Can You Navigate the Uncertainty of Change? with Peter Senge
Jan 21, 2021
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Peter Senge, an expert in organizational learning and author of The Fifth Discipline, discusses creating cultures of learning and navigating workplace uncertainty. Topics include new measures of success for change efforts, misunderstood complexity of change, creating healthy leadership communities, prioritizing well-being, and recognizing collective trauma.
Change efforts should be evaluated with a nuanced lens, considering the complexities and the value that comes from the process of navigating change together.
Creating a culture of engagement, mutual respect, and shared responsibility is necessary to overcome common flaws in change efforts.
Deep dives
The Need to Reevaluate Measures of Workplace Change
Despite advances in understanding the complexity of change, workplaces often still rely on simplistic success or failure measures. These measures fail to capture the ongoing nature of change and the potential for learning and growth, even when the intended outcomes are not achieved. Change efforts should be evaluated with a more nuanced lens, considering the complexities and the real value that comes from the process of navigating change together.
The Challenges and Flaws in Change Efforts
Many change efforts fail due to common flaws. Change is often driven by a few people at the top, which creates resistance and a lack of engagement from others. There is often a lack of clear intellectual buy-in and no sense of real mutuality. Change is seen as something that others need to do, creating a compliance mindset. To overcome these flaws, a culture of real engagement, mutual respect, and shared responsibility is necessary.
The Importance of Holding Creative Tension
Navigating change involves holding creative tension, the gap between our hopes for the future and the current reality. This tension is a natural part of the learning process and should be embraced rather than feared. It requires a culture of safety and trust where people feel respected and supported, even in the face of failure. The capacity to aspire and hold creative tension should be nurtured and maintained to foster continual improvement and growth.
Building Healthy Leadership Communities
Healthy leadership communities are essential for navigating change successfully. These communities are characterized by a shared sense of purpose or core values and a generative social field where imagination and authentic relationships thrive. Leaders should prioritize creating an environment where every voice is heard and valued, and where people feel safe to take risks and explore their potential. Trust, mutuality, and support are key elements in building healthy leadership communities.
Peter Senge, who has been at the forefront of organizational learning since publishing his classic text, The Fifth Discipline, in 1990, provided theories and methods to foster aspiration, develop reflective conversation, and understand complexity in service of shaping learning orientated organization cultures. Throughout Peter’s work with leading organizations around the world, he’s been asking, “How do we create the conditions for people to work together at their best, cultivating the innate system’s intelligence that is our birthright, but is all but lost in modern culture.” As an engineer by training, Peter’s work has always emphasized tools and methods, not for their own sake, but as vehicles for building individual and collective capacities. And these approaches have been captured in the many books he’s published.
In this week’s podcast, we explore how to embrace the uncertainty and complexity of navigating change and unlocking learning in our workplaces.
[02:57] - Peter explores if we need new measures of success when it comes to determining if workplace change efforts have succeeded or failed.
[06:22] - Peter explains why the complexity of change in workplaces is often misunderstood.
[11:32] - Peter offers tips for how we can create more cultures of learning to help us navigate workplace uncertainty and change in 2021.
[16:12] - Peter explains how we can better navigate the creative and emotional tension that exists between our hopes for the future and our current reality.
[21:50] - Peter shares why workplaces need healthy leadership communities, rather than leaders as heroes, to support change.
[24:17] - Peter explains why the desire for continual growth creates changes challenges in workplaces.
[28:49] - Peter offers guidance for our workplaces can leverage complexity to help them create more successful changes.
Thanks so much for joining me again this week. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of this post.
You can also listen to all the episodes of Making Positive Psychology Work streamed directly to your smartphone or iPad through stitcher. No need for downloading or syncing.
Until next time, take care! Thank you, Peter!
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