Discovering and Embodying Nature's Patterns

DISCOVERING AND EMBODYING NATURE’S PATTERNS

For many years, the common definition of learning within the SoL network has been learning is a process of enhancing learners’ capacity, individually and collectively, to produce results they truly want to produce. This definition has been helpful because it emphasizes two crucial features of learning that are often misunderstood: (1) the building of capacity for effective action, as opposed to intellectual understanding only; and (2) the fact that this capacity builds over time, often over considerable time. We had considered many alternative definitions, but found none as simple and useful. So it came as a surprise when I encountered a very different definition of learning, one that was even simpler.

The source of this new definition was H. Thomas Johnson, one of the world’s leading accounting theorists. Johnson is co-inventor of activity-based costing (ABC) and co-author of Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, cited by Harvard Business Review as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years.[1] Though ABC was considered a significant contribution, Johnson himself thought of it only as a first step in radically rethinking performance management, and devoted himself in the following decade to in-depth study of a small number of industry-leading firms. One of these was Toyota, whose approach to cost management he documented in Profit Beyond Measure,[2] a heretical book that suggested that Toyota’s extraordinary long-term success was due in part to carefully limiting the use of performance metrics by managers. In particular, Johnson argued that when performance metrics are reported to those at higher levels in the management hierarchy, managers are induced to use them to set numerical targets and drive change—what W. Edwards Deming called “meddling.” Johnson, like Deming, claimed that continual learning and superior performance actually depend on connecting metrics and target setting with in-depth process knowledge at the front lines. This directly contradicts what many managers consider their primary task—setting numerical targets and driving results—which may be why so few competitors have been able to match Toyota’s long-term performance.[3]

But sensing and acting locally is exactly how complex living systems work—indeed, it was through studying living systems that Johnson came to understand Toyota’s approach to cost management. No one is “in charge” of a forest. Your body does not wait for orders from the brain to flow coagulants to a cut in your finger. Whatever “centralized” control does exist in nature is possible precisely because of complex networks of local control. We have no idea how we walk, but once this “body knowledge” is developed, the body responds to our conscious directives; without that body knowledge, all the central directives in the world would be ineffectual. Johnson realized that Toyota’s approach to performance management embodied the essence of living systems: company managers were engaged in continually building and deploying locally embedded know-how and then trusting frontline workers to manage and improve cost performance. In effect, Toyota’s approach to localized performance management amounted to discovering and embodying nature’s patterns, and that is why Toyota’s team were superior learners.

This simple definition of learning illuminates a wide range of potentially profound changes in social systems, from how we work together to the nature of industrial systems as a whole. For example, Plug Power’s “zero-to-landfill” vision for manufacturing fuel cells draws on an ideal inspired by living systems: “waste equals food.” The aim is to use the by-products of one process as inputs to another. In China, the president and prime minister were talking about the “circular economy” based on this principle. Designing all products, packaging for products, and processes used in making products to eliminate all waste would represent a profound transformation for industrial economies, and any country aspiring to this vision faces a long road. But the basic concept of a circular economy is clear, as are its distinctions from industrial economies as they have developed over the past two hundred years.[4]

In many ways, the same spirit of learning to come into harmony with nature guides the Sustainable Food Lab—in this case, harmony at a global scale. The members of the Sustainable Food Lab understand that no economic system can remain viable that systematically destroys the social and ecological systems upon which it depends. How we organize the production and distribution of food could be considered humankind’s first system. So, it is fitting that it should also be the first of our global systems that we bring back into harmony with social and ecological reality.

This idea of learning also informs other organizational practices. When managers are committed to growing people in order to grow the enterprise or committed to utilizing conversation as the core process for change, their practices reflect insights into human nature—our innate desire to grow as human beings and to be in relationship with one another. Similarly, consider the new understanding of self-creating social networks as a natural pattern of organizing—“how work actually gets done,” as Anne Murray Allen put it. And remember Dee Hock’s generative question that gave rise to Visa’s radical decentralized governance structure: “Why couldn’t an organization work like a rain forest?”

Eventually, H. Thomas Johnson’s definition of learning led me to realize that the first principle underlying our work on organizational learning is simply to develop a system of management consistent with nature—human nature and the nature of the larger social and natural systems in which we always operate. I remember my first conversation with a young woman from China as to why The Fifth Discipline had become so popular in her country. She answered in a surprising way. “We see it as a book about personal development,” she said. “So much of management theory from the West contradicts our basic belief in developing our deepest nature as human beings. Your book reinforces this belief and gives us hope that this can be consistent with building successful organizations.” Anthropologist Edward Hall calls the drive to learn the “most basic drive in the human species.” What is this drive to learn other than our own innate personal quest to discover and embody nature’s patterns in all aspects of our lives?