A Community of Effort

We often talk about inclusion as a means of creating higher performance, how tapping into the diverse experiences, ideas, and skills of people can transform and elevate organizational effectiveness.  A great example is seen in Christopher Dickey’s book Securing the City, which chronicles how the New York City Police Department became one of the world’s premier terrorist-fighting agencies in the aftermath of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks.

Post 9-11, the NYPD faced a daunting reality: limited resources, a monumental task before them, and no time to waste.  Many believed that the city’s sprawling diversity compounded the problem; with so many cultures at play (40% of the city’s population was born outside the United States), it was hard to see how the police department could effectively connect with all the neighborhoods and populations it needed to protect.

But Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and new Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen saw it differently.  Recognizing that the force itself included officers of many different backgrounds, they asked members of the department to come forward if they were interested in anti-terrorism work and spoke another language fluently. Approximately 1,800 officers responded. Kelly and Cohen had the officers tested and found that 700 of them were native speakers in languages considered important to combating terrorism—languages like Farsi, Pashtu, Bengali, Urdu, and Arabic, among others. (By point of comparison, the total number of students graduating U.S. colleges and universities in 2002 with degrees in Arabic was 6!)

The department immediately began training these officers for their new duties. Some were sent into deep cover in NYC communities and neighborhoods; others joined online intelligence gathering efforts.  Dickey’s book cites plots foiled, conspirators apprehended, and devious activities interrupted as a direct result of this culturally savvy police force’s ability to reach into new communities. By 2003, the FBI and CIA were contacting the NYPD for assistance in counterterrorism operations.

The force has also recognized the need for a global approach. The NYPD now has officers stationed in Paris, Tel Aviv, London—cities that, like New York, are susceptible to terrorist attack. These officers learn new methods and tactics and communicate them back to their colleagues in the United States. When the Mumbai attacks occurred in November 2008, three NYPD investigators were on site before the siege ended.

There were many aspects of the NYPD’s efforts that made their work successful, but a key component was tapping into the diversity of its workforce in new ways that spurred high performance, and adopting a mindset that saw cultural differences as additive. When leaders began to widen their perspective about what skills were valuable, they discovered a huge reserve of potential in its members that wasn’t being tapped.

The other day during a session with a leadership team and a group of change agents they had chartered to model inclusion, several members of the change agent group talked about their habits of deferring to authority. As the topic went around the room, people discussed the relative merits of deferring to seniority (tenure) or position or expertise. The emerging understanding was that position did not guaranty experience or knowledge about any particular problem or issue, so deferring to position might not make sense.   

But what about seniority? Does it make sense to defer to tenure? And what about expertise? Does it make sense to defer when someone is the clear expert in a subject area? In the course of the discussion, no one said, “wait a minute. Why do we want to defer at all? What value does deferring produce?”  

Maybe deferring is an artifact of the old culture in which assumptions about where knowledge resides and how decisions get made were largely hierarchical. In a connected organization, it may not make sense to defer even to expertise. What would replace deferring?  Maybe engagement of perspectives. If I defer, I disengage and transfer responsibility to someone else. If I engage, I connect my knowledge and my perspective with another person’s without relinquishing responsibility.

Even if I’m not the expert, I have my point of view to contribute, which I may do by asking questions to understand enough of what the expert knows to connect her knowledge with my responsibilities. In this way, I make her expertise more valuable to me and potentially to her and to the organization. Maybe deferring is obsolete.

On 4-7 February I attended my second TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), marking the conference’s 25th anniversary. Unlike last year when I was at the “overflow” site in Aspen while the main event was in Monterrey, this year I attended at TED’s new permanent location (for now) at the Performing Arts Center in Long Beach, California. Although I was sad that Tara Whittle (who brought TED into my life) and Judith Katz were at Palm Springs (remote site this year, 400 people), and I missed them, I was thrilled to be with 1,300 people from 51 countries experiencing TED live and not on TV.

TED does not disappoint. It is a place where people unveil their latest inventions, discoveries, ideas, and scientific breakthroughs. It is seeing and hearing genius, and being inspired by it. People connect and join together to create something that changes the world and they credit TED with both the meeting and the inspiration. Google and Apple Macintosh are some of the inventions/concepts that were first unveiled at TED.But TED is not a place for longwinded speeches. Some presentations run 3 or 6 minutes. Major presentations (of which there are about 20 a day) are maxed at 18 minutes–no overtime, even for presenters like Bill Gates and Al Gore. Say it in 18 minutes or host Chris Anderson starts walking up the steps. There is also a TED University that happens a few times during TED in a separate room, before the main sessions. At the one I attended, there were 18 presentations in 1 hour and 45 minutes.

So TED is a fire hose of knowledge coming at you from fields and topics far and wide. It is TED’s job to put before us the latest and most brilliant thinking on earth (with a United States and California lean). It is our J-O-B as “TEDsters” (yes, there is a little of a cult feeling) to bring the information and knowledge into our being, into our thinking and work, and to make something out of it.

This year’s TED included presentations on:
deep space…………………………………..deep seas
robotics……………………………………….electric/green cars
food security and safety………………vertical farming
saving orangutans……………………….wind suit flying
making cheese…………………………….giving away shoes to the needy
giving away rice on the Internet….rock climbing
giant waterfalls in NYC………………..blowing glass
bring creativity to the layout of newspapers……dance and music performances
what young men are learning from porno movies about what women want

I want to share some context and to give you a portion of the view from walking about TED for 3 days (8:00 am to 11:00 pm every day including a gala every evening).

Once again I was stuck with the elitism of the whole thing. This year I tried to refine my calling them elites…they are mostly creative elites. They are fun to watch and talk with and be around, but they are not my hang-out-with-for-the-rest-of-my-life group. I think Judith’s and my attendance is part of the cosmic joke that has us show up in places where a Jewish woman from Queens and an African American man from the inner city of Philly would never have imagined. Walking around TED, I bumped into Arianna Huffington, Glenn Close, Forest Whitaker, Paul Simon, Herbie Hancock (he performed, his 12th TED)–they are just hanging out for four days to learn and interact like the rest of us. There are few places where you can bump into Robin Williams and then sit next to Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) or chat with Richard Rockefeller…definitely the creatives and the wealthy.

As for content, below are a few of my thoughts regarding some of the presentations I attended. You can see many of the TED presentations online at ted.com.

Juan Enriquez talked about the Economy. I was struck by a quote that he used that fits all our clients:

The key to managing crises
Is to keep an eye on the long term
While dancing in the flames
                                    Sir Philip Hampton
                                    Chair, Royal Bank of Scotland
        

                          And, in these times you must “Cut AND Grow.”

David Hanson is working on empathy in robots. WOW!!!! He talked about how Google search currently does not understand our intent when we ask a question and therefore gives us 100 answers, 99 of which are not what we are looking for…Some just the wrong category…right words, but not related to our meaning/intent. I took from David’s 18 minutes that as he programs robots with “empathy” it is one step from programming robots to understand our intent. So, robots will be/are able to think faster than us humans, to be more invincible than us humans, to have empathy, and understand intent.

The BIG Question becomes what is our value-added as homo sapiens at some point in time. It takes me back to TED 2008 and a BIG Question there (somewhat serious and somewhat not), but a WOW for me: Maybe we have this whole thing inverted with the machine, maybe we humans are here to enhance the evolution of the machine and not the other way around. Sure does seem like a case I could argue.

Bill Gates talked about how in a regular classroom, teachers are not told how good they are at their primary task of teaching students. For our KJCG clients (and others) it is redefining what is “good.”  What is “good” leadership this decade? What should be measured? Should we still be focusing on feedback (maybe some) or on feedforward? (Yes, and a lot.) Lots of organizations are measuring leaders based on 80% delivery, projects, product process and 20% people. As one person said, we can get an 80 grade/B without the people part. This has to change. At minimum it needs to be flipped to 20%-80%. And we need to measure inspiring people to do their best work, to enable and facilitate partnership (person-to-person), collaboration (group/function-to-group/function) and inclusion (a system mindset and everyday behaviors). We need to change the feedback and feedforward for manager-leaders in our organizations. It needs to focus on how they inspire people, develop people, create sustainability with and through people, and create future leaders. And the most important source of feedback and feedforward is the experience of the people working with the leader.

One of the favorite statements that Judith Katz and I like to say is a quote from one of our favorite CEOs, Hal Yoh, of Day and Zimmermann:

                        “A leader’s job is to:
                                    Grow the business
                                                Grow your team
                                                            Grow yourself

If you are not doing all three you are not doing your job and doing what the organization needs of you.”

Ben Zander talked about three opportunities in every situation in life:

• Resignation
• Anger
• Possibilities

I think there are probably a few more, and people often pick up one of these three. AND, Ben is probably one of the best “getting the audience thinking, learning and performing (singing)” entertainers/conductors there is. Always brings the crowd to its feet.

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, talked about the next evolution of the web–Linked Data. Linked data is about bringing related data together in very user friendly ways and creating data-to-data relationships, meaning and connections. This fits what Judith and I are working on with our clients and our next book: The Connected Organization. We humans are seeing the future through our technology and it invites us to think about the human interaction possibilities.

Nandan Nilekani made several good points about India, but the one that struck me was that India (and China) are going to skip the Industrial Revolution.

Oliver Sacks, made an intriguing comment that we see with our eyes, and we also see with our minds.

It speaks to the need for people to imagine the change they want. Judith and I have been urging the people in our client systems to create new stories, create a “Shared Narrative” that becomes a reality in their minds. It is clear to us that to move change fast, people have to see it in their minds’ eye. And we need to point out examples of the change-in-action so people can see and “touch” it.

A comment from TED (who knows from where):

            Say “YES” and let the idea go forward.

Sounds like a wonderful way to live life and to enable creativity and empowerment. It is all about finding the “Yes.”

A star client said something that caught our attention the other day. He said that leading today requires more revealing than it does concealing.             

Here’s what I think that means: in times of great change like we are in today and probably will be forever, people look for ways to gain a foothold, a sense of confidence that things will be all right. They especially look to their leaders for signals of what’s to come. Leaders are often in a position of knowing things about the future that they cannot share or suspecting things that they think they shouldn’t share or fearing things that they have not sorted out for themselves.  

This senior leader was saying that leading in these times requires revealing what you are thinking and feeling. It’s a prerequisite to being seen as an authentic person and, therefore, someone worth listening to. People have become very savvy about deception, especially with the number of scandals we’ve witnessed in business and government lately. Why should anyone believe you?   

By Judith H. Katz and Frederick A. Miller 

The conversation about diversity has moved organizations forward in many positive ways, but recently the term diversity has lost some of the usefulness and power that it once held.   

The challenge today is that when people hear the term diversity they immediately think it is synonymous with representation, referring only to women and people of color. This has left many other groups, including white men, out of the picture. When diversity was initially framed and started to be used in the seventies, it was a reaction to the specifically targeted anti-discrimination legislation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The term was meant to be an inclusive term—meaning all dimensions of difference and identities. It was meant to differentiate from Affirmative Action, which targeted under-represented groups, mostly women and people of color. It was intended to focus on the myriad of differences that people have and the need to bring the mix of differences to organizations. However the more organizations and individuals began to speak about seeking a “diverse” candidate it became a code for Affirmative Action, and no longer a descriptor, of the differences all people bring.   

The reality is we are all different. Every one of us is unique. Each person has something of value to offer—a perspective that no one else has. Even people who grew up in the same neighborhood and are the same age, gender, and race, bring uniqueness and difference. Identical twins are not identical. So to define some individuals and some populations as “diverse” and others as not does not make sense.  

Also, over the past thirty years there has been a major shift related to how differences are seen and valued: We have moved from seeing differences that people have as negative (believing that people who were different from the mainstream were somehow deficient or lacking in skills and abilities) to neutral (the desire to be blind to difference as a way to counteract negative stereotypes) to now seeing and believing that differences are an asset. Now, many recognize the need for differences to provide 360-degree vision (Miller, 1921)—diversity of thought, background, approach, and experience as adding value to our vision, enhancing creativity, and solving problems. 

As the conversation and comfort with differences expands in organizations, it is time to let go of the vestiges of the past. Globally, “diversity” is still seen as a United States-centric issue because it is still laden with the race and gender associations when heard outside the United States.   

Using the word differences to describe people’s value-added enables all people to be seen and become part of the conversation.

As organizations reframe the conversation from one of Diversity to one of Differences, it does not take away from dealing with the challenges we face because we are not all the same, including the challenges on the individual level (you and me), the social identity group level (people like me and people like you), and the organizational level (the institutionalization of the isms). In fact, it calls out for attending those mindsets and behaviors that make it difficult for all people to do their best work and make a contribution.    Organizations must face the challenge of having the mix of talent, background, and skills they need for business results. They will need to talk about the differences that make a difference within their organizations and what differences are needed for success. And, everyone is in that game; no one is on the side line…everyone is or needs to be included. Sad as it is many people in organizations have felt excluded at times because of some difference they bring or represent in the organization. This hurts productivity, causes waste, and results in an underutilization of talent that no organization can afford today.    When people feel seen and valued for who they are and how they can apply their individual and social identity group perspectives, experiences, skills, and talents in ways that contribute to the success of the organization, then they have the opportunity to do their best work.  

The irony of this critical shift from Diversity to Differences is that when our work in this field began, the concept of leveraging Differences was rejected in favor of assimilation and integration, a push toward creating uniformity—the melting pot. Successful 21^st Century organizations, though, must engage in “new thinking” and leverage the differences that people bring in addition to their race and gender. By leveraging these differences, organizations can hope to achieve the 360-degree vision necessary for more effective and efficient problem solving and decision making. This is a critical organizational competency to navigate the turbulent waters of today’s marketplace.