EP 163 : Scaffolding Collective Resilience - Rowena Morrow

 
 

A return interview with Rowena Morrow to hear about her work with Adaptive Cultures and the challenge of assisting organisations evolving their culture to better match their environmental complexity.

Interviewed by: Peter Hayward

Links for this interview

Transcript

Peter Hayward: A question for you. Is the challenge in our work the overwhelming complexity we face in the external environment. Or is it, in fact, the underwhelming complexity of our organizational cultures?

Rowena Morrow: Every group I work with, when they consider their future external environment, what is it the external environment asking of us? What's the level of complexity that we need to hold in order to make good decisions to bring our purpose to life, whatever that is? Every single group is landing on, we need to be collaborative. We need to work across functions, across silos. We need the most diverse group of thinkers that we can get in a room around any problem to get as many views as possible so that we can understand where we are. And even then, we might not be able to make the right decision, but at least we can understand where we are and try some stuff and see what happens. None of that is held in organizational structures.

Yes, we would get agreement around what does the future look like? What do we want? How you actually get this thing to come about? It becomes extraordinarily difficult if you're saying you want the future to be around co creation, collaboration, everyone has a voice, we have distributed decision making, et cetera, et cetera, and you've got manuals and processes that require you to get sign off from 15 levels before you can take the next step. The two things are totally incommensurate.

Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on Futurepod. Rowena Morrow returning for another conversation.

Welcome back to FuturePod Rowena.

Rowena Morrow: Thank you, Peter. Always lovely to see you. And hear you.

Peter Hayward: Last time we spoke to you, actually we spoke to you twice on FuturePod. This will be your third time through. So we did a pre COVID, Rowena Morrow, her view of the world, how she works in the world, how she makes a difference. Then we had right in the middle of coronavirus, how is the world?

So we're now in a post COVID world. It's got to be at least, two and a half years since we've heard from you. So where are you? Where's the world? What are you doing? That kind of thing.

Rowena Morrow: It's interesting to go back there. Melbourne had one of the longest lockdowns in the world. We were locked into our home, our five kilometre radius, for over a hundred days. And just before that lockdown happened, my husband and I had made a break for the border. We packed everything into the car. We planned a trip around Australia. The first stop was on the west coast of Victoria, heading towards the South Australian border. We'd had a donut day, so we'd had a day with no cases, so we felt pretty confident that we were going to be able to get across the border. The border was within days of opening, we felt. And then we were going across the bottom of Australia and up around Perth and up into Western Australia.

Anyway, we got as far as Aireys Inlet, which is about two hours from Melbourne, and the lockdown, the ring of steel went up and we were back in our home. And in mourning for a good couple of weeks. Big plans came to an arresting halt very quickly. That was quite confronting. We know that we were lucky. That was the hardest thing we had to deal with. Family and friends were unwell, but they got better. In the scheme of things, it wasn't a difficult issue to be dealing with. And it was a difficult issue to be dealing with. I had started a new job,  I actually went and worked for a cemeteries trust in the second year of COVID.

And I really enjoyed that role. I think firstly because I was working for someone who had a degree in Foresight Future Studies. Deb Ganderton had actually studied with us at Swinburne, and she had gotten herself into a CEO role in the Cemeteries Trust and was really keen to set the sector up for the next hundred years.She brought me on as a Futures and Foresight practitioner, basically, to start thinking about what does death look like over the next hundred years? And how do cemeteries, and how does the death sector need to respond to those changes? And as part of that, we were planning and they are planning for the first cemetery in a hundred years in Melbourne.

And this thing is enormous, like hectares upon hectares out in the western fringe of the Greater Metropolitan area. And will service Melbourne for fifty to a hundred years after it is established. Thinking about and looking at, what has happened around death rituals and death care in the past hundred years? And how can we look at that moving forward into a hundred years and what do we have to think about for Melbourne in particular? Overlaying the Climate Emergency, overlaying a whole lot of other things that could be coming our way in that period. Also overlaying the Indigenous owners and First Peoples of that area, so how do we hold them, and how do they become part of the planning and bringing this place to life?

And it was fascinating. Both a fascinating industry and a confronting industry to be obviously in the middle of COVID because the conversations we were having around death rates, et cetera, were confronting because it becomes less about the mourning while that's important and each of those individuals is loved and missed by people. In the death industry it becomes about the numbers and how you manage the numbers. And it was a very interesting. I had a whole lot of stuff around death in my head around what death was, that it was scary, that it was this, that and the other. All of that has been replaced. With a real feeling of gratitude and joy at the human species ability to wrap something up that we all go through in what could be a very grace filled and almost joyous moment, if you can manage it. It doesn't always go like that obviously for many people.

But unpacking from a cultural point of view, all the different cultural ways that people approach death. The things they have in common. The things they don't. How some death practices are completely different to others. And yet these cemeteries, these public spaces, which in Australia are large and in Victoria are perpetual. We are setting them up forever. It is very interesting application of Foresight and Futures practice to bring all these Images of the Future together in a place and hold them together without privileging one over the other.

A difficult line to tread for any organization. Especially one that runs under a State Government type of auspice with a Board and in an industry where most people don't go to have their career goals met. It's not somewhere necessarily that people wake up and say, I want to be in the death industry when I grow up. As an industry that really helps people in their time of need and sets up a legacy for the future is where it's at and just so interesting. I really enjoyed that role.

Unfortunately, Deb wasn't well, and she passed away about a year after I started the role and after her passing, the organization went into a bit of shock, and the board decided to revert back to so business as usual. Which meant the Futures and Foresight role that I was bringing to the table really wasn't needed. So, I decided to go off and do something else, which we can talk about in a sec. But I guess from a Futures and Foresight perspective, I didn't ever expect that I would be thinking about the Future of Death. And as a, I guess as a very human endeavour, it's probably one of the richest and most satisfying pieces of futures work I've ever done. Just so interesting, and really felt like it was really valuable work to be doing, so thoroughly enjoyed that.

I guess in... In every pandemic, there's a high point. I came from quite an unusual position, but really enjoyed it. So, from that point, I was looking for something to do. And I think we talked about this in my first interview, I've been casting around. In my career looking for how do we move people collectively to shared images of the future and you and I had done quite a bit of that work in our consulting practice in the early 2000s. I couldn't get traction. I was looking again around 2019, 2018, really couldn't get traction in the strategy space. It was very full. A lot of people and a lot of organizations had really started delivering services into that space.

I started thinking about organizational culture and collective images of the future around organizations and around the ways people work together. And I'd fallen across the work of Adaptive Cultures while I was in Local Government. And what Alison and Andrew have done, the two founders, is basically come up with a way of articulating how organizational cultures change over time, based on the vertical development, psychological models of Lovinger, et cetera.

They use Kegan's work as their main touchstone. And it's a way of giving people a language and how I found it useful as a way of giving people a language around development of groups over a period. Like Spiral Dynamics, but unlike Spiral, it's focused on Individual, Social and Structural levers. It's a very pragmatic, and deep, way of looking at how organizations might choose to be when they grow up. Whatever that looks like for them. I liked it so much I decided to buy a bit of the business. I am now having a visceral experience of what it is to be a business owner with employees and all of that going on. I guess the thing I'm really enjoying about it is quite unexpectedly, so I went in, yes, I've got all the Foresight and Futures tools techniques in my kit bag, and yes, it is who I am, so that's how I turn up. And I wanted to have this experience really getting into what is the Adaptive Cultures way of doing things. What is Adaptive Capacity, Adaptive Leadership, all of these buzzwords which are now really common in lots of organizations around, especially Western countries.

I wasn't really leaning into my toolkit, but what became really obvious very quickly was that most people, or a lot of the people, a lot of the time, were trying to talk about different images of the future without having a language to talk about it. Images of the future is not language that people have, usually, when they talk about things.

I would be in organizations which had moved from one state, which had been disowned in some way, shape, or form. There'd been some shame around something that had happened and they needed to move to this new future state. And the executive and CEO were saying here's this brand new vision of the shiny future. It's all going to be wonderful. Here are the things that we're going to do and how it's all going to be different. And these people are feeling left behind and saying our future is still a good future. It doesn't need to be disowned. Our image is still viable. It's this image and against your image. And so it was a clash of images of the future without anybody being able to talk about it like that. And I found overlaying the future's work and how individuals understand the future with the collective culture work gave us some real insights into A, what was going on for people in the present. Probably more about that than anything to do with the future, if I'm frank, but unpacking the present in order to get more alignment about where they would like the future to be. So that much more positive, aspirational, hopeful stance.

As opposed to an argument around images of the future, which then nobody feels like they have any agency, and they revert to hierarchy and whoever's at the top of the tree wins type of approach. I've really enjoyed that. And the thing that's happened for me in that work, and I think I talked about this in the coronavirus podcast, is through coronavirus and through the pandemic I really couldn't see how the future would be unfolding. To me it seemed like the future, how I perceive that rolling out over time was really becoming quite foreshortened. I couldn't see much past the end of my nose really. And that's continued that real feeling of actually what's going to happen out there is irrelevant. It's what's happening right now that matters. And yes, we need direction. Yes, there has to be some kind of, we're heading for that hill, not the one over there, whatever it is. And it's less about that and more about the next right step.

I am finding myself falling back into and leveraging Causal Layered Analysis, Worldviews, Moral basis of making decisions, and laying that with Complexity and how you stand and work within Complex Adaptive Systems. Helping people develop their internal capacities to understand, articulate and decide around system crises that seem to be hitting them from every direction.

This idea that we're in Polycrisis really resonates for me, and it's what I see in organizations every day. I think, Peter, you and I used to talk about highly successful people that got to the end of the all of the skills and techniques that they had and foresight gave them the next bit. It's almost like it's past the end of the bits that they have. Some people are even past doubling down, so I think before the pandemic, I was watching people and leaders throw whatever the next thing was in their toolkit at the problem and doubling down to some degree to say if it hasn't worked, I'll give it a shot again, because, obviously the first time I didn't do it right, whatever it was. What I'm actually seeing now, to a greater extent, is much more like in the GFC 2008-10, where leaders are saying, actually I've got nothing that works. I actually don't know what to do. And from my perspective, that's the crack. That's the bit where the door has opened.

The Expert, Ego driven, I've got this, state of people is shaky enough that you can start to have a conversation about, Alright, if all of that's not working for you... How about these 25 other things that could, and which of those is going to be more useful to you at this moment. So again, it's the work of person by person.

The tension I feel is we don't have time to do person by person. So, when I started doing this work person by person in the early 2000s, it felt like we had decades. It now doesn't feel like we have decades. And I guess I try not to let that because it still has to be person by person, there doesn't seem to be any other way of short circuiting this. So I just try and keep going, and I find that tension sometimes almost overwhelming to hold because it does get very difficult to think, all right I've got, however many people I've managed to influence, open their minds, they've come to whatever point they've come to because of an interaction we've had, whatever that might be, whatever influence I've been able to deploy in the world may not be enough, actually, to get us where we need to go. And I've been holding grief for that for decades, so it doesn't feel different, it just feels really pointy. But then the other thing is that happens, of course, as you go searching for sources of hope and inspiration, they're everywhere. It is a complex world we're in, and thank goodness for that.

Peter Hayward: I'm wondering Rowena, listening to what you described, I'll give you a back of the envelope theory and I'll let you pull it apart.

Rowena Morrow: Excellent.

Peter Hayward: Is what you're talking about, that when we hold images of the future, they are personal, they fit, they are felt important to us, but there's so many different images of the future. It's difficult to turn them into a collective thing that doesn't turn them into some anodyne watered down, version of platitudes. As Zia Sardar said, there is a contest of ideas of possible futures. Here's what you're talking about, rather than try and resolve the contest, because the contest is what is going to happen through time, through events, through complexity. But let's draw back to how we are together now. And I'm going to give you two things that I was told by a pair of friends of ours.

One was John Batros. John used to say that people wish to be met as they are. This notion of meeting people where they are, warts and all. Ideas of the future, who they are. But to meet them as they are. And the second person I want to... Point you to is Nita Cherry, who Nita said, culture for her is people working together well doing worthwhile work. That's it. That's all culture is. It's this notion that people come to work. And want to be who they are, and want to be seen as they are. And people want to do good work. And they want to do important work. And they have to do it together. They've got to find a way that when they think the world is different, the future could be different. But we have to find a way to work together.

Rowena Morrow: Beautiful. There's a lot to unpack there, so let me start in. The first thing that popped to mind as you were talking was the Flotilla of Boats, which is a metaphor that I've used, and continue to use, in groups around Images of the Future. It's not about choosing a boat. It's about having images of the future that are coexisting together and have some sort of directional linkage to them.We can each have a boat in the flotilla where we still have a contest is in which direction is the flotilla going and how do we know and how do we choose and all those sorts of things.

I think John Batros was completely and utterly right as he was in so many things around people do want to be met. And I guess from Nita's perspective, and I agree with her around what she was talking about in terms of organizational culture. I think what we're seeing in many organizations is we have had individual interior development across society,  as a general statement, and our organizational structures and ways of working have not met that.  We're having  a whole load of people who have had an experience whether it's in their own interior development because of something that's happened to them, something they focused on, or even using things like social media, et cetera, digital technologies have a view of the future embedded into the way they work, which then builds people's expectations and ways of operating to say that I have agency, I am listened to..

It is that experience of using that type of technology that says I am important, and my views are important. They get into organizations that aren't structured to hold those views. Our collective ways of working and relating to each other, are not really in place to allow for grand scale collaboration. There are examples of models where that does work, but most organizations in most places don't work like that. They're hierarchical. They require compliance to the leader. They're leadership led as opposed to people led. And so not only Nita's point of view, having arguments or contests in Zia's language around images of the future. What is good purposeful work and how do we know?. And even if we can agree on that, and this was what you and I used to run into, I think, when we were doing foresight work in organisations. Yes, we would get agreement around what does the future look like? What do we want? How you actually get this thing to come about?

It becomes extraordinarily difficult if you're saying you want the future to be around co-creation, collaboration, everyone has a voice, we have distributed decision making, et cetera, et cetera, and you've got manuals and processes that require you to get sign off from 15 levels before you can take the next step the two things are totally incommensurate.

What I spend my life doing is articulating, helping, assisting, supporting groups of people to articulate that future vision. Yes, the strategy bit, but also what does it look like when we're there? How are we working together? What decisions are people making? How are they making those decisions? And then talking to people and working through what are ways that we can model, trial, experiment, collective conversations? Because in organizations, we don't have collective conversations, we are having downloading of ideas. If you're lucky, you might get a bit of building on the previous idea. But most people, most of the time, are sitting in meetings with strict agendas that stick to time. Where somebody does a PowerPoint pack with 25 different slides where they talk at you, tell you that an idea that's 95% formed, they'd like your input in. You put your hand up on Zoom or Teams or whatever you're doing to put your input in, which gets totally ignored. That is most people's experience of working in organizations.

And what we're saying and seeing is that every group I work with, when they consider their future external environment,  what is it the external environment asking of us? What's the level of complexity that we need to hold in order to make good decisions to bring our purpose to life, whatever that is? Every single group is landing on, we need to be collaborative. We need to work across functions, across silos. We need the most diverse group of thinkers that we can get in a room around any problem to get as many views as possible so that we can understand where we are. And even then, we might not be able to make the right decision, but at least we can understand where we are and try some stuff and see what happens. None of that is held in organizational structures.

What I think is going on is that we've spent decades focusing on the interiors of individuals, because that's the easy bit, frankly, and it's not that easy, but it's the easier bit. We started to move into this collective work. If I look at Joanna Macy's work around nuclear disarmament, et cetera, there was a real thing in the 70s and 80s around that. It dropped off, and I'm assuming it's got something to do with Neoliberalist views of how organizations should be worked, or neo economics, or something to do with, that real structure and atomization of how things should operate. That for me is the hole. That's the bit that's missing, is we actually don't know how to do that bit. And then even if we've nailed that, we've got structures and processes that are in place and assume earlier iterations of how we structure organisations are going to get us there, and they're not.

For me, the work we have to do in organizations is massive, and what I find fascinating is even new organizations, so we're a fairly new organization,  we've gone from two founders to five directors, and we've got three people that work with us, plus a group of associates that come and do work with us with clients, we've been around for about a year in this formulation. We know this stuff. We live this stuff. We work with this stuff. For us, it's difficult. And we are motivated, conscientious, conscious, and putting in time, effort, and days into working it through. And it's not easy. Which tells me that we don't have the train tracks socially and collectively to roll down. Is that we're laying the tracks as we're on them. And with that comes pain sometimes.

 I find it fascinating because it's almost that, and I think you, Nita, and I had a conversation about this probably about a decade ago. That bootstrapping bricolage approach to leadership development, I think was the topic we were talking about at that point, but she made a point in there around, how do you scaffold people in such a way that they can step into this new way of, in her, the way she would say focus on leadership, this new way of leading. I think that's, it's a yes and how do we also scaffold the collective conversations and the structural changes that we need to make and bring all those things together without breaking the organization, and most people that I'm talking to are tired. The thing that the pandemic's done, is exhausted people. Their resilience is down, their creativity is down, they're being told to come in the office and they're putting up the middle finger. There is all sorts of stuff going on, let alone wanting to have a conversation about the sorts of things I want to have a conversation about. It is it is very interesting and it feels the old ways of engaging, just not cutting it.

It's actually about learning how to work and be different as you are doing whatever work you're doing. The next time you're writing a board brief, what that looks like the next time you're writing a marketing brief, what that looks like the next time you're putting together your budget, what that looks, so it's all those little bits and pieces. The other thing that we've been doing or I've been doing is because of the overwhelm in organizations, I've been scaling right back. With the Foresight Masters, we'd encourage people to go off and find the person with influence and position yourself, see if you can run a workshop. That's quite big pieces for an individual to dofor most people at the moment, that's totally overwhelming.

The idea that they would completely do something different, they just can't get their heads around. I've actually been dialing it right back and saying micro actions in the moment. Get into that zone of non-attachment that we continue to build in ourselves and try and encourage others to build around rather than reacting or responding in a particular way, react or respond in a different way, rather than staying on the dance floor in the mix, get up on the balcony and take the bird's eye view as to what's happening and reflect on that, rather than opening the meeting with an agenda check, open the meeting with a clearing.

So just really small things, and they do seem to make a difference. Because it's just shifting people away from the way we've always done it is the way it has to happen to actually, if I want the future to be different, not only do I need to be different,  we need to be different, and the things that we use to support the we, so the structures and processes that support our collective effort, also need to be different. And how do we do all those three things at once?

Peter Hayward: You're talking to a Developmentalist, you know that, you know me too well, and you haven't said this, but I do want you to go over this again, just so people hear it. You're talking about a developmental approach to how organizational cultures scaffold the way we are together in the organization, dealing with unlimited complexity outside of the organization. And organizations, as you are describing it, are struggling with that because they have cultures and ways of working that don't match the complexity they face. But you're not describing the way you are currently dealing with complexity is broken and we can fix it. It's a developmental model.

It's about this is the complexity you can handle in your organization. Do it well. Then, as you then can admit more complexity in. Climb the level, add more complexity, change your culture. It's a process not of fixing culture, but of teaching culture to learn. It's not the broken organizations can't do it. It's organizations have got to this point, they probably do enough well, but they're doing less, less and less well over time. Is that the sense of what you're talking about?

Rowena Morrow: Our approach is Transcended and Include, so it is developmental, it's evolutionary from the perspective of every level of maturity in the developmental model has its gifts and shadows, and in an external environment for which that level is matching the complexity, it works beautifully.

If you're in an environment that is predictable, structured, standardized and replicable having a hierarchy that works around people cleaving to the leader's view and following orders and doing what is best absolutely makes sense. And those cultures work beautifully and are beautiful places to be. So, there's absolutely nothing wrong with any of it. Where it becomes difficult is when the external environment shifts, and your customers require you to be much more attentive to their needs rather than your organizational needs. When you're need to be, growing and driving and striving as opposed to having some sort of steady state that you keep standardised and replicable.

When you reach the edge of what's possible in that organizational form, then moving into a much more achievement-based way of being and doing makes much more sense. You can put your customers at the centre of everything that you do. You can focus on outcomes. You can focus on professionalism. They still keep all of the things that you had before, so the focus on compliance and safety and making sure that people are heard. And that decisions are made at the requisite level, so you may bring some of that with you, but you may also give parts of the organisation much more power to do what they need to do at the moment they need to do it, because that makes sense to do so for those two organisational forms, so we call them compliant, dependent and achievement forms, most organisations have bits of their organisation that are very stable at that.

Some organizations will have bits of their organization that are toxic in both, but the developmental level does not lead to the toxicity. There's some other stuff in play to get that going.

What we're seeing is that, as I said before, most people when you ask them, what are you being asked to do, what's your external environment asking you to do? For most people in the organizations we're working with around those as large corporates, Government, smaller organizations, mostly in Energy, Banking and Finance, Superannuation and Healthcare as well. They're saying our external environment is asking us to work better with our partners and stakeholders. We need to get our internal boundaries much more porous. We need to get much better at sharing information and understanding different points of view before we make a decision. We need to get our external boundaries more porous and get much more information from the external environment to understand what's actually going on. We have to take a systems view, this idea that we can take a functional or siloed view is not working for us anymore.

They are really starting to move into what we call collaborative growth, which is that much more collaborative, sustainable, working within your limits type of stance on the world. The one that comes after that we very rarely see, but people get, is co-creation, which is Second Tier thinking and development in interior individual development models, but that idea of, basically emergence as it emerges and what the sort of organizational structures would look like to support that do turn up in the world, but they're very few and far between. For us, we're playing mostly in the space of Compliant Dependent, Achievement and Collaborative Growth, which map onto Kegan's, Socialized, Self Authoring, Self Transforming. . And the way that Alison and Andrew conceived of the framework was that they were steeped in Integral and vertical development models and walking into organizations and seeing this stuff play out. What they've done is describe the world as they've seen it. And then we've got a diagnostic that we use to test into that and we’re building the data.

Peter Hayward: You described where an organization is impelled by it's... Customers and its stakeholders to become more porous, less functional, more systemic, more organic. And that's the outside of the organization, using my language. The inside of the organization is still trying to operate with functions, structure. Is the issue that you're describing that organizations face that as they need to become more porous and flexible on the outside, they have to also become more porous and flexible on the inside. And therein lies the dilemma. As Nita would say, that the leaders are comfortable with controlling on the inside, but leaving emergence on the outside?

Rowena Morrow: There's that and, in Sohail's language, the Metaphor of the organization needs to shift. In that Collaborative Growth co- creative stage, the metaphors are organic. In the Compliant Dependent and Achievement, they're mechanistic. If I'm going to broad brush stereotype. So yes, you've got individuals who are being rewarded and are successful based on old metaphors, worldviews, social causes and litany coming up the CLA, we're asking them to step into this new way, this new metaphor. There's going to be new reward mechanisms, new ways that honour will be bestowed upon you if you behave in different ways. And very few people have got their heads around what that looks like, me included. Because we're learning as we go into it.

What is it to be a good porous organization? How do you hold your internal coherence? How do you cleave to legislation? One of the things that we've found in Adaptive Cultures is that we have all these wonderful ideas about how we want to operate. Most of it we can't do under the legal constraints that we operate in, and we're a small organization.

Imagine you're a, an organization with 80, 000 people in it. How are you doing that? It is very interesting in this time that our societies, our organization, our structures are set up for the past. And we know the past is going to be very different to the future, even the next 10 years. So how do we move fast enough while still holding internal coherence to do the things we need to do to shift and change?

For me, I guess the last 12 months has shown me it's possible. It's been great from that perspective as I've gone back into working as a consultant with hundreds of people a year. Which gives me hope because I watch all of these brave individuals throwing themselves at these problems and really grappling with them and stepping into what might be possible. That's awesome and we need to ramp it up. We need to do it globally, everywhere, because these are the sorts of approaches and practices that will get us through the next bit. Because they're deeply humanistic, but they're also focused on the biosphere. Focused on that Collaborative Growth, Co creation level. It isn't about humans win at all costs. It's about how does the entire biosphere thrive in a way that makes sense for everything that's on it.

Which is a completely different way of thinking to how do I make as much money as possible out of doing whatever this one thing is that I'm going to do really well. It's a ‘both/and’ because there's going to be still so many millions of people in that, how do I make as much money as possible? And they all have to come with. So how do we do the transcend and include thing that offers up enough Love and acceptance of what's come before and compassion for what needs to come now and keeps us moving into a space that means that we might get through the next bit in some sort of coherent group. So that's the work.

Peter Hayward: You talked about a range of industries, sectors that are wrestling with this notion of becoming collaborative in how they relate and do their work. But the actual issue that the way they are structured and organized is often planned around legal requirements, structure requirements. So pick an organization. You don't need to identify who, but you're introduced that you go in and you talk to someone in a C suite. And when you are meeting them for the first time or you're meeting the organization for the first time, what are the tells? What are the things that you are paying attention to at the start that give you an idea that this is a group or a leadership or a culture that we could work with or yes, they're saying they want to change, but are they going to be able to change?

Rowena Morrow: For me, there's three buckets. There's, who are these people? Really, to be frank, in the C suite, what we need is Humility. If I come across a leader, a CEO, who is happy to admit they don't know. Then I feel like I've won the jackpot,. Many of the CEOs that we've worked with in organizations that have really taken this stuff and run have got that, it'll turn up in different ways, but that basic humility and curiosity around, yes, I am where I am, and I'm really curious to understand who you are, what you can bring, and I actually don't have all the answers and that's okay. If that's not in place, one of those bits, so a curiosity about it, a humility about it, actually I've tried everything, I don't know what to do about it, that's good too.

What doesn't work, and where we've come a cropper, is Narcissists. People who are absolutely sure that they are God's gift to the universe, and would die rather than change their mind. It's just not going to work and really, we should just find something else to do with our lives before we go any further.

The Executive Team doesn't all have to be on the same page around this stuff. People are where they are and meet them where they are,  having a few of them ready to grapple with this organization has got whatever it is that's going for it that they want to bring into the world. We're ready to do the work to get that done, and we're ready to do whatever it takes to get that done. And I don't mean that strive, drive, whatever it takes. I mean that expansive, actually, we don't know what it's going to take, so what could that look like type of approach.

From a structural point of view what I look for is do they have a compelling vision of the future? They might not have the the PowerPoint pack or the marketing slogan. They might be on the cusp, a number of our clients are on the cusp of moving from one future to the next, so they can tell us where they were going, , even if they can't tell us quite where they are going, but they think it looks or smells or feels like this, whatever that looks like. It's a much more abstract, amorphous future, but it's different, and they can articulate the difference, that's one opportunity.

The other one is , often what will happen is the Board and CEO executive team will have had a conversation around actually we need to be different in the future. They've had the strategy conversation. They sat with that for a number of months, or a year and they can't work out how to bring the organization with them. It's how do we do the next bit? So that clear purpose or strategy statement around what the future needs to look like and great if they've got some sort of outside in view of that, whatever that is.

From a collective perspective, for me, that started the minute I got into the parking lot. I'm looking for, the moment I roll up to any of our clients, which is why COVID was a bit hard actually, because we were doing a lot of it online, so you just didn't get any of this stuff. But we had one client, which was in a major metropolitan centre, out on the outskirts. I didn't even know where we were in the cab. We got there, none of the buildings have got signs on them or the signs they have got on them are so abstract I actually don't know what they mean. We got there, we looked at the building we thought was the right building, we got to the bottom of the ramp, and you can't get through the door. You've got to push a button and wait for the security guard to pay attention, come back to the desk and \ what we ended up doing was going in behind somebody who'd swiped their card to go in. Then you get your temperature taken. Then you get signed in. Then you're like, yay!

All of which was done for really good reason. So when that organization says, we want to be open, we want to bring people in, it's I can't find where you are. I can't get into your building, it's all of that stuff about how we've organized ourselves, what we think is important.

Because for us, it's not all about getting everybody to Collaborative Growth. It might be that you're really good at Compliant Dependent , and you need to move to Achievement. What does that look like? And how do you need to turn up to do that? How do you get outcomes and measures that drive the behaviours that you want to see?

That's less problematic. And in fact, that was the work that Adaptive Cultures came into. A local government area that I was working in was to help move the way the organization was operating from Compliant Dependent into Achievement, which we talked about as being from a customer experience lens, so everything arranged around the customer. That's a fairly well trodden path.

It gets more, interesting from my perspective, but less well trodden to go from Achievement to Collaborative Growth. Just for the structure part of it, because we haven't quite landed. Then what the other things we're looking for is what have they done that has succeeded or not. Lots of organizations everywhere have done Digital Transformations of various sorts, Customer Experience, like transformations, whatever they've done. What sense do they make of that?

If they tell the story of that transformation about how it was all about, and I'm paraphrasing stupid people who didn't get it and it was all individual failure. That's probably not where we're going. It's much more around curiosity, around why this great idea didn't land, or didn't get the traction they thought it would, and what were some of the things that were going on for them, and this bit worked, but that bit didn't. So that real sense of experimentation, sense of systems thinking, sense of complexity, even if it's nascent, around what it is they're dealing with, as opposed to clear cut Expert analysis of all the 25 things that everybody else did wrong and whatever. It's that, looking for fellow explorers is really what we're trying to find.

Peter Hayward: Can I take you into deep water?

Oh, please.

A good friend of ours, Andy Hines, has got an ongoing piece of work with the students at Houston on the Future of Democracy. And what you've been describing, what I've been hearing, is this notion of how we build structures to support culture to deal with complexity in organizations that have a degree of agency. They actually, to some extent, control who they are and what they do. And there are these other, quote, organizations or systems that sit around us, the big ones, the ones that tend to be political, tend to be... National, possibly even operate transnationally. I imagine the same dilemmas you are describing that happened to a finance company, health provider, operate at the level of national culture, national purpose. Virtually every country in the world is wrestling with the way that it's Democratic systems represent the wishes of people and the people in the political systems. Do you see any possibility that these kinds of ideas, that if they can be made to work in large organizations, possibly help the more high level issues that we face at the level of the planet?

Rowena Morrow: Yes. We have a client that is a multinational organization with 80, 000 people who works globally and so we have, and they have a visceral experience of what it is to bring this way of thinking into such an organization.

So I came in at the end of that, it's been something that Adaptive's been doing for a number of years. What's really fascinating to me is you've got the culture bit going, as I've just described it, so how organisational cultures work, individual, social, structural. You've also got, of course, the cultural bit overlaid from the different countries. You've got the Americans who, in the survey comments, are talking about certain things, and the people in the UK are talking about other things, and the people in France who are talking about other things. You've got all of the national dilemmas and debates popping up in the culture work in the organization. So these transnational organizations are holding their boundaries and operating as their functions overlaid on what's going on for their people in all of their different countries.

What I find fascinating about that is if we are liberating people and structures and ways of operating in these great multinational organizations, much like I said around, people have had experiences in Digital Media that have been profoundly empowering and agentic. You have an experience of life when what you do and how you do it matters to this behemoth of which you are a part. And then you go back to your one vote that votes, in my case, for a long time, a middle aged white guy who was completely unaligned to anything that I believed in or wanted for the world, and you think how's that work?  The future of democracy will need to change.

I think that's the work that Andy's team is looking at. The future is changing, things are changing, and how do the structures around democracy need to change For me, these ideas are already out in the world. What we've done is tried to encapsulate them in a framework and language that allows people to have a conversation about their organizations. People are smart, so they'll work out if it can work for us in this organization, why couldn't it work for us nationally? What's interesting, I think, about the political and democratic, is that we have, unlike organizations, which to your point can shift rather quickly if they decide to, there is so much legacy wrapped up in our democracy and those structures and processes is moving away from those. There's such a long tail, the weight of the past is so heavy that the pull of the future isn't enough to tip the scales.

I guess what I'm looking for is from the visceral, the lived experience of being different in organisations and in organisational cultures. That weight of the past version, the pull of the future, gets overlaid with the push of the present. The push of the present actually drives, is the energy that drives out, rather than looking for some future vision to do the work. If I had to, analyze it, I think that's where I would land. I'm not arrogant enough to think that our little framework's going to make a difference globally, and that's our aim. We've got big dreams. We want to bring this stuff to the world, because why the hell not? We may as well give it a shot, and if no one likes it that is what it is. I find it extraordinarily useful.

Peter Hayward: That's all great Rowena. So for people that have found the stuff you've been talking about interesting and want to know more where might people find more information.

Rowena Morrow: The Adaptive Cultures website is adaptivecultures. co We've got a White Paper that Andrew and Alice and our founders wrote in 2018 that talks about the developmental model. The other place I'd go looking if you haven't already is Frederick Laloux’s work on Second Tier organizations. There's some interesting bits and pieces in there. The other thing is Boundaryless, which is an Italian group that talks about Platform Technology. They do some training and have a lot of information around the Haier model of platform, so how organizations construct themselves as a platform. Of course, all the developmental material that I'm sure you can find in other Futurepod conversations around how individuals develop over time, anything in that vertical development space is also interesting and helpful.

Peter Hayward: Thanks Rowena. It's always great to hear where you are and you are on your journey. So it all sounds fascinating. Thanks for taking some time out to spend it with me and the FuturePod community.

Rowena Morrow: Thank you. It's always a pleasure, Peter.

Peter Hayward: My thanks to Rowena for another honest and stimulating conversation. You will find further information about the things Rowena spoke to, including Adaptive Cultures, in the episode show notes on our website. Futurepod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist because of the generosity of our supporters. If you love listening to the Pod and would like to support us then please check out the Patreon on link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.