- Rich Kassel of the National Resources Defense Council
- Stephen Marlin of General Motors
- Bruce Schaller of the New York City Department of Transportation

We’ll be taking on everything from the continuing challenges for electric vehicles to the sorry state of public investment in mass transit. Of course this is a business audience, we’ll also be talking about where the smart money is placing its bets now.

If you are going to be in New York on the evening of May 17, please join us. If not (or in any case), what questions would you like me to pose to these panelists? I’ll post on the discussion so you’ll get your answers.

Here is more information on the event: MGFG Transportation 5 17 12_(Final PDF)

Nicole Freedman is a former bicycle racer with two titles as U.S. national champion and a member of the 2000 Olympic team, she brings an intense love of of bicycling and a competitor’s zeal to the position. Her racing career gave her experience riding in cities around the country and internationally. She also has an urban planning degree and experience as a bicycle  planner in California.

Freedman said that the inspiration to make the city more bicycle friendly came from Mayor Menino. Boston had been ranked as one of the most unfriendly cities for bicycles and he “was savvy enough to know that if Boston was to be appealing to smart, young professionals it had to be seen as socially progressive.” This was the inspiration for his sustainability initiatives and the bicycle program is part of that effort.

This top-down approach was critical according to Freedman. She noted that Boston is governed by a “strong mayor system” and thus Menino’s support and enthusiasm were critical. She said that this has been true for each of the top bicycling cities she has visited.

“Mayor Menino opened doors,” she said. “My job was to walk through them and make things happen.”

One of her significant early challenges was working with City engineers as they were not familiar with how to make a city bicycle friendly. Their training was automobile-centric. She brought in an outside firm, Tool Design Group, that had cutting edge expertise in this area. This gave Freedman a critical interface: she had engineers with whom she could communicate — they understood what she wanted to do — and they in turn could communicate with the City’s engineers in “engineer speak.”

“Once the City engineers knew that this was going to be a long-term effort and not just a passing fad, they took it seriously. Once they understood how they could contribute and how bicycles could be integrated into their projects, they became enthusiastic.”

She knew that she alone would not have all of the answers. In October 2007 she convened a three-day Boston Bikes Summit which brought together the public and a wide range of experts to brainstorm ideas for cycling in Boston. From these diverse perspectives came a plan to achieve the vision of a bike-friendly Boston.

The results are beginning to show. The share of trips in Boston made by bicycle doubled between 2007 and 2009. “That sounds impressive but we have only gone from 1% to 2%.” Her goal is to get to European levels of “5%, 7%, 10% mode share of journeys.” Five percent or greater is the level at which a city is a “world class bicycle city, she said. She looks to New York and Portland, Oregon as model U.S. cities to watch.

The most recent visible evidence of Boston’s commitment to bicycles is the Hubway bike share program that launched in summer 2011. While it is too early to have much data, Freedman said that usage had met expectations. The vision is that the Hubway bicycles will be used about equally by residents and visitors.

Freedman uses a fairly standard arsenal of tools to build community support and bicycle  usage: events, education, and enticements. “Building support is not complicated,” she said. “It is time intensive and labor intensive, but it is not complicated.”

For example, Boston hosts a city-wide ride called Hub on Wheels that is both an event and an educational opportunity. The ride is designed to get show more bicyclists the many opportunities there are to ride in the city and for people in the city to get to used  to seeing more bicycles on the streets. She noted that Hub on Wheels is also designed to help educate riders on how to ride safely in an urban environment and for non-riders to see that large groups can ride in an orderly, courteous way.

Freedman said that the more people see bicycles as part of the normal flow of traffic, the more likely they are to try cycling themselves and respect cyclists’ use of the road. Pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists must all respect each other, particularly given Boston’s narrow, congested streets. “It’s a combination of demonstration and inspiration,” she said.

Enticements include demarcated bike lanes, bike racks, and other amenities that make it easier to use a bicycle as a regular mode of transportation.

Most recently, the City has begun to investigate a program of personalized marketing. Inspired by an initiative in Australia, the City wants to move beyond general information and timetables to providing precise answers to specific travel inquiries. Dubbed Travel Smart, it enables citizens to get exact mass transit and biking route information between points in Boston.

The City also works with the business community. It provides a list of suggestions for how to be a bike-friendly enterprise and Freedman says that participation is increasing. The City is also using its regulatory tools to increase the requirements for new construction in terms of bicycle amenities.

Asked about collaboration with neighboring communities such as Brookline and Cambridge, Freedman said that it is important but a lower priority than “getting Boston where it needs to be.” She said that Boston will align bike lanes when requested. They also used the City’s heftier bargaining power to set favorable terms with the bike share program vendor that will be extended to Cambridge and Somerville in 2012.

Freedman said that City of Boston is much better as using inducements, “carrots,” than penalties and other “sticks.” There isn’t yet the political support to use authority to be more assertive.  She noted, however, that “until you make drivers pay for all of the externalities” associated with the automobile “there is only so far you can go before you hit a wall.”

Asked what she would do if she could wave a magic wand, Freedman went right to the “sticks”: $6.00 a gallon gas, no on-street parking, and a downtown congestion charge. She concluded, “Give me those and I wouldn’t have to build a single mile of bike lane because the streets would be full of cyclists.”

While this might be a plot synopsis for one of the fictional HBR case studies I’ve written, it is the very real situation that confronts the executives at Apple. While the issues of overworked employees and lax environmental standards are not unique to Apple, they may be the brand with the most to lose. Apple has subsequently stepped up its efforts to monitor suppliers and is inviting third party verification of standards.

In a recent post for BecomeALeader.org, I used this tension between the needs of stakeholders as the jumping off point for a broader question for all leaders: where would you draw the line between values and financial performance? The post is below. I look forward to your thoughts.

Just a few months ago Steve Jobs was being lauded as one of the great CEOs of all time. I was a bit more reserved in my praise because I think it’s important to evaluate leaders on their legacy as well as their performance while in the job. Recently Apple was back in the news both for its stellar profits and the allegedly abhorent labor practices of the subcontractor that assembles many of its devices.

This juxtaposition presents an excellent opportunity to ask yourself the question: how far will you go to deliver financial performance?

First, a bit of background in case you missed these stories. Apple had a bang-up fourth quarter in 2011 selling 37 million iPhones and more than 15 million iPads. We love these products (full disclosure: I treasure my iPad but I am having second thoughts about an upcoming iPhone purchase). Apple’s profits for the quarter doubled over the previous year. Wall Street could not have been more jubilant:

“It almost defies words in terms of the strength across all products,” Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company told the New York Times. “Everything about it eclipsed even the wildest expectations of analysts.”

Then came news of a darker side of our love affair with all things Apple. Following on earlier reporting of worker suicides at China-based Foxconn, a major supplier to Apple and other electronics makers, the New York Times published a major exposé on labor conditions in the plants from which our sleek, sexy devices emerge. It was not a pretty picture. The article described “harsh conditions” with problems ranging from “onerous work environments and serious—sometimes deadly—safety problems”:

“Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.”

Does this sound like a job you would take? Would you encourage your son or daughter to apply for a summer job on the assembly line? I doubt it. These are conditions that would not be tolerated in the United States or many other places around the globe. Yet lines form around the block whenever a new Apple product is released.

A critical leadership tension is brought into high relief: some of the hottest, most profitable products on the planet come from factories in which Apple would not want its customers walking around. This from a company whose “Think Different” advertising campaign featured human rights champion Mahatma Gandhi and labor leader Cesar Chavez.

I frame the larger leadership question in terms of clarity in three areas: purpose, values, and performance. I call this the PVP framework.

Purpose comprises two questions: What job is your customer hiring you to do? What are you trying to build? Your Values are the answer to the question: How will you conduct your activities? Performance also comprises two questions: How viable is your business model? How you will measure success?

I believe that the PVP framework can be applied to any organization whether it is for profit, nonprofit, or even a government agency. Every organization should have a clear purpose and values. Every organization needs to be financially sustainable. The challenge is that while most organizations have myriad processes for measuring and monitoring performance, they are less rigorous around purpose and values. Each needs equal attention.

I think that the case can be made that Apple’s leadership maintained greater clarity around purpose than its competitors. The company clearly delights its customers and elicits extraordinary loyalty from them. None of its competitors has been able to match the cachet of its products. The performance numbers above speak for themselves. They demonstrate that the organization is clear about its business model and executes well.

The wrinkle here is values. Perhaps Apple executives have made their peace with the labor conditions at Foxconn and other suppliers. Customers are clamoring for our products, one could imagine these executives saying to themselves—isn’t our job to make those customers happy? If improving labor conditions would add to the cost of an iPad, far fewer would be likely to sell, the logic would continue. That would wipe the smiles off the delirious investors who pushed the stock over $450 per share, which would, in turn, cut into the executives’ compensation.

What would you do? Your customers are not demanding changes. People are much more interested in when you’ll release the next iPhone. Your investors want you to keep doing what you are doing. The New York Times story didn’t cause a blip in the share price. Perhaps the public won’t care that much—Chinese workers are a world away and the newspaper stories are soon forgotten.

I am not writing this to provide an answer; my hope is to stimulate a discussion. As a leader, you have to be prepared for your situation to change in a heartbeat. Just ask the executives at the Susan G. Komen Foundation who experienced a furious values-driven backlash when they recently decided to stop funding Planned Parenthood. The best preparation for that moment is to be clear about your values from the beginnnig and use them to guide transparent decision making.

The question is on the table: if you were in charge at Apple, what would you do?

In the paper I put forth a conceptual framework for examining the leadership issues and it is build around three simple prepositions: of, in, and with. Leaders of a system, really a sub-system, such as a CEO of a company have one level of influence largely bounded by the extent of their authority. Leaders in a system, perhaps that same CEO  but working through a U.N. initiative or the head of an international NGO, have a larger level of influence as they don’t define it in terms of formal authority. They know that they must collaborate and move multiple stakeholders in order to be effective. A few truly achieve large scale, meta-system change and I call these leaders with the system. They articulate the inconsistencies within the system and lead the system to be true to itself. Their leadership is not motivated by personal gain or the self-interest of any entity other than the system itself.

Jim Spohrer of IBM, one of my advisory team members, has suggested that leading with a system may at the point where one moves beyond a zero-sum outcomes. That’s an interesting insight that I am going to explore.

“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The leader with a system I examine most closely in the paper is Martin Luther King, Jr. That’s why I am posting the paper today on MLK Day 2012. Others whom I would consider leaders with the system would be Gandhi, Mandela, and perhaps the Dalai Lama. That’s an illustrious, almost stereotypical list. I will be looking for more as my work progresses. I invite you to read the paper and give me your thoughts on the of, in, with framework.

Read the full paper here: Leadership of Social Change cc.

Bargmann is an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture where her research through Project D.I.R.T., Design Investigations Reclaiming Terrain, aims to “excavate the creative potential of degraded landscapes.” She is also a principal at D.I.R.T. (Dump it Right Here) Studio in New York. In both of these pursuits, Bargmann’s work is interdisciplinary and driven by an “obsession with urban regeneration”.

Bargmann has worked on such high profile projects as the green roof on the Ford River Rouge plant, working with William McDonough & Associates among others, and New York’s High Line Park, working with Michael VanValkenberg & Associates among others.

Her hero is Robert Smithson, the American artist who is one of the founders of the earthworks or land art movement. She described him as thinking with “a greater clock” – having deeper and more expansive concepts of time that were revealed through his sculpture. His art and essays have inspired her to think differently about land and landscapes. She said that she finds beauty in industrial landscapes and sees industrial uses of land simply as one point on a continuum of usage that stretch through time. “It’s not as if we are taking a landscape from what it is back to what it once was; I want to help the landscape become what it is meant to be next.”

Bargmann described the challenges of her work as beginning with the general lack of familiarity with brownfields issues. “You have to understand the minds you are dealing with,” she said. “My job is not to make the issues less complex, but to make the outcomes seem more attainable.” Bargmann said that this is her greatest leadership challenge. She has to be facile with economic as well as design issues.

On the Rouge River project, Ford executives were initially not interested in a green roof. However she and the team were able to convince the head of Ford’s environment group of the value of the project. He, in turn, became a champion who swayed the balance of the Ford executives.

“Every designer needs a champion on the client side,” she said. “You have to plant the seed, be catalytic, and get them thinking beyond business as usual. It means being both pragmatic and poetic.”

She worked on the Vintondale Reclamation Park project in Pennsylvania. In this case, a historian was the champion for the project: he had the vision that the site of a former coal mine could be reclaimed as park land. The historian saw the park, which would also include art installations, as continuation of the work of the land. “He saw this as the next logical step for the land,” she said. Bargmann worked as part of pro-bono team for five years and describes this as a “seminal project” as it brought severely damaged land back as a productive, vital landscape. It was awarded the Phoenix Award, “the brownfields equivalent of Hollywood’s Oscars.”

Bargmann described the Vintondale project as a typical example of leading from the bottom up. This is where she often sees projects taking shape and so now concentrates her work on pilot and demonstration projects. She noted that major projects are difficult to find given the current economic climate. She has purposefully kept her firm small so that she can pick-and-choose those projects that are most interesting.

Not every project comes to fruition. The architect on a large project for a university that was expanding into a brownfield site brought Bargmann onto the project team. The original plan called for excavating tons of potentially contaminated soil and trucking it across several states for disposal. Bargmann and her team developed a plan for a “soil farm” process through which the “dirty” soil could have been reclaimed on site. “It made an enormous amount of sense but the team from the university just couldn’t get their arms around the idea,” she said.

Another leadership challenge for Bargmann is navigating the political aspects of a project. She noted that major projects typically involve a “dysfunctional network” of agencies, developers, designers, and other players. She said that she often had to play “match maker” between agencies that don’t often speak with each other, yet that must come together for a successful brownfield redevelopment. She counseled that knowing the players and their interests. Then you can “make room for the landscape’s best interests,” she said.

Bargmann said that it is important to “level the ground” and find a common desired outcome. She works to do this by focusing on what is “best for the landscape.” This gets the discussion out of the functional silos and up to a more strategic level. “I try to be the voice of the landscape,” she said.

No matter how skillful one is, however, permitting is still an enormous logistical challenge, she said. “No matter how many agencies give you the green light, there is always one more out there that can stop you in your tracks,” she said. To mitigate this she tries to work with architects (who are usually the design lead on a project) who are politically astute and who know how to navigate in the city where the project is situated. “Someone on the team has to know the bureaucracy,” she said.

Looking to the future Bargmann said that she is intrigued by smaller industrial cities such as Trenton and Baltimore where the challenges are great but resources scarce. She is particularly energized about the possibilities in Detroit, a city that is trying to “shrink in a purposeful way.” She sees the potential to create “an urban wilderness” out of abandoned industrial and commercial sites, a prospect she sees as an enormous, exciting challenge.

Bargmann’s work is instructive and an inspiration to see the discards of our past in a new light.

This article in Disaster Response Journal, co-authored with my NPLI colleague, Dr. Barry Dorn who also spent time in the Gulf with National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen, presents some of the lessons learned specific to situational awareness in a fast-evolving incident. It explores how the meta-leadership framework developed at the NPLI can improve situational awareness and thus enhance decision making. Among the lessons:

A COP (common operating picture) ensures everyone sees a common set of facts. This is important. However, each individual will interpret those facts somewhat differently because each person has different experience, expertise, biases, and preferences. That is why the meta-leadership framework begins with the person: having the capacity to be self-aware and cognizant of others’ perceptions, the leader will more accurately comprehend the situation and integrate input from others. Being able to integrate multiple sources of information, both objective and subjective, is central to situational awareness.

Please read the article and share your thoughts and comments.

In doing the research for the proposal, I spoke with a number of local people and the idea took on a life of its own. It has been embraced by a number of local organizations as well as the Green Restaurant Association (GRA) which has agreed to certify Washington Square as the nation’s first green restaurant district if 25% of its restaurants meet the GRA’s certification standards. The Green Restaurant District project will be a feature of Brookline’s Climate Week in January 2012.

Why pursue a Green Restaurant District?

-          Restaurants are the dominant business in Wasington Square (20 of 62 storefront businesses are restaurants).

-          Restaurants have a greater impact on the environment than other businesses: on average, they use 2.5x the energy of other businesses, generate approximately 50,000 lbs of waste (95% of which could be recycled or composted), and use up to 300,000 gals of water;

-          The Square already has Boston’s first certified green restaurant here: The Fireplace. Owner Jim Solomon is enthusiastic and says that he saves significantly on his operating costs as a result of adopting environmentally friendly practices;

-          The Green Restaurant Association (GRA) gathered more than 2,000 signatures in Brookline from people who said that they wanted Brookline restaurants to “go green.”

Thus it seems logical: if  Washington Square restaurants  “go green,” they benefit from lower costs while the town benefits from a smaller environmental footprint. And, with the publicity likely to result from becoming the first green restaurant district in the country, more diners will be attracted to the Square giving business a boost. It’s a win, win, win!

Another personal benefit of the project is that it is a chance to move beyond the academic exploration of leadership to the front lines. While the initial enthusiasm from the neighborhood is great, it will take a lot of meeting, educating, and cajoling to make the green restaurant district a reality. And did I mention that I am looking forward to getting to know the restauranteurs better?

I’ll keep you posted. If you are interested in helping, please be in touch.

Related Events

• Artist: Eric J. McNulty
• Event: Sustainable Cities
• Date: Thursday, April 26th 2012
• Time: 7:00pm
• City: Eric J. McNulty in Brookline, MA
• Venue: Brookline Adult Education
• Address: Brokline High School
• Country: United States
• Age restrictions: All Ages
• Notes: Panel: Your Dining Impact: Green Restaurants
• Add to Google Calendar | Download iCal

This tradition is also reflected in how we think about leaders: we relate the rise and fall of organizations through the stories of their executives, the successes and failures of armies through the exploits of their generals, and the triumph or defeat of social movements through the journeys of their most visible advocates. Bezos. Bloomberg. Petraeus. Gandhi.

The reality is not that simple.

Leaders never act alone. Rarely, if ever, do breakthrough ideas have a single parent.

Successful strategies, tactics, negotiations, and operations are not often the product of sitting alone in one’s room. Researchers use the term agency to describe the actions of individuals. The leaders described above are portrayed as individual agents—think “my idea,” “my vision,” or the title of a regular feature on CEOs in Harvard Business Review, “How I Did It.”

In my experience and research, leaders are more often co-creators or joint agents. I may have an idea, but you and several others add to it before it becomes the next big thing. Jeff Bezos has contributed mightily to the success of amazon.com, but he certainly didn’t do it alone. Employees, investors, suppliers, customers, and even competitors played roles in making the company what it is today. So, too, with the efforts of Mayor Bloomberg to make New York a more sustainable city.

Research on nonlinear systems at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere holds that change in a system comes not from the actions of one agent but rather from the interactions of two or more agents.

If you view global organizations and cities as complex systems, as I do, then evaluating and developing leaders as individual agents is foolhardy at best. These efforts are much better directed at improving how leaders foster interaction and build relationships.

In a recent literature survey, I found that the agency of leaders was an area not covered in great depth (see my recent post on complexity for another).

Warren Bennis wrote about “great groups” at Apple and other innovative companies as the successors to the “great man” tradition of leadership. He wrote about “the myth of the triumphant individual” that underlies much leadership thinking. Most others—from James McGregor Burns through Jim Collins—focus on the efforts of the individual rather than the individual as part of a group.

Creation is wonderful, but cocreation opens up far greater possibilities, unlocks more resources, and more effectively hedges the risk of overlooking either opportunities or pitfalls. Cocreation gives you the freedom to say, “I’m not sure. What do you think?” It allows you to more deeply engage followers, peers, and even potential naysayers.

As you think about your own leadership journey, I encourage you to keep agency in mind. Yes, you must think about what you will do, but try placing it the context of what you will enable others to contribute, how you will remove obstacles to others’ success, how you catalyze collaboration, and how you can ensure that credit is shared as widely as is deserved.

Heroic narratives may be easy—perhaps even essential in storytelling—but do not confuse them with what is actually essential to your success as a leader. Truly great leaders are masters of cocreation.

The Action Plan
• Watch the credits. The next time that you see a film, stay through the credits. You will see that the stars’ names may be in larger type but that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of others who were essential to creating the film. Eliminate any of them and you would have a lesser experience or perhaps no movie at all.
• Create a genealogy chart for a great idea. Look at the last (or next) successful initiative in your organization and trace its lineage. From where did the seed emerge? Who was at the meeting where it was first surfaced? Who was it bounced off as it matured? How did you or another leader nurture the idea? Try to include everyone who contributed in some way to its development—and then post it on the wall for everyone to see.
• As you keep your leadership journal (and I encourage everyone to do so), periodically note the times when your actions have either encouraged or discouraged cocreation. Think about what worked and what you might have done differently.

A version of this post first appeared on BecomeaLeader.org.

Mayor Bloomberg photo from Flickr. Some rights reserved by makeroadssafe. City Year photo from Flickr. Some rights reserved by cityyear.

Library of Congress Photo courtesy of KansasPhoto (Flickr Creative Commons)

I have been thinking for some time about the gradual disappearance of what I call the “rich-poor” life. This is the life once lived by my grade school teachers who didn’t have a lot of money but who managed to be culturally rich. They traveled and brought their slides to school. They read books and saw films. They visited museums.  They were educated, sophisticated, and adventurous without being slaves to a job or worrying about health care. This was a life I always felt that I could live as a fall-back should I find myself in hard times. Now, I’m not so sure.

The rich-poor life depends upon public libraries, free nights at museums, public lectures, open rehearsals at the symphony, theater in the park, the parks themselves, and so much more. It needs quality public spaces and those “third places” where one can find a reasonably priced cup of coffee or glass of wine and spend an hour conversing. At a more fundamental level, it requires quality public schools so that people cultivate a taste for cultural exploration, an appreciation of nature, and a thirst to learn. Each of these is under threat by our current economic downturn with funds dwindling and, more significant, a turning away from viewing social spending as necessary.

I may have a romantic view of the rich-poor life, thinking that I could survive happily in a small garret with my books, tea (OK, wine), and a subway pass. For many, however, these resources are critical for social mobility. It was for my parents and many other people of their generation. The library, the arboretum, the museum opened a view on the world that inspired them to study. They saw a better life and a way to get there. They saved and worked and strove.

Instead we have been sold, and to be fair have happily bought, a poor-rich life full of easy credit and the mountains of stuff it makes possible: a new car leased every two years, acres of granite counter tops, and useless gee-gaws that give us a momentary purchase high.  We can’t live without 200 cable channels so that we can track every movement of the Kardashians (who are they and what do they actually do?).  We have failed to address the decline in public education in a meaningful way for more than a generation.  Household debt is up; social mobility is down. Unemployment is up and so is income inequality. Our public infrastructure is a shambles. We’ve quite willingly sold our collective soul to the company store.

This is not about the “nanny state.” This is about how much of our common wealth should be hidden behind a pay wall. Is there a certain amount of life that should be free or is it all going to be pay-to-play? I believe that making it possible to have an intellectually and culturally rich life at low or no cost is critical to the fabric of a healthy democracy and vibrant economy.

Is it that important, this rich-poor life? We have reached a point where it seems we cannot afford to be us. Or at least us as we’ve defined it over the past 20 years. We’ve just witnessed widespread rioting in London. When people at every economic strata cannot live satisfying lives, pressure builds and eventually bursts. When we hollow out life so that it is defined only in economic terms, it becomes expensive at best and impossible at worst for many people to find that satisfaction. That is a tragedy for  individuals and society as a whole if we wish them both to be sustainable and resilient.

Leaders, however, must acknowledge that while simplicity has its place, the world is non-linear, disorderly, and in many ways unpredictable. Leaders need to embrace and understand complexity.

In a literature survey (Meta System Leadership CC) that I conducted this past spring I found that complexity was a topic not covered in depth in most traditional leadership scholarship (I will cover the other “missing” topics in future columns). A relatively small group of thinkers including Meg Wheatley, Peter Senge, and Donella Meadows have rooted their work in a systems-based world view that brings complexity to the fore and offers important leadership insights.

One approach to complexity that I have found particularly useful was developed in the 1950s by Dr. Warren Weaver to help explain the evolution of scientific thought. In Weaver’s framework, Simplicity refers to challenges with 1 – 4 variables. Disorganized complexity refers to challenges with many, many independent variables such that sophisticated statistical analysis is necessary to understand it. As organizations and cities become more sophisticated with analytics, they become more comfortable with disorganized complexity. In between the two, and often overlooked, is organized complexity. These situations have more variables than found in simplicity yet fewer than disorganized complexity and, more important, there are interdependencies between the variables. Jane Jacobs, in her classic Death and Life of Great American Cities, felt that neighborhoods were examples of organized complexity.

Senge, in his book The Fifth Discipline, made a similar distinction between detail complexity (arising from a large number of variables) and dynamic complexity (arising from the relationships between the components where cause and effect may not be clear and may vary over time).

Much direct mail fundraising activity is an exercise in disorganized complexity. Offers are sent to thousand or perhaps millions of people. Each responds or not independent of any of the others who have received the offer. The complexity is mastered through averages (response rate, gift size, etc.) derived through statistical analysis. Success is achieved when those autonomous responses conform to or exceed the predicted average response.

Large organizations, by contrast, represent organized complexity. Key to success is understanding the interdependencies and relationships between the components.  Marketing may generate thousands of gifts but if Member Services does not follow up with a “thank you,” if Purchasing does not procure the promised premium, if Fulfillment does not send the premium, and if Accounting does process the donations success will not be achieved.

It is not uncommon for people in organizations – or their external constituencies – to complain that “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” In my experience, things are often arrayed so that they make sense on paper – a simplicity-based view – but are derailed by sour personal relationships, misaligned or conflicting incentives, or a failure to discern hard-to-see interdependencies. For example, Marketing may have had an opportunity to get into the mail early and failed to notify Purchasing that premiums would be needed sooner than planned. Or Purchasing, incented to save money, may have switched suppliers resulting in a delivery delay. At one level, this is management: getting people to do things right. At a higher level, however, it is about leading through complexity.

Leaders must continually work to ensure that each component of their extended enterprises – within and outside of their formal organizations – has clarity on three things: purpose, values, and the business model.  Purpose is understanding the job that the customer is hiring you to do – if they are donating to your environmental organization they want to know that their money has been received and is being put to work. If they opted to receive the premium product, they may also value the chance to promote their efforts on behalf the natural world. Values are the bedrock principles by which you operate – among which may be providing the highest level of service to members. The business model is how the organization remains financially viable – and understanding that saving a nickel on each tote bag may cost more than it saves if they arrive a month late.

The dynamic nature of complex systems means that clarity is always threatened. People come and go, assume new roles, and acquire new experiences. Market conditions shift. Competitors act. Leaders must always try to see the whole and help those they lead see it as well. Embrace complexity and give others clarity. Then people will begin to act as parts of the system and more accurately perceive their impact on the rest of the system.

Action Plan

-          Read more about leadership and complex systems. Donella Meadows’ article, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” or the book A Simpler Way by Meg Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers are great places to start.

-          Pursue clarity around Purpose and Values as well as the Business Model. Many meetings begin with a review of “the numbers.” Try starting one with a conversation about purpose or values to signal that these are high on your agenda and to find fuzziness around why and how you operate.

-          Exercise a framework for understanding complexity. Whether you adopt Weaver’s, Senge’s, or another approach, practice using complexity as a diagnostic for addressing situations you face. Keep notes on where relationships between elements rather than the elements themselves are the critical issue to resolve.

A version of this post appeared on BecomeaLeader.org.