LIFE LEADERSHIP DOMAINS

MOOD MANAGERS
– Facing Facts
– Exploring Possibilities
– Embracing Uncertainty
– Seeking Growth

REALITY CREATORS
– Emotioning
– Presencing
– Relating
– Languaging

MOVIE MAKERS
– Inner Producer
– Inner Director
– Inner Scriptwriter
– Inner Actor

ENERGY PRODUCERS
– Inside-Out Energy
– Outside-In Energy
– Top-Down Energy
– Bottom-Up Energy

Learn how to observe your authentic presence in a social context. You can feed off and match the energy of others whilst remaining centred and empathetic.

When leadership follows the trends and preferences within society, communities and membership groups the energy for leadership is coming from “outside” the “system in focus”. Outside-In Energy comes in the form of customer and other stakeholder needs, objectives and challenges. This kind of energy can come out of the blue in the form of “big data”. But it is for the leader to decide how important it is and what it means. The response can be instinctive, revealing hidden insights, stimulating new ways of thinking and doing things.

We draw this energy from “emergent truths” that are relateable. They are what is observable, self-evident and present when we become aware of the bigger picture and cannot be ignored. It is outside of our personal knowing yet is verifiable and evident from what makes sense and is logical. It’s what we refer to as the “grounding” of facts in context.”

“An inner process stands in need of outward criteria”  – Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is the world “out there” that we share with others who can see the same things quite differently, yet can agree with when serving something they care about. It includes the behaviour of others performing roles such as citizens, professionals or customers that we can set out to measure and assess through surveys and focus groups.  We are not referring here to people we “know” personally. They are seen as fellow actors in our “life movie”  We connect with their demands and the responsibilities placed upon them.

The power of culture

It’s important we “know” our colleagues and customers as human beings. Not as statistics but as unique individuals with different perspectives to offer. We can then observe and describe their mindsets, and emotions, even empathise, but not “know” their feelings as they are unique to them. We look for evidence upon which to ascribe a motive or intention to act.

The time that I have spent in community and organisation development, within voluntary and public sector organisations, has helped me realise that relationships, context and environment are more than data. I would interpret data from observation and make assessments of the impact on human beings and the bottom line. I have to be careful to see my own assumptions and biases. Politics and business are about polarities, trade-offs and priorities.

Ken Wilber refers to the “outside-in” perspective as his “IT Quadrant. Phenomena that are mind created and described in pragmatic terms. Clare Graves sees this perspective reflected in his RED vMemes where the attitude is to gain power over the environment to exploit and dominate it for the purpose of personal gain.  This is reflected today in cultures that impose an ideology to extort money or dominate a market or even a country.  But this takes a creative and imaginative mind that can see the strengths and weaknesses in the human condition. This requires practices such as reframing and mapping out mental models to combine with Bottom-Up Energy sources. This accesses the diverse perspectives available from stakeholders to achieve collaborative action.

The outside-in mindset can impact change and collaboration. It adds to inside-out thinking that includes Carol Dweck’s fixed(static) and growth (dynamic) mindsets; Peter Senge’s mental models and systems thinking (The Fifth Discipline); Robert Kegan’s and Lisa Leahey’s mental complexity (immunity to Change); Otto Scharmer’s ‘blind spot’ and generative listening (Theory U); Bill Torbert’s action logics as well as Chris Argyris’ single and double loop learning.

The problem is that the outside-in dynamic is growing stronger and becoming a more ruthless form of capitalism as it focuses on impact. It’s vitally important in any competitive market to stimulate the Inside-Out perspective that enables our creativity to focus the mind on new thinking. This is prompting leaders to think about what it means to be more human and access the inside-out values, skills, attitudes, talents, knowledge and relationships that are needed to expand an outside mindset that addresses customer loyalty, consumer demand and social expectations.

Modern organisations are getting better at processing information and resources to secure inside-out commitments by questioning the value of “big data” itself. It’s the insights it can trigger and the stories it can tell us that we need to value.  This is where outside-in energy can be an asset.

Environmental conditions also create a context that shapes a customer’s response to what businesses are offering. Howard Gardner reminds us that experts are needed but they must now be disciplined and dedicated to gathering information from disparate sources and combining it creatively. For example, young people rely more and more on digital Apps in the creation of their reality and identity. We have to respect and embrace the power of outside-in energy in shaping how we think and act beyond our own self-interest.

Your Energy Producers

We draw Outside-In Energy from our context. Our Way of Being is “coupled” with our environment because it shapes our thoughts and actions. We are subject to the demands of culture and the constraints of our context to compete with “them” for resources to serve “our” intentions.

Being outside-in driven

In the commercial world, Simon Sinek sees people “naturally communicating from the outside-in; they typically go from what is easiest to understand to what is hardest to understand and explain. They tell people what they need, tell them how they are different or better, and then expect behavior like a purchase,” 

There is a growing realisation that leadership for change in today’s organisations and communities must be distributed widely, with a focus on managing the relationship between service users (outside) and service providers (inside).

I directed a partnership project called Learning from Service Users in the early 90s, between Birmingham City Council and the then Local Government Management Board (now the IDeA). Its brief was to see how service managers and teams could learn from their service users.  Many lessons were learned with the potential to transform public services. But resistance to customer-led solutions meant lip service was paid, and few of the lessons learned were embedded by professional managers who believed they knew better and had more important priorities to consider. Good practice and goodwill were lost.

The disaster at Grenfell Tower in London yet again raised the question of not listening to or learning from service users.  Public sector bodies are still not learning the lessons from this work, which I led in 1990. Some 30-plus years on, we are better at engaging stakeholders, but not in processing the feedback from a complex network of interest groups. We tend to wait for “big solutions” that are never fully implemented.  It would be better to take the advice of Kevin Kelly and “grow by chunking”. Commit to a result and deliver what is promised.  Service user views are treated as if they are a passive audience awaiting direction from those imposing their Top-Down Energy. The new science of marketing focuses on the “mind” of the market. It seeks to tap into the dynamic and complex interactions and co-creative opportunities on offer from customer-provider relationships.

The draw of “Big Data”

And here we are some 20 years later and leading thinkers at Harvard Business School continue to argue that “a shift of focus is needed from the inside-out to the outside-in”.  They argue that the role of today’s leaders must be to look outwards to connect and align customer expectations with employee priorities and service processes. It seems that short-sighted politicians and shareholders have only served to create top-down pressures to reduce variety – diversity being too expensive and unmanageable. We cannot please all of the people all of the time as more diverse demands and new data come along all the time, constantly shifting priorities.

Herminia Ibarra explores this idea from a leadership perspective and the need to look to the outside world for innovation and transformation to improve results. This inevitably means building bridges to explore and understand the outside-in energy coming from a changing environment.

To build a life and a business we have to build hubs and bridges to understand the bigger picture that we are part of. In business, the bridging role involves aligning team goals with organisation values and (where possible) with customer priorities. This means funneling critical information from outside into the organisation so that resources and coaching support can be used effectively to help key allies. This enhances the visibility and reputation of the team, allocating good performers to the most important assignments so they can achieve a better understanding of what’s going on “out there”.

To drive change and improve performance it is critical to know what is important to those we are seeking to serve. Businesses need to find out what matters to customers and translate their findings into operational activities that add value to outside-in demands. The fastest way to make changes that will deliver what matters to customers and use it to drive the design and management of work. Cooperation among business partners and with customers will enable us to pull away from the competition.

In life, we build experiences through customer engagement, friendships, engaging in personal development activities and clubs, socialising to enhance our support network, focusing our job choices on career ambitions and recognition and planning adventurous holidays. The Life Leader is focused on doing and learning new things that will serve real needs.

How customers think

Technology is coming to the rescue. It will allow the variety of supply channels to match the diversity of demands, thereby realising Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. John Seddon’s work at Vanguard has shown that adopting a systemic approach starts by identifying the variety and nature of customer demand which enables an organisation to eliminate waste and create ‘lean’ survival processes to vastly reduce levels of “failure demand”.

John Seddon teases out elements of the dynamic tension that exists between the inside-out energy for change, which is the way we might think about ourselves, the choices we have to make, our beliefs, our confidence, etc., and the outside-in energy for change that provides the context or environment to which we must respond with different types of behaviour. John argues that if the focus is on work demands (outside-in energy) set against our willingness to shift the way we think and feel about work (inside-out energy), we can reduce the tension and integrate these two forces to achieve beneficial change. The result is often vastly improved levels of performance and motivation in the workplace, but the driver for change comes from the outside-in.

Those working in marketing and research, such as Gerald Zaltman, speak about “woefully flawed paradigms for navigating an increasingly precarious environment”.  Discovering that customers don’t actually think in words, is forcing a change in the way marketers go about influencing the way people think and communicate. We are discovering the power of metaphor, stories and manipulating emotions as ways of pre-disposing people to make particular assumptions or choices. We are influenced from the outside-in through conversation, the media, and customer demand because we see them as objects.  Therefore it makes sense to try and understand the elements of human behaviour and what is needed to stimulate them. What’s needed is a paradigm shift in the way leaders encourage new ways of thinking about problems and creating solutions based on facts and possibilities.

How we ask questions becomes fundamentally important for leaders to promote rational thoughts to help face facts, explore possibilities and embrace uncertainty.  David Rock believes that leaders who know how to ask questions will get other people to think objectively. This holds the key to transforming people’s motivation to perform.  He draws his thinking from the new sciences of evolutionary psychology, systems theory, genetics, linguistics, and neuropsychology. Our brains like to create order out of chaos, so using questions that get the mind to create new connections energises us to think things through and commits us to take new actions.

Using outside-in questioning to find inside-out answers

Asking the brain to analyse what’s wrong just deepens the old ‘wiring’.  When stimulated to think about solutions a new ‘circuitry’ is created. The best way to use questions is to:

1. Encourage others to think about possible solutions so they come up with a variety of ideas coming from a bigger world

2. Support the other person with further questions that encourage them to focus and achieve clarity of thought

3. Use questions to help people find answers that find the common ground in different perceptions of the world out there.

This outside-in questioning can promote inside-out answers. This process lies at the heart of leadership.  Much depends on the quality of the listening to ensure that the questions are succinct, specific and sensitive.  This approach enables the leader to take others on a journey from:

• raising awareness of the problem and its uncertainties (seeking permission to ask the question and listen to what makes sense)
• focusing on the facts that have to be faced (seeking to anchor the question in a given context)
• questioning to bring out possibilities (seeking to explore options, feelings, and priorities)
• resolving dilemmas (seeking growth through risk-taking, goal setting, and purposeful action).

Scanning the environment

The whole process of delivering “Best Value” in public services is designed to foster outside-in thinking. Consultation with customers and the engagement of partners, comparison with the best performers, the challenging of the previous decisions of managers, members and boards as well as getting a sense of one’s competitive position, all serve to encourage ‘outside’ thinking and action. To develop partnership working and local involvement, the focus of attention must be to look at the threats and opportunities to the organisation coming from employees, customers and stakeholders.

• SCANNING to find out what the future may bring or how to create it.
• ALIGNING to see interrelationships based on knowledge, not position, and organisations operating as complex adaptive networks.
• RESEARCHING to discover what the leading thinkers and change leaders are saying and doing.
• CLIMATISING to create a positive atmosphere to encourage creative and productive interactions and conversations.

The outside-in dimension draws on the Complexity Sciences and concepts such as ecosystem, metaphor, co-evolution, double-loop learning, feedback, nonlinearity, receiver-based communication and different perspectives.

The inside-outside connection

No living thing can exist separate from its environment. Every activity thought and emotion is influenced by its context. It is a hidden source of energy that comes at us from the outside-in. Neuroscientists refer to this phenomenon as structural coupling. It reflects the complementary nature of different organisms that can emerge even when they operate interdependently over a prolonged period. It explains how the brain self-organises the data it receives from our senses to direct the body to sustain its own survival. Different systems are creating different ways of connecting so they influence each other’s behaviour. Body and mind create a synergistic relationship.

“We speak of structural coupling whenever there is a history of recurrent interactions leading to the structural congruence between two (or more) systems.”  – Humberto Maturana & Francesco Varela

It is natural to look outside ourselves for evidence of our assessments. Depending on which story we choose to declare as true (the inside-out energy) determines the world we observe and react to (the outside-in energy). The story that science offers us is one of an evolving spiral of human consciousness that brings together a world of harmony and balance (the bottom-up energy) with a world of directed progress (the top-down energy).

It is the way we choose to interpret our context in terms of these competing energy sources that impact our effectiveness. It can take many forms. What we are doing is giving meaning to our perceptions represented by concepts such as spontaneous evolution, complex adaptive system, a natural world, etc. To change your life you have to change your beliefs, which means you have to observe and interpret the outside world in a different way. Consider the value in alternative worldviews.

Dealing with Outside-In Change

When there is more change outside than inside the energy for change will stagnate. Random attempts to adjust just generate more uncertainty. If the response is too little then nothing will improve, but if there is too much change the result is often chaos. The need for change grows but people’s inability to face facts prevents them from going forward. They are constrained by long-standing agreements, expectations, and traditions on the one hand and unwillingness to accept fewer constraints in order to find new ways of thinking and working. A balance has to be struck which is best fostered by active learning, encouraging new relationships, promoting creative thinking and supporting innovation.

By adopting a solution focus it is possible to find the small steps that will move things forward.

STEP 1: Your current situation – why you are where you are and what’s not working

STEP 2: Changes needed to meet future challenges – where ideally you need to be

STEP 3: Identify options available – the small actions that contribute to the desired future

STEP 4. Observe and measure the impact – on policy and people constraints/freedoms and the results on business performance.

The Age of Reunion

The “age of reunion” is a phrase used by Charles Eisenstein that recognises our environment is in crisis. A fundamental ecological relationship with all of nature means that the boundary between our inside-out energised self is merging with our outside-in energised world. We are re-discovering the relationship between our way of being and our way of doing that is causing us to be grateful for the simple joys in our environment and value our humanness in order to experience them.

The world out there is therefore not benign. Global events, environmental conditions, social situations, political relationships and customer expectations, all have an energy that impacts on the way we see the direction and intensity of how we must lead our lives to have a healthy and fulfilling future. Culture and technology have become core issues for humanity. They provide the context that shapes our personal thoughts and actions. But are we deluded in seeing ourselves separate from our context? Is it more helpful to see ourselves as the makers of context?

We are living in a world of human creation. We can blame earthquakes, but the deaths are more often than the result of our own making in choices we make about where we live and what we live in. Perhaps we bring suffering on ourselves and blame what’s happening “out there” when we are creating it “in here.” Now is the time to regenerate our human capabilities and renew our ecosystems.

Context shapes the mind

Recent research by scientists such as Bruce Lipton is showing that genes and DNA do not control our biology. DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts that are stimulated by the energy received from our environment. This research into cellular biology and quantum physics is being hailed as a major breakthrough showing that our bodies can be changed as we embody our thinking and sensory experiences. In the first months of life, the brain gathers and processes through its senses vast amounts of data from its environment that shapes how we respond. My Coaching Guides enable you to explore how to heighten and eliminate sensations, thoughts, and feelings by observing patterns of behaviour.

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”   – Albert Einstein

We tend to describe the real world “out there” as quantifiable objects with qualities. We then give meaning to them through our senses and form emotional relationships with them so we can innovate, learn and adapt to create new realities. The new Complexity Sciences are giving us new perspectives from which to make sense of an unpredictable world.

Accepting ever increasing complexity

Science is transforming the way we interpret our world and our relationship with it. In his book Navigating Complexity, Arthur Battram offers a few examples:

• knowledge cannot be managed like commodities because it can create more of itself at an ever-increasing rate.
• Ordered systems do not collapse into chaos if left alone
• People do not behave rationally when making economic choices
• It is impossible to assign clear boundaries to a living system
• Ideas spread, not by rational thought, but by the memetic transfer of fashion and fads
• Biological metaphors are creating a new world reality

No surprises here. What’s changed is the way we have embraced concepts such as turbulence, disequilibrium, unpredictability, self-organisation, adaptation, learning, increasing returns and persistence. They are the new principles we are adopting to help us face facts, explore possibilities, embrace uncertainty and seek growth.

References

Spontaneous Evolution by Bruce Lipton & Steve Bhaerman. Hay House 2011

The Ascent of Man by Charles Eisenstein. Evolver 2013

Navigating Complexity by Arthur Battram. Industrial Society 1998

Out of Control by Kevin Kelly. Basic Books 1995

Adaptive Action by Glenda Eoyang & Royce Holladay. Stanford Business 2013

Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader by Herminia Ibarra. Harvard 2015