Seeing Patterns That Connect

A couple of days ago Chrissa Merron called from the OD Network to talk about the fireside chat that I and five other award winners would have at the upcoming Organization Development Network Conference in Baltimore. “I’m interested in topics and themes that might be interesting to discuss,” she said. The question challenged me. What do I think is the most important thing to be thinking about as a profession?

What jumped to mind immediately were the deep roots the ODN has in systems thinking and looking at organizations as organic, alive entities. I then mused on why the network would give The Grove the Members Award for contribution to the field. What does visualization have to do with OD? A lot, I thought.

I ended up free associating with Chrissa about the way in which our particular time is challenged more than ever to move to a systems level understanding of phenomena, and how impossible this is without display making, prototyping, and visualizing. It’s why Peter Senge puts’ mental models and systems thinking as two of the five essential components of a learning organization in his work, The Fifth Discipline, and teaches causal loop diagramming as a key skill in the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. It’s why Al Gore’s documentary got an academy award and few global warming articles get published without a map. It’s why 80% of the advances in complexity science have been made using computer visualization, to literally “look” at dynamic phenomena that remain unpredictable in detail, but exhibiting patterns of order when studied visually.

“The challenge of being a consultant to contemporary organizations is knowing where the boundaries are,” I found myself saying. “Can we really think about organizations within the bounding box of the traditional employee, when 40% or more of most organizations are contractors, and customers are being invited into the product and content creation business in every expanding networks of interaction?”

There is little question in my mind that the emerging mental models associated with living systems theory and ecology are more inclusive and sophisticated than the old engineering models from the age of industrialization, but at the same time that these are emerging, the world is shifting demographically to cities with few and fewer youth having primary experiences with nature. What will be the basis of this new work force understanding ecological metaphors?

At The Grove we know that something magic happens when people get out the markers and start drawing and visualizing on paper. The analogical, messy, unfolding nature of the work is exactly the kind of stimulation needed to think around corners and take leaps in the imagination. Doing it collectively softly and persistently brings people to a deeper group understanding of the patterns than connect.

While I know this from more than 30 years of professional work as a graphic facilitation and designer, in talking with Chrissa I couldn’t be sure that it will be enough to make a difference.

“We need to question some of the root values of the work we do as OD professionals if we are going to contribute to a real growth in collective ability to think systemically and act collaboratively. For all the creativity our work inspires, most of our clients are involving us graphically because they need alignment and discipline, and are struggling to create boundaries. There are so many information inputs today that fragmentation and drift are ever present.”

Environmentalists embrace systems thinking. But I still remember with a little chill the words of the chief of Region 9 for the Environmental Protection Agency back in the late 1970’s when I was leading a businessman’s problem trying to understand how the large San Francisco waste water bond issue that was passed at the time succeeded. It required the Regional Water Quality Board imposing a building ban on San Francisco to get it going. But we were told it was the EPA and the head of the state Resources Board, in the private breakfast near Sacramento, that forced the regional group to act. Sitting between two stacks of regulations, and two assistants that looked like they could have been on the line for the Green Bay Packers (the pre-eminent football team at the time), the director said. “Mark my words. If you are concerned about government control and challenges to civil right look to the environmental agencies. They are putting in place the mechanisms for control the likes of which we’ve never seen.”

This was well before 9/11, the Transportation Security Administration, 30-minute TV news, and a steady decline in reading and traditional forms of information. My point is that at the same time that systems awareness is possible with modern tools, interest in having a truly educated citizenry may be waning, and teaching children and adults how to problem solve and think systemically may be even harder still.

Is this something that OD consultants need to think about? I think so.