the circle organization: structuring for collective wisdom
The Circle Organization:
Structuring for collective wisdom
Jim Rough[1]
The faculty of a Seattle high school was in bitter conflict. They had endured six different principals in seven years and the culture had devolved into low trust, fear, disrespect, anger, and childish behaviors. Many were expressing the desire for a principal to make decisions that would stick. Others wanted people to abide by votes that had already been taken.
A third group was wondering, “Why can’t we just talk these issues through?” They wanted the ideal, where people work together in trust achieving excellence in a spirit of mutual appreciation. The school had recently received a substantial grant from a philanthropic foundation to transform itself to a process of participative decision-making. But the grant became part of the problem when those on the committee were paid overtime while other teachers on other committees were not. The union became involved, advocating that everyone should be paid for any activity after school, which was impossible. So the effort at transformation was making things worse.
Three Systems
This situation illustrates three different approaches to achieving collective intelligence within schools, corporations, hospitals, government agencies, or human societies in general. The three approaches are: 1) the Triangle, based on hierarchy and positional authority where a leader is ultimately in charge; 2) the Box, where a prescribed set of agreements like a constitution is ultimately in charge; and 3) the Circle, where a creative conversation of everyone is the ultimate authority. At heart, most people desire the Circle system, where employees, students, citizens, or organizational members share a common aim, are deeply involved with one another, where their best talents and skills are evoked, and where results are exceptional. This is true democracy. But the Circle is difficult to achieve. In fact, many people actively avoid it because previous efforts to achieve it have been painful and made things worse.
Each of the three systems has a different underlying structure, promotes a different attitude, requires different leadership competencies, and generates different results, which in the high school includes student learning.
Military organizations and those with charismatic leaders are Triangles in which status and rank predominate. Government agencies and schools are Boxes where the entrepreneurial spirit is both evoked and limited by a clear set of rules. For unions, business cooperatives, membership organizations, and democracies, the Circle seems appropriate because the people own the system equally. But in practice, these organizations are often rigid Boxes or Triangles because the Circle has proven impossible to achieve. Surprisingly, corporations are often most capable of achieving a Circle. But publicly traded corporations eventually retreat to the Box because their bottom line is profit, not the pursuit of shared values.
A new principal has come to Seattle’s high school. If his personal style is Triangle he will seek to exert hands-on leadership and make the decisions. If it’s the Box, he might exert hands-off leadership by establishing clear goals for each department with measures and boundaries, permitting teachers to do their jobs within a range of freedom. However, the stated aim of the school board is the Circle. So he is expected to overcome the Box nature of his situation with facilitative leadership. To do this he must assure a particular quality of conversation throughout the organization. Plus, he must assure that each person in the organization is a willing participant.
The Conversation
Each of the three systems generates a different kind of conversation. The Triangle teaches deference to the leader. People learn to suppress their own ideas and enthusiasm in favor of what the leader thinks and feels. The conversation revolves around who is speaking rather than the merit of ideas. To make a difference in this organization one must influence the leaders or gain status with them.
Ideally, the Box conversation is a puzzle-solving process where people analyze the situation, define the problem, deliberate on which idea is best, and make decisions based on objective data. However, since people are often driven by their feelings problems rarely present themselves cleanly in this way. So the Box conversation is often a competitive back and forth discussion or debate. People seek to stay rational, which is the aim of the Box, so they suppress their feelings and avoid addressing the big, seemingly impossible issues. Like players in a game, they limit their attention to the score and staying within the boundaries.
Choice-creating
The Circle requires a form of conversation where people drop their roles and become authentic, face the big seemingly unsolvable issues collaboratively and creatively, and reach unanimous perspectives. It’s a paradoxical form of conversation because each person becomes more unique while at the same time he or she feels more connected as one. This happens naturally when people face a difficult problem and achieve a breakthrough. Then the result is unanimous and better than what anyone had imagined. Each person grows from the experience and all feel a new sense of unity.
This quality of talking is unique. It is similar to dialogue, but unlike dialogue it generates group conclusions. It is also similar to but different from decision-making, consensus-building, discussion, debate, negotiation, deliberation, problem-solving, and creative problem-solving. I call this Circle form of conversation “choice-creating”.
Choice-creating is when people address a problem they care about creatively and collaboratively seeking solutions that work for all. While choice-creating is creative it’s not brainstorming, where people stay in their roles, address issues about which they are emotionally detached, generate ideas off the top of their heads and then decide which one to do. In choice-creating people express themselves in a heartfelt way and what to do just emerges. In this kind of conversation, if a person or ideas are judged, it can be deeply hurtful.
The movie Dead Poet’s Society provides a dramatic illustration. A teacher (played by Robin Williams) comes to a boys’ school and evokes real passion for learning. He enlivens creativity and enthusiasm for poetry such that his students no longer follow the prescribed curriculum. They quest after the true spirit of poetry, following the muse inside them. To parents and administrators rooted in the Box system, such empowering changes in the students threaten a loss of control. So they re-impose the Box curriculum.
One student in the class had felt such a deep opening in his life that in this emotionally vulnerable state he commits suicide rather than return to his repressed inside-the-Box existence. The administration blames the facilitative teacher and the other teachers become more alert than ever to the dangers of releasing heartfelt creativity in students.
Many organizations have enacted elements of this story. Once upon a time they experimented with the Circle system beginning the heartfelt creative conversation. They did not understand the vulnerability that comes with releasing creativity, and didn’t adequately protect people from judgment. Today these organizations often have a core group of people who adamantly say, “Never again!” Now jaded, they resist all change, especially if it seems “touchy-feely.”
So how might the new Seattle high school principal safely transform the school to the Circle system when the structure is a Box where judgment is lurking, and there is a core group of people actively resisting new approaches? A similar question might be asked of us: How might we safely transform our organizations and our society so that we come together in respect, face the big impossible-seeming issues, and creatively determine solutions that work for everyone? … and where there is lots of resistance to change?
Besides establishing choice-creating as the form of conversation we must also assure that this conversation will be ongoing. English consultant Dennis Martin was able to design this into a new pharmaceutical plant in Ireland. Now many years later it is the culture. Major decisions in that plant are made by employee teams or through large group meetings and each person participates. Now a different transnational corporation has acquired this plant. They recognize the immense benefits of this approach and the dangers of contaminating it with their normal management style. So they keep this plant and these employees isolated from the rest of their operations. No one wants to undermine the Circle System once it’s established, but interestingly they also don’t seek to extend this style throughout the company.
Another approach is through a form of facilitative leadership exemplified by CEO Jack Rooney at U.S. Cellular. With the aid of an internal consulting group he assures ongoing choice-creating conversations among managers. About once a month managers meet in day-long leadership development retreats. This unusually large investment of management time promotes a Circle style throughout the organization.
The ongoing choice-creating conversation that involves everyone quietly becomes the primary mode of “decision-making” in the organization. This form of talking and thinking empowers people as individuals and evokes the emergence of “We the People,” everyone working together toward the same end. Dynamic Facilitation is a way by which one person can assure this high quality of thinking in a small group. The “Wisdom Council” extends the range of Dynamic Facilitation so that a very large system of people can be in one choice-creating conversation.
Dynamic Facilitation
The dynamic facilitator helps people address issues important to them regardless of how impossible they might seem. Instead of asking people to only work on what is possible, adhere to guidelines or to restrain themselves in some way, the dynamic facilitator welcomes participants as they are. Each person expresses him or her self naturally, while the dynamic facilitator assures that every expression is received as an important contribution to the group.
She or he uses four charts—Solutions, Data, Concerns, and Problem-Statements—to help all hear one another fully without judgment. For example, if someone starts to disagree with an idea, the facilitator invites that person to direct the comment directly to her, rather than to the person with whom he is disagreeing. Then she records the comment as a concern to be added to the list of Concerns, and invites the person to offer an alternate solution, which is added to the list of Solutions. This approach avoids judgment. There is no agree/disagree discussion. Each person is honored. Each comment is an asset to the group and people are creative together. Shifts and breakthroughs naturally result.
Meetings in the Department of Public Works in Jefferson County, Washington are dynamically facilitated. This allows the manager, Frank Gifford, to be a full participant in the conversations and gives him greater flexibility as leader. Each person contributes to managing the organization and results are exceptional.
Once I dynamically facilitated employees of a sawmill over a period of years. They turned their frustrations into thoughtful actions and dramatically improved the functioning of the mill. In the early stages management wasn’t involved in the meetings, but were surprised by unforeseen leaps in productivity and quality. Just by participating in a conversation where they talked about problems important to them, mill workers became more cooperative, curious, informed, and observant in their work. They trusted more, risked more, and began to understand the intricacies of their workplace. They invented new solutions to seemingly impossible problems and generated a spirit of community in the mill. As a group they approached both the union and management, enabling them to cooperate on new training programs and dramatically reducing discipline issues.
The Wisdom Council
The best way to facilitate a transformation to the Circle is for there to be one overarching, ongoing choice-creating conversation as well as many small group conversations. This one conversation is made more difficult when the system is large, like for a corporation, city or nation, or when people have different schedules or locations. The Wisdom Council is a new strategy to overcome these difficulties.
In a Wisdom Council, every four months eight to twelve people are randomly selected as a microcosm of the organization. This small group meets for a couple of days with a dynamic facilitator. They choose big issues to address and reach unanimous conclusions. Then the Wisdom Council presents these conclusions and the story of how they were developed to everyone. Then all the people are invited to talk face-to-face in small groups, or over the telephone or via the Internet. Those that hear the story generally agree, feel involved and continue the conversation. Largely because of the nature of choice-creating, people in the greater audience feel resonant with the process. If one person differs with the Wisdom Council conclusions, all are interested to know why. They listen carefully and seek ways to incorporate this divergent view. This inclusiveness is unlike the normal political conversation where people argue, exclude, and try to mute differences. In the Wisdom Council process, people value different perspectives as a way to achieve unanimity and to make the current solutions better.
At one elementary school, a group of parents decided they were tired of the usual adversarial process of decision-making and implemented a year-long Wisdom Council among themselves. This conversation among parents generated more volunteers, developed greater understanding, produced a new parent guidebook, and demonstrated support for the faculty and administration. The principal, who was rooted in the leadership style of the Triangle, was not supportive, so it was dropped after a year. Later however, people began acknowledging the many positive changes, so they began it again. This time the principal and faculty embraced it.
Three ordinary citizens in Ashland, Oregon experimented with one Wisdom Council for their county. They arranged for a randomly selected group of registered voters to come together for a day and a half and be dynamically facilitated. The Wisdom Council presented its conclusions to a gathering of the community. The council said that “We the People” need to awaken from our slumber, take charge of our society, make politicians more accountable, and start implementing common-sense policies, like adequately funding education. It was just a one-time experiment but important developments resulted. A number of Wisdom Council participants said that the experience was life changing and many began a citizens’ movement to rewrite the town charter.