be before they start.  Servant Leadership 2.0 demands self-aware relational diversification.

The nice thing about this is it allows relatively easy benchmarking and reflection for the leader.  In the process of simplifying the org chart of your organization, for example, are you simultaneously allowing more opportunities for people to create their own relationships?  If so, you are likely Evolutionary and Empathetic.  If not — then what exactly are you doing?  And why are you doing it?  There are, as always, no set answers.

Was Genghis Khan a Servant Leader 2.0?  Likely not.  Though he created an empire that had many benefits, he did it in a decidedly anti-empathetic way. What was his level of self-awareness?  Once again, not clear.  I try not to moralize, but needless to say, I never consider genocide as a sign of enlightenment.

That then leads to the next question:  if an Evolutionary Empathic Leader is mainly characterized by relational diversification, what is a Devolutionary, Non/Anti-Empathetic leader going to do?  If we apply Beck’s maxim, it would imply that such a leader would be AT or BELOW the level of the general population.  And instead of diversifying relationships in their community, they would be relational simplifiers.

How does one simplify relationships?  The only way I can think of is through disruption.  So, that means that leaders at, or below the dominant social organizing principles of their constituency, are relational disrupters.

And the more common term for such people are empathy disordered — or, to simplify a little bit myself,  psychopaths.  And how they work, as we will discuss, is a fascinating pathology, as well as a not-so-merry chase.

Takeaways:  One of the fundamental principles undergirding Evolutionary, Empathetic Leadership is attempting to create more appropriate and diverse relationships in the organization or society one is responsible for leading.  Servant Leadership 2.0 demands that you are aware of what you are doing, and are attempting, as best as you can to create an environment where more people can connect.

Further Reading:  There’s a lot to unpack with that final statement, and we’ll be getting to that a little later.  But you can get a head start by reading Bill Eddy’s Blog on High Conflict Personalities.

Chianti, or probably more accurately, Sangiovese, in Chianti, outside Florence, Italy

I occasionally read Medium, an interesting website that serves as some kind of pass-through for good writing, but at the same time, doesn’t seem to pay anyone for the writing that they do.  Which means that it typically serves as a platform for either the very famous, who don’t have to get paid to write, or those starting out and hoping for ‘exposure’.

This morning’s feed contained an interesting article from Umair Haque, who seems to fall in the former category.  He is unusual in that he actually gives out his e-mail address (good on him, though at some level I’m sure it’s burdensome!) so I’ll e-mail him a link to this post.  Umair makes the point in this piece that Twitter is dying, less and less people are doing it, and his reason is that it is because abuse is rampant on Twitter.  You Tweet something, and then nasty people attack you.

Fair enough.  I’m sure he’s right.  I don’t have a Twitter account, though, because I’ve always thought that it was a great way to get into trouble.  Twitter’s format of 140 characters, along with the various hashtags, constrain thought to what devoted readers of this blog, few though those are :-), would recognize are knowledge fragments, identifiable with Authoritarian v-Meme agents and social systems.  Not surprisingly, lots of these Tweets are going to pop out of people’s impulsive, limbic mind, and are at best going to correspond to some modest level of emotional empathy.  At worst, they’re going to be the tool of Relational Disrupters, and other various icks of the empathy disordered.

Umair also makes the point that over time, people are going to drift away from Twitter, or things like it, because, well, it’s unpleasant.  No one wants to voice a thought and be attacked by strangers.  But we can also see the emergent behavior of our social/relational journey at work.  The Internet is nothing if not a tool of connectivity, and carries with it the potential for generation of larger empathy.  Through information sharing, we have far more awareness of far more great things, as well as abuses, throughout the world.  Twenty years ago, who would have even known, or cared about Boko Haram, the group that kidnapped and married off 200 young girls in Nigeria?  A cultural anthropologist of the time might even have characterized it as culturally appropriate, considering the tribal structure of the area.  Now, everyone knows, and has an opinion of their own.  And through the Internet, over time, there is going to be more of a global consensus on this kind of thing — in the case of Boko Haram, that it is a tragedy, and we should care.

What’s interesting is that less connected knowledge structures are going to behave in the fashion of their fundamental information-theoretic dynamics — not the wishes, no matter how noble, of their founders.  Those that live by the knowledge structure they adapt, die by the knowledge structure.  And there’s little way to establish a larger dialog in 140 character bites.  No matter how profound the individuals are, or accessible the medium is.  It turns into a low-probability situation.  It’s not that it couldn’t happen — and I’m sure there are Twitter proponents who would argue that it has.  It’s just that the odds are against it.

Umair also makes the point that the various parties responsible for creating the resource don’t seem much to care and fix the problem of abuse on Twitter.  Once again, not surprising and predicted from the writings on this blog.  People who refine code are, for lots of righteous reasons, likely to occupy the Legalistic v-Meme, unless there are larger cultural sidebars that would force different behavior.  ‘Faster, less computational time, etc.’ are not characteristics that immediately cause an increase in empathetic interaction.  Or rather, it is a constrained interaction.  Content and its effects do not come into play.

Evolving communications environments that structurally create emergent empathetic evolution of the actors engaged in them is something I’ve been thinking about.  Twitter, at some level, shows the way not to do this.

Takeaways: When you create communication pathways that only use given knowledge structures, you shouldn’t be surprised that they create the behavior, good or bad, associated with the corresponding v-Meme.  Those that live by the Authoritarian Tweet, die by the Authoritarian Tweet!  It’s very difficult to have multi-solution thinking in a 140 character SMS string.

Stradivarius — Inside the Accademia, Firenze, Italy

One of the great questions that could be asked about a lot of the stuff I write about might be this:

OK – you say we can’t just write down a bunch of rules, or bullet points, and expect to have people figure this out.  What can we do?

The challenge in evolution of social systems is helping those used to more rigid systems see the  potentials for flexible work environments. Management has to give others that may have more difficulty taking the old ‘Org Chart’ with a grain of salt, a window into the possibilities.

This article on Kaizen events for Manor Tool is just about perfect.  They center many of their Kaizen, or continuous improvement events, around safety.  In today’s environment, no one argues about the need for workplace safety, or the avoided costs when ergonomic or safety concerns are surfaced.  As such, spending a day to address these types of issues is a company-uniter.

But what’s even better is the way they execute this.  Everyone is involved, and people from different departments, with fresh eyes, are required to watch work practice from outside their area and make suggestions.  Not only do the new perspectives help, but employees walk away with a far more holistic set of relationships inside the company, along with a positive shared experience, and tons of new empathy developed.  What’s not to like?

A Quiet Moment — Mt. Rainier National Park, Adjacent to the Longmire Visitor Center

One of the challenging issues that many executives are just waking up to is the fact that, like it or not, they must consider social/ethical issues in their production or supply chain.  In their heart, they may want to service their inner Authoritarian — but the connectivity of the Internet, what I’ve called the evolving nervous system for the planet, isn’t going to let them decide that they get to lop off large parts of the world for their own use.

Once we understand how emergent social systems (as well as the people necessary to run them) evolve, we start accepting that V-Meme scaffolding will happen.  And it might behoove players to get involved with the game a priori instead of finding out, too late, and getting punished or crucified.

The Servant Leadership 2.0 Servant Leader has far more going for him or her in heading off conflict, and negative consequences at the pass.  Because they’ve moved beyond total egocentricity, they’re open to exploring others’ agendas, as well as functioning at a higher level of total responsibility, than someone who views their role as master and commander.

A great example of “it’s gonna be Global Holistic, like it or not” might be the rise of the group, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).  RAN is a different kind of environmental group.  Operating largely on international issues spatially far away from their home office in San Francisco, RAN has successfully run campaigns to save coastal rainforests in British Columbia, stop cattle ranching and exportation in Central and South America that were driving deforestation, and toxic waste dumping in Ecuador. It does this through a variety of tactics, including civil disobedience, media campaigns, but most importantly, corporate campaigns directed against large multi-nationals.  In the world of Spiral Dynamics, they are a coupled Global Holistic/Performance-based V-meme organization, focused on results, as opposed to process.  Though they may participate in larger conferences involving both governmental and non-governmental organizations, their focus is on bringing change on issues they are concerned with inside a created social environment of informed consumer outrage.

This is in direct contrast to more typical environmental organizations, that, in many ways, ‘play by the rules’ laid out by governments and their statutory legal environments.  The results have evolved the organization into one of the most effective actors in the social change portfolio.

Consider their actions against Chevron in their ‘We Can Change Chevron’ campaign in 2009.  Chevron had acquired Texaco, along with its liabilities in Ecuador, in 2001.  Chevron claimed that it had honored its commitments to past Texaco liabilities by funding 1/3 of their cleanup for dumping toxic waste in Ecuador, in its shared business with PetroEcuador.  Through a combination of legal action in Ecuador, as well as an extremely well-managed PR campaign, run jointly with the satirical group, the Yes Men, Rainforest Action Network crowdsourced multiple farcical advertisements from supporters, while essentially destroying an $80 million Greenwashing ad campaign run concurrently by Chevron.  Judges in Ecuador ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion to the plaintiffs.

Still other campaigns, like the latest Conflict Palm Oil campaign, instead of looking solely to punish companies using palm oil grown on deforested lands in Indonesia and Malaysia, recruit companies into signing pledges for sustainable sourcing.  Palm oil, a key ingredient in snack food and noodles around the world, has been a driver of deforestation and serves as an extinction threat for animals such as orangutans.  Through coupling a combination carrot and stick approach, along with connections across issues — the palm oil campaign highlights not just forest destruction and species extinction, but human slave trafficking, child labor laws, and native community destruction — RAN creates effective higher-level empathetic hooks in developed countries that then put pressure on Authoritarian v-Meme governments, like Indonesia, to evolve.

The point here is simple — the idea of a painless neocolonialist approach toward using areas off the communication channel, with the intent of reaping profits, doesn’t exist anymore.  The Internet, and the tools for creating all sorts of media content, are ubiquitous.  RAN, and other groups like RAN, are coming for the non-empathetic corporation.

At the same time, I should say that in RAN’s latest campaign to save orangutans, as well as the forests they live in in Indonesia, has no guarantee of success.  Wouldn’t it be better if we evolved our multi-nationals to a more enlightened level of leadership in the first place?  Especially when the larger external costs so often end up in corporate ledgers.  Doing the larger, right thing is also the best thing for the bottom line.

Takeaways:  The idea that ‘what you don’t care to know can’t hurt you’ is simply no longer true.  Servant Leadership 2.0 offers a channel to understand multiple stakeholder perspectives and develop pathways for consequential thinking before things go south.  

Further reading:  In case you want to understand just how bad the orangutan situation is in Borneo, you might read this article.  And then think before you buy — do you really want 2500 baby orangutans living in cages because a company that could use an easily substituted commodity needs to make a couple extra bucks?  A small note — this situation has not changed significantly since the publication date of 2009.

On the Piazza, Lucca, Italy

Once we understand the origination of a given paradigm, we can map how it might evolve empathetically — as well as assess how difficult it might be to move groups of people up the Spiral to higher levels of connectivity.  Servant leadership is one paradigm that can motivate a group of individuals — leaders in the business community — to start that journey.  Even though, as we’ve seen, servant leadership rests on independent, trust-based relationships, it is a status trigger for those down there in external relationship v-Meme land.  Getting to deny, then proclaim oneself striving for servant leadership is good bait for the status conscious.

But because it is based not on title, but an aggregate of empathetic relationship construction and actual performance, anyone that’s healthy in the head is along for an upward ride.  That’s the point of Servant Leadership 1.0.  It’s an implicit evolutionary ladder.  You do the various tasks — build your team, focus on performance and measurement, catalyze your team, and so on — you’re going to grow empathetically.  Because you have to.

Servant Leadership 2.0 is also an evolutionary, empathetic ladder — with Servant Leadership 1.0 nested inside of it.  But with its focus on self-awareness, and inner development of the individual, it unlocks larger potentials in terms of leadership team function.  And because mindfulness training is millennia-old, far more evolved minds have debated and discussed it.

But if you have to boil it down, it’s going to come down to two core practices.  The first is debate with others.  One has to open oneself up to exchange with other constituencies — the broader, the better.  It can’t just happen with a bunch of white men sitting in a board room.  The broader the constituencies, the larger the growth.

The second is meditation and reflection.  The two are tied intrinsically together, because you simply can’t get to the silence of meditation without reflection.  For me personally, it happens on my bike — I start riding, and after about 30 minutes of getting through my stress and anger about whoever I perceive is doing me wrong today, I get to a point of positivity, and then start thinking about the good things in my life.  And then, after about 15 more minutes, I’m through those thoughts.  And then there’s just me.

Debate is an intrinsic element of learning to build independent relationships with others.  Anyone that aspires to servant leadership has to effectively, empathetically master it — because without it, the information coherence in the channel simply can’t be sufficient for the effective leader to receive accurate information.  That means the Servant Leader must place-take constantly, because if not, the person they are talking to may shut down, and not tell them something critical they need to know.  The quality of the grounding of experience with others is directly related to the openness one approaches the dialogue.

And as well, reflection and meditation must be core practices for Servant Leadership 2.0.  Why?  Because without an inner dialogue, where one deals empathetically with oneself, how can one develop an honest dialogue with our own insides?  Because if we want to have data-driven, trust-based relationships with others, the first person we must construct one with is ourselves.

Once we accept this paradigm, many pathways open up for development of Servant Leadership 2.0.  There may be some direct algorithmic training involved — breathing exercises and so on.  But by and large, it’s going to involve interacting with others — experiential learning.  Varying the scales of such learning, both temporally and spatially — from short-term to long-term relationships, as well as friends here, and friends across the globe, in different cultures and places — is key.

When enough of a cohort of such individuals are gathered together, the possibility of interconnected, empathetic collaborative teams offer a pathway to larger, Global Holistic modes.  No one independently needs to be the spiritual master.  It’s the whole — not the one.  And skilled in open debate, as well as private reflection, decisions can be jointly made that benefit the larger whole.  That’s how you get Global Holistic out of a team of Global Systemic thinkers.  Each one is a self-aware node on their authority and realm of influence and responsibility.  And because all parties are well-formed, they know what they know — as well as what they don’t.  That then yields to the integrated landscape necessary for running the modern, empathetic global corporation.

Further Reading:  Some interesting work on the development and merging of rational thought with spiritual practice.  Though I haven’t heard much since I read about this four years ago — teaching Tibetan monks neuroscience —  I’m wondering how Arri Eisen’s work has proceeded.  Not surprisingly for followers of this blog, the development of a rational spirituality opens the door, when even previously unexposed, to the methods of science.

Snowshoeing five years ago, on the Palouse Divide

A nod to Jake Leachman, good friend and debating partner for the title.  Check out his blog:  hydrogen.wsu.edu!

One of the key things to understanding the answer to the evolution of servant leadership — and yes, the concept has to evolve — is to understand the likely mindset of Jim Collins, the inventor of the term, when he made it.  There’s lots of data, with his definition of servant leadership, that Collins is firmly ensconced in the Performance v-Meme (what does it take to have enduring financial performance is a huge theme of his writing), and then that tracks to the Inner Hedgehog (the one thing one’s company does well, subject to constraints.)  Collins makes the point that one can’t become a servant leader without his or her employees connecting profoundly with him or her — which at some level, implies an independent, trust-based, data driven relationship — that has to be reciprocated, as much as is possible.  Pretty Communitarian v-Meme, if you ask me.

And for those that remember past posts, that all fits.  Someone in the Performance v-Meme is going to allude in a meaningful way to the v-Meme above them as being core to leadership — in this case, building a community where individuals are valued.

But after, or really above that, it’s also no surprise that things start to run dry.  It’s been a while since I read the book, but I can’t remember any nod at all to Self Awareness (Global Systemic — Tier 2 V-meme).  And on up, it doesn’t get any better.  Collins, with his prescriptive Hedgehog, doesn’t even consider the Global Holistic obligations any truly evolved leader has in today’s global marketplace.  In fact, he might very well consider it a conflict — out of the range — or compacted down into the elusive nature of servant leadership which he says is poorly understood.  How do you build the core integrity of a low probability, magical animal?  Like every other business writer, Collins is v-Meme limited.  It’s gonna get down to things like ‘spirituality’ sooner or later — that ‘nod to God’.

And it’s also no surprise that there are Coral/Bodhisattva allusions.  One thing I’ve seen is that open-minded people can recognize enlightenment when they see it, even if they’re going to have a hard time getting there themselves.  One of my favorite little anecdotes is traveling around the world and finding people like the movie ‘Groundhog Day’.  People get the enlightenment path — even if it’s staged in Punxsutawney, PA.

Collins pulled his definition out of an exhaustive, algorithmic search, with a little heuristic messing-about where he used his own personal judgment.  He did it from data collected in the ’90s — in so many ways, a very different world.  And then he pulled the 11 companies out from his own judgment after he applied his rubric.

I want to reiterate — there is nothing wrong with that.  And the concept of servant leadership, I’d argue, is fundamentally a Spiral/Empathetic Ladder.  Good on him.  But how can we build on his insight, as our societies continue to evolve?  What might an Evolved Hedgehog look like?

Enter Servant Leadership 2.0.  The biggest leap  to be made from Servant Leadership 1.0 (Collins’ model) is the idea that the Servant Leader is aware of their own motivations in their actions.  Why is that important?  Because then the Servant Leader has the potential for self-compensatory feedback.  They don’t need someone else at their level to tell them about themselves (though outside influences and coaches never hurt!)  They are aware of their own Confirmation Bias, and instead of searching out case studies and data that support their worldview, are aware of knowledge coming their way that doesn’t support their worldview.  And, as an extension, are accepting of that.  Confirmation Bias is a huge vector for down converting Heuristic Thinking to Algorithmic Thinking.  Self-awareness can prevent that.

What that does, more than anything else, is prevent the shift in one’s thinking, out of Roger Martin’s Heuristic down to Algorithmic thinking.  Confirmation Bias is a huge vector for down converting Heuristic Thinking to Algorithmic Thinking.  Self-awareness can prevent that.  It keeps one data-driven, instead of, over time, creating a set of beliefs that become more rigid.  It keeps meta-cognition alive, and keeps the individual Servant Leader on an evolutionary path. Which then makes that person more resilient in the face of change, and more open to input channels from especially younger employees, as the tools and paradigms available for business change.

But most importantly, what it likely does is this:

It makes it more possible for the Servant Leader to collaborate across other industries/divisions with equivalent personalities. Or even non-equivalent, less-evolved individuals.

Why does this matter so much?

One of the things that has been bothering me quite a bit in my thinking are Beck’s statistics on percentages of individuals occupying various v-Memes.  Most of the information I’ve received comes from web pages, and these, for some reason, vanish and reappear.  Not very encouraging.  But there are a couple of numbers that stick in my head:

Performance v-Memes in the US population:  30%

Communitarian v-Memes in the US population ~ 10-20%

Global Systemic v-Memes ~ 1%

Global Holistic v-Memes ~.1%

So, let’s think of the implications.  What this means is that the odds that someone with a global perspective, with an evolved sense of global empathy and the decision-making ability to create meaningful management and change, is basically 0%.

Yet what we see is that there are global corporations.  Their behavior ranges on a spectrum from a moral good -> bad scale (I’m not going to list the bad actors, but it’s not hard to guess) and they’re proceeding apace.  How can that be?  Is Spiral Dynamics wrong?

I think what we are seeing is the emergence of combined higher thinking in management teams across global enterprises.  Global enterprises require global thinking — there’s simply no way to get away from the fundamental exigencies of the situation.  And so, true to form, global thinking becomes emergent.  Networks of individuals embody the communication needs across continents and countries, and start the process of evolving the people inside.

That does not mean that a more profound empathy is always created — one that satisfies our moral codes for justice, egalitarian treatment, and human and environmental rights.  Those types of values must be developed more deeply in the scaffolding of organizations, and cannot come without interaction with governments, NGOs, and basic populations.  As has been discussed before, diversity is key.  But it is hard to argue that Amazon or Shell isn’t globally interactive.  They may be, in certain ways, pathological because of poor scaffolding — a recent siting of an Amazon computing cloud in Dayton, driven by the desire for cheap, coal-powered electricity might be an example.  More progressive players like Apple and Google, in announcing their data centers, for example, said they would be powered 100% by renewables.  But this is likely a result of poor scaffolding — not the lack of global thinking and the demanding interconnectivity it requires.

What is likely required for the modern corporation, then, is the more achievable goal of Servant Leadership 2.0 — an evolved mindfulness of the individual leader.  And that may lead to fixing the larger deficits we see in corporate governance across the planet.

Takeaways:  Servant leadership, defined as elusive, and potentially non-achievable by most, is unsatisfying to say the least.  Implying there is no causal chain to get there  is also not so hot.  We can do better than just describe it.  We can think of it in evolutionary terms.  And that gives us paths, and actions that we can take to have a more evolved leadership team — Servant Leadership 2.0.

Old Highway 195, outside of Thornton, WA, south of Spokane

After pondering the characteristics of environments that, unfortunately, we’re all familiar with — Authoritarian and Legalistic v-Meme sets that dominate a large part of our world — you’re probably looking for a little hope that higher level leadership is even possible.

The good news is that it is.  Work environments that, at some level, prioritize performance can evolve.  The common denominator that starts the process may not be as appealing to the idealists in the crowd.

What is that common denominator?  Believe it or not, it’s money.  Money is a great generator of information coherence inside an organization.  It’s an external measure of performance.  People are only going to buy your product if they want to.  And money comes from customers.  And interaction with customers, through their diverse personalities, is going to drive empathy development — especially rational place-taking — throughout a given company.

Continuing along this track, we can also see that industries that rely on customer preference also have the greatest potential for empathetic development of their employees.  It’s no wonder that oil, gas and mining companies are chronically running afoul of varieties of public opinion.  No one really has a gasoline preference nowadays, other than regular/premium.  Whereas companies with semi-infinite supply chains (like aerospace) or ones driven by consumer preference (like selling tennis shoes) are more likely to have accelerated empathetic development.  And once again, companies with larger empathetic backgrounds are much more likely to have avenues where servant leadership can develop.

Let’s put up Collins’ Servant Leadership pyramid and do a little examination for the Performance v-Meme in his levels.

Collins explicitly prioritizes making money as part of his tripartite prioritization of the Hedgehog Principle.  So it should come as no surprise that one of the primary characteristics of a servant leader is to service that one thing the company does well as a vehicle for creating economic value.  And every level of his management development schema emphasizes performance.  Let’s review, one by one.

Level 1 — the person themselves must be capable of performance and being productive.

Level 2 — the person must have all of Level 1, plus connect to others to share information (both emotional and rational empathetic.)

Level 3 — Efficient resource manager implies a perspective toward optimal resource allocation, as well as the first nod toward multi-solution thinking.  Optimal is inherently going to be time dependent, and means evolving the operation to current market conditions.  And that means multi-solution thinking, which comes out of an environment where rational place-taking, with its nonlinear connections, is encouraged.

Level 4 — Interestingly enough, this level implies a larger level of emotional empathy with individuals that they work with.  It is impossible to catalyze commitment from people who sense you do not care about their larger well-being.

Level 5 — Finally at Level 5, we establish enduring performance and embodiment of larger care and concern for more aspects of his/her employees lives (and even destinies) as critical.  And the only way for an individual to do this is to develop those larger temporal and spatial scales in their own head that are possible through empathetic development.

We can also start seeing that Design Thinking starts coming into play, from Level 3 on up — if the objectives that Collins is referring to are generated in part from their customers.

In short, the Performance v-Meme, along with Design Thinking at the higher levels, is ingratiated into Collins’ model.  Along the way, Collins emphasizes indirectly the need to build community along with this.  Employees are individuals, and optimal performance can only be drawn out of those people with some level of independent connection and knowledge through leadership.

Yet at the same time, Collins’ model, originally published in his book in 2001, shows some element of age.  Is there servant leadership, and corporate performance, beyond his definition and the Hedgehog Principle?  The Hedgehog Principle itself, requiring a company to do one thing well, should draw your suspicions.  Within the last 15 years, much has changed with companies that aspire to SOTA performance.  That not only they do well (with solid profits) but they also do good.  What kind of leadership gets us there?

Takeaways:  Collins’ model of servant leadership, while having nods to higher Spiral levels above Performance/Communitarian, and showing some appearance of the Coral/Bodhisattva v-Memes, is, like all our structures, a creation of knowledge structures of our time.  It’s true that servant leadership is a huge step up from the tired Authoritarianism of the past.  But there are (and always will be) higher levels to aspire to.

Braden on a roll at nine, starting on the journey between Passau, Germany, and Vienna, Austria.

When I started the Industrial Design Clinic (IDC) over 22 years ago, it can be fairly safe to say I had no idea what I was doing.  I was a nonlinear physicist, essentially, by training — though my degree was in mechanical engineering.  Helped by my as-yet-unmade friend, Les Okonek, from ARCO/BP/now retired, and fellow refinery engineer Brett Emmons, I implemented a pretty standard design process.  This was further enhanced by the adoption of the book, Product Design and Development, by Karl Ulrich and Steven Eppinger. The First Edition came out in 1995, and it was the first textbook I folded into my efforts.  It may seem just a little dated now, but it’s a solid book, and describes what most people recognize as a canonical design process — in fact, it documents THE canonical design process that most people use.  There are variations on modification of design ‘gates’ and decision points, dependent on the agency and organization (is it any surprise, for example, that MILSPEC has ‘gates’?).  But it still holds up — and my students have literally built hundreds of designs using some modification of this process.

What’s the short version?

1.  Scoping.
2. Specification, using some form of Needs/Metrics/House of Quality toolset.
3. Conceptual and Preliminary Design, with a focus on generation of multiple designs, followed by review and down-select.
4. Final Design.
5. Manufacturing.
6. Benchmarking of the design against the specification.
7. Redesign (if benchmarks aren’t met) or Delivery to the Customer.

This all seems reasonable, of course.  And it is.  Yet like all knowledge products, its dominant characteristics are inseparable from our social/empathetic structure.  Both Ulrich and Eppinger are professors at MIT, and it’s not surprising that this design process sits squarely on the transition between the Legalistic v-Meme and the Performance v-Meme.  Design necessarily must have a large focus on performance and hitting goals, and these are rigorously enshrined in the process.

I’ve said that we can see that the knowledge product of the design process itself is a function of the v-Memes of the people documenting and generating it.  How?

1.  The process is meta-linear.  Varying diagrams may show this process as a straight line, or perhaps as a circle, but the bottom line is ‘we get one thing done, we move to the next one.’
2. Ulrich and Eppinger are big on a variety of algorithmic tools — more meta-linear, step-by-step processes that scaffold each of the heuristic steps, that lead in a predictable fashion to the next level.
3. Customers are included at the start of the project, as focus groups primarily.  Their input is then distilled into numbers (Measure to Manage!) and these are represented in the House of Quality/Metrics type tools.  Customers typically don’t loop around back into the process until the Benchmark/Delivery steps.
4. Empathetic development of the team does not allow for evolution of empathy and relationships with the customer.  The idea of evolving an experience along with the customer, while not particularly disallowed,  is not so much in the cards.
5. Larger synergies are not intrinsic between designers of the product and the outside world.  Synergies in that form are largely an afterthought — not surprising, considering the relative level of empathetic connection in the process.

As I’ve said earlier, we’ve used this process (and still use it!) for literally hundreds of successfully shipped products.  And for most products developed by the students in the IDC, it’s great.  Those products are necessarily Rev. 1, due to time limitations — the students only spend 4 months in the class.  Rev. 2 designs are sometimes commissioned by customers/sponsors, but are usually refinement projects (that algorithmic devolution thing again) — this system developed an unexpected crack during testing/use, etc., and the customer wants to take the extant design and improve it.

What is this design process great at?  Not surprisingly, it works very well for assembling engineered components (what I call ‘Lego Engineering’) into a new product, designing components with a large basis in the laws of physics (contrasting, evaluating and selecting, for example, different boiler designs), and some limited systems work, where interfaces are well-known.  Students often will be asked to visit a factory where a problem has been specified within a given system boundary, and students, in coming up with different preliminary designs, will often draw different system sizes and zones of inclusions.

Because multiple solutions are mandated in the preliminary design phase, there is the necessary headroom for different members of a group to be heard.  I often task everyone in the group with coming up with at least one potential design, and in order to dump a little empathetic development in the mix, often insist of pairing among students to generate ideas.  Students naturally tend toward solitary innovation — that comes straight out of their dominant authoritarian social structure (we’ve penalized them for working together their whole career — we call it cheating!) and so it is often necessary to order collaboration and sharing at the beginning of the project.  Students (and often multidisciplinary teams) will often take any project and fractionate it according to specific titles and established skill sets. Synergies, if any, will come at the end.

So much of what happens with this given design process will depend on the manager(s) of the effort.  If they implement things like pairing, the odds of synergies will increase.  If they insist more time spent with the customer, then it will happen.  Much rests on their Authority.  There is only a minimal level of emergent empathetic connection in the process itself.

And that shouldn’t be surprising.  That would be the natural construction of the professors who created it.

What’s especially fascinating is that in a follow-on paper, in the Harvard Business Review, Are Your Engineers Talking to One Another When They Should?, by Manuel Sosa, Steven Eppinger, and Craig Rowles — the same Eppinger of the book above — they recognize some of these problems.  They note the lack of metacognition — not with the language of this blog, but by stating in large projects (such as the Airbus A380) the existence of unattended interfaces.  They then state that the effort is really a failure of planning, and not surprisingly, introduce a set of algorithmic tools called Design Interface, Team Interaction, and Alignment Matrices — a Legalistic v-Meme intervention and tracking tool.  None of this is, of course, surprising.  The Principle of Reinforcement, where social/relational systems and their respective empathetic levels, reinforce and develop the behavior of its participants, and vice-versa, is at play even at MIT.

For things like large aircraft, where configurations are relatively fixed (look at the Boeing 737 family of designs) such tools are in themselves not such a bad thing.  Mapping out the interfaces, and who’s talking to whom is important.  There’s all sorts of implicit assumptions built into this, of course — that not only are they talking to each other, but the protocol that exists is actually getting the message across.  It’s an Authoritarian v-Meme idea that communication is 100% effective, even when it’s not.

But at the same time, the point of all this is that one must be aware of where our tools come from, and what kind of behavior they generate.  Ulrich and Eppinger’s process is great (not surprisingly) for the uses listed above.  Those map well within the social structure created to accomplish those given designs.  But we’ve got to think out-of-the-box, or perhaps better said, with a truly expanded sense of metacognition, if we’re going to attack larger problems, or larger synergistic systems — or cater more effectively to varying human preferences.  If we want more breakthroughs, we have to have more opportunities for larger rational empathetic interactions, and more nonlinear behavior.  We have to make a larger commitment to empathetically evolving the people inside the problem so they can naturally recognize and solve these types of challenges.  That’s not going to happen so much with the design process sketched out above.

And with the above design process, synergistic behavior is not intrinsic or emergent.  If leadership doesn’t order some of it up, with the social physics discussed in this blog, we likely won’t see it.  In fact, we may see failure because of a lack of it.  The system is not self-correcting.  Like Clint Eastwood as the character Dirty Harry so famously said — “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Takeaways:  The canonical design process above is a huge step up from the arbitrary design processes of the past.  It successfully promotes multi-solution thinking, benchmarking with metrics, and working from a specification.  But there are limitations in generating new synergies, as well as tackling more complex, time-dependent projects.  

Passau, Germany — on the Beautiful, Blue Danube

At some level, it’s instructive to go back and review the longer definition of a Heuristic, and then consider what the implications are behind NOT going with a particular algorithmic approach.  Academics typically get conniption fits with heuristic thinking — usually along the lines of NOT RIGOROUS ENOUGH.  Too touchy-feely — which is really a term for a poor understanding of more evolved empathy!

Some of this might be a manifestation of v-Meme conflict that we’ve covered earlier.  The non-empathetic don’t particularly like, nor understand more empathetic approaches.  And if the stretch is long enough, we’ve already covered the fact that one can run into major hostility.  But do they have a point?  And if they do, what can we do to remediate their concerns of rigor?

The definition from Wikipedia is as follows —  A heuristic technique (/hjʉˈrɪstɨk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, “find” or “discover”), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical methodology not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, stereotyping, profiling, or common sense.

Often, heuristic methods involve ‘messing around’ with some problem (experiential learning) and embodying the ‘fail early, fail cheaply, fail often’ mentality we introduced in the last post.  That’s not going to make the Power and Control, or the Rule-Following crowd very happy.  With such processes, it looks like there is some indeterminate end, or even worse, an end determined in some fashion by the participants in the process.

And if you scroll back and remember how timescales are calibrated by empathetic development, now you’re bringing on the Major Crazy to the Authoritarians (time scales are decided by the authority above them) or the Legalists (time scales follow rules set from the outside — remember the creation of time zones/railroads story.)  The people involved in the process aren’t supposed to have the agency to set the limits on time for a project.  That’s above their pay grade.

What is needed by the Performance v-Meme crowd (get to the goal) that will mollify those lower down on the v-Meme Spiral is some kind of heuristic design process that resembles an algorithm, or at least a plan.  And then dependent on the technical requirements of the process, this plan appropriately scaffolds analysis effort into the design, in the quest for validity, with enough reliability to move forward with confidence.  These naturally fall out of the different Spiral v-Meme levels for a given project.

What might those be?  Just like a Matryoshka doll, higher/larger levels must be filled with the lower levels.

Matryoshka dolls, from Wikimedia

1. Legalistic/Absolutistic — enough analysis steps and algorithms (think computer-based finite element analysis, cursory flow analysis, statics, thermodynamics, etc.) that the potential designs do not violate the laws of physics.
2.  Authoritarian — enough facts, figures, and understanding prior art that a design is appropriately referenced to what has come before.
3. Tribal/Magical — referencing prior knowledge and stories that exist in the organization on past projects that have created the iconography behind specific choices.  This last one, in many ways, is the toughest, because of past failures with particular technologies.  A deeper dive will be necessary to understand the story well enough that changed conditions and technology development arcs will create an argument that will allow larger change.  A great example might be the adoption of lithium-ion batteries in the Boeing 787, and the resultant battery fire.  Clearly, lighter batteries are going to be used in aerospace applications.  The challenge is to assure reliability to commercial aviation standards.  Yet the experience was so traumatic (potentially nothing is worse than a fire inside an aircraft) that the story has been encoded into Boeing’s collective memory as the threshold statement for a major crisis!
4. Survival — the circumstances inside the company RIGHT NOW are amenable to a given design process.  This likely means sufficient budgeting, no other ongoing crises demanding the attention of group members, and so on.

Modern Computer-Aided Design and Analysis tools have made addressing #2 even easier than before.  Reliability of such tools has increased that a minimum of training is necessary for cursory results, and the acceptance that this is actually the case has spread even in the hierarchy of engineering schools.  It used to be that, for example, stress analysis using computers was taught as a graduate class, and there was much consternation about error control, meshing, and such.  Now, freshmen engineering students in our drafting class are taught the basics of how to find out the stress on a part given a loading condition, and the analysis tool itself is used to develop heuristics inside students’ heads for material behavior!

So what might a more structured heuristic design process look like?  That will be the subject of the next post.  But before we get carried away, I think it is very important to note: we’ll only discuss one potential heuristic.  Like all products of thought, it evolves out of the social structure that created it — this is absolutely inescapable, until we obtain some level of self-awareness on why we think the way we do.  In future blog posts, I’ll discuss other design heuristics and methodologies that are reflective of exactly those same types of mental dynamics, but at a higher v-Meme level.  And then, finally, we’ll wrap up with some speculation on how understanding higher-order connectivity can help us design the multiply connected, synergistic systems of the future.

Takeaway:  You can’t just wing it when it comes to the design of complex, technological systems.  You have to provide appropriate scaffolding that recognizes past Tribal Knowledge, known facts, the Laws of Physics, and whether there are enough donuts on the counter.  Because the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the law.  And if people are hungry, they won’t pay attention!

Credit where credit is due:  Lou Agosta, of the Chicago Empathy Project, pointed out to me that using the matryoshka analogy for empathy didn’t start with me.  Franz De Waal, in his seminal text, The Age of Empathy, he has equivalent mapping in the bottom three levels of his empathy model, and rightly deserves credit for being first to talk about the nested level of the bottom three levels of my Empathy Pyramid.