Seeing Gaps in Organizational Capacity

SEEING GAPS IN ORGANIZATIONAL CAPACITY

Just as design work is often catalyzed by the recognition of an important need for communication or coordination that is not being met, leaders’ work as teachers often starts with their recognition of an important capacity that is lacking in an organization. In 2001, Vivienne Cox started organizing “salons” to enable BP managers to think together about the future. She says, “As I rose to more senior positions in BP, I began to see that a core issue for us was collective leadership. We have a lot of very competent individual leaders within BP, but we also have a culture that stresses individual accountability and often promotes excessive competition between people.

“I started with the notion of convening a set of conversations that had no agenda. I invited twenty or thirty people for a day and a half, and invited them to take the conversation wherever they wanted to take it. The groups were very diverse. They included a complete cross-section of grades from within BP, senior and more junior managers, including new graduates who had just entered the organization. About one-third of the people were from outside BP; the first one included a headmaster, a ballet dancer, someone from a charity, and people from other businesses. The rule was that everybody had to know at least one other person in the room.

“In a way I didn’t care about specific outcomes from the conversations. I was more interested in the conversation itself. I picked very broad subjects in order to stretch us in important directions: issues around globalization, about how we managed and our impact in the world. For example, we had a session with Tom Johnson on the tyranny of numbers, the way we tend to run our businesses based on obsessive focus on what we can measure, while we all know very well that much of what matters cannot be measured.[7] That was a fascinating conversation. People loved the fact that they were given space to talk about what they were concerned about. It didn’t really matter what the topic was that we started with; the conversation always took on a life of its own.”

The impacts of such efforts to build new capacities are always difficult to gauge. One indication of success is simply whether or not people show up. In the case of Cox’s salons, despite the conflict with BP’s performance-oriented culture, people kept coming. One of her senior management peers commented to me, “Viv’s meetings drive me crazy.” But he also kept making room in his very full calendar to come as often as possible. Cox herself was unsure of the impact, because the salons didn’t continue on their own without her convening them. “I was quite disappointed until I realized that the salons had seeded things which had many of the same elements. Maybe people didn’t feel they had the positional power, or the right to do exactly what I’d done, or maybe they simply didn’t want to. Eventually I saw that there were people who really had been influenced by these conversations and were holding meetings, or organizing workshops or exploring issues in new and different ways.”

The salons also taught Cox valuable lessons in creating environments for learning that can close important capacity gaps, lessons that have been especially important as she has been promoted into more senior jobs. “How do you lead an organization of this scope and scale when you cannot be involved in everything directly? For me, the secret is to focus on a very few, carefully considered interventions and a way of conducting myself that is personally consistent with that. For example, when we bring people together for a strategy conversation, the only thing I control is the construction of the space, and the construction of the intention, what I feel is the real imperative. The rest of it, I don’t control. It is controlled by the people who are there through their conversations and interactions.”