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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Bryan, thank you for joining the Leadermorphosis podcast. I thought we could start by, for the listeners who aren’t familiar with the term deliberately developmental organizations, maybe you could say something about what that means and also what that means at your organization at Decurion.
Bryan: A deliberately developmental organization or a DDO is an organization that puts development at the center of everything it does. It actually weaves development into how the company or business operates. So that means it’s asking questions about the development of the business, it’s asking questions about the development of whatever it is that the business serves, and then it’s also asking questions internally about what the teams and communities within the business, what development is going on there, and of course the individuals, people that are throughout. The term comes from Dr. Keegan, Bob Keegan at Harvard, who coined it for us after we’ve been doing this for about 15 years. But I think it’s a perfect term because it really highlights the fact that it’s developmental, but it’s also very deliberate. It’s an intentional choice about how we operate the company.
Lisa: Could you give an example of how that works in practice at Decurion, how you facilitate those conversations at those different levels?
Bryan: Well, it’s a… they’re cascading, so one level pulls the next level and usually from the top. So one of… we’ve got a number of different businesses from movie theaters to commercial real estate to senior living. Our most recent is our Senior Living, and that’s often one that’s easier to understand, although it started in the movie theaters strangely enough.
In the senior living, the purpose that we ended up defining for senior living is to deliver love in the context of affordable care—to actually create the conditions, loving conditions for our residents and their families at the cheapest possible rate in the marketplace, which is what affordable care means, which everybody in the industry says is impossible. You can’t even do that at high-priced offerings, much less low-priced offerings.
So right from the beginning, it became clear that we’re going to have to develop the entire organization to be able to know what love meant in the work context and what did it mean for the residents, for folks that are in the final years of their life and their families, to experience love in those conditions and then do it cheaper than anybody in the marketplace is doing it right now. So that requires development. That requires developing a capacity that you don’t have yet. Capacity is more than a skill. The skill is, you know, to be able to do a particular task, but a capacity is to be able to somehow make a difference that you weren’t able to make before.
So that then said, okay, there’s multiple teams throughout the business. So there’s a care team, there’s a food and beverage team, there’s a facilities team, there’s a recruiting team and an onboard marketing team, and then there’s one whole building or facility operations that needs to happen. How does that whole thing need to work? And so we had… we are still in the process, that’s been going on for seven years now, six-seven years, and we’re continually in the process of asking the question, well, what’s the role or multiple roles that a team plays?
So there are things like agility in the face of the unexpected and being able to take the unexpected and rather than having it knock you off your game, pull you further into your game. You know, I thought I was going to do this on the shift, and then this resident became ill or became angry, something went off, or somebody got lost. And how is our… those opportunities to actually express care and love in the situation. And in order to do that, every person on that team, yes, is given the opportunity to say, okay, well, what’s the role I’m gonna play in all of this, and how do I need to develop my own awareness or my own discernment or my own ability to act in the face of something. And this is something I may not be able to do today, but I would like to be able to do in order to have this whole thing work better.
So you end up with these reciprocal interrelations. The business can’t work without the teams doing something differently. The teams can’t work without the individuals doing something differently. But everyone’s being pulled to the mission or the purpose of the business. So it’s not a push, it’s a pull to… “Yeah, I want to do that. That’s worth getting out of bed in the morning to go work on that,” because it’s something that makes sense to me, it aligns with what makes sense with my life, but it also makes sense for the business itself.
Lisa: I’m wondering what some of the practices are that you’ve developed to create and sustain this organizing around development across the business. In, you know, you mentioned there are different parts of the business and different sectors. What are some of the ways that you’ve developed to, for example, if I were working in Decurion, like what would some of the things, some of the practices be that would help me in my personal development and help me contribute in my role or find that path?
Bryan: We wouldn’t start there, and that’s the most common misinterpretation of the DDOs, and one unfortunately that has come from one interpretation of the book, is that you start with personal development. And that you start with practices. Personal development and practices around development is actually the lowest leverage and the last thing you do, at least at Decurion.
And so at Decurion, you have to start thinking about the organization itself from the top. So if we’re right in saying that the development of the organization pulls the development of the individuals, then you have to ask these kind of strange questions about, well, what are the processes and structures and then eventually practices of the organization itself? So you can kind of take all the people out of the organization mentally and say, “I want this organization to be more aware of something that it’s not aware of right now.” So how could I structure or add—you could design a process for this organization to be more aware.
And that might mean I have to think about the way that the organization engages with the external community, or I might have to think about the way the organization interacts with its customers, or is it becomes aware of data. So a lot of organizations just don’t know a lot of things that would be really valuable for them to know, and they just don’t have the structures and processes to do that. So from an organizational design point of view, your redesigning the organization itself.
Then you’re usually putting that in charge of teams. So you’re saying team acts, you know, you’re in charge of this particular awareness process. But then you’ve got to make sense of whatever it is your the organization’s becoming aware of. So if in Holly Brook, where we’re trying to pay attention to the well-being of not only the residents but the families of the residents, how would you know that? Are their regular calls? The third with the family, when the family comes, with us, do they get a time to hang out and talk about something beyond just what’s going on right now? Those have to be processes that are designed in.
And then how do, what… how do you make sense of that data? So if there was a camera or a recording—there isn’t, but if there was a camera recording every activity in the building—would you be able to identify the activities to go and see there, the organization is attempting to understand? So is there a set of conversations where people get together and go, well, this is what I heard from the family, would you hear from the family, and how does that connect to what we know about what’s going on with the resident, and how does that connect to other things? So there’s a meaning-making process of all of that.
Once you’ve done all that organizational design work, then there are practices for the individual to then to start to join them at the… In that, an individual would be given an opportunity to say, what, out of all of this, is pulling me? What, out of all of this, is of interest to me, and what’s the contribution I want to make? So that’s a practice to be able to spend some time thinking about what’s my role in this? Where do I want to play?
And then the other practice is to have that join up with what the business is working on right now, because if what I want to do is become a pastry chef, that’s may not… maybe, but that probably doesn’t have a role there. But if what I want to do have something to do with the care that we’re providing or the business that we’re running or the recruiting that we’re doing and all of that, then there’s a joining up. And there’s another set of practice to… the practices that say, okay, well, what comes next?
So there’s a goal setting or an aim setting practice doing the business is trying to do this, and I’m trying to do this. How do those two things line up as one thing? And I can start working on it.
Then there’s another practice to kind of get in the rhythm of just being in that conversation week over week over week of going, I was trying to do this this week, but something else happened instead of what I was trying to do. So I thought I was going to accomplish this goal, and instead, you know, it went a different direction. So what’s up with that? Was that something that I should pay attention to? Is that something the business was going on too? How do we hold that in a community?
And then finally, kind of one of the… when people find out about Decurion, a practice that gets a lot of attention as the check-in practice of us kind of checking into meetings and being fully there. That’s kind of the lowest level practice. So in the middle of all of this other activity of hooking everything up, then there’s just kind of the basic practice there going, “What’s going on for me and how is this sitting for me? How’s this sitting for you? How’s this sitting for us as a community? Are we… how we doing?” That’s kind of a way of holding all the other things together.
Lisa: So you mentioned that there, you know, this starting with the individuals or starting with practices is one of the misconceptions that came about as a result of this book, An Everyone Culture, about DDOs. What are some of the other misconceptions, do you think? And a second part of that question is also, how does Decurion compare to some of the other organizations featured in the book? Because there’s no one-size-fits-all for a DDO, is my understanding.
Bryan: No, there certainly isn’t one-size-fits-all. And don’t get me wrong, the book is marvelous. Keegan did a beautiful job of really focusing on what individual development looks like in the DDO and what’s required in a culture in order to cultivate and perpetuate individual human development. So that part, and highlight that as a DDO was deliberately developmental, is spot on. And there’s a whole lot more to it than that, at least there was for Decurion.
With Decurion, we didn’t start with human development, and that’s one of the accidental misconceptions that comes from the book. So I think even more broadly than the book, there’s the notion that if you start developing the people in the organization, or even if you start developing the leadership in the organization, that you’ll end up with a developmental organization. And I haven’t found that to be true, or at least not reliably true.
I think you have to develop the organization itself first, and that’s a different toolbox. That’s a different… requires a different method and a different approach to start thinking about developmental, at the organizational development, a plan or the way you go about developing an organization that then creates the conditions for people within it to develop.
I think I see this in the conscious business movement as well, as there’s kind of a unintentional assumption that if we have conscious leaders, people therefore have conscious business. And what I see over and over again is amazing leaders go work on themselves at any of the dozens of different seminars and workshops that are available to help leaders become more and more of themselves. And then they go back to the organization, and they just get assimilated right back into the very powerful culture—call it what you want, culture, energetic field, dominant assumption set—that’s going on. And if they’re almost individually, there’s this very little you can do about it. Once in a while, there’s an amazing heroic story of somebody that pulls that off, but on the norm is that that just doesn’t work.
So for me, that’s really calling for… if we want conscious organizations, and here at Decurion, development and consciousness, if they’re not the same thing, they’re pretty darn closely related. So raising a developmental level kind of means raising the consciousness level of the organization. And if we want conscious organizations, I think we’re going to have to pay specific attention to the organization itself. But what does it mean to develop the organization? What does it mean for an organization to move to the next stage, a next stage of development, and be more and more able to contribute? But I think it’s every organization has the ability to contribute.
Lisa: So you mentioned that it’s a different toolbox for looking at the organizational development. Could you say something about one or two examples of the tools or ways of doing that?
Bryan: Well, that… yeah, there’s a number of them. The first one I’ve already hinted at in my first example. There’s a level of thinking about the organization without the people in it, which sounds very non-human development. But literally, for me, my own personal practice is to treat the organization as if it’s a living entity.
And I’ve learned from various teachers that if you treat something as alive, that you have to start following the principles of life rather than the principles of machines or simpler ones. And some of those principles are every living thing is unique. So far I have not met two living things on the planet that are identical to each other. And that life lives within life, is that life is nested within other life. And that the conditions for life create the conditions for more life.
So I… you can then step back and kind of look at the organization that way and go, “Huh, what’s unique about this organization, and what’s going to be required in order for it to kind of grow up into a bigger, more whole version of itself?” So the question about how is it aware of the environment that it’s in, how does it process that information, and how is it able to act are all put in context of its own uniqueness.
So you’re not… I’m not taking best practices and role models and trying to make Decurion like, pick your favorite, you know, success story. I’m not trying to make it like Apple or like another DDO. I’m trying to make it like Decurion, because Decurion, as far as I know, is only one of them. So there’s a set of tools and approaches to inquire into the uniqueness and to inquire into what it would mean for that uniqueness to be more fully present in the world.
Then there’s all the tools around what are the internal processes and structures. So you literally… I would literally start to map out with the team of local folks, what are the processes that make this place run and the ones that actually create the value here that is unique to this company? And then what are the structures that help those processes sustain themselves, keep running? So structures can be all the way from meetings to accountabilities to assumptions. The structures can be mental assumptions as well, which is probably one of the biggest tool sets for working on organizations.
Cultures are a set of unwritten assumptions that are just kind of held communally in here, and you can’t see them on a camera, but they’re palpably alive inside an organization. So there can also be a set of practices, communal practices that we use to surface those assumptions and ask as to whether or not they’re useful for what we’re trying to do and be in the world. And if they’re not useful, work on starting to shift those assumptions to ones that are more alignment with what we want to do and be in the world. So those are all examples of things where you’re working directly with the organization as opposed to just with individual people, although people are involved in all of those, of course.
Lisa: I’m curious also because when we spoke last time, we touched on some of the other trends, I guess you could call them, out there in the world of work at the moment, like Reinventing Organizations and teal organizations and Holacracy and things like that. And you said, you know, that those are all well and good, but where’s the development? How would you… can you say some more about what you mean by that and what… how you would compare DDOs to what’s going on in the rest of this landscape at the moment?
Bryan: Well, I think all of these different moves, including DDOs, are are evolving and shifting as we go. So I’m not holding up DDOs as a best model for anything. Let me be clear about that.
With Reinventing Organizations, or just more broadly, the move to self-organizing, self-managing organizations, a less and less emphasis on hierarchy, more and more on emergent structures—that’s going to be a crucial part of any conscious or developmental… any maturing organization is going to inevitably require the ability to have emergent processes throughout it.
What I worry about is I don’t think that’s primary. I think that’s one of the downstream effects that happens when you’re starting to become more and more yourself, and you’re starting to allow the uniqueness of both the organization and the people within the organization to emerge. So I think a single-minded focus on removing hierarchy and moving to self-organizing misses a more primary point that says a deep inquiry into the uniqueness of an organization, the uniqueness of the people that work there, and the reciprocal contribution that that organization can make to the living system that it is part of.
And in that, I… when you are deeply embedded in that, I think you’ll find more and more of it becomes emergent over time. But the converse, for me, I’m not seeing to be true. If you focus purely on the removal of hierarchy, I think you can end up with an organization that does a wonderful job of self-managing, and yet you’ve lost the thread of development. You’ve lost the thread of actually becoming the unique contribution.
So I’ve seen some examples where self-managing organizations can be very mechanical. They focused on becoming more efficient, for example, and we’re not interested primarily in becoming efficient. Efficiency is yet another one of those downstream things that happens. We get better and better at our jobs, but that’s not my goal from the beginning is to get better and better at my job. My goal from the beginning is to become who we are and for me to become a more and more complete version.
Lisa: Yeah, I like what comes up for me when you say that is like, I think a lot of organizations fall into the trap of self-organization for self-organization’s sake. And yeah, and then everyone spends a lot of time and energy doing the project, the work of becoming self-organizing, and they sort of forget about what’s the purpose of this organization? What’s the meaning that we’re trying to, you know, contribute to the world? I mean, are DDOs falling into that same trap of DDOs? Are they falling into the trap of development for the sake of…
Bryan: Yeah, yeah. That is a similar trap, and I think it’s really important to say to think of development as a means, not an end in and of itself. And then it begs the question, the very important question, why? Why develop? And I don’t think anybody can impose that answer on anybody else. There has to be a really integral and authentic inquiry into, yeah, what, who are we and what is our work?
I think somebody famous said that that was the kind of the definition of spirituality or the human quest on this planet, of two parts: “Who are we?” And as you start to answer that, if you make any progress in answering that, going and “Why am I here? What am I here to do?”
And for me—and this is a fairly recent realization—is, yeah, I woke up four or five years ago and realized that we were in that trap of developing for the sake of developing. And the purpose of Decurion a few years ago was to provide places for people to flourish. And my title is the True Purpose Officer, so I felt like it was my duty to kind of say, “Are we flourishing?” And the really honest answer was, I think everybody at the company was learning, I think a lot of the people at the company were developing, and I don’t think very many people were actually flourishing.
So I went on a search for what does it mean to flourish? And that kind of led me inexorably to flourish is a life question. And you can’t answer that without some sort of understanding about how life works. And so many of the conversations that I hear now in next stage organizations, organizations that are exploring different ways of being and operating, I hear all sorts of things about purpose and work-life balance and, you know, how to be how to be yourself.
But I don’t really hear that much about flourish or thriving or what does it mean to be really alive. And when I look at the news, what’s going on in the world, I mean, this is just… this is a pressing question at every level, from the smallest organisms to us humans to the larger, to our cities, our bio-regions, our societies, our industries. And I think a really useful question for all of those different interconnected systems would be, how can they become more alive? How can they genuinely thrive?
And that’s going, in my opinion, that’s going to require development. That’s going to require for us to figure out how to make each one of us make our unique contribution to a system that matters to us. And again, you can’t impose that on anybody. Everyone’s gonna have to figure out what that environment or context or system is and get busy figuring out how to make that contribution. And you know, that’s… the whole thing could come alive, or it could become more alive than it is today. That’s worth redoing the whole organization for. That’s worth, that’s so much more than just getting rid of hierarchy or running better meetings or feeling better at the end of the day. I think those things will happen, but they’ll happen in the service of something much larger.
Lisa: Yeah, it’s very inspiring. It strikes me as well that the power of good questions, you know, big questions in inquiring into where the organization is and what’s needed and what’s next. And yeah, you’ve mentioned a few big questions like, “Who are we? Who am I? How could we be more alive?” You know, these kind of questions driving inquiries.
Bryan: The further I go down this road—and I feel like I’m just starting down the road in many ways—the more I realize it’s almost all about questions. Because if you really take this premise that we’re all unique and we all, and therefore we all have a unique contribution to make, honoring and respecting that uniqueness becomes kind of a center guiding principle of the deep reverence of each other and the organizations and all the other… a deep reverence of uniqueness and unwillingness or requirement not to impose what I think you should be on you.
And I’ve started realizing how deep that… and it’s completely, I think it’s mostly completely accidental. We’re not doing it intentionally, but we accidentally impose so much on each other. All the way from, “My life experience, this is how it works for me, so it must mean you should work for you.” “These are ways that helped me on my path, so they should help you.” And, “Here’s some best practices for doing all this. Here’s some role models for doing all this. Let’s all strive to be like the success stories.”
And then we build these elaborate systems that put each other in boxes. And it’s well-intentioned, very noble most of the time, but we accidentally end up putting each other in boxes. And that’s directly contravenes this notion of uniqueness and unique contribution.
Lisa: Yeah, I… you lead into a question that I wanted to ask, which is about feedback, because I understand that for you, feedback is a practice that can be dangerous, in fact. And I know that you’re also a proponent of Carol Sanford, and she’s just released this book, No More Feedback. What are your thoughts about feedback and if it’s not something that you practice in Decurion, or, you know, what’s the alternative?
Bryan: That has been one of my more shocking discoveries because, man, I used to be a very vocal, public, and devoted practitioner of both giving and receiving feedback. And it was at the core of one of the versions here at Decurion. And it’s still in Decurion. We’re making, we’re making the turn right now. But it’s just assumed, both here at Decurion and almost in every place I go in the world that talks about development, it’s just assumed that, of course, you need feedback.
The assumption goes something like, I want to develop, but I can’t fully see myself objectively, so I need other people who will hold up a mirror to me and tell me what’s going on so that I can see myself more objectively and do something about it. And I wholeheartedly accepted that. And Carol was instrumental, but not the only person that started to poke holes in that theory and practice for me.
I started to realize that, in part, that is true, that people do have a hard time seeing themselves. I do have a hard time seeing myself. But if I rely on you to tell me what’s going on for myself internally, I’m not building my own capacity to be able to be aware of my own internal processes, be aware of what’s going on for myself, and how what goes on inside manifests with what goes on outside.
So there’s a number of problems that I’ve realized about feedback. One of them is that it comes from an assumption that there is some sort of objective truth and that I can be given that truth from the outside and be… and help that truth improve whatever’s going on on the inside. Number one, there’s been lots of holes poked in whether or not people can objectively be accurate about what’s going on to tell me, to evaluate me, what’s going on for me. So the cognitive biases are just… there’s hundreds of them.
And not only is that a problem for the individual, but there’s our studies that say when you start getting more and more people involved, rather than getting better, the actual data, it gets worse. It deviates further and further from some sort of a mean. But ultimately, it comes down to, am I going to accept someone’s out evaluation of what’s going on for me, or am I going to build my own muscle to be able to evaluate what’s going on for myself?
And the really key moment came when I realized that when I look back at some very pivotal moments in my life and that involved feedback—and there have been a number of very pivotal moments that involved feedback—I accepted feedback from a couple powerful people in my life that I completely trusted, right? Pretty close to completely trusted, which is what made the feedback so powerful.
But baked into that feedback was a subtle bias about who I was and what I should be doing. And I accepted those biases and shifted my own identity of who I thought I was based on what the person was telling me because I trusted them so much. And it’s only been years later that I look back at that and said, I’m not sure that was actually true about me. I’ve accepted that it is true, and I kind of shaped my life as true, but I’m not sure it’s true. I’ve warped my own identity of myself because of the feedback I received from others.
So I’m firmly in the camp now of the no feedback. But by feedback, I mean any evaluation of me, any attributive statement that says, “Bryan, you are” fill in the blank, or “you are doing” fill in the blank, you know, something that would lead me to believe something about myself, as opposed to the other person saying something about their own experience, where the other person would say, “Bryan, when you do X, Y, & Z, this is how I feel,” or “this is the impact that it has on me.”
Or I think even more, more powerfully, is when the other person can come stand shoulder to shoulder with me, and we’re both look at whatever it is that we’re doing that’s important to both of us in the world. And we’re able to observe together going, “Huh, what patterns do we see going on in there?” And able to start to take accountability for myself or I say, “I noticed that when I do this, this thing happens with these other people, with the system I’m in, with, you know, with my family, with my coworkers.”
And together, we’re able to start to talk about what’s going on. I’m able to start to relate what’s going on internally with what I see happening externally. I start to make the connections, and the person that shoulder to shoulder with me helps make the connections, not like giving me direct feedback but by helping understand the larger pattern within which we’re participating.
I think that ends up being much, much more powerful because that larger pattern, it can increase the care that I have for that pattern. And at the same time, and the self-accountability that I have for myself as part of that pattern. And it’s, it’s, it’s in a paradoxical way, it’s less about me, but it’s more about me at the same time. Whereas feedback is more like this… I want to shift it more to the shoulder-to-shoulder looking at the world.
Lisa: I think Bernie Brown says something similar as well about kind of where it’s good to come from if you are gonna give someone feedback, that can you sit side by side with them instead of across the table from them, you know, really see through their eyes and really come from an intention of care, really.
And I really like what you’re saying about, I think, yeah, one of the big dangers of feedback is making the mistake that it can never be objective. I think if you can own it as “I know this is how I experience you,” or “this is the impact that this has on me,” and you know, “this is this is something that I’m sharing,” and leaving that person with the choice of whether they do something with that or not, as opposed to what feedback has become in management culture, which is, you know, if I’m a manager, then I’m automatically entitled to the right to just sort of vomit feedback on all of my, you know, employees and then attached some advice to it, or “you should do this” or “do more of this” or “stop doing that.” Let me fix you, correct you, change you. So on and then let’s attach that to pay and performance and all this kind of stuff. If there’s so many things kind of all bundled into one that I think are really unhelpful. And I know Carol describes as like toxic in that instance. So I’m, yeah, I’m on an interesting journey with feedback because I’m I’m reading Carol’s work, and I’m reading some other things at the moment, I’m talking to people like yourself and sort of inquiring into like, what about feedback is meaningful and valuable for me and what are, you know, what are things I agree about in terms of when it can be harmful or dangerous?
Bryan: The other thing that Carol has helped me see more, and then it connects with others that are working on the same thing, is the notion of paradigms. And this was also a huge revelation to me, particularly for DDOs, but I think for any organization, is the notion that there are different paradigms, which are… paradigm is a way that you, you assumption sets about how you think the world works and what you think your role is in this world that you think works that way, and how you’re aware of anything in that world.
So really, there’s dozens of different ways talking about paradigms. The one that I like the most is a four-level paradigm that Carol uses. And the bottom level paradigm is a paradigm called extracting value. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked at a number of organizations that that was the predominant paradigm. So it’s a paradigm that’s organized around competition, around power, around us-and-them, around transactions.
And there’s no right or wrong in these paradigms. So you don’t automatically say, you know, “must be bad to be extracting value.” But there’s useful or constructive for the world that we want to build. And extracting value is very much this transactional of we’re in a series of transactions. You can even between be between teacher and students in a very noble way. My job as a teacher is to get the most out of the student or for the students to get the most out of themselves. And there’s always kind of a Darwinian survival of the fittest in there.
The next paradigm is the Machine paradigm, which is probably the most prevalent in the world right now. And it’s based on a kind of this unconscious notion that we view the world as this amazingly complex mechanism that needs to be perfected. It’s in a bit of disarray. It’s not running as well as it could run, but it would be amazing if we get the whole thing to work like an amazing Swiss watch, you know, a well-oiled machine.
You can even hear these, the metaphors. If we’re not using war metaphors, which come from the extracting value, then we’re using these machine metaphors. And feedback came from the machine metaphor. It came from this notion that everybody has a role to play, but it’s kind of a fungible role. If there’s this widget that needs to fit into the Machine, and your job is to fit into that box, and if you don’t quite perfectly fit into the box, we’re gonna give you feedback so you can get that rough edge off your corner because that rough edge is keeping you from fitting in that box, you know, perfectly.
But that’s all at this assumption that the world is this mechanism. Some of the 20th century’s most amazing progress has come from this. You know, that’s the space program, the Toyota Production system, most of modern medicine, most of most of the business models have all come from that continuous improvement, Lean Six Sigma, all come from this notion that we need to fix things in order to get them to work better. So the notion of going into everything as a problem and we need to fix it—when you fix it, value is created, enormous progress. But when it gets applied to people, the accidental leap that happens is that people get treated as machines. And feedback was part of that, the kind of the cybernetic of we want you to do this, but you’re not doing this. We’re gonna get you some feedback so that you start doing this.
The next big paradigm is a loosely called human growth or a human potential or doing good paradigm. And this is starting to show up a lot in the world right now, particularly in some of those in the DDOs and in the Reinventing Organizations, is the realization in Wisdom 2.0 and Conscious Capitalism, is the realization that there’s a role for organizations to play in the world, there’s a role for people to play in the world, and there’s certainly no end of good that needs to be done. So organizations are more and more, from the simplest corporate social responsibility to more profound engagements around that.
And again, nothing wrong with that, but there’s an unintended consequence that most of the time, the good that’s being done is my good that’s being done to you. So, you know, I think you should fill in the blank, spend more time with your family, adopt a charity, do something sustainable, you know, help out with the homeless. And again, nothing necessarily wrong with that, but there’s a accidental imposition of my good, kind of a socially constructed good, people with people or systems.
So those three paradigms are one way of talking about paradigms. A developmental paradigm, which is above that, is profoundly different. I think a developmental paradigm is what I’ve been talking about so far. It’s one that’s built on life and on the principles of life. It’s the realization that humans are alive, but so is the rest of the planet. And what would it take, the questions again of what would it take for the planet to be alive, for our cities to be alive, for our industries to be alive, for our countries to be alive and genuinely thrive? And I think those are living systems questions, not machine questions, not doing good questions, certainly not extracting value questions.
And it was it was a bit horrifying to me and then extremely catalyzing when I realized that a DDO can live at any one of those paradigms. And I think, I think you can find examples of ones that are extracting value and ones that are just performance improvement ones and ones that are human growth oriented.
So another word, another way of even simplifying that is you could put a paradigm… you could only have three paradigms if you wanted: performance improvement, human growth, and development. And that, for me, is even blunter and starker, going, “Are you getting into changing your organization because you want a performance improvement, or are you primarily interested in growing your people?” There are certainly examples of that. And I think the bigger opportunity is to be in a developmental conversation, which then starts involving both the organization and the systems outside the organization and everybody inside and everybody outside and the whole system and asking what the whole thing could be.
Lisa: You know, it’s really interesting lens for looking at organizations. I was thinking as you were describing those four paradigms, all kind of collecting went to the three there. I wonder if, to me, the first three you mentioned, you could describe the dynamic as as a bit like a parent-to-child dynamic, where it’s either a benevolent parent, you know, “I think you need to do this and let me help you,” or sort of more critical parent, like “you need to do this to fit into the system,” whereas the developmental paradigm, to me, seems much more adult-adult, which is like, life, you know, life life is tough, and you know something, and you have to take responsibility, and no one’s gonna look after you and undo those things for you. So it’s much more involved in having conversations about, you know, what is this and what makes sense, and let’s, let’s do this together, but not in a kind of “everyone has to be equal” harmonious kind of way. It’s… there are hierarchies in nature.
Bryan: But I think the age of dominating hierarchies has has run its course, right? The old aristocracies where people got their roles because of their bloodline or because they were immune… And those dominating hierarchies are still very prevalent in the world. So that part of the movement into kind of a rebellion against domination is as appropriate.
But a more useful question of, in an adult world where we’re all responsible for ourselves, what are the roles of different people? There are people that are further ahead on the developmental path, and do they have a role to play that’s not a dominating role? It’s still a role to play with other self, everybody else who has their own personal agency and their own self-accountability in all of that.
And yeah, for me, that gets to be a really interesting question because you have these interconnected networks then of living beings, each of them striving to be themselves. And how can we help that, help all of them? I more and more deeply believe that you can’t develop by yourself, that it requires relationships. I think it requires a community, and it often requires a teacher relationship. But it has to be a teacher relationship that has integrity and no… not domination. And so it’s tricky, but it has to be freely chosen, and you, but you’re cultivating… to cultivate development, to cultivate life, life just doesn’t… life isn’t an island, right?
You can’t find life in the world, but there’s just one living thing and nothing else, right? It’s always part of the network. It’s always part of the system. And that, for me, as a clarion call for our organizations, business organizations, but all our human organizations, to say, how can we become these living networks, cultivate life where things are more alive because they’re part of it, not less alive? There they are more whole and able to be themselves because they’re part of it? They don’t have to go recover from being part of it, you know, it’s some other part of their life they get over toxicity or the harshness of being, having an organization.
Lisa: The image I’m having now in my head is of organizations being life-giving and a life itself, I guess. You even… just that phrase that’s that has come up recently and in one of the places that I’m practicing, and just asking the question whether it’s life-giving for me promises all set of reflections.
On that note, in wrapping up a wonderful conversation, many of the listeners tuning in to this episode will be on a journey somewhere in their own lives towards becoming a, let’s say, conscious organization. What advice or words of wisdom would you give them from what you’ve learned?
Bryan: Well, that’s a big question. It’s hard not to project everything that I’m going through right now. So it’s this notion of paradigms has been really, really important to me. So I would give that advice. Go spend a little time asking about your paradigm and whether or not the—because paradigms are usually invisible to us, they normally—we’re just in them, we’re not even… it’s like the water we swim in. We don’t even know we’re swimming in the water.
So there would be an invitation to inquire a little bit about your own, how you think the world works and whether or not it’s helpful for the world that you want to be in. And my invitation would be to start thinking about things more from that living context of, if you want to build a developmental organization, then start to ask the initial questions about what makes your organization unique. If your organization was a living being, what makes it different from any other living being? And I probably can’t answer this right away, but what role might it play in a life-giving role in something that’s important to it and something that’s important to you? And that, I think, is one of the most important questions that we can start that answer.
Downstream from that, there’s all sorts of things. Sure, there’s practices or structures, there’s those networks. I have founded something called the DDO Practitioners Network for people that want to be change-agent practitioners in that. There’s places like Carol’s school, but there’s also many other schools around development. So as you start to ask these questions, then I’d seek out others that are that are on that same path because I don’t think you can do it. You can do it by yourself. And the story I hear over and over again is that the path right now is a little bit of a lonely path because there’s a lot of organizations out there that aren’t asking these questions yet. But I think there’s more and more people, and we have these… we have assumed now and the ability to connect globally. So I think it’s possible to connect into communities of people that are asking the same questions.
Lisa: Yeah, Bryan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing all of your insights and what you’ve learned. And it’s been really thought-provoking and profound conversation for me, actually. So I really appreciate you taking the time. Thanks so much.
Bryan: It’s a pleasure being here, and I think these are important topics to cover. So thank you for the podcast.
