Breaking Through
At the heart of self-managing organizations is the dynamic and fragile interrelationship between the individual and that human aggregate mapped onto an entity we call an organization.
In an interview about their book, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, authors Kegan, Lahey, and Fleming describe core ingredients of organizational innovation:
“Scanning the literature on innovation over the last 10 years or so, one thing stands out for us: The core dynamic that drives sustained creativity and innovation has to do with a high capacity to challenge existing assumptions. That’s what the most consistently innovative people and organizations know how to do regarding their customers and markets, as well as their internal operations. They rigorously surface, test, and transcend limiting assumptions.”
The interconnection of the individual and organization reveals itself in this work: there is a deep relationship between the individual’s capacity to sense, engage with, and transcend their own assumptions and their ability to do that for the organization. The lines between the individual and the organization are never clear, as the organization itself is simply a projection of the human imagination. And yet we know from these Deliberately Developmental Organizations that organizational innovation is predicated on individuals’ abilities to transcend limiting assumptions and the organizational infrastructure that can support that.
It seems to me that there are (at least) three levels of highly interrelated assumptions built into organizational DNA:
Assumptions re: self: who I am in the world, how I act, relate to people
Assumptions re: role: how I do this work, what I can do in my role, what the work is
Assumptions re: organization: what the organization is able to do and accomplish within its environment
Each of these assumptions creates habits and draws invisible boundary lines for how we act in this world and relate to others. In looking at these deep interrelationships, I wonder: how might we build cultures of testing and transcending assumptions — individually and organizationally?
What if…
Rituals were built into team meetings where individuals shared one assumption they were testing/trialing (this could be at any of the three levels)?
Staff retreats did scenario planning/storytelling around visions of radically shifted assumptions?
Organizations celebrated not only the sharing of ‘mistakes’ (see Bridgewater Associates’ Issue Log), but of mind shifts (“I changed my mind!”)?
Organizations held year-end parties where ‘busted’ assumptions were burned (like Burning Man, but with more clothes)?
Organizations held regular ‘earthquake talks’ — bringing in outsiders that intentionally offered perspectives that radically challenged core organizational assumptions?
Feedback processes (whether in formal appraisal processes or informal ones) were grounded in the language of assumptions, e.g., ‘self-evaluations could ask about limiting assumptions, positive feedback could be offered when teams broke through limiting assumptions?
Each person in an organization was paired with a colleague; the pairs would meet for monthly ‘breakthrough sessions’ where they would each workshop an assumption that might be limiting their creativity, innovation, or thrive capacity?
We humans often get stuck in entrenched conceptions of who we are — as individuals, in the roles we play, and in the collective structures we make. These fixed identities are barriers to growth. There are endless opportunities for organizations to build into their DNA both the questioning of seemingly fixed assumptions and the celebration of their transcendence. These are just a few.
