Posts

Thrivable Leadership : Interview with Kevin A. Clark

by

Each Wednesday, we post an interview with someone who is living, exploring, or championing aspects of thrivability – people at the forefront of cultural, organizational, or individual change.

Kevin A. Clark is an award-winning brand strategist, experience designer, author, and transformational catalyst.  He is President and Founder of Content Evolution LLC formed in 2002 to provide leadership in brand behavior and experience strategy.  In early 2009 Kevin retired from IBM with 30 years of service.  He is Program Director emeritus, Brand and Values Experience, IBM Corporate Marketing and Communications – responsible for discovering and creating new ways for people to experience IBM.  As a business metaphysicist, Kevin also is a member of the North American Thrivable Network.

Todd Hoskins:  In your experience how are the impacts, methods, or requirements of leadership changing?

Kevin A. Clark:   Yes, there’s definitely a shift.  John Perry Barlow says the role of the manager is changing from telling people what to do, to helping them make sense of things (so they can act on their own).  Leaders need to move from directing to enabling.  Governance at the board level needs to move to enablement too, and environmental scanning.  This is part of the resilience and adaptive function leaders need to embrace.

Business schools are creating technically capable professionals, yet they are not delivering two things you get promoted for:  leadership and judgment.  Leadership gets some air time mostly by case study, yet more focused on outcomes than the journey.  Judgment hardly at all.  We need to find better ways to provide learning environments to hone good judgment – both inside the enterprise (the federation in my case) and the classroom.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter at Harvard Business School said two decades ago the new deal with employers and employees is:  We can’t guarantee your employment, but we can guarantee your employ-ability.  I like that deal.  It means you take full advantage of being the best you can be as a lifelong learner and professional, and it places the burden on the organization to find ways to hold on to you.

Todd:  There is a collapse of disciplines/silos that we see happening, which also seems to point towards the more thrivable whole.  Business leaders are no longer just reading business books.  You are influenced by Don Beck, Ken Wilber, Dave Snowden, Carl Jung, Dan Ariely, among others.  What is happening here?

Kevin:  Business leaders are beginning to act as authentic selves in all contexts as opposed to acting situationally.  Situational management techniques lead to multiple personality disorder; and organizational schizophrenia.  If you treat all the people in your life with respect and don’t become another person when you go to work, you start to understand how to play non-zero – or more ways to play in an increasingly win-win world.

I believe we’re also inheriting a new generation of people who are broadly networked and think in bursts (texting-minds), combined with short attention spans and a width of broad knowledge.  I see imprinting and collective consciousness moving toward bite-size interaction with implications for short-burst projects and direction.

I work with companies in other parts of the world that have 100 year plans and accompanying scenarios – we have a shorter time horizon in our Western left-brain linear processor world.  We need to embrace the non-time-dependent, holistic side of our thinking to be fully ready for economic forces emerging that have a much longer term and more comprehensive outlook.  There is also a perceptual and cognitive readiness emerging that makes it possible to both collaborate and compete simultaneously.  It is the “I” and the “we” held in dynamic tension – not canceling out each other, but amplifying the strengths of both.

Todd:  Is business planning changing?

Kevin:  Business planning is changing from simply doing “well,” to doing well and doing “good” for a number of stakeholders.  We encourage an understanding of the full spectrum of resource acquisition and resource allocation, making provision for alternative futures and preparing for them.  We look at monitoring emergence, and understanding both the permissions to operate freely and unconstrained along with the behaviors that will trigger regulation and customer defection.  These are all needed by the contemporary business planner.  Spreadsheets will no longer be the primary planning tool.

Visual models accompanied with explanatory narrative and a financial business case will be needed to deliver competitive resilience in the future.  The planning cycle will also have to move from annual or quarterly cycles to continuous modes with selected deep dives.  This will provide new insights and help eliminate the unjustified assumptions which can deplete the energy of companies through unnecessary activities and operations.

Todd:  Content Evolution is a global “non-holding” company.  I know you’ve called it a “federation.”  How do the companies relate to one another?

Kevin:  Content Evolution functions as a global ecosystem of member companies – we work together to organize intention around marketplace behavior.  Much of this is done by exposing members to each others’ capabilities, participating in joint business development activities, and global teleconferences.

We have a business development commons that brings together the sales and development executives from the member companies and provides a safe environment for them to collaborate and quietly do horse-trading.  We also have an annual conference for our 40 companies worldwide – last year at Interbrand headquarters in Manhattan – and this coming year in the spring at Jack Morton Worldwide in Boston.

Todd:  How does this model represent a shift from the old “if you can’t beat them, join them” model of compete or acquire?

Kevin:  We collaborate.  I’m reinvesting the 30 years I spent in the corporate world and taking my professional relationships and federating them into something integral that hasn’t existed before.  It’s also better being a global mentor than being a traditional manager – just like it’s better to be a grandparent than being a parent!

Content Evolution as a member federation has no debt, since no one acquired anyone.  We have more capabilities than the largest of the marketing holding companies, spanning customer and market research, product and service ergonomics, business and thrivability strategy, brand strategy and management, and customer and constituency experience design and strategy.

Todd:  What have you learned in pioneering this federation?  What mistakes have you made?

Kevin:  I have made no mistakes (says the ego).  “Ha!” says the rest of my consciousness.  I like to move in several different directions at once.  Some of my experiments failed, such as working on a collaborative book (too much effort for too little collective reward).  We refocused our group energy around driving revenue rather than driving early visibility.  The recognition we’re here is growing – commensurate to our practical contributions to solving client problems and adding breakthrough value.

Our strategic selling method: listening, just like I’ve needed to direct less and listen more to the members.  Today we’re working together better than ever and thriving as a group.

Todd:  Anything else, Kevin, that can help us thrive in the New Year?

Kevin: Be intentional!

Todd:  Thanks, Kevin.

Zero-Sum Games

by

Have you ever heard of zero-sum games? How about non-zero sum games? For those of you who have not heard of zero-sum games, allow me to briefly explain and share some links. It comes from political and economic theory, and it means if wins are plusses and losses are negatives, the equation will end up with zero. Think about money. We start with zero, Alfred borrows 10 so he can buy widgets from Zeno. Alfred gives Zeno the 10. Alfred has -10 and Zeno has +10, and the system has zero sum.

While there are lots of games we play that actually add up numbers, such as football, in the end one team has more points than the other and is therefore the winner. What matters is not how many points but the difference between them and who has more. This zero-sum game mentality shows up in our behaviors toward each other. Do we act as if my having something means you can’t have it? It puts us in a competition mind frame, and we behave like opponents.

What if there are non-zero sum games? Can we, as humans, transcend the competition mindset and behave cooperatively? What if there are games where helping you do well helps me do well? Sure, there are lots of places we interact where this is appropriate! I have always been surprised that business plans have competition analysis and yet don’t adequately describe the cooperation network the organization will be embedded in.

The real question I want to address here, now that we know a bit about zero-sum and non-zero sum games: how do we work in non-zero sum ways when people we need to work with operate from a zero-sum mind frame?

First and foremost, trying to change others through argument or explanation often just makes them defensive and resistant. I suggest a two-prong approach.

  1. Use their zero-sum mentality to your advantage – and the advantage of the group. Ask where the zero-sum games are – because they exist, and point these zero-sum minded folks to those opportunities.
  2. Demonstrate success of non-zero sum approach. Model what you want to see in the world. Be the change you seek. Through demonstration, others can see the success that comes from it. What they are truly after is success.

That sounds all well and good in an abstract theoretical way. But the situation at hand is not an ideal – it is a specific. And likely in that specific, you, my non-zero sum friends, are on a board of an organization having to navigate decisions about the organization with a zero-sum thinking collaborator, for example. What do you do?

30 Love (explored)
Creative Commons License photo credit: Evil Erin

First I want to talk about body work. So much of what we communicate happens in the body rather than through our words. Avoid sitting across from people who want to act oppositionally. Sit beside them. When they talk about a problem, be sure they gesture toward a shared space in front of them rather than at you. Imagine that they are playing dodgeball as if they were one of those tennis ball launching machines – stay away from the physical space they are launching at with their gestures.

Second, I want to talk about a model of understanding interpersonal dynamics. I use this model often when talking about relationships between people.WeDiagram The diagram, at right, shows two people, A and B, as well as a third node – the WE of A and B. Zero-sum thinkers usually think of their connection as the gray line from you to them. Helping them think beyond zero-sum involves helping them understand the WE connection. When we are in the AB relationship, we still use words like: I, me, mine, you, yours. When we are in the WE of AB, we talk about: we, our, ours. These pronouns point to what we have together in the relationship. demonstrate WE language. Start with you and the zero-sum person. As the language becomes reflected in their statements, you can begin to expand the WE to include others. Keep expanding until you reach we as a community (or what level you need to be at for the group objectives).

Next I want to share a bit about facilitation questions. Our zero-sum thinkers say they want to do something. Ask, “what will that get for you/us?” When they give an answer, ask again, “What will that get for you/us?” First, this helps them feel heard. They have the attention. Be sure to ask in a kind and inquisitive way, because they will quickly intuit if you are asking in order to undermine them. Remember, they think in competitive ways. When you get to a gem – something that is common ground for the collective – in the answer you get from the “what will that get for you/us” THEN ask, “how else might we be able to get that?” Bring in others to help answer that.

This is a brief introduction to ways to navigate zero-sum thinking. We can continue to explore, especially with specific stories. If you have specific needs you want to discuss, we can discuss your issues in a private context via my coaching services.

I would love to hear ways you have navigated zero-sum thinkers in the comments or on twitter (@nurturegirl).