An Interview with Sharon Eakes

Sharon Eakes is an executive coach who works with leaders wanting to hone their interpersonal skills and enhance the systems in which they operate. As chair of the board for Pegasus Communications, a longtime Pegasus Conference attendee, and a participant this year as a coach in the teams program, Sharon brings multiple perspectives to the conference experience.

In the following interview with Leverage Points editor Vicky Schubert, she reflects on the importance of the conference to her own work and to the systems thinking and organizational learning communities.

LP: You have attended the Pegasus Conference every year since 1996. What sets it apart from other conferences and why is it so important to you?

SE: I always feel renewed by this conference on so many levels—head, heart, and spirit. Intellectually, I come away with ideas or practices that are stimulating and useful. Socially and professionally, it’s an indispensable connections point; I have remained connected to many of the people I’ve met at the conference, and we’ve become friends and resources for each other throughout the year. And then spiritually, there’s always something uplifting about it, a hopefulness. The keynotes often provide the sense that there’s a way out of this mess.

On top of all that, you get practical tools. This time, I got a terrific, well-thought out piece on mental models from Marc-Andre Olivier and an enormously useful look at how to design for team interdependence from Jack Regan (both of whose sessions will be available on audiotape). I find the combination of high-level thinking and pragmatism at this conference unusually satisfying.

LP: Are there also ways in which the conference has evolved over the last 10 years?

SE: There have been a couple changes in format that have been improvements. I’ve never been to another conference that incorporates 45-minute networking breaks. Those weren’t there in the beginning, but the conference designers added them in response to people’s requests. Most events have a 10- or 15-minute break between sessions. But 45 minutes is enough time to have a real conversation. Another format innovation was seating participants at conversation tables during the general sessions. I know those are a challenge to coordinate, but they allow for a lot of valuable cross-pollination of ideas.

There has also been an evolution in the make-up of the conference community. Over the years, the core business constituency has been augmented by more people from education, healthcare, and government. And there’s a growing compliment of international participants. It feels as if we now have a broader spectrum of sectors and people coming together in a way that generates a lot of new ideas and demonstrates that this approach can be used in so many arenas.

LP: That mix of sectors and interests puts the onus on the program designers to find the right balance of content that will be relevant and stimulating to systems thinkers of all kinds.

SE: That’s right. I think that cross-pollination creates opportunities for breakthrough thinking that wouldn’t occur in a community predominated by a single sector. For example, in the forum about the US Army’s training program led by Marilyn Darling and Joe Moore, I learned that the military has developed a whole lot of knowledge about adapting fast. And this is something that other sectors need to learn.

Pushing ourselves to borrow across sectors and to extrapolate from the experiences of others helps build our capacity for systems thinking. It’s consistent with a whole systems perspective to avoid narrow compartmentalization: “Oh, well, he’s in automotive; that’s not what I’m about.” I found the conversation by keynote speakers Rose von Thater-Braan, Leroy Little Bear, and Amethyst First Rider about the Native sciences provocative and generative in that sense.

LP: This year’s theme was “Embracing Interdependence: Effective and Responsible Action in Our Organizations and the World.” Do you have any stories from your experience at this year’s conference that give you hope that people are expanding their capacity for building effective relationships?

SE: Through the teams program, I got to work as a coach with a large group from a statewide child welfare system. Some years ago, this group sent a few people to the conference who had a powerful experience. As a result, they have been quietly making a difference in their individual areas ever since. This small group began to think, “How could we have this experience shared by more people?” So they got a grant and managed to bring a team of 14 people to the conference this year. This time, they represented a much bigger slice of the whole picture, including a state legislator, a few heads of agencies, and people representative of all different components of this very complex system.

The way they had created this team reflected their instinctive awareness of interdependence. They not only drew people from the all the various sectors of family policy, but they included a woman who had left the child welfare system to get a master’s degree in organizational systems. Her familiarity with the territory combined with her new knowledge of systems theory proved very useful. She stayed mostly on the outskirts, but every now and then offered an important observation that helped the group see itself more clearly.

The group came wanting to fix their system, of course, which they think is basically broken. But they also just wanted to get to know each other a little bit better and be exposed to this material. At the first meeting we had together, people wanted to vent. So they did that, just complaining about things in the system. At the next meeting, after they had been to only two sessions, some of the people said, “This is too complicated. We’ll never be able to do it.” And others said, “You know, let’s not try to solve everything. Let’s just hang in and see what we can pick up.” They began to talk to each other, and I sensed that the real mission was figuring out how they could have more effective relationships—or have relationships at all—rather than just roles.

Over the course of the conference, I actually saw relationships shift and people get unstuck. The group members started talking with each other about little pieces from the program that they were excited about. They also opened up and networked with other participants, including people from child welfare systems in both New Zealand and the Netherlands. The group from New Zealand had struggled with many of the same issues and was further along. And so, they left there with contacts and promises to exchange resources. It was very exciting.

Also, as a coach, I was able to introduce them to Kris Wile in the Causal Loop Clinic, who happens to be keenly interested in child welfare issues. She and the group hit it off right away, and they are in fact making arrangements for Kris to visit and help them with their loops. It was magical.

LP: What is your perspective on the strategic importance of the conference to Pegasus’s mission and to sustaining the organization as a vital force for change?

SE: I think of it as very important. It’s the visible, palpable, experiential place where get people energized by applying the tools and concepts of systems thinking. There are other conferences that touch on systems thinking, but none that I know of that brings together leading thinkers, old and new, and a variety of practice fields in the same way. This conference is a pivotal renewal process for both old timers and newcomers who’ve stumbled into a systems way of working and thinking or who have been working with these ideas in an isolated way.

I would love to find some way to help people who are so energized at the conference to take their experience home and share it well. This year, I bought the DVD of Peter Senge’s keynote presentation. I have set up two gatherings where we’re going to invite a bunch of people and view the program as an occasion for conversation. We won’t have a big agenda. A lot of these people know that I go to this conference every year, and I’ve often shared the audiotapes. But I haven’t done it in a gathering, so I’m going to try something different this time and see how it goes. I would be grateful to hear ideas other people have about bringing the excitement home and helping to grow the systems thinking community.