Shownotes
Ralph Stacey Matrix
Leadership Centre graph
see: https://www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/artofchangemaking/theory/complexity/
transcript
Kate: Hello! And welcome to “Leading in Conversation”. We are going to try something a little bit new today, aren’t we, Nelis?
Nelis: Yes, we are, and it is quite a challenge, because I have no idea where we’re going to end up. We are going to explore verbally, just chat about this topic without exactly knowing where we’re going to land.
Kate: So this is a little Christmas treat for you, something different. And we’ll see where it goes. So let me start out by explaining how this topic came about. I’ve been doing a leadership course recently and one of the things we looked at in our last residential was this matrix by Ralph Stacey. Now, it will probably help you to see this, and there are two ways you can do that. You can either visit our website leadinginconversation.net. Or you can Google “Stacey matrix”. We’re going to talk about the version of it that’s on our website. You will get slightly different versions if you Google, there are lots of different versions out there, but it will help you to be able to visualise it. Nelis. Why don’t you describe the matrix, first of all?
Nelis: Yes, let’s describe it. And people who are just listening will still get the gist of it. So the matrix basically has two axes. So one is the level of certainty. Are you very certain or very close to certainty? Or are you very far from certainty?
Kate: And that’s along the bottom. The certainty axis is the horizontal.
Nelis: Yes, and then you’ve got the vertical axis which is about agreement. Are we close to agreement? Does everybody basically have the same opinion about it? Or is it far from agreement? Are there a lot of different opinions around it? And people go in every direction about what the solution actually is. So when you visualise that, certainty versus agreement, when you are in the bottom left area where most people agree, and most people are pretty certain about what’s going to happen. Then you are in the zone of control, and that’s indicated as the “Control” zone where you just need to do a good job in executing. When you get into the region where that is much less the case, the whole middle area, that is the area where it’s complex. where agreement is not a given, the outcomes are not a given, and you’ve got to work together to find ways forward. And that is described as the area where you want to convene. Now, there’s also a third area, and, Kate, why don’t you describe that?
Kate: First of all, I’m going to say, you what we’ve been talking about in this podcast – Conversational leadership – is what you do in that central zone where it’s complex when there’s not total agreement, not total certainty. Things are complex, not complicated, and various graphs, the charts that you’ll see online, have “complicated” between “control”, the control zone and the complex zone. But in that complex zone, in a sense that’s what we’ve been talking about, how to convene, how to gather people together to get input, the diversity, hearing from all voices. Because when you’re not certain, and when you don’t agree, it’s really good to get together and discuss things. Now, I was all very happy looking at this chart and thinking, “Yeah, that’s where we are. That’s where we do convening, conversational leadership”. But then, if you go further up diagonally up towards the top right corner, you enter what’s called the chaotic zone and this is what caught my attention recently, because I have been sensing chaos in our work. We have been in a complex zone for a long time, and are getting probably quite comfortable with living there, with medium amounts of agreement and certainty. But it seems in our work particularly right now, we are entering into this space where there is not a lot of agreement, and there’s not a lot of certainty about things. And I wonder if that resonates with other people, as well. In the world around us things are happening so quickly. Things are emerging that we don’t know much about, like AI, is changing the world of work, the world for all of us. We’re not necessarily in agreement on how to use it. We don’t really know how to use it, and things are changing all the time. So keeping on top of that chaos in that chaotic zone. And the leadership approach that Stacey recommends for that zone is called “sense and act”. So you have “execution” in the bottom left corner, you have “convening” in the middle and you have “sensing and acting” in the top right.
Nelis: Yes. and we want to explore that area today because it goes against what we’ve been talking about for the last two years. And sometimes you need that. And it’s good to challenge ourselves. How do you act in a place where agreement is just not going to be possible. You can convene all you want but people are going to go in every direction. The polarisation is so strong that convening won’t be enough and the outcomes are so uncertain that you can talk all you want, but you’re not going to get to a place where everybody’s reasonably comfortable, that this is the right direction. And that is this zone of chaos, that as an organisation you want to avoid getting into, but sometimes you can’t. But it’s also the place where new things happen. It actually can be an exciting place.
Kate: Yes, so actually, on the version of Stacey’s matrix that we’re using, the space between complexity and chaos is called the zone of innovation. And if you’ve done any reading about complexity science, the edge of chaos is where there is great productivity, novelty emerges. And we won’t go into that in any depth now but that’s where innovation happens and happens well. If you try to innovate in the control zone it’s not going to work. You’ve got to be on the edge of chaos for it to have the right environment for new things to emerge.
Nelis: And there’s another version of this model which the Leadership Center has brought out, which, as the first part of that area, says “saying yes to the mess, experiments, uncertainty”. And I find that interesting. So to what extent are we, as organisations, able to say yes to the mess? And how do you deal with that? What kind of leadership is needed in the mess? And I find that a quite invigorating kind of topic to say, “Okay, what does that mean?” And how do you avoid becoming too sort of dictatorial because somebody will need to make decisions, and there’s no agreement. How do you then have healthy leadership patterns in that zone?
Kate: And I think that the version of Stacey’s matrix that the Leadership Center has put out is really helpful, actually Nelis. Maybe we’ll put that onto the website as well. It contrasts the bottom left corner which it calls “ordinary management”. It’s where, it’s that technical rational decision making simple structures, effective procedures, monitoring coordination, providing direction. It’s all the things we’ve set up over the years to make a business or organisation funtion well. And that’s fine when you’re close to agreement and near to certainty. But when you’re in the top right, far from agreement, far from certainty, they describe it as, that’s when leadership is necessary, or “extraordinary management”. Ordinary management won’t suffice when you’re in that top right space, and I think they merge complexity and chaos there more than we would. But, as Nelis said, they list things like “saying yes to the mess, experiments, uncertainty, encouraging connectivity, conversation, building networks”. I think that’s all things that we’ve talked about as part of conversational leadership. But then those adaptive issues, wicked issues, that are the ones that you can’t just rely on your ordinary proven approaches to solve. You have to find different solutions and bring different people in to try and work out what they are. An interesting one listed there also is challenging habits and assumptions and containing anxiety. Nelis, what does it feel like in the chaotic zone? We’re kind of entering it a little bit. Which is why this resonated with us. And we decided, “Hey, let’s do a podcast talking about it”.
Nelis: Yes. anxiety is a good word there. And the interesting part of that is you need to contain it as a leader in order to not communicate angst to your followers, because if there is, if your leaders are giving a sense that they’re lost, total chaos emerges. And so how do you enter into the chaotic zone while… and as a leader feel anxious and and still communicate a sense of control or a sense of yeah, being on top of things. Trust is key. So personally, I resonate with a sense of anxiety. I have no idea where it’s going to go, and sometimes it feels quite overwhelming, because there’s so many things coming at you at the same time. We’re talking about our partnership environment. We’re talking about technical developments in the whole AI space, the whole area where we’re working in is changing dramatically. Our financial models are starting to fall apart or need to be replaced. All of those things.
Kate: There are a lot of new new partners emerging, new players in the field and we’re trying to figure out, “Well, okay, how do we fit here?”.
Nelis: And in some ways that is complex. But it gets into this area of chaos where there’s so much uncertainty, so much disagreement, that you’ve got people going all directions at the same time. And for me as a leader, it is that sense of “I have no idea where it is going to go”. At the same time holding on to certain key beliefs. And I think that is key in that. So you’ve got that sense of uncertainty. You’re not sure yourself. You certainly disagree with a lot of others about it. But at the same time that is when you need to hold on to what you really believe in, and that’s spiritually, but also practically, what are your core values? And anchor your actions and your sensing on that. And I think that is one of the things that comes to mind for me primarily. I don’t know. How do you feel about that?
Kate: You know that I don’t do well with chaos and disorder! I think those who work with me will know that they’ve seen me…Holding anxiety is not one of my gifts. I think you do it quite well. But I’m a very expressive person. I’m a very emotional person. What I feel is usually very apparent to other people. So this is an area I need to grow in if chaos is going to be somewhere where we’re living a lot more. Let’s talk about sensing and acting. I’m very comfortable with convening now. Executing, fine. Sensing and acting to me sounds a little bit contrary to some of the stuff we’ve been stressing about convening. You know, you get the right people in the room. You get diversity. Everyone has wisdom. Does that all go out the window, do you think, when we’re in this corner where Stacey’s saying, we need to sense and act? What does that mean to you?
Nelis: And that’s where we get into the unpredictability of even this podcast because…
Kate: We’re in the chaos zone.
Nelis: This is a chaotic podcast! I think the key here is in some ways bringing those two things close together. You can’t get agreement in the sense of what you normally do in the convening zone. Looking for ways to move forward with the highest level of buy-in you can possibly get. But there is still a need to get the wisdom from more than one person, because sensing to me is not just an individual thing. It’s not about me sensing as a leader and just doing it. The systems that we talked about in all of the other podcasts, the wisdom of the group, bringing in new ideas, new perspectives. That’s still going to be important,
Kate: …hearing from all parts of the system.
Nelis: Exactly. So the challenge is, of course, that the changes are often so fast that you can’t do it. You can’t expect the same outcome of full agreement, but you still need to pattern your response on the same kind of ideas. And that’s why I think the merging of the two is not bad. It gives you tools.
Kate: So maybe it will help us if we contrast sensing with knowing. And that’s when you don’t have the certainty. We don’t know, necessarily, what the right response is going to be to the next decision we have to make. Say, on the situation we’re facing currently, we can’t know exactly but what does it mean to sense? There’s a tentativeness, isn’t there? There’s a – and I like how you said – bringing those two closer together. Sensing and acting, experimentation: “Well, let’s probe. Let’s take a step in this direction. See what happens. Okay. That’s not going to work. Take a step back. Let’s try another”. I don’t know, I’m just exploring, obviously. We always say to each other, “I’m verbally processing right now”. And that is totally what we’re doing here.
Nelis: Yes, and I love that.
Kate: And we’re not feeling anxious at all, are we?
Nelis: But I think it actually touches on something that I think is important. We have enough trust, and we have enough patterns to fall back on in our podcast, trust between us. Key things are in place that allow us…
Kate: We have signals that we use when we want to speak, when I want to tell you you’ve gone on for too long.
Nelis: Exactly.
Kate: We have a history. We have patterns. We have expectations of how this is going to go.
Nelis: And that allows us to go into that chaotic zone with some sense of trust that will go well. It’ll all be well. And I think that organizationally actually works as well. If there is enough trust in leadership, if you have patterns of convening and sharing with people sometimes, when that’s not possible, you’ve got to make snap decisions. You can’t come to agreement. You have a leader who basically is going to say, we’re going to do those three experiments. And I’ve got no idea whether any of them will work. There is enough trust in the system , enough patterns to fall back on that you’re okay. And I think that is going to be key. So trust, relationships, are still going to be absolutely important.
Kate: I think that’s a really key point. But how can we prepare ourselves? Just as we were preparing for this podcast, we were talking about borrowing from other domains such as crisis response. We talked about how people working in crisis response, in medical emergency response, have scenarios, they have templates, they’ve prepared for different scenarios. And I’m not sure that we could actually do that. But, knowing your systems well enough that you can actually improvise, thinking through what are the kind of crises that we could anticipate. And I think we’ve done that a little bit in the past, around issues that come up, we might have media exposure coming. We’ll prepare press releases, we’ll make sure we know who our spokespeople are in those scenarios, and who our spokespeople are not. And you know, those are some chaotic scenarios that we have prepared for in the past.
Nelis: Yes, and I think that what you started saying here is really important. So when you look at crisis response, the three Ps that you’re referring to – plan, prepare, and practice – still apply. So you don’t know what the situation is going to be, it’s completely chaotic. The unpredictability is the norm in some ways. At the same time, if you have a foundation of elements that you are agreed on, you sort of deconstruct it. What do we agree on, and what are we ready to do? What are we ready to practise? So that when the chaos ensues we’re ready to deal with that. I find that a really helpful concept. Because at the higher level, to reiterate what we do believe in, the kind of leadership we want to provide. Having the practice of quickly convening on the things we can convene on is going to be key to actually survive. And that preparedness, the sense of having practised that, having done that enough, having planned for the unplannable, I think, is going to be really helpful when you enter into that zone of chaos.
Kate: I think, looking back at the pandemic is quite interesting, because that was chaotic at the beginning. We had to pivot very quickly on a number of things and because we had already practised convening quite a lot, because we had already moved into hybrid events, into
Zoom meetings, I think we were able to pivot a lot more quickly than other people.
and I think that relational foundation of trust that we’d spent quite a long time building…
Our relationships were good at that point, and I think when the chaos hit, I think that helped us to move quite swiftly. For example, pivoting our international conference in 6 weeks from an in person meeting in April, to a hybrid event. No, not hybrid, to a completely online event.
Nelis: Yes, I love that, what you’re saying about relationships. And often we equate relationship with agreement. And I think they’re completely different things. And so you can have complete disagreement, but have really strong relationships. And I think that is going to be key to survive the chaotic zone well, because you are allowing yourself and the group to do the give and take when you disagree, because the relational foundations are in place. So I think that is, that’s actually as we’re talking, I realise how important that is to disconnect agreement from relationship.
Kate: That’s really interesting. And I know that you and our colleague Karsten, as fellow Dutch men, often say that you agree to disagree. That’s always been a good example to me of how you can be really good friends with someone, even if you disagree with them on a given matter. And I think, you know, the thing we have certainty on is that we are committed to the cause. We are committed to good relationships. We are committed to trust and seeking to understand and walk forward together.
Nelis: Yes. And I think that is another part of what we are discovering together as we talk about it. So in some ways you need to disentangle or analyse what is it that we have low certainty and low agreement on? And what is it that we actually have lots of agreement on? And what are we certain about? And pulling that apart and saying, yeah, it’s not everything. It probably is only certain things. And that allows you then to actually have a foundation of agreement, certainty, execution, that helps to survive the chaotic parts.
Kate: Yes, I really like that. I wonder if that’s something we need to do as a leadership team- around this current situation that we’ve been discussing – is actually get together and state the things that we are certain about, the things we have agreement about and in a sense doing the planning and the preparation, putting that foundation in that, these are non-negotiables for us. In whichever of the multitude of ways this situation may unfold, here’s our sort of bedrock, these are the things we agree on. These are the things we’re committed to. And that will provide us a bit more certainty and agreement actually, from which to operate.
Nelis: Yes. And I think if you do that, you allow the trust to stay intact. And actually, if you disentangle what is chaotic and what is complex, you also continue to have the right kind of leadership approach, convening people, having the right kind of dialogue that shows people that you haven’t abandoned that. You are still committed to your principles. It’s just on certain things, something else is needed.
Kate: And it’s really important to stress, I think, in a time of chaos and crisis, it’s important to stress those fundamentals, to reassert the things that we hold to as an organisation, our values, you know, our mission, our vision and say, “We’re still about this, even though all of this is changing. This is who we are. This is what we do. This is where we’re going”. And that’s part of holding the anxiety, is giving people that security and stability.
Nelis: Yes, because people need that. Because we had earlier in our conversation, some people like change, but I don’t think anyone loves chaos, and if you sort of contain that by showing, “Okay, this is the chaotic part. But here is what we do control. This is, yes, this is complex, but we have a handle on it”. You allow yourself to contain it and not give the impression that the whole world is falling apart. Which is what happens when people panic, they hone in so much on the not-knowing that it feels like everything is falling apart, which may not be the case actually.
Kate: And so as a leadership team, we need to do our planning, preparing our scenario planning, etc., so that we can lead confidently into the unknown, and yes, be there for our staff.
Nelis: Yes, and be able to have enough of that trust that you’re going to make the highly unpopular decisions that half the group disagrees with. Because you need to be able to do that.
Kate: Well, Nelis, I think that we have not only a plan for one of our future team meetings there, talking about this. I think we have a podcast.
Nelis: I think we do. One of the things we didn’t discuss is how speed relates all of that.
Kate: Oh yes. Do you want to just talk about that before we wrap up?
Nelis: As I was looking at this whole matrix, I realised that speed is not one of the axes. And at the same time, when you think about chaos, speed is so much a factor in that, because change happens so quickly that you don’t have time to convene and decisions are needed now, and they change every two months. And that kind of situation. So it is interesting that a lack of certainty and lack of agreement sort of has as a by-product the speed of change, because things go in different directions very suddenly. So it’s just an interesting observation that when you get into that mode you also need to have, you need to be ready to turn on a dime, and do a quick turnaround, pivot very quickly. And again, I think that crisis preparedness helps you to also deal with the question of speed. And one of the things that I was thinking about is in the chaotic zone, do you actually have data to do sensing or is… if your data is always 3 or 6 months old, it may be completely irrelevant. So I think as a leader, you need to create systems – and that’s again planning and preparing and practising – that the data you have is actually up-to-date, so that you can make quick decisions.
Kate King: So I think that’s a wrap for today, Nelis.
Nelis: I agree. And I’m excited about this. Actually, there are more outcomes than I expected. It is actually quite actionable. We have some ideas that you can actually take into leading in chaos. And I hope that our listeners find this helpful as well.
Kate King: And just linking back to conversational leadership, I think what we’ve done today is, we started out with a topic, we started out with a kind of stimulus, this matrix from Ralph Stacey, and said, “Let’s have a conversation about this, and see where it goes”. And actually in building off each other and having no boundaries for the conversation, and just yeah, bouncing off each other’s ideas we’ve actually come up with some actionable steps for ourselves as a leadership team, which is kind of good, kind of shows…
Nelis: … that conversational leadership actually works!
Kate: Sometimes when we’re facing big new things like this, we just need to clear some space and say, let’s just talk, let’s have no limits on this, and let’s just brainstorm together. See where it goes. Thanks, Nelis. This was fun.
Nelis: Thank you, Kate. And I’m looking forward to our next one with, I think, a guest again.
Kate King: Yes, we have a couple of guests lined up. So that’s going to be fun. Happy Christmas, and best wishes for the New Year to you all.