Reflective Openness

REFLECTIVE OPENNESS

Part IV of the original edition of The Fifth Discipline discussed distinctions between participative openness and reflective openness. Participative openness, which might also be called expressive openness, concerns speaking openly about one’s views. While it is an important element of creating a more learning-oriented work environment, it is also dangerously incomplete. It started to come into vogue in the 1980s, an outgrowth of the philosophy of “participative management.” Some organizations even tried to institutionalize formal procedures for open communication. But many of these eventually fell out of favor because they and their organizational proponents were simply not very effective.[1] In a classic 1994 Harvard Business Review article, Chris Argyris criticized “good communication that blocks learning,” arguing that formal communication mechanisms like focus groups and organizational surveys in effect give employees mechanisms for letting management know what they think without taking any responsibility for problems and their role in doing something about them. These mechanisms fail because “they do not get people to reflect on their own work and behavior. They do not encourage individual accountability. And they do not surface the kinds of deep and potentially threatening or embarrassing information that can motivate learning and produce real change.” But, as Argyris implies, moving beyond participative openness may be difficult, especially for managers seeking to maintain control.

Roger Saillant used organizational learning methods for many years at Ford Motor Company, where he was one of the organization’s most effective managers. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, he was moved from one daunting manufacturing site to another, in Northern Ireland, Eastern Europe, China, and Mexico. In some cases, he succeeded in transforming operations that were among Ford’s poorest performers into some of the best. In other cases, he started up new plants that became best-in-class in settings with no comparable history of manufacturing excellence. Many are still among Ford’s top-performing manufacturing operations a decade after his tenure.

What most surprised Saillant over the years was not what he accomplished, but how his bosses in the Ford system reacted to what he did. “I always felt that so long as I respected the company’s core values and business objectives, I could try to do things in ways that were more consistent with who I am and what I care about,” Saillant reflects. “Of course, gradually my bosses would grasp that I was engaging people differently in order to achieve these results. But they never asked me how I was accomplishing the results—I mean, no one ever asked. I was always puzzled by that because you’d think they’d have an interest in getting similar results elsewhere. They would just say to me, ‘You should do this [go to this new site] because we need you to go do this,’ or, ‘You’ll make a difference if you go here.’ They always shrank from the conversation that would start by asking, ‘How did you really do that?’

“I think it’s because they sort of knew how I did it, but didn’t want to know. At some level, they were not prepared to be that vulnerable. Maybe they were a little frightened by what it meant to challenge themselves, to be that exposed, that human. Somehow, I had learned that if you can get connected with what’s inside of you, you can be fearless in your openness. That can be scary as a leader.”

Participative openness is inadequate because it fails to generate the commitment and shared understanding needed for real change. As one disgruntled executive put it, “The implicit assumption around here is that the solution to all problems is sharing our views.” The core problem is that learning together starts when we actually listen to one another rather than just talk at one another. And listening is not easy. Reflective openness leads to looking inward, allowing our conversations to make us more aware of the biases and limitations in our own thinking, and how our thinking and actions contribute to problems.

Reflective openness is the cornerstone of the discipline of mental models. None of us has a company in our heads, or a family, or a country. But our life experience shapes a rich mix of assumptions, feelings, and at best some well-formed hypotheses about these systems. Nurturing reflective openness leads to a willingness to continually test these views. It is characterized by true open-mindedness, the first step toward deeper listening and real conversation. This is easy to say but not so easy to do—because, as master practitioners like Cox or Saillant know, building an environment of reflectiveness starts with our own willingness to open ourselves, to be vulnerable, to be “exposed,” as Saillant put it. This is unlikely to happen in any organizational environment that does not have a deep commitment to helping people grow, and to creating the trust and spirit of mutuality this requires.