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“….merely an organization of intelligent men, presumably of creative capacity, specially trained in a knowledge of the things and methods of science, and provided with the facilities and wherewithal to study and develop the particular industry with which they are associated…meant to apply science to the ‘common affairs’ of everyday life… it is an instrument capable of avoiding many of the mistakes of a blind-cut-and- try experimentation. It is likewise an instrument which can bring to bear an aggregate of creative force on any particular problem which is infinitely greater than any force which can be conceived of as residing in the intellectual capacity of an individual…” - Frank Jewett, Founding President of Bell Labs
Thanks so much for the invitation; really enjoyed both the story and the process. Great insights shared. For my own sense making and landing the lessons and insights; to share with my team and just to share w yourselves in gratitude; here are some of my reflections sparked by the session:
(1) A theme that stood out strongly for me across the whole story was that of synchronicity and harmony; themes that I’d more readily associate with more “gentler” and more graceful disciplines of ballet and artistic swimming than rowing. A thought that occurred to me was that we are not a team simply because we work together or occupy the same boat, we only really become a team when we arrive at a place of synchronicity and harmony; this goes beyond us being in the same boat, wanting the same thing (to win) or believing in the same thing (that we can win); it is about how those beliefs, desires, competencies come together (I think a word that was used is “converge”) when it matters most;
(2) I know that you’re all going through a journey with David Whyte and this concept of synchronicity and harmony brought to mind a poem that I read in a David Whyte book years ago, Crossing the Unknown Sea, where he references a poem by Robert Bly on the swan :
“This clumsy living that moves lumberingas if in ropes through what is not done, reminds us of the awkward way that a swan walks.
And to die, which is letting goof the ground we stand on and cling to every day,is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself downinto the water, which receives him gailyand which flows joyfully underand after him, wave after wave, while the swan, unmoving and marvellously calm,is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,more like a king, further and further on."
The very same swan that is awkward and lacking of grace when it walks on ground; gains a majestic and king-like grace when it finds its synchronicity with the water; when it surrenders itself (vulnerability) and lets itself down into it. What’s of interest to me and links back to something that was highlighted by yourselves in the case study is that in order to achieve synchronicity with the water the swan does not try to take control of the water; it simply focuses on “pulling its own weight” in synchronicity with the water which “flows joyfully under and after him, wave after wave” while allowing the water to be itself and to do its thing. Reminds me of a quote on sailing by Matshona Dhliwayo : “You don’t command wind in the direction it blows, but you command a ship in the direction it sails. The storm only comes to teach you how to skilfully sail your ship.” All of this surrender/yielding/not commanding the wind or channeling the water is counterintuitive to our inherited notions of what it means to take control of situations yet even for the boys, the “hot one” as he was referred to by one of the participants had to get over his instinct (probably the result of what is referred to as the "amygdala hijack” in LRMG language) of “fighting” through hardship - hitting the water harder and paddling faster - and settle for a counterintuitive productive yielding to finding that synchronous stroke that made all the difference.
(3) It occurs to me that being synchronous is not about learning hard code about being weak when the rest are strong or being strong when they are strong; it is an acceptance to an invitation to pay a radical form of attention to whatever is happening in and to those around you and having the dynamic intelligence to adjust your own performance and behaviour accordingly - at times this might require you to match the team, other times it might call on you to serve as a counter-balance for the team; there is no set formula except that you constantly be in tune and alignment with the current, real-time state of the team; this also seems to suggest that contextual adaptability carries much greater premium than “this is the way it's always been done” kind of thinking. Interesting implications on how experience and the one size fits all methods that it might come with can thus become an inhibitor of contextual adaptability;
(4) What is implied in the swan poem above and what also stood out in the case study was that it wasn’t just about finding synchronicity with the rest of the team it was also about finding synchronicity with the unique wood (“only God can make a tree”) that one was working with that day, it was about finding synchronicity with the water, it was about finding synchronicity with one’s own internal infrastructure borne of past and present experiences and aspirations of the future whether derived from negative or from positive experiences and finally finding synchronicity with the prevailing “laws of nature” (e.g. knowing how to unlock consistent performance in a key member of the team) as it were that could only be discovered through both acquiring useful learning and abandoning unproductive learning which is only possible if one yields and engages w humility. The kicker, I found, was that one always has to be synchronised to these as individual entities and as a collective; being intimately attuned to how each of them are behaving individually and also how they are behaving as a converged system.
(5) If there’s a key lesson I’m taking away from this is that you simply can’t operate in synchronicity if all you hear is the sound of your own “demons”, aspirations, fears, etc. Synchronicity seems to require, no demands, that a radical amount of attention be paid to what’s happening around you without losing the rhythm of your own unique contribution. Reminds me of when I was (unsuccessfully) learning to play the drums back in high school and how I struggled to achieve synchronous performance of my respective limbs that had to produce a single, coherent rhythm and beat while individually doing different things - for the life of me my right hand could not maintain the required tap-tap-tap tempo on the hi-hat and leave my right leg to do its doof-doof-doof on the bass drum at its own tempo; the hand kept synchronising to the beat of the bass drum. My conundrum (excuse the pun) seems to suggest that it’s not so much synchronous input (doing the same thing/uniformity) that is required, but rather synchronous output (different things done in lockstep to one another).
(6) On the question of legacy - given the context then and the context now the case study did raise a question in my mind about one’s own legacy vs the broader legacy that one aligns oneself to. By being at the Olympics in Nazi Germany it can be argued that the American team served and perhaps somewhat enabled Hitler’s agenda irrespective of what it meant for their own individual legacies. The video said that Hitler was using the Olympics to project a certain propaganda out in the world. We live in a world where present-day injustices are being highlighted and confronted in increasingly forceful ways. Is it enough for me to keep my head down and focus on my individual legacy or should I be paying greater attention to how my pursuit of legacy is perhaps nested in a broader legacy that I may be further reinforcing? If, for instance, I want my legacy to be that I led a 10X company does it matter that I pursue and achieve that goal with a team made up entirely of men? Achieving my personal legacy on the one hand yet reinforcing a broader negative legacy on the other. This didn’t come up in the story and the boys seem to have gone down in history as heroes so does it/should it matter?
(7) Interesting question raised for me on the tension between sentiment and pragmatism when they insisted on having a sick team member on the boat. It makes for great, inspiring and rousing sentiment that the guys were not willing to leave one of their own behind; that they were prepared to drag him along across the finish line - that’s the kind of stuff that legendary quotes are made of indeed. Pragmatically, though, it does raise the question for me as a leader whether it is a good leadership call to carry “dead weight” as it were into a high stakes scenario for the sake of sentiment. They won in the end and so it becomes a non-issue; yet had they lost how would that call been read? To distill principle out of anecdote that particular heuristic needs to hold regardless of the outcome and so it raises two key questions for me to reflect on : (a) would it have still been a good call if they had lost? and (b) is it regarded as a good call because they won as a result of it or is it regarded as a good call because things worked out in the end? From what was shared in the story the decision was based on sentimental considerations rather than practical ones from what I could gather. Beyond just being interesting catalysts for thought-experimentation these questions do have practical implications, especially at a time such as what we are going through economically where decisions have to be made on retrenching people for instance;
(8) We were asked to reflect, in our groups, on our own experiences of turning adversity into triumph in our lives. That brought the Serenity Prayer to mind for me because though; I can’t really say I’ve turned the adversity of the COVID-19 challenge into triumph of Olympic gold medal proportions, what I have managed to do (forced to do rather than out of any particular wisdom on my part) is made a study of suffering - not trying to avoid, fight or ameliorate it but just to sit in it a bit and study it, confront it and meet the stranger within who is probably out of practice when it comes to suffering at the depths that this season has required. The lemonade I’ve been able to squeeze out of the lemon has simply been to internalise the principles of the serenity prayer and doing less stressing over things I have no control over and pushing through the pain on things I do have control over, even if they are hard to do and achieve success in nonetheless.
God grant me the serenityto accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; taking, as He did, this sinful worldas it is, not as I would have it; trusting that He will make all things rightif I surrender to His Will; that I may be reasonably happy in this lifeand supremely happy with Himforever in the next. Amen.reinhold niebuhr (1892-1971)
Values Based Leadership
10 years of values-based leadership by Rorisang Tshabalala10 years ago I established Chapter One Innovation, a business model research and development firm with the vision of being the platform off which market-winners, industry-leaders and world-changers are launched. Our vision is pursued by building and launching high-impact, listable organisational systems at scale and helping others to do the same. On the occasion of our 10th-year anniversary celebrating a decade in which we have proactively or been called upon to build new organisational systems across different sectors around the world, I was asked to reflect on some of the lessons learnt during that period through the lens of seeing values-based leadership as a product that we would want to build and launch into a market-winner, industry-leader and world-changer in its own right. What follows are some of these reflections as, perhaps, provocations and the basis of further discussion on how we as ALI and YALI fellows might think about how we ensure that values-based leadership gains dominant market share in our society as a way of leading and being: It is near impossible to turn organisational systems around from theinside– It has become the common refrain of many values-based leaders who choose to be and remain embedded within systems that are patently not values-based, to argue that the systems that those systems can be turned around from the inside, that such systems can self-correct or discover their consciences from within, helped along by their presence. Many a times over the past 10-years I have watched well-intentioned, values-based leaders (me amongst those individuals) enter such systems with a view to turning them around from the inside only to realise that the decades and centuries old networks of incentives that have and continue to sustain those systems, are far greater and more resilient than the good intentions of yet another values-based leader moved to throwing his or her hat into the arena so as to induce within these systems a self-correction. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of any isolated system always increases. To attempt to counter such entropy is to attempt to counter natural laws, not just of how natural systems operate but also of how human systems operate as well. Such entropy can be countered but this is often from an external source of heat rather than an internal stimulus. As such, at best, those values-based leaders that enter such systems are typically unceremoniously spat out by those systems or they eject themselves from such systems as crestfallen cynics who have written off all and any attempts to change the status quo as futile. At worst, it is them who are turned before they are able to turn those systems around; leaving in their wake a disillusionment with the brand that is values-based leadership. This is not a defeatist perspective though because it does not conclude that such systems cannot be changed; instead my experience is that the surest way of turning organisational systems around is to develop competing systems that render the old way of doing things obsolete, forcing the incumbent system to either collapse under the weight of its own inertia or to quickly adapt and self-organise towards the new way of doing things lest they suffer a Darwinian fate. Our best hope of making values-based leadership and values-based being mainstream is to establish organisational systems, be they families, communities, religious and civil society organisations, political formations and corporations that represent meaningfully differentiated, sustainable and competitive alternatives to the dominant status-quo. Those ideas, people and communities that society invests its capital into are ultimately those thatflourish– The biggest and most significant organisational systems in existence today are not necessarily an indication of the best ideas, they are only an indication of the best capitalised ideas; this is as true in politics or civil society as it is in business or sports. I spent some time in politics; one of the charts that I will never forget was one that showed the almost perfect correlation that existed at that time between the funding that South African political parties were able to raise and their eventual performance in the national elections. By most objective accounts the current political league tables in South Africa more strongly reflect access to resources than they do substance of prevailing ideology and efficacy of leadership. More recently, to this point, the question has been raised whether wealthy philanthropy (“the elite charade of changing the world”) is doing more harm than good; once again reflecting through the words of authors like Rob Reich on the question of whether access to relatively greater resources makes the wealthy best suited to be leading efforts to fundamentally change the world. Values-based leadership is one such idea; it is an argument put forward by some of us on the type of leadership required to bring about the fundamental change and impact on society that we long to see. The strength of the argument rests not only on its substantive merits but also on how well we capitalise it. Values-based leadership as an argument is losing, for now, not because it is a weak argument but because it is a weakly capitalised argument. For every corporate that stands a monument to all other ideas of leadership and corporate stewardship; if we do not invest in building organisational systems in the image of a values-based paradigm then we cannot expect that such a philosophy could ever become mainstream. As a matter of course, most economically active and thus socially powerful people spend most of their waking hours punching away in the organisational systems that they refer to as their work. These organisational systems have, by far, the greatest and most disproportionate impact on the values and norms that these people embrace and ultimately express out in the world by virtue of the amount of time that gets spent in them. The workplace is thus a dominant driver of societal values and norms. If we are to transform our societal values, then we have to capitalise organisational systems that reflect that difference and can imbue those that work within them with such values. The change we long to see in our society must be preceded by a change in the ways in which we allocate our capital; be it financial, intellectual, political or otherwise. Innovation is a force-multiplier to capital– While it is relatively easy enough to start a small venture or initiative; ideas and organisations do not grow into organisational systems at scale by accident. There is a certain deliberate art and science to bringing “born-big” ideas to life and the critical ingredient in that respect is innovation – no organisational system of any significance ever legitimately became that way without deliberate effort being applied towards doing something different. The Obama campaign of 2009, for instance, was not the best capitalised in terms of financial resources but through innovative ways of organising and mobilising voters, innovation became a force-multiplier that turned the two fish and five loaves of bread that ordinary voters could offer to the campaign into the groundswell and movement that catapulted the relative outsider to the Oval Office. Values-based leadership is a challenger brand of leadership to the dominant forms of being and leadership that exist in society today. For those of us who have reflected on the merits of such values-based leadership for a long time, it seems the obvious and most sustainable choice; for the vast majority, however, it seems the path of greatest resistance. If we are to drive greater market-share for values-based leadership then we have to take innovation up as a critical enabler of that drive; we have to remove those barriers that make values-based leadership an unrelatable and inaccessible brand; we have to become values-entrepreneurs who are constantly innovating on how to gain greater market share for values-based leadership. Scale matters–Ideologies and arguments are like spirits or even parasites; they can only be as strong and as dominant as the bodies and the systems that they occupy. Values-based leadership is an ideology, it is an argument, a technology; it can only be as dominant as the bodies and systems that it occupies – both the size of the individual bodies and systems that it occupies and the quantity of the bodies and systems that it occupies. It is thus important that we not only build values-based organisational systems but that we build them at scale so that this brand of being and of leading touches and influences more lives. It is perhaps a result of our well-intentioned and justified veneration of individuals such as Nelson Mandela as values-based that has led the values-based leadership brand down a path of being a niche and inaccessible brand that few could ever hope to live up to, though many admire it. Yet, there are values-based leaders all around us and beyond that, there are even more moments of values-based leadership all around us. Every chance we take to celebrate those individuals and those moments and the people within them is a chance we take to grow the scale of this values-based leadership brand. It is thus not enough for us to enjoy the accolades and recognition that many of us receive for our values-based leadership; we have to be actively nurturing those that will compete against us for those awards and titles because the more of us that there are, the less market share that competing ideologies and arguments have. It is okay to be contrarian, as long as you are right– Diversity, like values-based leadership, is an argument, an ideology and a “behavioural technology” that is a challenger brand to the incumbent ways of putting teams and organisational systems together. At the firm we spend a long time thinking about the issue of diversity and what we have come upon is the notion that diversity is losing the ideological battle because though it is said that it produces better business outcomes; there is scant evidence around to prove that more diverse teams produce better business outcomes than un-diverse ones. Corporate South Africa continues to fail at diversity but its business outcomes continue to improve. If diversity is going to win the battle of ideologies then it has to show real, tangible, meaningful results that go beyond it simply being the right thing to do. Similarly, values-based leadership has to demonstrate real, tangible, meaningful results that go beyond just the fact that it is the right thing to do. The values-based organisational systems that we build must show superior results for the notion of values-based leadership to gain mass credibility. The question to us, I suppose, is: who must it show those results for? A favourite quote of ours at the firm is: “It is okay to be contrarian, as long as you are right”. Values-based leadership is a contrarian notion in the world that we live in today and it is fine for us to hold onto it, as long as we are right. It is far easier to fight for principles than it is to live up to them– Alfred Adler expressed it best that principles are far easier to fight for than they are to live up to. Values-based leadership is, itself, a principle – one that we mostly fight for in our politics only to betray in our business dealings and our homes. If the brand of values-based leadership is going to become a market-winner, industry-leader and world-changer, then it is critical that we, those who fight for it, live up to it to as best our ability as our mortal existences allow. This brand gains more based on who wears it; just as much as it loses most when those who wear it fail to live up to what it represents. The greatest damage to this brand, in this respect, is often done in our families where we are more inclined to unencumber ourselves of the weight of pretence and to reflect to our partners and children the truest version of ourselves in all of its splendid glory. Values-based leadership begins in the home where the next generation of brand-loyalists are created. Just like any other segment of customers, the market segment at home is more discerning than we often give it credit for and that which we do thinking they cannot see, is that which most influences what they believe about that which we do and say when we know that they are watching us.
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ChapterOne gives you the ability to expand on an idea, to add to it, to really think out of the box and take it to new places and add dimensions that you, as the person who originally came up with the idea, hadn’t.
ChapterOne gives you the ability to expand on an idea, to add to it, to really think out of the box and take it to new places and add dimensions that you, as the person who originally came up with the idea, hadn’t.
ChapterOne gives you the abilid add dimensions that you, as the person who originally came up with the idea, hadn’t.
The Chapter One campus is made up of a series of high-ceilinged buildings that seem to be made of more glass than brick, letting the sunlight in, warm yet minimalist and engaging. It intentionally allows Onensies to look out into the beautiful, lush gardens that seem to have grown around the buildings and make them look like a veritable Garden of Eden.
Chapter One fulfills its mission through four practice areas as follows: