Inner Complexity : using Landscape of the Mind to … · Web viewBut many “techies” have difficulty seeing the value of what they regard as this touchy feely stuff, and definitely

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Inner Complexity: Using Landscape of the Mind to catalyse change in organisations

ByK. F. Hopkinson

BA Hons (Liverpool); MA (Centre for the Study of Management Learning, Lancaster University)

Senior Research Associate, Complexity Research Group, LSE; Director, Inner Skills Consultancy Ltd

All material, including all figures, is protected by copyright and should not be reproduced without the express permission of the author.

ABSTRACT

Most social science research applying complexity principles concentrates on the complexity of the external world. There has been relatively little work on the inner complexity of human beings, and how this influences their behaviour in the world.This chapter introduces a visual methodology called Landscape of the Mind (referred to as LoM), which is designed to focus on these issues. Case studies and examples are given to illustrate its practical applications and show how it can be used to catalyse change in organisations, with particular reference to the implications for leadership and innovation.

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Introduction

Most social science research which applies complexity principles is an attempt to get to grips with important aspects of the outside world. There has been much less emphasis on the intrinsic complexity human beings bring to any situation, by reason of being human.

Yet multifariousness and unpredictability of response is a key factor in human social systems in general, and organisations in particular (look how often “human error” is identified as a cause, when complex systems fail).

Landscape of the Mind (LoM) is a model and a methodology designed to take account of our inner complexity (Shaw and Frost, 2015, p.638) and to illuminate how it interacts with the complexity of the world around us. This in turn has significant implications for management at all levels.

The concept of inner skills

We begin from the concept of inner skills. Every individual brings an extraordinary range of inner gifts and qualities to every situation. These include experience, logic, imagination, intuition, feelings and values. Somehow, we orchestrate all these intangible competencies (Hailey, 2015) into coherent, if sometimes unexpected, action in the world (hence, inner skills):

My docs\complexity handbook\diamond integrated chapter\diamond integrated as of 11.12.15 © Kate Hopkinson 2015

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Diagram 1: What are inner skills?

Generally speaking, everyone is equipped with all inner skills, though we use them differently.

On the basis of our research over 40 years, several characteristics of inner skills have become clear:

There are significant individual, team and corporate differences in preferences. Preferences are reflected in performance. Some inner skills strategies seem to be much more enabling of some outcomes

than others. For instance, navigating successfully in uncertainty, complexity and turbulence seems to depend on using more of some types of inner skills, rather than others.

By preference being reflected in performance, I mean that if you know someone’s pattern of inner skills preferences, you can usually make some quite good predictions about where their time, energy and attention will go, and vice versa. This is probably one of our most important findings, as it highlights the immense practical consequences which follow from apparently nebulous, invisible inner activity.

What is unusual about LoM, is that, as well as using it to understand people, you can also apply the concepts to work. Different tasks, projects, and jobs require a different mix of inner skills to perform successfully.

This doesn’t mean there is only one “right” way to do something – on the contrary – but there are sequences of inner skills which will not get you to where you want to go.

LoM is something you do with people, not to them (Argyris and Schon, 1989), so LoM projects are collaborative explorations, out of which emerge chosen courses of action


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which have been generated by, and are owned by, the participants. This is facilitated by LoM providing a language and framework for exploring both what they are trying to do, and what, dynamically, they are bringing to the task.

Different kinds of inner skills

Most everyday managerial work in all fields draws mainly on convergent and evaluative inner skills. It involves collecting and organising facts and figures, and drawing logical conclusions based on the evidence. It also involves talking and listening to others, and having a drive to overcome obstacles and achieve outcomes.

By exercising these inner skills (and other related ones) appropriately, individuals and organisations can achieve and sustain considerable success.

But there is one crucial criterion which must be met: for this kind of strategy to work, the organisation’s operating environment needs to be relatively stable. The more turbulent and unpredictable the environment, the less will a combination of convergent and evaluative inner skills, support continuing success. Many highly successful companies have gone out of business doing what they had always done best, because the fitness landscape [ref. Kauffman] around them had changed. There is widespread recognition of this – hence repeated calls for organisations to become more flexible, agile and resilient.

But it is one thing to identify the need, and another to change behaviour to meet it. LoM is very good at catalysing this shift in awareness and behaviour. Later in this chapter, I will be presenting a number of case studies illustrating its use, but first we need to look more closely at the model, and then the methodology.

The Landscape of the Mind (LoM) model

If we are interested in how to help organisations navigate in ambiguity and uncertainty, and shape a future in a continually changing context, we need to understand and mobilise another major type of inner skill, which we have, but largely do not value.

Convergent inner skills underpin working with what we already know and understand. Evaluative inner skills enable us to make choices, judgments and decisions. But we also come equipped with a whole range of inner skills for moving away from what we currently know and understand, out into the unknown. We call these divergent inner skills* (Hudson, 1966) - and we now know that they are crucial to navigating successfully in turbulence.

Although we all arrive with these divergent inner skills (it’s hard to see how we could accomplish growing up without them), they are not supported by our education system, or the culture at large. So by the time most people are adult, they have learned not to use divergent inner skills, and are often rather out of touch with these inner gifts.

*I do not use the concept of divergence in the same way that Hudson did, but I acknowledge his influence on my work.

LoM can:


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i) Identify individuals and groups who are still in touch with their capacity to diverge from the known

ii) Help individuals and organisations to develop both competence and confidence in doing this, by using divergent inner skills, and

iii) Link them to the other dimensions of inner skills which are essential for implementing ideas in a dynamic, constantly co-evolving process.

To capture the universe of possibilities of all the different kinds of inner skills which can be brought to bear, we map them onto a globe. Just as with a geographical globe, by drawing imaginary lines on the LoM globe, we can work out both where we are (in the sense of which inner skills are in play at a particular time ), and agree where we want to get to.

Our basic globe looks like this:

Diagram 2: Basic First Level globe

As you can see, as well as the distinctions between divergent, convergent and evaluative inner skills, we also make another distinction, orthogonal to those, between cool and warm inner skills. Cool inner skills (those above the “equator”) are detached, and seem to stand on the outside looking in. Warm inner skills, on the other hand (those below the “equator”) are emotionally engaged and on the inside looking out, as it were [ref Cox, Hopkinson et al].

To close this section, here is another version of the LoM globe, populated with some examples of behaviour which are primarily underpinned by each kind of inner skill:


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Diagram 3: Colourkey Globe

The Profiling process

As a consultant working with organisations, it helps to have a simple method for collecting a lot of useful data quickly, without putting heavy demands on the client. The LoM electronic profiling process enables this. Triangulating the results with other sources of information (Keskinen, AAltonen and Mitleton-Kelly, 2003, p.65-7) also allows us to populate the LoM globe with actual examples from the client’s own story and experience. This “grounds” the “theory” so it becomes real and relevant.

It is less the absolute scores and more the relative scores, the patterns of use in practice, and the choreography with others’ contributions which are interesting and helpful to people. This is why feedback is a face-to-face process where the meaning is an emergent aspect of the conversation between participants and consultant.

The LoM globe and the profiling results usually make sense intuitively to participants, sometimes after a little time to reflect, particularly when participants themselves begin to give telling examples from the coal face. The LoM framework is then fairly readily adopted and applied, sometimes more skilfully than others, of course.

Here are three First Level LoM profiles:


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Diagram 4: Three first level profiles

The two on the left hand side are very common, in the sense that there are many examples of patterns of strong preference for these inner skills on our database. The one on the right, on the other hand, is very unusual: only a small proportion of profiles on the database display the characteristic that divergent inner skills dominate.

But crucially, these are the people who navigate very easily and fluently in turbulence and uncertainty, and who come up with sometimes radically novel ideas and solutions to problems (I describe one striking example, Carole, later in the case studies section).

However, they don’t fit easily or comfortably in large organisations, and often either jump or are pushed, especially when companies are trying to become leaner and meaner.This results in the curious spectacle of these same organisations ramping up the rhetoric about the need for flexibility, creativity, and innovation – at the same time as they are divesting themselves of exactly the potential trail blazers and role models who could have helped them achieve the changes they say they need and want.

First Level profiles provide an introductory, broad brush picture of the territory which LoM covers. There is also another much more detailed analysis which puts a particular pattern of inner skills preferences under a microscope, and brings into focus each separate inner skill within each of the families of inner skills:


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Diagram 5: Depth profile

Depth profiling is a very powerful tool, especially with senior executives, but limitations of space will unfortunately prevent us exploring its applications and implications within this chapter.

Lastly, here are answers to some frequently asked questions about LoM:

Points of clarification Everyone uses all the colours Applies to tasks as well as people Scale invariant – individual, team, organisation and ecosystem More is not necessarily better: it depends on what you are trying to do Preference is not necessarily the same as competence Divergence is not creativity, and scores are not comparable across the three

main LoM dimensions Warm blue scores do not reflect personal values Not all colours get on equally well Usage is context-dependent (reciprocal influence) Colours become relevant in different ways at different stages of a process.

What changes and what doesn’t Preferences are fairly stable over time But choices may change, as a result of

o developing competence in using non-preferred inner skills and in timing contributions


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o developing tolerance to allow others to use theirso changes in context enable people to use inner skills they haven’t felt able

to before. Quite small changes in behaviour can have substantial practical benefits.

Landscape of the Mind in action - theory into practice

It has been said that there is nothing so practical as a good theory, but how do LoM’s theoretical predictions compare with what we find on the ground?

Simply on the basis of the LoM model, it’s possible to predict that units and organisations which are primarily focused on delivery (whether of products or services), are likely to have cool gold, cool blue and warm gold as their dominant preferences. In other words, the majority of their time, energy and attention will be devoted to producing whatever they produce, to standard, on time and within budget.

This gives us what we call the Delivery pattern. “Improver” groups, on the other hand (that is, units or groups tasked with bringing about innovation and significant change), would be expected to show stronger preferences for the inner skills which underpin those kinds of activities. This gives the Discovery pattern.

The discovery pattern includes all green inner skills, because these are the ones which enable us to diverge from the status quo; plus warm blue because these inner skills are implicated in having the courage to take personal risks, to stand up for what you believe in, and trial new options.


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Diagram 6: Operational management versus strategic change

Is this difference reflected in real organisations? Well, it certainly seems to be. Here is an example, taken from the NHS as it is very easy to classify different groups into primarily deliverers or discoverers.

Here are the rank ordered preferences for 130 senior managers in Acute Hospital Trusts, with for contrast, the rank ordered preferences for the top 60 managers in the NHS Modernisation Agency (since closed down). The Modernisation Agency was set up to do exactly that – support innovation and modernise the NHS:


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Diagram 7: Operational sample (Deliverers) versus Improvers sample (Discoverers)

In each case, the improvers sample’s preference for the inner skills involved in the discovery pattern, is higher than for their colleagues in the delivery sample.

This is only the beginning of illuminating the not always comfortable dynamic between these two groups / tasks, because there are potentially strong tensions inherent in the juxtaposition of the delivery and discovery patterns. Here are a few indicators of where the gremlins lurk:


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Diagram 8: Inherent tensions between different inner skills strategies

The catch is that organisations need to be doing both at once, with the balance progressively shifting further towards allocating more resources to discovery relative to delivery, the more turbulent their operating environment becomes. But once the issues of when and how to actually do this are opened up to constructive practical debate, instead of an endless exchange of conflicting opinions (which themselves reflect different patterns of inner skills preferences), progress can usually begin to be made.

Case studies and examples to illustrate the application of Landscape of the Mind

An easy way to engage participants with LoM findings, is to use rank ordered preferences, mapped onto a globe. There are many other ways of interpreting LoM data, especially at the Depth Level, but I am using rank ordered preferences here as they are very accessible measures. Dominant preferences usually “run the show”, tending to take up most of an individual or group’s time, energy and attention.

Here are two members of a senior team, who have “opposite” dominant preferences. We can predict that they may find it hard to work together, even with good will on both sides:


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Diagram 9: Comparison of rank ordered preferences (AN and AW)

There will be a strong temptation for AN, whose top three preferences are all cool, to regard AW as a time-wasting chatterbox, caught up in emotions and gossip; while AW will likely see AN as cold, aloof, possibly arrogant and certainly not a team player. Being able to look at their differences as a function of their inner skills preferences, and not malice or insensitivity, is a good starting point to explore and discuss which other inner skills sequences they could use, which might improve their working relationship.

Here is an example where the dominant preferences for a whole top team, are highly discrepant with those of their new CEO:


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Diagram 10: The New Broom

This kind of situation is common, when a new CEO has been brought in break up the old ways of doing things, and bring about radical change. It often has predictable consequences too, when the situation blows up completely and the new CEO leaves. An expensive and time consuming maladaptive walk for all concerned.

But this outcome is not inevitable. Once everyone in the situation can see the gulf in LoM terms, they can (and do) set about figuring out how to “bridge the gap” and work successfully together (even if, as in this case, the team referred to their CEO as “The Tornado” behind her back).

What about the reverse case? Here is a senior team and team leader where the dynamics are quite different:


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Diagram 11: Development Director and the regional centre managers – national not-for-profit

This too can be tricky to manage, but is much more likely to be successful if there can be open and honest discussion of what it is like for participants. The regional centres were a new venture for the organisation, so they needed directors who could innovate, improvise and start something up from scratch. This is reflected in their higher than average scores on divergence. But their boss’s two most dominant preferences are both blue (evaluative). Strong “blue” preferences tend to shut down green divergence, frustrating the divergers, and depriving the organisation of the innovation at the periphery which it needs. This configuration risks the regional centre directors being the direction-finders, with their boss always saying “no” and blocking needed innovation / variation.

Incidentally, the LoM model is significantly “no blame”. It is not about the right way or the wrong way; or the people who don’t see it as you do, being either mad or bad or both. The relevant questions are about what we’re trying to do together, and what kinds of inner skills patterns this will need to support it, to be assessed against what kinds of sequences we’re currently using.

Inner skills patterns across management levels

Here is a slightly more complicated example, looking at the top three levels of a world class commercial manufacturing company.

This organisation, although it was at pole position internationally in its field, recognised that simply carrying on doing what it did best, was not going to save it, in a rapidly


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changing fitness landscape. So there was good theoretical recognition of the need for increased agility, flexibility, and innovation. Practically everyone was talking the talk. But when we looked at the dominant patterns of preference for each of the top three levels of management, this is what we found:

Diagram 12: Three levels of leadership

At each level, the pattern was different; but for all three levels, diverging from what they were currently doing was not getting a lot of time, energy or attention, in spite of all the aspirational rhetoric swirling around.

This raised serious questions about whether this group were well placed to lead the kind of fundamental changes which they recognised intellectually they needed to design and implement.

This in turn led to the incorporation of LoM workshops and profiling in their development activities, both for senior executives and also for young high flyers.

Working with the less-than-thrilled

As already mentioned, LoM is an approach which you do with people, not to people. So how does it work if the prospective participants are not keen? Here is a case study about a global, world class, household-name company and their use of LoM to address a strategic issue they faced.

The head of their IT function, Paul, was concerned that this side of the business risked being out sourced. He saw this as having serious unintended consequences for the company, as well as for the individuals concerned.


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He then took an unusually fresh, thoughtful look at how his IT experts added value to the company (his ability to do this is reflected in his own LoM profile). They themselves assumed their value lay in their technical skills and leading edge software know-how. But actually, their irreplaceable contribution lay in the quality of the relationships they built with their internal clients, so that they became trusted advisors to line managers, not just “fix-it” merchants and fire fighters when company systems went down.

And this was what would be lost if the IT function was out sourced.

So the challenge was to strengthen their capability to initiate and sustain these high quality relationships, where they really understood the needs of the business and were seen to, by their internal customers.

But many “techies” have difficulty seeing the value of what they regard as this touchy feely stuff, and definitely don’t recognise it as fundamental to their work. In fact, we were told that if we even used the word “relationships” in the title of the project, we’d be dead in the water. It also became clear that, in some cases because of less than good experiences in the past, they would be very resistant to individual profiling.

So at the front end, the project was described as being about “network development”, and built around jointly exploring the aggregate LoM data, and mapping that onto their work and how it was evolving.

Meanwhile, the scaffolding for the whole project was four goals which had already been decided and which they had to meet anyway – so it wasn’t “extra” on top of what was already going on, but an enabler for current commitments. This noticeably increased participants’ motivation to take part.

In the first workshop, we presented the aggregate findings regarding LoM preferences for the whole department


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Diagram 13: Whole group (48 people) without Management Team and Head of Department

This exactly mirrored predictions, based on the demands of their jobs.

But we also showed aggregate figures for the management group in the department – which were a bit different:


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Diagram 14: IT Management Team (5 people) without Head of Department

The Head of Department had specifically chosen this group for their higher loading on warm gold (the inner skills particularly implicated in relationships). This was simply presented as information, but since they all knew this group, it wasn’t hard for them to see the relevance, and the difference which this altered weighting made.

The final plank in the initial sub-project to gain credibility for the LoM model, was, with his permission, to present the individual profile results for the Head of Department. Again with his prior consent, this was introduced with the observation “so if you always thought Paul was from another planet, you were absolutely right!”


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Diagram 15: Head of Department’s rank ordered preferences

Since they had indeed thought this, as we unpacked what these differences meant on the ground (Paul was present in the workshop), while there was a good deal of laughter, there was also a dawning recognition that the methodology could accurately surface important but intangible issues – as well as providing a language and a framework for discussing them. And it could tell them something useful as well as intriguing, such as how to manage their boss better.

It was at this point that the participants insisted they wanted their own individual profiles – which then had to be built in to the project. Finally, the before and after measures by an independent consultancy, did indeed show significant improvement on exactly the relationship-building skills which the project had been set up to support.

Serendipitous research findings

Another characteristic of the LoM approach is that it can turn up completely unexpected phenomena. Not just interesting oddities, but findings which may turn out to have direct consequences for a company’s bottom line.

Here is one such case study. In the course of profiling a group of about 60 people whose dominant preferences were strongly cool gold and cool blue, we noticed a few outliers, who had more green in their profiles than the majority – and one in particular, Carole, who had a significant loading on divergence.

Although not covered by the project, I arranged to give Carole feedback on her profile. This was personally life-changing, as it not uncommonly is. Since the management team in her department was familiar with the LoM model, I asked Carole if she was willing for


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me to show them her profile. She agreed. The reaction of the management team was interesting: they immediately recognised that here was someone with highly discrepant preferences to most of their staff, and someone with something distinctive and important to contribute – but they had no idea what to do with her.

This again, is common, even when the air is thick with exhortations about the need for flexibility and innovation. I was able to suggest that they take her off the very run-of-the-mill stuff she was currently doing; give her a project no one knew how to do; and resist the temptation to micro-manage her while she tackled it. So no fortnightly review meetings, where she would have to account for how she’d spent her time, and which sub-targets she’d hit.

When she thought she’d found something interesting, the idea was that she should put herself on the agenda for a management team meeting, and come and tell them about it.

That’s what they did. Within a matter of weeks, she had saved the company £1/4million.

The reaping of a substantial divergence dividend is not peculiar to this project. On the contrary, it is a potential source of advantage which is present in most circumstances – just unrecognised.

Conclusions

What we see repeatedly in our work is people, individually and collectively, largely trapped inside their inner skills preferences, whether or not these reflect the real needs of the situation. Using LoM is unlikely to change their preferences, but it often changes the behavioural choices they make: they start to become “inner skills globetrotters”, moving fluently and appropriately around the LoM globe, depending on task needs. In the case of improving flexibility, agility, innovation and resilience, how might this help? Well, it moves us beyond the generic descriptions, to look more carefully at what is happening in a specific case, and hence what directions of movement might be beneficial for this organisation, at this point in time, and in this operating environment. The enquiry is thus grounded practically in present realities. At the same time fresh and relevant adaptive walks are signposted, and the inner skills patterns which would support them, identified.

Thus without relying on simplistic “answers”, LoM provides both a conceptual and practical enabling environment for continuing co-evolution into a turbulent and unpredictable future – a future perhaps a little less threatening when viewed through the lens of LoM.

There is much further research to be done on the LoM methodology and its potential. I hope this chapter will stimulate interest in doing it.

For those readers interested in learning more about the methodology, there is a film about Landscape of the Mind which can be streamed free from www.innerskills.co.uk and also from the LSE website. The film is in three parts. The first part introduces the concepts and the model (including a small pilot study we carried out using fMRI brain imaging, with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). The second part offers a wide


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variety of case studies of real projects. And the third part consists of interviews with users, about their experiences of LoM.

Of course, it is not just organisations which are struggling with the turbulence of our times. So are governments and the international community. We have used LoM as a lens ( ref ) to make sense of social ecosystems, and because it is visual and accessible, perhaps it could in future make a small contribution to navigating successfully through the uncertainties which face us all.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the help of the following people in the preparation of this chapter: Suzanne Bramham, Simon Carruth, Duncan Frowde and Alexandra Hopkinson.


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References:

Argyris, C. and D. A. Schon (1989), ‘Participatory Action Research and Action Science Compared. A Commentary: The Dilemma of Rigor or Relevance’, American Behavioral Scientist. 32 (5), 612-623.

Cox, A., K. Hopkinson and M. Rutter (1981), ‘Psychiatric interviewing techniques II. Naturalistic study: eliciting factual information’, The British Journal of Psychiatry. 138 (4), 283-291.

Hailey, J. (2015), ‘Rethinking NGO Leadership: Strategic Capabilities for the New Future’, paper presented at an IMA International Event, New Economics Foundation, 24 June.

Hopkinson, K., A. Cox and M. Rutter (1981), ‘Psychiatric interviewing techniques. III. Naturalistic study: eliciting feelings’, The British Journal of Psychiatry. 138 (5) 406-415.

Hopkinson, K. (2015), ‘Working with Inner Complexity’, film accessed 31 July 2015 at www.innerskills.co.uk/film-introduction/

Hudson, L. (1966), Contrary Imaginations: A Psychological Study of the English Schoolboy. London: Methuen.

Kaufmann, S. (1995), At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.Keskinen, A., M. AAltonen and E. Mitleton-Kelly (2003), Organisational Complexity. Helsinki, Finland: Finland Futures Research Centre.

Lettice, F. and M. Parekh (2010), ‘The social innovation process: themes, challenges and implications for practice’, International Journal of Technology Management, (51) 1, 139-158.

Mitleton-Kelly, E. (2011), ‘Identifying the Multi-Dimensional Problem-space & Co-creating an Enabling Environment’, in Andrew Tait & Kurt A. Richardson (eds), Moving Forward with Complexity. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Complex Systems Thinking and Real World Applications. AZ, USA: Emergent Publications, pp. 21-44.

Shaw, R. and N. Frost (2015), ‘Breaking out of the silo mentality’, The Psychologist, (28) (8), 638-641.


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Inner Complexity : using Landscape of the Mind to … · Web viewBut many “techies” have difficulty seeing the value of what they regard as this touchy feely stuff, and definitely