Anxiety as a trigger for learning

The evidence is mounting that real change does not begin until the organization experiences some real threat of pain that in some way dashes its expectations or hope to make it open to the possibility of learning. — Edgar Schein

I was reading an interview where Edgar Schein asserted his belief that all learning is coercive, and that organisations learn because they are forced to.  He maintains that anxiety is neccessary as a trigger for learning, and talks about two types of anxiety.  “Learning anxiety” inhibits learning or trying something new due to fear of failure, while “Survival anxiety” promotes learning when the survival or the individual or the organisation depends on change.

Pessimistic although this seems, it immediately rang a chord with me.  Thinking on my own experience, on several occassions recently I have suggested innovations or changes that might help an organisation learn.  Here I am thinking of systems that deliver management information that were dismissed, only to be requested a short time afterwards.  In the specific cases I am thinking of, change/learning was embraced due to external pressure from funders and from poor performance.

I’m with Schein on the idea that learning anxiety – fear of getting it wrong – prevents learning and therefore change in organisations.  Perhaps not just fear of getting it wrong, but the fear that we will expose our own inadequacies, especially to ourselves.  Learning and change is painful – my own has certainly been at times.  I see this everywhere – especially amongst executives who perhaps have more invested in “being right” first time.

What can we do about this?  We can “feel the fear and do it anyway“, we can acknowledge anxiety and allow for it in how we propose change, and we can raise “Survival anxiety” when proposing change.  The latter puts me in mind of the “disconfirmation” stage of Lewin’s change model, the need to discomfort people and show that the old paradigm is spent, before asking them to change.

Innovation – failure and success

I have led two similar innovative projects for not for profit organisations, one of which was implemented, and the other of which suffered prolonged delays.  While many innovation projects stumble and fail, working on two similar projects gave me a chance to compare factors that may have contributed to getting through the planning stage to implementation.

First, I asked myself if it was me?  The projects happened at roughly the same time and I don’t think my approach was significantly different.  In both cases participants were very enthusiastic and I paid insufficient attention to some of the powerful stakeholders involved.

Next, I considered how they differed in scope.  The one that suffered the most delay was more ambitious and involved greater potential innovation.  This made it harder to persuade the powerful stakeholders to approve implementation.

However, the most significant factor appeared to be the forces driving the need for change.  The delayed project had powerful business drivers, but they were not as acute as in the other case.  In addition, the CEO set a clear deadline for the one that went successfully through to implementation, forcing other stakeholders to make decisions.

I’ve drawn several tentative lessons from this:

1. Projects need a powerful champion who can ensure barriers to timely implementation can be overcome.
2. Pay attention to powerful and interested stakeholders, even if they are only going to be involved in a final review and sign off – the importance of persuasion and politics.
3. Outside forces help promote change.
4. Smaller step by step adaptations are easier to implement than more ambitious innovations.
5. A big change requires either a very pressing need and powerful champions, or involvement of as many interested stakeholders as possible.

These lessons apply to my work in the not for profit sector, where the involvement of all potential stakeholders is widely expected and risk can often be treated conservatively.  Note that I am only thinking about getting a project through into implementation here, not about the quality of the final result.

Point 5 links to reasons why it is so hard for organisations to change and innovate in a timely way, and why strategic drift may be so widespread.  Innovation changes culture, culture can represent a mindset that it is hard to step out of, so perhaps the biggest job for any significant innovation is to manage powerful stakeholders so that they are ready for change.

Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership is the latest historical “movement” in classical leadership (which can be contrasted with “shared leadership“).

Transformational leaders seek to share their vision, gain commitment and motivation from their team, and inspire performance. It involves charisma, rests on morality and ethics and underlies modern executive coaching and top team development.  Its the current favourite for academics and gurus but as yet there seems to be little empirical proof available for claims about it.

One implication of transformational leadership is that the before trying to lead others, the leader needs to understand themselves.  You might argue that this has always been the case, and I’d agree, but with transformational leadership it seems even more central.

You could so easily end up back with the idea of the “big man”, the egotistical leader who leads not from any moral basis or vision, but simply from charisma and self belief, creating dependent followers.  To guard against this the self development of the leader becomes crucial, especially understanding how their own emotion and cognitive biases affect their decisions, and how they interact with people.

If you think of leadership as “relational influence” (Patton) rather than one penguin out in front of the rest going who knows where, then we get a better sense of what transformational leadership might be.  To my mind, influencing, developing and inspiring others to become their best is more about participation and shared leadership than classical models of leadership.

The problem with all this is that the “masters of the universe” are likely to think this is all very woolly, when they pause for breath between paintball contests.  I searched for images of “shared leadership” and came up with the image where we all hold hands.  Show me the money?

Shared leadership just isn’t heroic.  Transformational leadership can be, but there I think is a trap waiting for would be leaders.