For once I liked something I read in Harvard Business Review. Christine Riordan’s article has it right: diversity without inclusion is useless.HBR Diversity is Useless

I have no time at all for the political socially correct form of diversity. The issue is far too important for that.  We need difference, real difference. And we need it profoundly and with urgency.

The problems we face as western industrial society, and as leaders in the kind of organisations that this society tends to create, simply cannot be solved from with the frame that created the problems in the first place. 

Unfortunately the frames are deeply held in our socio-cultural and neuro-psychological fabric: we can’t just “snap out of them”. We need the insights that come from engaging people with really different life experience, socio-cultural norms and different framings to join together in real collaboration to address these issues.

But that is where it gets hard: because we tend to celebrate difference only to the point where it is sufficiently familiar to us to be recognisable as valid.

Real difference runs the risk of rejection and exclusion because it references evidence and experience that lies outside our framing. It can sound off-beam, irrelevant and just plain wrong. We may want real difference, we may need real difference, and we may still drive it away despite our best efforts. 

To see how pervasive and powerful this is, just take note of Henri Tajfel’s work on social identity theory and “minimal groups”.  

Tajfel’s 1971 work showed just how minor an affiliation we need to feel to a group to begin to be prejudiced against other groups. Minimal groups were called that because they were formed on the basis of things that didn’t matter. But still, based on inclusion in such a minimal (apparently trivial) group, people will exclude, reject, ignore and harbour prejudice against members of other equally minimal groups.(For more on this listen to the BBC Radio programme podcast at  Tajfel on Mind Changers  )

At a more playful level, look at Jeff Milner’s “backmasking” site.  Backmasking

Play Stairway to Heaven backwards and try to make sense of it. Then read the reverse lyrics and listen to it again. You’ll hear every word. This “top down” processing is a powerful part of our neuro-cognitive make up. We hear what we have a filter to hear, we see what we have filters to see. And often these “top down” filters will be provided by the in-group of which we are part. 

Someone from a really different group will sound like they talk nonsense because they won’t fit our filters.

Watch out!! Because this is where we destroy real diversity and lose cognitive complexity. This is essentially dumbing down on seeing and conversation to the norms of the in-group. It is the ultimate societal risk and squanders much intelligence and talent.

OK, So What Can I DO?

Well, we run a two years MSc program to help people experiment with seeing and being different, and becoming open to rich and diverse ways of knowing, seeing and being.  

But if you can’t do that, at least do this: STOP!!

• Stand Still and Notice when you need some diversity. The more you are facing a strategic challenge the more you need cognitive complexity and diversity of framing.
• Take Time to notice your own assumptions and be aware about where they come from. Why are you so sure that this is the right data, the right way of seeing? On what authority are you accepting this source of expertise?
• Open your eyes, ears and mind to other stories, especially the ones that are the most difficult to hear and see, as these will be the ones of diversity most at odds with your own framing
• Privilege participation, become biased in favour of processes that “greenhouse” and protect dissident and diverse views. It is easy to kill them off: don’t allow diversity to die on your watch, don’t allow the subtle bullying by the majority culture. It is a leadership act to pay attention to real participation. Privilege real participation and collaboration.

Strong cultures make great organisations great, but they also blind great organisations to real difference. Superficial diversity won’t do the job. 

Make the most of every bit of complexity, intelligence and difference you have. 

It’s a real leadership act to do so.

Mary Poppins as Provocateur and Change Agent ....

.... Practically Perfect Change Agency, from the World's Ultimate Alchemist

A blog-post by Chris Nichols
August 2014

I saw Mary Poppins at the cinema this week - and the more I watched, the more impressed I became. 

This was a massively innovative film for its time (Technicolor, animatronics, integrated animation) ....  It was also incredibly far sighted in its core messages from a book of the 1930s and a film of 1964. 

It speaks volumes to today's concerns in so many ways. I think it has genuinely got much to teach leaders and organizational consultants, indeed anyone working to intervene in complex systems to bring about profound change ....

Here's why:


Enchantment and "Re-Wilding" ... 

Above all, for me, this film is about "re-enchanting" the disenchanted world. Bringing new life to No 17 Cherry Tree Lane, transforming the dead-to-the-world bankers .... About restoring connection to the birds, bringing in new narratives, music, new ways of seeing the world ... 

Mary Poppins leads the family in a dance beyond the confines of Mr Banks logical and mechanical worldview ("a British bank is run with precision, a British home requires nothing less") .... 

Mr Banks has lost all connection to wildness. Mary Poppins brings the sacred feminine to re-enchant the banker, the bank and the life of the children, returning connection to wonder, to wildness and to life itself.

It calls out to me in the same way as Morris Berman's (1981) Re-Enchanting the World And Frijtof Capra's The Web of Life (1996) about the limitation of the mechanistic and the fragmented, and the desperate need to breath life into our work and our organisations ....

Paradox, politics and power ....  

There is delicious paradox in the way Mrs Banks simultaneously acts as suffragette activist and compliant wife. One minute marching around getting the servants singing in support of women's votes - yes, the servants :-), and the next scurries to put away her suffragette sash ("you know how much 'the cause' aggravates Mr Banks" ). She is both empathetic to the children and largely abandons them to nannies and servants while she marches, being "absent" almost as much as Mr Banks himself ...And Mrs Banks is no fool, she picks her battles.

Mary Poppins uses power differently, setting her own terms for her "contract" ("Hmmmm, I'll give you a week as a trial")  whilst always apparently respecting Mr Banks' positional power she never fails to subvert it (such as when she leads him into taking the children to the bank) ... She works within the frame, to shift the frame: just delightful.

It's a lovely study of the many faces of power, and also in respecting and working artfully with paradox, without trying to take every power struggle as a battle to be faced head on. 

This reminds me of two sources of influence on my own practice and framing:

• Meyerson and Scully's (1995) work on Tempered Radicalism - the kind of radicalism that exists sufficiently "within the frame" of organisations such that it can act from within without causing outright "tissue type" rejection or terminal conflict
• Joyce Fletcher's Disappearing Acts (2001) work on women's leadership roles, in which she observes how many of the most powerful acts of making teams and relationships, acts of enormous power and significance, get disappeared and go unrewarded in orthodox organisational culture

Framing and frame shifting .... 

Much of the wonder of Mary Poppins work happens through frame shifting: diving into pavement art, flying up through fireplaces to dance on rooftops and staircases of smoke ... These are the windows of shape-shifting through which her access to other worlds become possible. 

It is the same in organisations and leadership. We are totally, cognition and imagination, the prisoner of our framing, and our framing language and imagery. The more we notice the framing the more we can use it intelligently. The more we dare to play with the framing, the more possibilities emerge.

This speaks to me of the work of both George Lakoff and Gareth Morgan (2006). Lakoff has written many books on how we form deeply held neuro-cognitive frames that influence how we see, speak, sense make and act - see for example Don't Think of an Elephant (2004). Morgan's (2006) Images of Organization showed how pervasive the most commonplace ways of seeing organisations - and of the implication for action that flow from this.

The ability to recognize frames, language, imagery, narratives and their consequences for action, is utterly essential in all organizational work. Much of Bill Torbert's (2005) contribution is about building the skills to recognize pervasive frames and work creatively with them using, and legitimizing, multiple narratives. I am also hugely influenced by my colleague Geoff Mead (2014), from whom I have learned much about the nature of narrative in organization and leadership work. 

When Mary Poppins leaps through the pavement art into a world of talking penguins and free-willed merry-go-round horses, she is doing Torbert's post-conventional work, in shaking the frame and allowing the emergence of magic. We need this work much more in organizations to allow us to see the possibility of addressing problems that absolutely cannot be resolved within the existing frame.



Focusing on life and what gives life ... 

Mary Poppins comes in with the east wind. East is the direction in the medicine wheel where native shamans turn to draw on passion, fire and spirit. When Mr Banks passion is dead, the wind from the East sweeps in to breathe new life. 

And so much of our organizational world is dead, or at least not working in the service of life. We need a gust of insight and life energy from the East.

When David Whyte (1994) talks about the day we look at the line on the corporate graph and realize that, somehow, the fire has gone out, that is when we are right there with Mr Banks, dead in the heart. 

When we work to serve orgnanization efforts that kill nature or harm people, and go home feeling sick in our souls, we are right there with Mr Banks, failing to see the bird woman on the steps of St Pauls, far from our deepest sense of being alive.

This is where the work of eco-psychology calls most potently to me, including work in the spirit of Joanna Macy (1998 / 2012), but also Giles Hutchins (2012) and the whole influence of "permaculture" as a design system (Holmgren, 2003 ). Each in their own way opens the possibility of ways of living, working and designing in ways that serve life rather than harm life. Each offers both insight and practical ways of working that re-connect fragmented and death-serving ways of being and working. 

Mary Poppins brings the Banks' household alive ... And as David Whyte writes in his poem Sweet Darkness ...

"Anything or anyone
That does not bring you alive
Is too small for you"

Even in the darkest of places there will be a glimmer of life: Appreciative Inquiry and solutions focused interventions allow us to work with the slenderest hint of positive energy. Let's make sure we use whatever opening we have to do only work that is big enough to bring us, our organizations alive. 

Stillness, Season and Rest ....

Mary Poppins in many ways represents the positive aspects of the Medicine Woman archetype (from Olivier Mythodrama, Olivier Mythodrama "What Next") She is animated, visionary, provocative, makes changes through story ... and has all the energy that goes with that.

But she has enough Great Mother archetypal energy when she needs it. I think her lullaby to the over-excited children is a masterpiece of paradoxical intervention:

Stay awake, don't rest your head
Don't lie down upon your bed
While the moon drifts in the skies
Stay awake, don't close your eyes
Though the world is fast asleep
Though your pillow's soft and deep
You're not sleepy as you seem
Stay awake, don't nod and dream

(c) Sherman Brothers / Disney 
http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Sherman_Brothers

Here's the link to YouTube for the clip Mary Poppins Lullaby

Simply magnificent as an example of a paradoxical intervention. No struggle: simply working with a shamanic sense of how to change energy. Leaders and organization practitioners can learn a lot from that.

There's also wisdom in recognizing the need for rest. Not everything can be done on the back of incessant upward energy. To everything, there is a season. This wisdom, that sometimes however great the energy there needs to be space for rest and reflection, has been represented in learning from the most ancient times, in yoga, in spirituality, in health. 

There is power in balance and we neglect it at our peril.



Humility over Hubris ... 

Somewhere in the film Bert says to Mary "the children love their father more than they love you".  May says, "and that's how it should be". In the end, the wind changes, her work is done, Mr Banks takes the children to play, and Mary flies away on the shifting wind ....

There is a lot of wisdom here about playing the right role, and about letting go & moving on ...

One of my great teachers Professor Bill Critchley once said that a consultant should play the smallest possible role in any intervention consistent with still getting the job done. I think this is massively important. It is so easy for us, as consultant, teacher or leader to become the central figure in the drama, the essential one in the spotlight. It is tempting and it is rarely right.

In the words of the Rule of St Benedict, humility is "the center piece of the true life". It is also essential in organizational work if the change in the system is to outlast the intervention. I am not calling for false humility here: more the knowing humility that the role is vital but transient. You might temporarily sit around the fire-pit, but it is not really your fire. There is often a vital role to be played in bringing difference, allowing a shift of frame to occur, revealing a new possibility. It is shamanic Trickster work in the deepest creative sense.

As Lewis Hyde writes in Trickster Makes this World (2008):

"A trickster is a boundary crosser. Every group has its edge, it's sense of in and out, and trickster is always there ...making sure there is commerce .... Trickster is the creative idiot .. the wise fool .. the speaker of sacred profanities" ...

"The trickster does not live near the hearth ... he passes through when there is a moment of silence... he enlivens with his mischief.."

Whilst it is wonderfully to become a central figure, a star in the spotlight, this is not the true work. We are not of the organization, and even as leaders inside the firm are often creating a future in which we will not fully share when our work is done.

Like Mary Poppins, when the work is done we have to let go and move on and leave the work to others.


I was utterly blown away by what I saw in this movie, and I will forever respect the woman who created this character. She managed to create a delightful comic figure of warmth and energy who embodied the wisdom of the ages: "practically perfect in every way", yet slipping out without ceremony, to serve others elsewhere.

CHRIS NICHOLS is Co-Director of the Ashridge MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility, a two year part time journey of discovery, challenge, insight, tears and joy, despair and plenty of Wow! Find out more at

Ashridge MSc - with tons of WOW factor and Much Much More

Chris is also an organisational consultant with 25 years of experience in over 50 countries who works with many of the world’s biggest companies addressing their most pressing challenges in innovative ways. He is co-founder of GameShift -  www.gameshift.co.uk

Not all of his work is magical all of the time, but every bit of it is steered by purpose, exploration and expanding our ways of knowing and being.

Chris.nichols@ashridge.org.uk

On Twitter at chrisnicholsT2i

Eating with our Eyes Open

I don't know if we are exactly what we eat, but how we choose to eat certainly has a lot to say in framing who, and how, we are.

And we face some big challenges: with an ever growing global population and resource crunches of every kind looming, we need to think carefully and creatively about how we feed ourselves.

This theme was picked up by BBC World Service today on in the Balance. Looking mainly at the technological options for meeting our demand for more. Where on earth is all this food going to come from?  With the population set to top 9 billion by 2050, and almost 1 billion currently going hungry, what hope is there?

BBC Listen Again (time limited)



Starting with a reminder of the ever present threat of population outrunning food supply, as Malthus predicted in the late 1700s, Colm O'Regan explored a number of technologists setting out to create tomorrow's food solutions. 

Broadly solutions were seen in these areas:

• Chemically fabricated foods: essentially astronaut food and nutritional shakes
• Creating new growing areas using seawater evaporation cooled greenhouses
• Improving wheat yields threefold by 2040
• Using entirely untapped plant species currently outside the human food chain
• Improving practices: using advanced technologies like "precision farming using GPS" and simple technologies like social media
• Eliminating waste: about 50% of food is wasted before it gets to market, and more is wasted afterwards
• Edible environmental packaging

I was most hooked by Joshua Tetrick, CEO of Hampton Creek HC webpage
Talking about using a wide range of plants not currently used or underused, he discussed how factory farmed chicken could be replaced by a plant substitute used for everything from baking to scrambled eggs.

And then there's Wikifoods, http://quantumdesigns.com/wikifoods/
a company working on using natural skins (such as peach skins) to create edible food packaging, making food more storable and transportable without environmental impact.

If you're interested in where food technology might be going, the programme is worth a listen.


It certainly brings up front and centre the question of how to eat wisely. The decisions we take on how we eat impact very deeply on our health, the societies and communities around us and the natural world of which we are part.  Our decisions also play into the balance of power between local players and global food corporations. It is a major systemic intervention every time we have lunch.

So how do we even begin to think about all of this?

I have been very impressed recently by the straightforward good sense of Julian Baggini's book The Virtues of the Table: How to Eat and Think.

It's not a polemic, it's not a how to do it book, it's not a cookbook ....It's a guide to some really good questions to ask about food and eating based on qualities we might aspire to in ourselves and in society.

I see it as a kind of action research outline for a self-guided reflection on food. Where we get it, how we choose it, what we do with it, and how we form the right relationship with it. 

Claire and I are using it ourselves during a period of reflection and experimentation on the food we eat, and we are in the process of inviting together a group of interested friends to form a shared exploration of food and eating ....

I'll let you know what emerges as the experiment goes on

But for now, eat wisely, eat well.

When Wow! and Jumping for Joy are not enough ....

When Wow! and Jumping for Joy are not enough ....

A Blog-post by Chris Nichols, August 2014



Tom Peters tweeted that training must make people “jump for joy” and shout Wow!

I like Joy and I like Wow ….

And I have huge regard for Tom Peters and his work on innovation.

But is there a time when all this "Wow" and "Jumping for Joy" just isn’t enough?

I have spent well over a decade producing executive education and corporate events that score massively on the popularity ratings.

I have a party piece conference gig that rocks them in the aisles.

I can make myself richer and more popular the more I get on that stage.  

And I often do. I love it and I love the feedback I get.

And often it is exactly the right thing to do.  Positive energy, “jumping for joy” and “shouting  WoW!” works.

But when is something else required?

We face some massive challenges as a species and as an ecosystem.

Our corporations need re-inventing, and our markets need transformation.  

We need a different way of being, with each other and with our planet, if future generations are to thrive.

I see a danger in doing only the work that makes us “Jump for Joy” and “Shout Wow!”

The outer work will never be puny

if the inner work is great

- Meister Eckhart

Sometimes there is a place for work that is hard, that demands sacrifice and challenges us to our very core.

Often when we are doing this work we do not "jump for joy" and we do not say "Wow" - that comes later...

We drag ourselves reluctantly to peer into the abyss.

We go into the dark and face the journey of self-discovery, of re-imagining our very being.

It is the very same journey taken by Dante, by Beowulf, by Thoreau, Muir, Arne Naess, Thomas Berry and countless others over the centuries.

There is a time for WOW! And for Jumping for Joy …

And there is a time for tears, and darkness. A time for stillness and finding the quiet voice that calls us to be braver than we can currently imagine.

Work that is all “Jumping for Joy” is work without balance.

Balance is dynamic and without balance, we fail.

But maybe the main issue here is that Tom is talking about “training” and maybe there "Wow" is enough.

I am talking about learning for profound change. And that demands a richer process.

CHRIS NICHOLS is Co-Director of the Ashridge MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility, a two year part time journey of discovery, challenge, insight, tears and joy, despair and plenty of Wow! Find out more at

Ashridge MSc - with tons of WOW factor and Much Much More

Chris is also an organisational consultant with 25 years of experience in over 50 countries who works with many of the world’s biggest companies addressing their most pressing challenges in innovative ways. 

Not all of his work is joyful all of the time, but every bit of it is steered by purpose, exploration and expanding our ways of knowing and being.

Chris.nichols@ashridge.org.uk

On Twitter at chrisnicholsT2i

Creative Sattvic Housing

Claire and I just spent a couple of days in Chris Seeley's shepherd's hut, which was very cosy, especially with the storm beating on the roof - quite wonderful ....Now we're home again in our tiny and lovely Dartmoor cottage ....

It set me thinking again about housing, because one of my main life challenges is to have somewhere to live that suits me, has enough space for my work, and doesn't cost so much that the cost of housing distorts the work I want to do simply to pay the bills ....

A friend of a friend has been looking at houses to buy near to Ashridge, and it makes my heart sink. It is so, so expensive up there. Cottages for £700,000, that kind of thing. About three times what I can buy based on Devon cottage prices .... Fed up of living out of suitcases, tired of renting flats I don't want ... But what do do instead??

It did make me think about my blogpost about the world's most expensive private house owned by Mukesh Ambani (learn about that house here Ambani House)

It brought to mind Satish Kumar's book The Spiritual Compass:

Satish reflects on the three gunas (from the sanskrit), or "basic qualities". He writes about:

• sattvic, which is the quality of calm purity and simple elegance. He compares it to..
• rajasic, which has energy and passion, but can be excessive, extravagant and showy, and
• tamasic, which has qualities of dullness, toxity, dark and depressing. 

The gunas can be applied to anything: food, work, homes, possessions, lifestyles ... I find them always a useful (if sometimes painful and challenging) guide, especially when I find myself yearning for more money, bigger houses and so on .... You can read more about the ideas here Resurgence Satish Kumar Review

Specifically in relation to houses, picking up Satish's book again made me revisit a great inspiration to me, Simon Dale's house. A simply beautiful eco-selfbuild. I think it is simply beautiful ....

Simon Dales webpage

And just today I saw in Permaculture magazine a feature on low cost low impact homes in Nicaragua ...
Permaculture Nicaragua article ....

There's a lot going on and people are being very creative in dreaming and making wonderful low cost homes that are in essence sattvic ... light, calm, elegant and rather wonderful


Maybe I am just not being creative enough yet .... and getting down about it isn't sattvic at all.

Still don't know what to do ... and I don't need to do it today.
A canal boat may be my best creative option :-)

REDACTED! That shale gas report in full

Well, here's good news.

All that money we spend on fighting wars so that people in far off places can have open and democratic government has not been wasted ....

The UK government's report on the rural economic and social effects of fracking is out .... and Caroline Lucas is on the radio complaining that it has been censored. So I had a look, being distrustful of most of what I hear on the radio ....

And look!! I have snipped in some extracts .....

And again ....

So I made a word cloud (thank you Tagxedo!) to celebrate UK democracy today ....

Let's go invade somewhere else and teach them how to run and open and fair government.

Read the report in full (well, as far as the censorship allows) here Shale Gas PDF

Working with Indian MBA Students from IIM Calcutta - The Power of Integration

So, this Tuesday I got to spend the afternoon with 23 MBA students from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta ...

What an interesting session we had :-)

I loved their energy and inquiring, open, spirit. They threw themselves into the session - and we explored some of the unorthodox creative edges of strategic thinking together.

To the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Massive Attack Remix, we did a "line up" of who they admired most and might emulate: at one end of the line Vinoba Bhave and Rabindranath Tagor, and at the other end of the line Mukesh Ambani, richest man in India. What do you think happened? Where on the continuum did the students stand?

This led to a fascinating discussion about the role of unorthodox ideas in refreshing strategic thinking. The fusion of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Massive Attack, the integration of perspectives from entrepreneurship and spirituality ... Each of these are powerful because they challenge a deeply held and rigid framing. Our orthodox conception of "strategy" is too small, and by playing with the framing we can open  our eyes and ears to more richness.

We looked at the importance of "exploring" in strategic thinking, and at the many ways in which strategic exploration can start.

We took a look into "artful knowing" (using more than just words and logic, we drew images of strategy and saw the unstated metaphors we all hold come to life in the room). A huge amount of energy was unleashed as the students made and remade "clusters " of the images, seeing the many different and previously unstated perspectives on strategy held even within an MBA group from IIMC.

We looked at different psychological impacts on strategic thinking - from linguistic framing to deeply held world views - and we saw many ways of making these more obvious, less hidden .... and by challenging and shifting them we made new options, new ways of seeing, become more possible.

I left the room feeling we had done some really interesting work together - and sad only that we didn't have another day to explore together. At the heart of our work was the place of richer and diverse ways of seeing, and of the creative energy and potential that comes from bringing together views, perspectives, models of seeing or action, and allowing them to emerge into new forms, just like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Massive Attack .... together they change the frame and something different and special emerges.

I was left wondering whether maybe it will be India that brings us a new way of seeing sustainable business, from a genuine fusion of big business and deep spirit, the fusion of  Bhave and Tagore with the entrepreneurial energy of these MBA students.

Anything is possible when people, openness and energy come together.

When is enough just taking the piss?

So today I was working with a great group of MBA students from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta ...

The Economist had this really interesting piece about Mukesh Ambani, who heads the largest privately held company in India, Reliance Industries (See Mukesh Ambani) ...India's richest man, and some say the most powerful too.

Among other notable statistics, this one struck me as very interesting: Mr Ambani has built himself the most expensive private home on the planet (apparently - though who knows?) .... 

But let's put it this way, it's pretty hard to miss because it's a 27-story sky-scraper tower in Mumbai :-) .... He's not, as it were, hiding away on a private island with this one. 

Have a look:

It's stirred up a bit of comment, mostly from the "Billionaire Homes Top !0 Lists" ...yes, this exists :-) ...
But also from people you might not expect ... Tata's Ratan Tata was quoted as saying that this was the kind of behaviour that starts revolutions, but latter denied the statement ...Tata Comment Denied

But it did make me wonder: why do you need a 27-story skyscraper home? And in a country where the 2009-2013 per capita GDP is less than $1500 is it the right gesture? World Bank per cap data,  

As someone in a movie once said:

Bud Fox: How much is enough? 
Gordon Gekko: It's not a question of enough, pal. It's a zero sum game, somebody wins, somebody loses. Money itself isn't lost or made, it's simply transferred from one perception to another

Quite. 

So long as you don't worry about your social license to operate, long term, that is.

Bankers, Business and the Oath ...Why Something Much More Will Be Needed

Apparently it's time for bankers to take the Hippocatic Oath - you know, the one doctors take.

You can find the proposal discussed in the Guardian, Banking Oath ... And in more detail at ResPublica Document. I think this is an important and worthwhile contribution to thinking on a very important topic.

But then, why stop at bankers? Why not ask everyone in business to do the same? Banking isn't unique? And what would happen if directors of, say tobacco companies, refined sugar producers, or bomb makers had to swear an oath "to do no harm"?

Of course there is one massive difference between bankers, businesses and medics .... Your doctor has to be qualified to do the job ...

Now I know that Graucho said something like "what do you call the guy who passes out bottom of his class at medical school? .... Doctor" ....  But the truth is Doctors do have to be qualified and they are firmly members of a professional community.

It is just not the same in banking and business.

I have heard, seen and read so, so many business leaders disparaging business education - preferring the school of life and all that: "those who can do, those who can't teach" and so on ....

You never hear this from Doctors .... They never say, "forget all that crap from four centuries of studying human anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, virology ... forget all of those dull and boring 'ologies ... just give me a scalpel and let me in there ..."  You just never, never hear it ....

But in business, it is respectable to be disparage learning, respectable to wing it, respectable to be utterly unqualified and part of no professional community whatsoever ...

Now (and Sumantra Ghoshal nailed this quite brilliantly in my view: see Bad Management Theories) Business Schools bear lots of the blame for this, but not all of it. The way we in our society respect ignorance in business and even glorify it is also part of the problem ...

We need a better community of practice around just what organisational leadership and business leadership is. Oaths "to do no harm" would be pointless without the ability to see and understand the harm we may be doing.

Harm in business, banking or not, isn't just a matter of harm to this one patient, it would have to be more systemic, or we can be "ethical" and still go to hell in the proverbial handcart ...

I am all for business being ethical, trusted and professional. Let's start by recognizing it isn't just bankers that are struggling for credibility here

Reflections On the Centenary of World War One

(image created by Chris Nichols from mash-up of web images)



As we approach the eve of the centenary, we recall that one hundred years ago today Britain, at least, was not yet at war.

Within 48 hours of now, 100 years ago, Lord Grey may well have said those famous words, "the lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life time" ....

And how easily war seems to come and come again.

Each time it comes, it brings moments of the most astonishing personal bravery
Each time it comes it calls up the spirit of nations together, of burdens shared, of courage, of stoicism

And each time it comes, it comes again, as certain as the tide

For all of our history, our experience, our supposed intelligence as a species, we seem incapable of spotting the incoming tide of war and we remain as unable, or unwilling, as ever to turn away from it.

As we approach this centenary let us by all means remember the fallen

But let us remember too that hard though war is, the harder struggle seems to be avoiding conflict with skill

Our ability to meet with difference and to create solutions without bloodshed, our ability to meet where meeting seems impossible, this seems to me to be the necessary frontier for our training, intelligence and efforts

If this centenary teaches us something let it teach us that war, though it may sometimes feel just, is rarely if ever right

What Barbara Hepworth's "Trio" Might Teach Us ...

I was at RAMM today in Exeter ... I went to have a mull at Detached and Timeless - contemporary artists inspired by nature and the spirit of place ....

But while there my eye was caught by Barbara Hepworth's 1948 painting Trio - a scene painted after the artist was allowed to observe surgery at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital, Exeter, in November 1947. I've snipped in an extract below ...

In the gallery notes Hepworth speaks that she had expected to find the experience difficult, unpleasant, but that it had been quite different to that. Recalling sketching in a sterilized notebook, she said:

"I was consistently absorbed by two things:  First, the extraordinary beauty of purpose and coordination between human beings all dedicated to the saving of life and the way that unity of purpose dictated a perfection of concentration, movement and gesture, and secondly, by the way this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture..."

Isn't that beautiful?

Let's take it slowly ........ and let's set it beside what Jo Confino, David Grayling and I were edging around on Twitter earlier in response to Jo's Guardian piece on sustainability professionals (see Sustainability Professionals)

The Barbara Hepworth phrase "the extraordinary beauty of purpose and coordination between human beings all dedicated to the saving of life" speaks massively about the difference between what she saw in that operating room and what happens in boardroom conversations, whether about sustainability or about anything else ... What if, just what if, our radical, innovative new leaders do help organisations to re-frame so that there is such an "extraordinary beauty of purpose and coordination" and that there is a dedication towards activity that supports life? Just imagine how radical that would be ...

When she writes of "this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture" ... I see in that an echo of what occasionally, just occasionally, happens in strategic conversations when purpose, intent and practice flow beautifully together in service of something bigger than business as usual, something that has the seeds in it of creating a new way of framing, a new way of working with this living world ... Where the form of the conversation becomes something more real, connected, flowing, deeper, wilder ....

We are not even close to this being normal in business. But Hepworth's observation reminds us that humans are capable of live giving, life saving, life serving collaboration, and that when we see it, we stand in wonder ...

Is Professional Sustainability Too Tame To Work?

Have you seen Jo Confino's fine and thoughtful piece in The Guardian Sustainable Business Blog, commenting on the launch of the Institute for Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility? You can get to Jo's article here

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/blog/institute-corporate-responsibility-icrs-sustainability-professionals

Jo wonders ...When sustainability becomes a professional body accepted into the boardroom, have all the teeth dropped out? It's a good question.

I have a bias here. I co-direct the Ashridge MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility and potentially many of our graduates are involved in exactly the kind of roles Jo is concerned about, and might well be members of ICRS  https://icrs.info/ ...

One of the reasons I keep working is that I hope it is possible to change the nature of conversations with the largest organisations, so that genuine and more deeply framed explorations of what it means to be a sustainable and responsible organisation really do reach the top table. For this to happen we need skilled practitioners who can work inside organisations to change the very framing of business. It's a big ask, but its an even bigger ask to wait for the glorious revolution to put corporations against the proverbial wall. By the time that day comes, well .....

I spend a lot of my life inside massive organisations trying to change the nature of conversation, and it is always hard. We are a long way from anything that might be called sustainable business. Much of what passes for corporate sustainability is nothing like up to the job. Often you're banging your head against the very wall you once planned to put the bastards up against ... All of this is true ...

And yet there is a shift, over the past ten years I have see some strategy conversations beginning to address real-earth issues such as peak resource, earth justice and so on. And many more at least moving to bring consideration of sustainability into strategy and leadership conversations slightly further along the curve from mere compliance towards something deeper ....

There's a long long way to go and the work is hardly begun. And we need radical thinking inside organisations, skilled in challenging the frame and in sparking innovation AND skilled in doing so in language and approaches that can be heard and can help move and shape the organisational agenda ....

Is "sustainable responsible tobacco" a lie or a strategic possibility?

British American Tobacco not long ago published Value Shared: A Tobacco Company for the 21^st Century (see the full report here: Value Shared: Sustainability at BAT ).

 BAT nails its colours pretty firmly to the mast of sustainability, saying “we have sharpened our business strategy, putting a much greater emphasis on sustainability… Our three key areas … Harm reduction, sustainable agriculture and corporate behaviour”.

Now it’s very easy to be cynical about this …. What on earth might be a truly sustainable and responsible tobacco company? 

After all the recent US Surgeon General’s report on 50 years of evidence didn’t leave much wiggle room ( USSurgeon General Report Exec Summary ). So much so that the US Department of Health aspires to eradicate tobacco smoking within a generation.

But this does raise some more interesting issues doesn’t it? 

After all, is tobacco that much more objectionable than, say, some fast food offers or sugar laden processed food production? Or for that matter, is selling tobacco less responsible than missile making, palm oil production, logging? And what is so noble about oil majors, sugary drinks and industrial agriculture? 

One way or another, as consumers, investors, pension holders, most of us are tied up in here somehow ….

The fact is we are all part of a complex and inter-connected system and none of us in business are acting in a way that is genuinely sustainable yet.

There is a lot of exploring, learning and creating to do before we can claim to have created business that genuinely does more good than harm to us, to life, to the future.

So long as there is more to corporate efforts than mere greenwash so long as somewhere in there is a genuine sense of inquiry into responsibility, so long as there is learning, experimentation and a will to learn, then there is hope

Trickster Makes the World ...Again, Again

There's magic in the world of the Trickster, don't you think?

Sometimes you have to cross boundaries, transgress a distinction and all the rules that go with it, to allow something amazing to happen.

Like Lewis Hyde said ... "Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and Trickster is always there at the gates of the cite and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce ... Trickster is the creative idiot, the wise fool, the grey haired baby, the cross dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities ..." Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World (1998)

Last night's BBC Radio 4 Zeitgeisters episode on the Theaster Gates told just this story. Urban planner, turned artist, turned revolutionary urban regeneration catalyst .... Theaster Gates is a superb example of Bill Torbert's "double loop" of action ....

There are behaviors that are legitimate with any given role in a system: planner, artist, entrepreneur, whatever. And we can spend a lifetime tweaking the legitimate behaviors to get marginal changes in outcomes from within the legitimate space ... What Torbert calls "Single Loop"

And we can shift ("Double loop") the strategic role in which we turn up in any system.  And this is so spot on for what Theaster Gates has done ...

A Trickster in the shamanic sense, shape shifting from the expectations of one domain to the expectations of another, and transgressing the norms of both, producing work that is lighting the imagination of art collectors and social activists ... and bringing transformation to his south Chicago neighborhood ....

One of those practical stories of radical innovation in action that makes Torbert's valuable insights leap to life with a practical and inspiring example ....

Radio 4 Zeitgeisters: Theaster Gates