by Robert Fritz

Robert Fritz spoke at the 2010 Systems Thinking in Action Conference. After the event, he generously made a podcast of his talk available. Below is a condensed version of the beginning of his presentation.

Let me just start with something really pretty basic, which is that great leadership makes all the difference. The converse is also true. Terrible leadership has been detrimental and destructive to a lot of organizations.

Leaders are embedded in structures that have certain tendencies. If you don't change the underlying structures, any change effort will not last. But people do not think structurally. Leaders have to be able to change the underlying structural dynamics if the underlying structural dynamics are not conducive to change, to growth, to good things happening. Structure determines behavior.

Here's a common pattern: Someone is not performing well in a position. Everything is tried to change the situation and make it better, to try to improve their performance. Nothing works. Eventually the person is replaced and, six month later, the new person is performing like the predecessor. It's a very common experience.

In this example, the structure is more causally dominant than people's talents and abilities, their good intentions, their past experience, their creativity and their capacity for innovation, and a whole host of other really great attributes that they would have as individuals in a different structure.

One of the funny bits of The Fifth Discipline is when Peter [Senge] writes, "You take a group of people who have very high IQs--125, 130, 140--and you put them together in an organization, and the collective IQ goes down to 60 or 70." There's something about the way certain things are structured that can bring out either the best or the worst in people.

What's the implication? Everything we say about human motivation is not as influential as the underlying structures people are in.

Systems Thinking in Action Conference
October 31-November 2, 2011
Westin Seattle Hotel
Seattle, Washington

By John Abele

Recently, Margaret (Meg) Wheatley (with Deborah Frieze) wrote an insightful article called "Leadership in the Age of Complexity: From Hero to Host," Resurgence Magazine, Winter 2011. In it, she describes the wonderfully classic paradox that in order to gain control, you must cede control.

That concept raises the issue of exactly what "control" is. Suffice it to say that it refers to having a goal and achieving it, with others and without needing to take credit for the result. Although, ironically, if you do master that skill, others will begin to connect the fact that when you are around, they do better.

Meg points out that most cultures make assumptions about leaders that are taken for granted: that they have all the answers, that the followers will follow, and that more control produces better results--particularly for big, risky projects. That's why CEOs, managing directors, etc. "get the big bucks."

But complex problems require integrating many different types of skills and creating an environment where the collective intelligence of a diverse set of minds (age, experience, knowledge, culture, geography) is harnessed to solve these problems. Together, people identify the problems, analyze, speculate, debate, experiment, and build and test ideas for their solutions. And maybe even rethink the goals.