Posts Tagged ‘opportunities’
Douglas Cardinal and Profound Change
Marilyn Herasymowych
Henry and I have always been fascinated with change, specifically with the kind of change that is profound and transformational. In his book, The Dance of Change, Peter Senge defines profound change as “…literally moving toward the fundamental. In profound change there is learning. The organization doesn’t just do something new; it builds its capacity for doing things in a new way – indeed, it builds capacity for ongoing change. … It is not enough to change strategies, structures, and systems, unless the thinking that produced those strategies, structures, and systems also changes (p. 15).” By the late 1990s we had experienced just how hard it was to create the conditions for profound change to occur, and to hold those conditions in place so that the change could be sustained.
On November 6, 1999, we were facilitating an action learning seminar in Ottawa, and were delighted to hear that Douglas Cardinal, a famous Canadian architect, would be the guest speaker in the evening. We had just spent the day with leaders, showing them how action learning is a process that creates profound change, but requires discipline and rules or controls to work. That evening, to our surprise, Douglas Cardinal would support what we had said with his own experience in creating a form of architecture that was itself a profound change. But, it wouldn’t be until I had had two cancer diagnoses that I would reconnect in a much more personal way with what he told us that evening in Ottawa.
In the mid 1960s, Cardinal saw the future in architecture. It was the computer – specifically the computational power of computers. In order for him to continue using his organic curvilinear designs on a larger scale, he would need the help of software that was not yet invented, software that Cardinal himself would help to develop and then beta test, software called computer-aided drafting and design or CADD for short. Cardinal would need one more thing. He would need his architectural and engineering staff to embrace this new way of working.
But his staff did not easily accept this change. They were far too comfortable with their drafting tables and pencils. So, Cardinal removed all of the drafting tables from their offices and broke all their pencils. It was like Cortez burning all of his ships. There would be no way back to the way it was.
Within 10 months of each other, I was diagnosed with two advanced and incurable cancers, both totally unrelated to each other, and both so traumatizing that it would change absolutely everything. Like Cortez, these cancers would burn all of my ships, and like Cardinal they would break all of my pencils. Within days of the first diagnosis, the tumour would almost kill me. The treatment for this cancer would drop a nuclear bomb on my life, creating a landscape with little hope for recovery. The second cancer would nail the coffin shut on what my life used to be. My pencils were now well and truly broken. There was no way back to the way it was.
But like Cardinal’s staff, I would not easily accept my new situation. I would stubbornly hold on to everything I thought my life was supposed to be, including how it was supposed to be after cancer treatment. I would not be swayed from this expectation. I didn’t care that my pencils were broken. I would mend them and life would return to normal. I would get my old life back, and that was it. Even with the death threat of a second cancer diagnosis, I struggled to accept that my life had now changed forever. I knew that acceptance was my only way out of the nuclear wasteland that was now my life, but I just couldn’t go there. Acceptance would require a type of faith that only saints grapple with, and I was not a saint.
Like Cardinal, who never accepted his lot as an architect to build the same old boxes that every other architect seemed to build, I have never accepted myself as a cancer survivor. I don’t want to just survive cancer. I want much more, but what that more now means is still a mystery. Like Cardinal, wanting no boundaries to his dream of building impressive organic buildings, I want a life worth living, regardless of whether or not I survive either of these two diagnoses. And like Cardinal, the software of this new life has not been written yet. I would not only have to write this new software, I would also have to beta-test it, one day at a time.
Today, each day is a struggle to live without my drafting table and with broken pencils. I still wake each morning, believing, for just a moment, that during the night my broken pencils have been mended, and my life is as it was. But then the effort of getting out of bed reminds me that this is not so. Although I still live with my broken pencils, my new future is not about living amongst the wreckage. When cancer broke all of my pencils, surviving was all that I had left. Now I want a life. What that looks like is yet to unfold for me.
Limits to Success
Blog Entry #2 by Marilyn Herasymowych
Marilyn Herasymowych
At 1:00 pm, March 17, 2009, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. At 4:00 pm that afternoon, I was admitted into the hospital because I had a lot of trouble breathing. There I was, sitting on a bed in emergency, Henry holding my hand, waiting to meet the oncologist. I remember feeling like a little girl, going to her first day of school. It was surreal. I had a paradoxical feeling of both anxiety about the cancer diagnosis and curiosity about being admitted into a hospital. Henry was very calm, and I was a chatterbox, talking about what we had just heard and what this might mean. We had just sold our house and we needed to move, and here I was being admitted into the hospital in a city that was two and half hours away from where we lived. Henry smiled, and said, “I guess we better start planning for limits.” We both laughed.
Henry and I had no idea how important “planning for limits” would become to helping us to deal with the most profound uncertainty of our life – being diagnosed with cancer. This would become even more critical as we went through cancer treatments, and dealt with the aftermath of viscous side effects, and the agonizing change in our life that would become our new normal.
We had spent the last 20 years in MHA Institute creating a learning system to help people in organizations to think and act more effectively in highly uncertain situations. Part of this learning system uses a language and patterns of behaviour to describe what people are experiencing. Another part of the learning system provides pathways through the difficulties, in order to create new patterns of behaviour that are beneficial to both people within organizations and the organizational goals. This learning system works because it gives people a way of thinking about uncertainty that makes it easier to act, rather than to react to the difficulties that uncertainty unleashes.
When Henry said “I guess we better start planning for limits,” he was using the language of this learning system we had created. We were dealing with a pattern of behaviour called limits to success, and the pathway through limits to success is called plan for limits. When Henry referred to planning for limits, he refocused our thinking so that we could quickly identify our limits and start dealing with them effectively, thus reducing the anxiety that uncertainty creates. Doing this helped us to feel more in control, and more able to take in information about what was happening and what choices we might have to make.
Plan for limits provides a number of strategies to consider when dealing with limits to success – the one that was most relevant to us at this time was to identify current limits. While we waited in Emergency for the doctor to arrive, we started talking about our current limits and what we had to do to deal with them. The first limit that we faced was that I was in a hospital in Lethbridge, and we lived in Calgary, two and half hours away. The second was to reschedule our work with clients, so that Henry could deal with emerging issues from this diagnosis and my stay in the hospital. The third was that we had just sold our house, and we had less than 60 days to find a new place to live, then pack and move. We had to deal with the first two limits right away. The third limit would have to wait until tomorrow.
Note: If you’d like to know more about Marilyn’s cancer journey, check out her blog at www.cancerbrokeallmypencils.com.
Transformational Learning
Marilyn Herasymowych
Our life is all about learning, how we learn, what we learn, and ultimately what happens to us as a result of learning. While watching a TV series called Addicted to Food, I was struck by how important it is for the clients who are trying to beat their addiction to food to discard their past relationship to food and to learn a different one. This type of learning is called transformational learning, because it transforms you. You are no longer who you were before the transformation. You can no longer do what you did before, because now you are conscious of your behaviour. You can see, and more importantly, feel any behaviour that is incongruent with who you have now become. Once transformed, there is no way back to what you were before. You are different now. And if you’re lucky to experience transformation, even if you fall back to the old way of doing things, you just can’t stay there anymore.
In our work, Emily, Henry, and I have always believed that at the root of every problem, every success, and every question is learning. As long as you work at your life at the level of the problem, the problem never gets solved. It is only managed, and that takes enormous energy and effort. Because the minute you stop managing the problem, it’s back with a vengeance. But, if you look at the learning system that underlies the problem, what you’ll see is how people are learning and what they are learning. Then, the transformation happens. You suddenly see how the learning system is actually nurturing the problem. Understanding the learning system both illuminates why the problem is so persistent as well as the pathway that allows you to learn through the problem to the other side. When this happens, you experience transformation.
Let me explain with a personal example. My first love was not a person, but a subject, and that subject was Chemistry. I’ll never forget the day I saw the Periodic Table and actually understood what this table was trying to say about the elements that make up everything we know about our universe. A moment before this happened for me, the Periodic Table was just another thing I had to learn. Then, I blinked, and in the space of that blink, something changed forever. I saw something very different. I saw the underlying system of the Periodic Table itself; I saw what made it so special. Suddenly, understanding blossomed, and I was in the realm of the magical. Even more amazing to me is that I still remember this moment so clearly. I can see the classroom, the Periodic Table, the teacher talking about the elements, and I can feel the transformation as if I am feeling it for the first time.
This is the kind of learning that interests me. This is the kind of learning that can change the world. Emily, Henry, and I believe this is the only kind of learning that can solve the difficult and persistent problems we are now facing in our personal lives, in our families, in our societies, in our companies, in our governments, and in our world. We simply can’t solve global problems without understanding the learning system that underlies them. The problems are manifestations of the learning that is occurring underneath.
You can see an example of this learning system in the series Addicted To Food. Everybody who comes to this centre to deal with their addiction to food, comes with their own learning system. Their problems with food are manifestations of their deeply embedded learning system. That’s why diets don’t work, because the learning system is not transformed by a diet. With a diet, all that changes is the surface problem of food intake, not the person. The learning system that a person is using is not even touched by a diet. That’s why a fall back to old patterns of behaviour is not only easy to do, it is impossible to avoid. You’ve heard this before, but what you may not have heard is that change has to happen at the level of learning. The more difficult the learning is, the more likely there is transformation on the other side. The difficulty you are experiencing is a direct signal that you are close to understanding your underlying learning system.
In the series Addicted To Food, the therapists deliberately assign the clients activities that are almost impossible for these people to do. For example, a person who constantly talks is asked to not speak at all for one entire week. Another person who has used exercise to keep herself at a low and unhealthy weight is asked to sit and watch other people exercise. These activities are incredibly painful for these people to do. More often than not, these activities actually bring people to a breaking point, critical for them to transform, but not seen as transformational for the person experiencing it. What most of these clients do is start packing. They just want to leave. This is too hard. Their learning system is manifesting in all its glory. The defensive reactions are a sign that the underlying learning system is trying to survive this perceived attack on itself. If the client leaves, the learning system that made their lives what it is, remains intact. But, if they’re fortunate, and they stick around just a while longer, and if the therapists are good at what they do, the clients transform. You can see it on their faces. One minute they’re angry, the next minute they are calm, strong, and confident in what they have just learned. Once transformed, they start learning differently.
There is no question that the journey for these clients in this series Addicted To Food is brutal on them and their underlying learning system. This is tough love at its extreme. Some people figure it out, others don’t. But at its root, it is the learning system that either stays put or transforms. For me, being diagnosed with cancer was not life changing. Yes, it was scary, but all I had to do was get through the treatment to the other side. Like a diet, I just did what I was told to do. The life changing event didn’t happen for me during the chemo either, but it was jump started there. The chemo became my activity, like the one that therapists gave to the person who talked too much. The chemo took away all of my control. Suddenly, I couldn’t do anything that was remotely reminiscent of my past life. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t read. The side effects took me to a place that shocked me to my core, and made me want to run for cover. Suddenly, I was in a place that not even my oncologist could explain
It is only now, two years later, that I can look back and see what this chemo experience taught me about my learning system. It is only now that I can understand the learning system I was operating from as I entered the surreal world of the chemo room. I also see the learning system that underlies my current life. I am different now, in ways that are both contradictory and amorphous. I am still on the road of recovery. But now I know that this road is my life, not just an interlude. The transformation that I am experiencing is not like the Periodic Table. It is not a moment in time. This is much bigger. My whole learning system is under attack by this cancer experience, and I want to know what that means.
Note: If you’d like to know more about Marilyn’s cancer journey, check out her blog at www.cancerbrokeallmypencils.com.
Navigating Through Complexity: Systems Thinking
Without question, increasing change and complexity are creating a storm that few organizations are able to weather. As the storm gains momentum, it lashes out in unpredictable ways, leaving many complex problems in its wake. You may deal with the resulting problems by trying to control what you can. You may use tried-and-true methods to cope with the problems and opportunities that the storm brings, only to find that your efforts create little or no change in the situation, and may, in fact, make things worse. You may notice that almost every tack you take works less and less well, making you feel less effective. As change accelerates, it creates even more complexity, thus further eroding your sense of competency.
When you start feeling out of control, you can easily become a victim of forces that you do not understand. It is a vicious cycle: change and complexity feed off each other to create even more change and complexity! The end result can be an exhausted workforce, unable to deal with the overwhelming problems that change and complexity bring.
People are tired of dealing with the constant storm of complexity and its after-effects. This tiredness is a symptom of complexity overload. The symptoms of complexity overload can be found in every corner of the organization ¾ it is only a question of degree. To cope with complexity overload, people navigate through the storm by using current skills and knowledge, which may help them to reach the eye of the storm, but not to clear the storm altogether. Systems thinking is an effective way to navigate out of the storm, and to be prepared for other storms.
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