Shownotes

Emergence: A disruption in the ongoing social construction of reality is stimulated or engaged in a way that leads to a more complex re-organization.

Narrative change: A change to one or more core story-lines that influence shared meaning-making takes place.

Generativity: A generative image is introduced or surfaces that provides new and compelling alternatives for thinking and acting.

Definitions taken from: Bushe & Marshak: Companion to the BMI Series in Dialogic OD

Further reading:Bushe, G.R. & Storch, J. (2015) Generative Image: Sourcing Novelty, from: From Bushe, G. R. & Marshak R. J. (eds.) (2015) Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change.

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Leading in Conversation. Today we’re going to talk about something that was a huge “Aha” moment for me when I first encountered it, and has been critical in my understanding of how change happens since then. As you might have already picked up, I’m a big fan of Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak’s dialogic organisational development (DOD). Conversational leadership and dialogic organisation development are not exactly the same thing largely because organisational development is usually done from an external consultant perspective. However, they’re part of the same family of approaches and they have the same goals in mind. Bushe and Marshak describe three, underlying processes, which are key to enabling change. We want to dig into those today, don’t we Nelis? 

Yes, absolutely. I hope that each of these three can be unpacked to the point that they start making sense and how they work together. 

Do you want to  run through what those three are before we start digging into them?

Yes, happy to. So first is emergence and disruption. The second one is narrative change. And the third is generative images. It’s really neat how those three go together. 

Yes, they really do work together well, don’t they? I think a key principle behind these change principles is that language and how meaning is made, and the narratives which guide people’s experiences, are central to organisational change. 

And that’s why conversation is so important. Language and communication kind of go together, don’t they?

So first up: emergence and disruption. Nelis, I know you are fascinated by the application of principles of complexity science to leadership and daily life. Can you talk a little bit about the concept of emergence and the role disruption has to play in creating novelty and therefore change? 

Yes, I’d love to. As you said, I’m always fascinated by that idea of complexity. It comes from the Natural Sciences and it flows deeply into what we’re talking about, that are social realities because social realities are by definition complex. Emergence is a term from complexity theory that describes how patterns emerge that are not planned, or are not obvious from the underlying things. So you have all of these underlying patterns, but they create something completely new, that is actually unpredictable. In the social sciences, that means that this happens without planning, without anyone thinking that through ahead of time, it happens through self-organisation. A neat example is a flock of birds and then you see those beautiful patterns of birds flying in all sorts of incredible shapes. But what happens is that each bird just references a few other birds around them and together this fascinating cloud happens. And people in organisations do the same. They don’t think ahead of time how to organise themselves, completely. You just have a few reference points and you act on that. The effect is often surprising and dynamic. So when you understand that, you start to think quite differently about organising social reality because they’re often self organised. And that is true for change as well. Because to implement change is not something like, you just build a different machine. It is influencing how those things work together, how those clouds of birds, or clouds of people interact with one another. So and that’s just hugely impactful in the way you talk about change because organisations are always changing whether we recognize it or not. And as a leader you are part of that cloud. You’ve got to go with the flow while finding ways to set up conditions that help people to kind of create new reference points, to think about things differently, and to get a new understanding of what is actually happening. 

And that’s where narrative change and generative images will come in later. But what about disruption? What does that have to do with emergence? 

Complexity science has seen that change actually doesn’t happen the way you often think. Systems are often incredibly stable. They don’t change, because people compensate. Actually, nature does the same. Stable systems are the norm but then because there’s underlying complexity at some point you get to a ‘Tipping Point’ when were suddenly change happens, and it’s often quite unexpected, and that’s what you can call the bifurcation point. When you’re in that space of systems that are becoming kind of unstable, that’s when disruption happens. Then you can flip the completely new pattern in creating a change that you didn’t expect. And again, that is emerging, you can’t completely predict that. 

Yes, and obviously disruption is nothing new. Most leadership approaches assume disruption at some point and a lot of it happens, without our involvement, or desire. Consider the last two years. I was reflecting on this earlier. We can probably understand the power of disruption to bring novelty and change in a whole new way, after the global pandemic experience. Just thinking of, for example, the speed at which vaccines developed, and the way the scientific community made changes to their processes so quickly to work together around the globe to bring these vaccines into being. Also, the shift to remote working, which we could never have imagined before really at this scale. But, you know, half the people down this side of my street, we’re all working at home now. In the summer we can hear our Zoom conversations through the open windows. And Zoom itself, the explosion of Zoom: even the owners of Zoom could not have planned or dreamt that their product would become a household name, or even a verb – to zoom – across the entire world. No strategic planner could have planned that expansion of Zoom, which the disruption of the pandemic caused. It’s incredible when you think about what’s happened because of the pandemic. A great example of emergence through disruption. 

Yes, and then the question is, of course, to what extent can you induce that, can you create change? Because the leader’s role is to help organisations change to deal with new realities. And the reality is that most systems, as I said earlier, resist change, so it’s not as easy as you think – just to throw a wrench in the gearbox is not a way to create helpful change. It’s an art in a way, to deal with that change, with that complexity, and leverage what happens towards positive new emerging patterns. As a leader you look for opportunities to work with the disruptions that are already happening, and help people to cope with that and to create a way to adapt together and it really is about doing that together and that helps by giving new points of view, new insights, by creating deep discussion. We talked last time about diversity because that’s what it takes. It’s all those viewpoints to help the whole system to deal with that disruption in a helpful way. 

Yes, I think we probably need to add the caveat here that, you know, we’re not promoting inflicting disruption on people, on organisations, on staff. It’s not pleasant. Although sometimes disruption can be very creative. But we have a duty of care as leaders not to inflict pain and suffering on our staff if at all possible! So what we’re talking about, like you said, is working with disruption as it occurs, as many as all of us have done in the last two years, to engage the potential of those unplanned disruptions. One example for us is that it meant that in some of our organisational units the growth of national leadership, as expats have had to return to their passport countries, and that’s, you know, serendipitous change, as we’ve been working towards that anyway, but it was accelerated in some places by the disruption of the pandemic. 

But we’re also talking about finding gentle ways to seed change and see what happens when that disruption occurs. 

Let me say something here because I think it’s important to understand that in some ways the disruptions will happen so we work with it. Another part of it, I think, that also Bushe and Marshak talk about is, that you actually make the disruption that’s happening visible, because a lot of people don’t realise that disruption is actually happening and then go to the group with that and say, hey, have you seen what’s actually happening? You suddenly then create a new dynamic that allows people to come to grips with that and you introduce disruption that you didn’t artificially create, but that was there anyway.

Sometimes we need to reframe disruption or crises for ourselves so that we see them in a positive light, not a negative light. What was it you were saying last episode about survival or opportunity mindset? 

Yes, the opportunity mindset versus the survival. And yes, that gets us actually to the second point we wanted to talk about because that’s a very natural bridge into narratives.

…

So, narrative change. What are narratives? 

Narratives are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense about the world. To make sense of the world, to make sense of the organisation we work in, about our role in the organisation, what a stakeholder soes, a customer, etc. So, that’s all built up of stories that are told to each other, to ourselves. Narratives are very powerful, enabling us to think about the reality in ways that make sense to us. It’s that sense-making part. But they can also restrict us because it can stop us looking at things from a different way because that narrative then becomes like the glasses through which you see the world. 

Do you have any examples of that?

One example, at the beginning of the new era of the pandemic, was that I noticed that I was walking into the bank with a mask on and I just had to laugh at myself. Like, you would have been arrested as a potential bank robber, if you had walked into the bank just a year before. Now, I would have been thrown out of the bank, if I didn’t have a mask! 

Yes, we all do it. Yes. I’ve been into a bank, wearing a mask and never thought about that before. But the narrative changed there, it’s okay to wear masks in banks now. 

If you did a little bit deeper, the narrative is, the risk of getting Covid is much higher than the risk of you being a robber! It is that thinking about risk that changed.

Definitely. Yes, that’s really interesting. Isn’t it? For these sorts of changes to occur, of course, we talked – I think in the first episode – about how the philosophical background to conversational leadership is social constructionism. So narratives have to be socially agreed upon for them to work. And the shift really only works if everyone’s agreeing that together. If you had just suddenly decided that you could walk into a bank, wearing a mask because you were afraid of catching something, but no one else was working off that same narrative, you would have been arrested. So there’s this element of social agreement around the narratives, but we don’t really discuss it ever. They are agreements that come into being, they gradually emerge, I guess, unless you create them deliberately. 

So let’s go a little bit deeper than the superficial thing with banks. A really important example in society at large is how we look at the role of the Western world, for example. So we used to see ourselves as the good guys who came to civilise the rest of the world. Now in hindsight we’re looking at that, and saying “actually we were conquerors and we were trying to exploit others”. That narrative was deeply seated. Everyone believed it. Everyone was like, “For them to be civilised, they’ve got to go through this stage and it’s our job to do that”.

Yes, it excused so many crimes against humanity that were done, that we look at now and think “How could that have been socially acceptable?” 

Because we had inherited it and that’s the glasses through which we saw everything happen. Yeah, that happens in organisations the same. So what is the story behind the organisation, what are we telling ourselves about why we exist? And that’s incredibly powerful and that can be leveraged for incredible good, and be an excuse for incredible crimes.

So can you explain more about how narratives work in organisations? 

I think they’re often visible in things like branding, and identity. So, it’s the story that the organisation tells itself about, as I said, why they exist. It can actually be seen in what you celebrate. What’s being rewarded in the organisation? What are people called out for as examples for others? 

What do we feature in our internal newsletters? 

Exactly. So that’s very interesting. And so we are working in an organisation that does language work, so, an example for us is around multilingualism. So we assume that our work was with single languages, people groups that spoke just one language and we come and help them develop their language. We called that the heart language. Now, we realise more and more there’s been disruption and our realisation of the narrative has become unsettled – that actually, most people don’t speak one language anymore. 

Most people in the world speak multiple languages. Most people are multilingual because we are so much more connected these days, apart from obviously a very few remote places where there are people living and just speaking one language to each other. But even then probably someone from that community connects externally and speaks a trade language or something, but there are obviously those places. But yes for most people multilingualism is their reality now, so we had to shift in our organisation. Do you want to share a little bit about that? 

Yes, so we started talking about that. We started to confront that reality because it’s uncomfortable, because if your whole organisation was set up to work with those single languages, people speaking a single language, you have to change your methods of work completely. So we had to talk about this. “Is this true? How does this work? Do people have a heart language as such?.” We created discussions around that, helping people to get used to the idea, did some videos about it, testimonies etc. and then people started to embrace that very gradually. 

Yes, they did an excellent job. I remember watching videos of our colleagues explaining, our multilingual colleagues explaining, what it meant to them, and how they change from one language to another in a different setting, things like that. It was great. I learned a lot. 

And then you start to adapt the way you work. So suddenly you do your effort in a language community very differently because you realise they need different kind of support, because the assumption that they only speak one language isn’t true, so they need different publications, education systems look differently, etc. 

So what does it actually take to change the narrative? You’ve mentioned a few things there that we did: videos and I guess conversation. 

So, yes, that’s going to be the answer: conversational leadership. Leading in conversation. I think part of it, and we touched on that, is providing new information, so that people can see a different reality. So you need to tell different stories like the video you talked about, and start to use different language, etc. And we started to put it in our core statements, our values. But I don’t think that that is how the core change itself happened. It is just a reflection of that change we already had happened.

You’re right. Actually, we did that after the fact almost, catching up with the reality, that now, we want to embed this narrative change into our core statements, our values, etc, but that wasn’t what we led with, because that doesn’t often cause change, changing the core statements.

Yes. So it’s introducing it at events, in conversations, providing that information, helping people wrestle with it and giving it time because this is not a top-down decision that you suddenly start doing that, because it’s beliefs that need to change. 

…

So that brings us to another way of bringing about change—and I think we’re just starting to see the power of that—is the idea of generative images. Which is then the third of those three things we wanted to talk about 

Yes, this is my favourite as, you know, my current area of research. I’ll probably want to talk about this at great length in future episodes. I was doing some more reading, digging around, before this podcast recording and there’s not very much out there written about it. A lot of the credit for this concept belongs to Gervase Bushe. I’ve not really seen it referred to in this way outside of dialogic organisational development. I may be wrong. I may not be looking in the right places. But yes, it’s an exciting new way, I think, of using language to connect with what motivates people. It’s different to a vision statement.

Definitely. The idea of generative images has of course has two words in it: generative and images. I love that word generative. So generative is the idea of generation, of creation. It is about something that becomes fruitful. So the idea of something that’s generative is really exciting because it then produces new ideas. It triggers new concepts, it pushes people to think in new ways. I love that about the idea of generative images. 

So a generative image is a combination of words or pictures or other symbolic media. It’s in my experience, it’s, you know, it’s not images. It’s sort of word pictures or a couple of words which conjure up an image, that provides new ways of thinking about reality, whether that’s society in general or your organisation or your business, and it can be introduced deliberately or sometimes it just emerges. And I think the really powerful thing about generative images is that they allow people to see something in a new light. And to think differently about it. It opens up the way for new insights, decisions and actions and you know, enables us to, as you said, go beyond our existing thinking about something and present these new possibilities. I think some of the key characteristics of generative images are that they’re compelling and attractive and they just kind of draw you even though you’re not quite sure why, they make you want to act differently. Or a good generative image will make you want to act differently. But it’s also something that’s quite hard to define or explain. And I’ll explain that in a bit or maybe you can actually – the ambiguity around a good generative image increases the generative possibilities it has, and maybe you want to talk a little bit about sustainable development, Nelis?

Yes, but first, I find that very undefined-ness is what makes it powerful.  That has to do with again what we talked about in complexity. It’s not all thought out ahead of time. It creates possibilities, it is in that sense, embraces the idea of unpredictable outcomes and it enables people to be creative, to come up with their own ideas of how to obtain it. And so yes, the example you mentioned about sustainable development is actually often cited as a good generative image, because it has that internal tension. So, in the past being sustainable and doing development seem to be completely at odds with each other as they were two things that couldn’t be combined. 

Nobody had even thought of combining them. 

The idea is here that we want to be sustainable, and we want to develop and we wanted both. And so then the term was coined, “sustainable development” and suddenly that created a completely new way of looking at the world and it opened up a world of new possibilities, that is incredibly helpful and it’s triggered new science, it has triggered a new way of looking at what development actually is, it has created new definitions of sustainability.

And yet it’s a term that we all just take for granted today. 

Without knowing exactly what it means.

Exactly. You can’t define it but it’s inspirational. Another example I was thinking of earlier is actually an image that had this generative power to change and I’m sure, as soon as I mention it, everyone will be able to picture it. That powerful photo of a young girl in a village in Vietnam, running down the road after a Napalm attack on her village. I think we can probably all immediately conjure that up. That single image was so powerful that it changed the narrative of the Vietnam War by communicating the human impact of what was happening. And some say, it led to the end of the war, ultimately. So that’s an example of an image that has that generative power, a visual image. 

Exactly. We’re still experimenting with this in our own organisation. You, Kate, started working on that when you were working with our community. So you coined, or together we coined, it was actually coined in two places at the same time, I think, the term “Community of Grace”, that I think is a good example of a generative image as well, that has taken off. So can you explain a bit more about that?

Yes. Sure. Thank you for reminding me that it did emerge in two places at once, it was very strange, we both discovered we’d been working with this concept. It was not an intentional generative image. I was doing my masters studies at the time and only realised after it had been suggested, “Hey, this is a generative image” and it had already begun to grow legs and walk by then. So we were focusing on growing our sense of being a community rather than just a bunch of individual colleagues scattered around the world. And I think it was during a planning session, someone suggested that we needed another word to describe the kind of community we wanted to be and the concept of grace emerged. We want to be a community of grace, a community that is kind, caring, supportive, you know, despite the intensity and challenges of our work that we face together. And really it just took off. We did little more than just launch the term, provided a few materials, discussion things around it, and it just took off, people ran with it. They did their own things, they made it mean something for their team, their unit. We actually did very little and yet, I think, I don’t know, would you go as far to say it has changed our staff community? 

I think it has. I like this example, it shows again that generative images can come in different kinds. So the sustainable development one is one that has a built-in polarity. This one doesn’t necessarily.

Well, unless you think of communities as being not always the easiest place to find unity and grace. But yes, it’s less obvious than sustainable development. 

I think one way of arriving at a good generative image is thinking through some of the polarities that you’re wrestling with and looking at what are the things we want to hold in tension, but intentionally embrace, and is there a way to bring those concepts together in a novel way. I think some of that did happen with the community idea, it was individualism versus togetherness. It was the idea of grace but still doing the right thing. And so there’s those things, some of the ideas behind it, which makes it so powerful. But again, you can’t predict exactly what will work out, what won’t. But to use generative images as a leverage for change, I think, is a hugely helpful tool for any leader.

It’s about creating a rallying point for people. It’s recognizing that we have motivations and giving people a sense of purpose. I think often our organisational visions are so big and lofty and out there that they don’t really speak to us in quite the same way as maybe a purpose like that. We want to be a community of grace, or sustainable development, or another one from a book we both read recently was this building supplies company that talked about “stress-free customer service”. They were having a lot of problems with getting the right things to the right place and the right people at the right time and they came up with this generative image of stress-free customer service. And that was a purpose that sort of everyone could go “Yeah, we want to do this”, it gave them a sort of rallying point together.

I think that’s a key part of it. It’s a way to capture a shared passion, that people can say “Yes, that’s what we want. We don’t know how yet, but that’s what we want”. 

Yes, and I think the fact that it has has to be a little bit unobtainable in a sense, but, not totally, because visions or impact statements are sometimes so far out there. You can kind of roll your eyes and say, well that’s really nice, and yes, that is what we’re looking for. But actually a purpose, like 

“stress free customer service” is more obtainable. 

And the idea behind this is that people can interpret this and start to make it their own and build on it and then it all steers everyone in the same direction because it’s something that is a shared exploration. 

So with the example, in our organisation, we put that term out there and people just did different things with it and used it in different ways, but we were all going in the same direction of trying to increase our sense of being a community that was caring and supportive.

Yes, and that’s where culture change emerges without being able to control it. That’s exactly what you’re hoping for in a sense. It brings us back to those three ideas coming together, disruption, narrative and generative images – all sort of working in the same direction and building on that together. 

So, a generative image can both change the narrative in an organisation and it can also act as a kind of disruptor to challenge us to reconsider our socially constructed understanding or narrative about who we are and what we do and how we do it. 

And vice versa, it can sense of the disruption that people are really seeing and it then rallies around a new way of coping with the disruption that has been just something to stress over into something that actually people can embrace and run with.

Yes. I really like that, hadn’t thought of that before. Yes, actually, the right generative image can give you a way to cope with a disruption and the uncertainty. Going back to our VUCA world – volatile uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Yes, those generative images can give us something to focus on. 

And having tied those three things together, I think we’re at the end of our time. 

I hope this inspires people to experiment, to work with change and realising that nurturing change is an art not a science. It’s an ongoing conversation. And again, we’d love to hear if any of this resonates with you. We’d love to hear your stories. Do you have any examples of how disruption, narrative change, generative images, all three together maybe, have contributed to change in your lives, in your work. Feel free to drop a line to us personally or a comment on the website at leadershipinconversation.net. 

Yes. We are preparing for an event in two weeks, where we will be experimenting with a very conversational process. So this means we will be off air for the rest of this month, but hopefully we can report back from that event afterwards and share what we did and how it went. And we’re also lining up a couple of interviews with others. So do check back for more episodes in May. 

Okay. I’m looking forward to sharing the stories of how disruption and conversation happened there. So that’s it for now. Thank you for listening.