THE STORY BEHIND ORGANIZATIONAL METAMORPHOSIS 101 — 3 VIEWS

A View From 30,000 Feet

Caterpillars consume up to 70X their body weight each day before their passage through metamorphosis. Humans, comprising only an infinitesimal fraction of the life-mass on this planet are currently “consuming” their living support system at an equally dramatic rate.

Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth”, focused on one of this planet’s many “adversity trends,” global warming. On July 8, ’06, Tom Atlee (www.Co-Intelligence.org) sent out an email entitled “An Even Deeper Inconvenient Truth”. It sums up the challenge and opportunity that we face as humans:

"We have evolved to create problems that are much bigger than we can readily solve. Our next evolutionary leap will change that. The only way we will remain in the great drama of life is to make that leap.

In short, this is our predicament: We can co-create global warming much easier than we can co-create a stable climate. Not only that, we can co-create population explosions, chemical pollution, weapons of mass destruction, species extinction, and poverty just by living our ordinary lives -- whereas solving these problems is a major challenge. Our social systems are so designed that when we each act intelligently on our own self-interest, we collectively move towards global destruction.

Once I realized that, I knew that solving each of these problems would not solve our propensity to create more problems. The Bigger Problem is deeper: To overcome our biological limitations as individuals, we have co-evolved collective systems and capacities -- cultural, social, economic, political, scientific, media, educational, public relations, etc. But the flaw in all that is that we have designed them primarily for comfort, profit, power, control, and entertainment rather than for collective intelligence, sanity, and wisdom.

That is what needs to change. And that is what is missing from powerful wake-up calls like Al Gore's remarkable film AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. They tell us that the change needed to deal with global warming is the political will generated by millions of individuals, a great "rising to the occasion".

But the change that is actually needed is in the collective systems that prevented us, as a society, from seeing clearly and responding to global warming in the first place. They are the same systems that prevent us from seeing clearly and responding to every other great problem, threat, and opportunity we face.

And there's more: It isn't just a matter of solving these problems or increasing our capacities. The changes that are demanded will transform us as a civilization, as a species. If we pass the test we have created for ourselves in the 21st Century, we will BE different, individually and collectively. We will have made the evolutionary leap required of us.

That evolutionary leap will be different in kind from every other evolutionary leap in the 13.7 billion year history of our universe: It will involve the ability of life to evolve CONSCIOUSLY -- to intentionally and wisely redesign itself to serve not only its own survival but the well-being of the whole of life.

And that will be something new under the sun, something of ineffable beauty and grace, a collective dream worthy of our best efforts today, when we have the resources we need to take that remarkable step together, to make that unprecedented difference in ourselves and our world..."

 

FireHawk and I picked up on Tom Atlee’s theme in our emerging eBook, Bay Area 2020—An Infinite Game, where we depict our “critical juncture as a species” as a choice between “Path A” and “Path B.” Path A would correspond to David Korten’s “Great Turning” and Path B to his “Great Unraveling”.

We, as a species, have an infinite number of possible futures. The Path A and Path B curves bound those possibilities. Path A seems impossible to most of us because we haven’t developed the capacity to “change… the collective systems that prevented us, as a society, from seeing clearly and responding to global warming in the first place.” Our man-made systems, our organizations in all sectors, are plagued by at least three design flaws:

1. A myopic definition of success.
2. Mechanistic, control-over-people cultures.
3. No provision for on-going generative design.

Because of the pervasiveness, the self-fulfilling nature, and mutual reinforcement of these three design flaws, Path A would seem to be an impossible dream—as impossible as the life of a butterfly would seem to a caterpillar.

However, just as the “seeds” for the butterfly exist within the caterpillar, so the seeds for “Path A” organizations exist in today’s organizations in all sectors.

A View From Inside The Chrysalis

Please read Nori Huddle’s delightful and strategically synchronous “Imaginal Cell Story”. It is this story that inspired both the title and the broad strategy for our OM 101 offering.

My 30+ years of work with organizational learning, design and change supports the notion that there are “Imaginal Souls” (Thank you, Craig Neal) scattered throughout most every organization in every sector who know in their heart-of-hearts that there’s got to be a better way. Many are already taking creative initiatives. Some are discovering that it’s dangerous—especially when their initiatives are so different from the organization’s normal patterns that the “immune system thinks they are enemies… and gobbles them up”. Most are unaware of what’s possible and are “keeping on keeping on” for lack of awareness and/or opportunities.

Organizational Metamorphosis 101 is designed to support leaders and practitioners in discovering organic, highly leveraged ways to begin to transform their organizations from finite to infinite games. OM 101 will support game-ready infinite players, “Imaginal Souls,” in finding themselves and each other—“clumping and clustering” in ways that enable them to see ways to help our organizations transcend their “caterpillar phase.”

A Genesis View

I experienced my first vision of the possibility for organizational metamorphosis in late1976. My mentor Herb Stokes, then a pioneering living-systems organization design architect within Procter & Gamble, arranged for me and a couple of Exxon’s Baytown Refinery managers to visit P&G’s Albany, Georgia 1000-employee paper plant. Our encounter with their “technician team-based” organization was an epiphany experience for each of us. We had our first exposure to how “butterfly-like” a complex manufacturing plant could become. We experienced highly evolved technician teams (40% African-American, 20% women) achieving breakthrough business results, coordinating their interactions with other teams and managing their own training and development — all in the deep south during times of incredible racial and gender strife. This plant has recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of continuous standard-setting performance. There has been a generative ripple effect throughout the surrounding community and P&G as a whole. That pioneering organization design has been an important inspiration for me ever since.

In the late ‘90s I was given the opportunity to develop and evolve leadership action-learning expeditions for managers and executives in a global high tech corporation. This experience catalyzed the development of a robust set of “Wholeness Lenses” and “Design Principles for Generative Initiatives”. These are now available on TheInfiniteGames.org web site in the Palette of Possibilities section.

In January, 2000 I was given the opportunity to serve as architect to an innovative approach to employee and leadership development at Granite Construction, Inc. We evolved a strategy to weave the work of employee development into the fabric of the operating organizations. We extended the “action-learning expedition” concept in a way that not only pioneered a breakthrough in the effectiveness of developmental work, but also served as a pragmatic integrating mechanism for its many relatively autonomous business units. Granite Construction has subsequently been selected as one of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies To Work For four years in a row. Coincidentally, GVA’s stock price has tripled from January, 2000 to January, 2007.

It was also in January, 2000 that Marilyn (my life partner) and I initiated our first Pathfinder Circle. This advanced leadership development “laboratory” was inspired by Marilyn’s organic dissertation entitled, “The Transformational Journey of Business Leaders”, and was yet another form of the “action-learning expedition”. This potent learning/growth adventure is now in its 8th season. For a more detailed description of Pathfinder Circles, click here.

Organization Metamorphosis 101 is yet another pioneering action-learning adventure. It’s intended to provide a chrysalis-like context for equipping Imaginal Souls—game-ready Infinite Players—with a safe space, with transformational support, and with a community of allies. All are essential when we undertake the special work of organizational metamorphosis within the systems we serve.

The real story of OM 101 is one that we will co-create together. We have the opportunity to co-create both the storyline as co-create our unique roles in that story. We will be a commitment to accelerate the rate at which we consciously evolve—both our selves and our systems.

Organization Metamorphosis 101 Description
Michael Ray Endorsement

March 5 VisionHolder Call on Organizational Metamorphosis 101 with Bill Veltrop.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.