Emergent Learning and the Evolution of Organizational Life
Organizational life can sometimes feel turbulent and confounding. As we navigate the many facets of our work — roles and responsibilities, compensation and performance, interpersonal relationships and communication, making a difference while maintaining work-life balance and aligning our personal values and commitments with the overall arc of our career path — we often find ourselves facing into the strong winds and roaring waves of a dilemma that won’t easily resolve.
It’s that distinct feeling you get in the pit of your stomach on some random Tuesday, when you realize that your best laid plans and efforts aren’t taking you where you want to go. You’re caught in a wild storm and your trusted guidance system is leading you off course.
But what if rather than something to be avoided, overcome or fixed, we treated the dilemmas we faced in our work as the access points for bringing out the best in ourselves and our organizations?
Without realizing it, I first stumbled on this exploration 25 years ago. And what I discovered along the way was surprising.
I had just started a new job as a national auditor for one of Canada’s largest franchisors. My work involved travelling across the country, meeting with entrepreneurs, checking up on the health of their businesses and finding ways for them to be more successful in the system.
For the first year or so, I brought the best of myself to my work. When I went on the road I was always gathering and bringing back ideas on how we could improve our systems for the benefit of our franchisees and our organization.
When I worked in the office, I was paying attention to our internal systems, structure and culture and what brought out the best or the worst in our people.
I started to formulate and share my ideas with our executive team. And at first my contributions were met with rewards and celebration. But as the complexity of organizational life set in, and the inertia of decision-making and change took hold, I began to feel ineffective, disempowered and eventually disengaged.
During my two and a half year tenure, our organization went through many economic and organizational challenges. Along the way, my passion, enthusiasm and commitment to making a difference was slowly etched out and taken over by feelings of resignation and cynicism. And judging from the conversations around the water cooler I wasn’t alone.
The dilemma from my perspective was that management was clearly responsible for having created what I saw as the cultural and structural problems that led to employee disengagement. Not having access or insight into why or how certain decisions were being made, I did what every human being does, I made stuff up.
I imagine if you had asked management at the time, they would have been able to identify the dilemma as any number of organizational behaviour issues that could fix our challenges if only people would comply. Otherwise known as the management science of making stuff up.
In fact, if we had checked in with all of our employees at the time, we likely would have gotten a different explanation of what the dilemma was from each person we asked.
Whatever or whomever we believed to be the source of the problems we faced, one very real impact was a rising tide of employee disengagement and decreasing morale.
As it turns out, the challenges we individually and collectively faced as employees, middle managers and executives were just the tip of a multi-billion dollar problem impacting organizations in every industry, across the globe. And yet it all felt so personal.
Being the early 90’s, organizations were more hierarchical in structure, and more opaque in terms of decision making and communication. The high cost of attracting, engaging and retaining employees wasn’t the global conversation that it is today.
- You didn’t involve employees in key decisions. Decisions were made and implemented top down.
- EQ and SQ weren’t critical leadership skills. They were the grammatical errors of someone with a questionable IQ.
- You didn’t foster cultures of collaboration. You pitted people against each other in an effort to improve performance and results.
- You worked to maximize the profit and return on investment for shareholders. The often devastating impacts on non-shareholders and the planet were an acceptable cost of doing business.
- High performers were championed and coached. Low performers were coerced and cajoled. Coaching and one on one support were for the organizational elite or the performance-challenged.
- People were expected to be experts in their role. The lean start-up approach wasn’t a thing. Not-knowing wasn’t sexy. Failure was not an option. And the imposter syndrome was never spoken about outside the bedroom, if there.
In these types of structures, survival of the fittest was the name of the game. People naturally took a very positional view of themselves, their role and the organization.
In the pre-Internet, pre-social media existence, it was difficult to see and understand perspectives from across the system. And in the absence of visibility and clear communication, we collectively made stuff up and acted as if it were true.
We’ve made progress in our understanding and design of organizational learning and development over the last 25 years.
Employee engagement and retention have become global conversations. And learning organizations, defined as “a group of people working together collectively to enhance their capacities to create results they really care about,” (Senge, 2005) are more common among us.
Despite these advances, many of us in our roles as employees, managers and executives still relate to our work experiences through a survival lens. Aspiring to greatness, yet never arriving, with only rare glimpses of what’s possible on the occasional Tuesday.
The Survival Game; If I Knew Then What I Knew Now
Here’s what I’ve learned in that time about what gets in the way of our ability to deeply engage and thrive in our work.
Over-relying on Fallible Knowledge
The first barrier to people and organizations that thrive is our tendency to mistake our limited, fallible knowing as truth.
“System blindness is everywhere. […] And the most dangerous thing about blindness is that when we’re blind, we don’t know we’re blind. We think we see. We take what we see as the truth, and we act.” (Oshry, 2007)
As human beings we are wired to pay attention to what helps us survive. We use our past experiences to make meaning of our current experiences and hold strong assumptions about the way things are or should be.
We make plans and take action based on our reactions to our own thoughts, feelings and assumptions and then filter our experiences to validate our thinking and justify those actions.
This closed and reactive way of navigating through life creates blindspots and a self-reinforcing system that makes it difficult to see or create new possibilities.
To be clear, our blindspots on their own aren’t the barrier to thriving. What gets in the way, is our tendency to treat our own limited understanding or misunderstanding as though it were the truth, which aligns closely with our aptitude for…
Making Stuff Up
The second barrier to people and organizations that thrive is our tendency to make stuff up without checking things out.
One of the most challenging things for us to do when we’re in survival mode is to interrupt the stories, filters, judgments and assumptions that we hold onto as a way to stay safe. Or to take the risk of asking for clarification on something that has disrupted our equilibrium or that appears to validate our assumptions or limiting views.
Making stuff up is an important part of the survival game. It’s designed to help us quickly decide whether something is a threat or an opportunity; whether it will make us look bad, put us at risk or lead to failure or will help us look good, avoid vulnerability and come out on top.
Unfortunately, making stuff up also limits our power, freedom and self-expression. The impact of which is costly and far-reaching not just in our organizations but in our personal lives.
And our propensity for storytelling to stay safe doesn’t stop there. We actually create a whole routine around it. Otherwise known as…
Mastering our Survival Act
The third barrier to people and organizations that thrive is our tendency to build a survival act based on our faulty stories.
This act becomes our go to strategy for avoiding risk, vulnerability and failure. And because of our survival orientation, we don’t even recognize it as an act. We take it for who and how we are.
As it goes, my act (my way of being and doing) at any time is perfectly designed to create the resources, relationships and results that I’m getting in that moment.
That’s not just true for me, it’s true for all of us, regardless of our position in the organization. If you’re experiencing a loss of power, freedom, self-expression in your work, your survival act is most likely in play.
Justifying and Validating Instead of Learning
The final barrier to developing people and organizations that thrive is our tendency to use our filtered knowing and limiting views to justify our actions, and validate our experiences against what we already know and to reject, resist or misinterpret everything else.
From this closed orientation we’re not able to recognize the emergent learning and growth opportunities that arise in the challenges and complexity of our work. Instead these experiences feel like threats to our equilibrium and trigger our survival act.
I distinctly remember one of my emergent learning experiences from about a decade ago. I was grappling with inter-personal stuff that I believed was getting in the way of the work that I was hired to do. But the more I tried to avoid it or strategize my way through it the more illusive my success became.
After months of grappling, I finally had the epiphany that the stuff I was trying to avoid or overcome, was actually the stuff that I most needed to pay attention to and learn from.
At an organizational level, our biggest dilemmas are often treated as unwelcome, frenetic energy that are getting in the way of our collective success.
For leaders who do take it on, it can be overwhelming to know where to start or how to organize your efforts around this unstructured, emergent ‘curriculum.’
Awakening the Co-Creative
To recap, the survival game is a closed, reactive, self-reinforcing system that keeps us repeating old patterns and experiencing barriers, breakdowns and burn-out instead of breakthroughs in the face of challenge.
In order to go from surviving to thriving in our work and organizations, we can create structures that transcend these survival tendencies and transform our dilemmas from the barriers we perceive them as today to powerful access points that can open up a space for a new and co-creative way of working together.
Unlike many of the organizational learning and development approaches, the co-creative is not a direct intervention. It’s something that arises as a by-product in our lives, families, work, teams, organizations and communities when we show up authentically, powerfully and fully-expressed in service to something greater than our survival.
A thriving organization is one that unlocks the highest levels of engagement, effectiveness and co-creativity of its people to generate resources, relationships and results that can’t easily be matched by competitors.
Here are some structures and supports that can awaken the co-creative in your organization and set you on the path from surviving to thriving:
Start with you
While organizational dilemmas such as employee engagement and retention are wide-spread and common place across the globe. The way that the dilemma is defined and plays out for each of us in an organizational setting is deeply personal.
The dilemma, as you define it, becomes the curriculum to unlock your power, freedom and self-expression in your work.
What I didn’t get 25 years ago and quite frankly still need coaching support and structures to lean into today is what it means to be 100% responsible, or “cause in the matter of one’s life” (Erhard, 1977).
And what it is to operate from the stand that my engagement, effectiveness and fulfillment at work is 100% up to me, which includes taking responsibility for my own learning and growth and transforming my challenging experiences into co-creative opportunities.
It wasn’t until I could see how I was giving my power away at work, robbing myself of freedom and self-expression and limiting the possibilities for myself and others that I was able to step authentically and powerfully into owning my mission to develop people and organizations that thrive.
By the way, this was the truly surprising part of my journey. At the time I thought my career path was in Accounting. But as I leaned into my emergent learning experience, I came to discover my true passion for bringing out the best in people and organizations.
What was at the heart of my dilemma 25 years ago was the fear of owning my power and stepping up to play a bigger game in the area of leadership and organization development.
Fortunately, there are now coaching and development programs and emergent learning apps that can help you unpack the hidden opportunities at the heart of your most persistent dilemmas to accelerate your learning and growth.
It no longer has to take you years to discover your deeper commitments, blocks to your effectiveness and the high-leverage actions you can take to access greater power, freedom and self-expression in your work and open up a whole new world of possibilities.
Our experiences are the curriculum
The rich experiences or dilemmas that arise in our work together contain the seeds of our greater potential and are perfectly designed to foster emergent learning.
From dealing with change, negotiating your salary, navigating a promotion, building customer relationships, leading from the middle or the top, communicating effectively, showing up at your best, meeting your sales targets or attracting investment, each of these circumstances can reveal the limits of your survival game and be the gateway to liberating the co-creative in yourself and your organization.
When we accept that we’re naturally wired to operate as closed, reactive survival systems we can create cultures and structures that counter-balance these tendencies and open up an inviting space for you and others to operate from the co-creative more often.
With emerging tools and technologies, we’re not only able to see ourselves and the systems we operate in more clearly, we’re able to convert the entropy that’s generated in a closed system — into an open, responsive and co-creative advantage that can’t be easily matched by competitors.
Don’t worry if you haven’t developed an emergent learning structure in your organization from day one. The best time to train a dog to stop barking is when it’s barking. As dilemmas arise in your organization, you have the perfect opportunity to generate a shift toward co-creative possibilities.
Make it available to anyone, anywhere, anytime
In order to develop a co-creative advantage, we need to enrol and engage everyone in the organization in what it means to be fully responsible for your collective fulfillment and success.
Participation can’t be based on position, performance or job responsibilities. And it’s the same curriculum for everyone, whether you lead, follow or do both from the middle.
Personal growth and organizational learning technologies such as coaching, group awareness programs and introspective frameworks have proven to be effective.
And they can be resource-heavy, time consuming and cost-prohibitive, making it difficult to include everyone or to effectively support adoption across your organization.
The persistent challenges or dilemmas that we face in our work together provide the content. Emergent learning technologies now make it possible to effectively use these experiences as integrative curriculum to unlock the learning for anyone in your organization, anywhere at anytime.
Creating from Possibility
With these new tools and structures at your disposal you can surface limiting views and assumptions as well as fresh and varied perspectives from stakeholders across your organization or ecosystem in near real time.
The act of surfacing the survival tendencies that were previously invisible but actively influencing the behaviours of people across the organization is a place to start.
From there the work is to:
- put a stake in the ground for a new possibility beyond the limitations of your survival thinking
- put yourself on the line for living into that new possibility every day
- be unstoppable in action; invest in deliberate actions that serve your commitments and challenge your assumptions beyond fear, reason, risk and the considerations that would normally have you playing small on the sidelines of your life
- keep integrating the emergent feedback and learning from your experiences in service to that greater possibility
When we ignore or are ill-equipped to see our personal and organizational blindspots, learn from the emergent and create new possibilities, we pay a higher price down the road in the form of consulting fees, missed opportunities in the market, employee attrition, legal fees, compliance penalties, lost revenue and investment, and on from there.
As we surface our individual and collective blindspots and seek and engage a variety of perspectives, the whole system becomes more aware of itself, wiser in the world and more open, responsive and engaged as a vital contributor to life and the world around us.
