Abstract
In this essay I share my reflections on Ed Schein's teachings and his wisdom and insights from a career that spans half a century both as a scholar and a practitioner. I have been fortunate enough to meet Ed 25 years ago and work closely with him in what he considers one of his high spots in his career. Here I share the many lessons learned that have guided my approach to research, consulting and life.
Ed Schein will always be with me and I am so grateful for all the joyful times and insightful conversations as well as the wisdom and knowledge he shared. His legacy will live not only with his close family and friends but also with the world at large thanks to his groundbreaking contributions to the field, his often-controversial perspectives illuminating the blind spots that often arise from being stuck in one own's culture, discipline, or community.
He describes me as friend and colleague which is an honor; but to me, he is also a mentor, teacher, guide, and at times a fatherly figure too. Ed's invaluable advice helped me push the boundaries ever so gently and shaped the underlying philosophies that have guided my career and approach to organizational health in the past 25 years.
He is a true “educator” as Russ Ackoff would have described him, offering endless encouragement of inquiry to modify one's thinking without constraints, initiate and stimulate the thinking process, staying open to influence and change, and helping people to stop to reflect and understand what's really going on in their minds, psyche, and context.
Reflections on our Early Conversations
Although I was very familiar with his work, I had not had the opportunity to meet Ed until I moved to the US in 1997. We found much common ground in exposure to many different cultures and languages and its profound impact on developing the cultural skills and appreciation for different perspectives in different communities. The fact that he considered experiential learning central to developing theories in group dynamics, and that the group being involved in the creation of solutions was the key to meaningful changes in the human systems helped me make sense of my own approach both to my research and my consulting work. My master’s thesis was about bringing learnings from psychology into the field of industrial engineering and my doctoral thesis used the action research methodology in which the researcher and the client jointly engage in moving toward new practice, develop theories, and make them actionable. Reflecting on these together with him in retrospect helped generate new insights.
Like many others, when I got exposed to his model of “process consultation”, it gave me the license to continue to do effective interventions in the organizations I was consulting without the need to be the “expert” but rather helping clients better frame their problems, understand their own situation from multiple perspectives, engage in solutions, and create their desired future. The process consultation model argued for “understanding the clients’ reality before imposing the consultant's norms” or “understanding the dynamics of social systems without getting prematurely into descriptions of how they ought to function or the values they should hold.”
Is organizational learning a form of coercive persuasion? We debated questions like this endlessly. Ed took a genuine interest in my consulting work and reflecting together always led to generation of theories in practice and useful frames for further inquiry. These conversations led to reflections and much learning that otherwise would not have occurred. Rather than understanding what led to success of any specific change project, I would have moved on to the next assignment as would other consultants. Instead, we were engaged in joint sensemaking and developing theories from practice. He kept encouraging me to write as he saw writing as a reflective process. And his motto was that we cannot learn unless we reflect.
He continuously emphasized “the need to think like an anthropologist, accepting culture for what it is, using the strengths of the culture to change elements that have become dysfunctional, the need to develop the skills of a family therapist, accepting the fact that human systems are complex and difficult to change and the need to trust the artistic impulse in deciding what kind of intervention to make and decide how to proceed.” Much of the stories he shared illustrated the dynamic interplay between the individual and the group, organization, or society, and the cyclical nature of how the system influences the individual and vice versa: for instance, whether leaders create the culture, or the culture creates the leaders.
His teachings of over 50 years and the countless books he has written convey the much-needed wisdom in the field and asking the tough questions. His latest books Humble Inquiry and Humble Leadership is the way I have experienced him and his approach to life and career, always staying open and humble, genuinely interested in others’ perspectives and rooted in what's really going on. While he has spent a lifetime looking to unveil the mysteries of the field, he humbly reaches the conclusions that “We cannot understand organizational and managerial dynamics well enough to be prescriptive about them”; “We do not appreciate how much learning is a contextual process, and the enormous role of the interpersonal dynamics.” Or “We do not understand cultural dynamics or do not take them seriously enough.”
He states that “organizational health can’t be understood without the ability to take all three perspectives: (1) individual perspective based on psychology; (2) a systemic perspective
based on anthropology, sociology, political science, and systems theory; (3) an interactive process perspective based on social psychology, sociology and other theories of dynamic processes.” And the beauty of it is his ability to play at all levels given his experience as much as a practitioner as a scholar. Reflecting on a career of over 50 years, he finds that the most productive research has been a result of an active practice of trying to help organizations.
Reflections on Reflections
I have been fortunate enough to work closely with Ed on what he considers to be one of the high spots in his career: Reflections startup (need to admit that it really came as a surprise, especially hearing it from him two decades later). This is the SoL Journal on Knowledge, Learning, and Change (published by the MIT Press) where he was the founding editor and we served together as editors producing the first four volumes. Planning it with the “pubs team” in deep conversations while having tea in Ed's garden in Cambridge was surely great fun and bringing the journal to life was a product of love and labor. But that's not it of course.
As I reflect over it now, tracing the continuum of his career and the lessons learned in his journey from brainwashing to organizational therapy, it starts becoming clearer why this was of such significance. In a talk at the SoL greenhouse (a conference bringing together the Sol community of researchers, consultants, and managers) he playfully depicted his conceptual and empirical journey as a drama in five acts: (1)
Being highly aware of how difficult it is to communicate across cultural boundaries in different communities, Reflections was launched with the premise of the need to build bridges across researchers, consultants and practicing managers so that knowledge developed in one domain can be used in other domains and contribute to the creation of an ongoing productive dialogue. At the time this was innovative, exploring new terrain.
Using the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) as its base, Reflections was to become a forum for cultivating conversations of co-inspiration and collaboration among researchers, consultants, and reflective managers. It was about broadening the knowledge base, drawing material from each community, and trying to speak meaningfully to each community. Each feature was always complemented by commentaries from diverse communities and perspectives. Both the diverse editorial board and our publication team reflected this purpose.
Part of the journey was embracing the freedom to innovate and finding ways to involve the readers – not unlike artists who engage their audience to participate. Topics we focused on over the course of the twelve issues included creating a sustainable environment, the many faces of leadership, the power of connections (in functioning as a link between bodies of knowledge), and the complexity of managing change. And sometimes we would put forth a collection of articles on leadership, community, and culture, the fundamental choices you make to shape an organization, or an issue simply focused on how to increase one's own reflective potential.
We experimented with stimulating dialog by bringing in a very diverse group of people, juxtaposing articles from different constituencies, and facilitating commentaries from different groups, letting readers discover that everyone can contribute. “Presenting learning concepts in accessible language is a rarity” commented one of our readers. We also tried to span across the time gap. The issues included classics with Ed bringing in the wisdom of his own mentors, teachers such as Kurt Lewin, reinforcing the fact there was no need to reinvent the foundations but rather understand how and where the tools and concepts may be applicable. Consultants contributed with rich experiences and skillsets developed across many organizations.
The issue themed “Devil is in the details” aimed to address why most change models are not practical and provided concrete stories to underline the interdependent elements of a change process. “Unless put into the proper concrete context concepts of change really don’t mean much”, Ed argued. “Models of change require specificity as to who is changing, what is changing, and from whose point of view change was being assessed.” And also reminded readers that “Culture as an ultimate conservative force would not be so powerful if it didn’t serve some useful functions. The best kind of change programs build on the strength of the culture rather than change the culture.”
One issue in particular where we explored the role of the arts, the aesthetic dimension in society, and the impact of the artist on our own lives stands out in the collection. Ed's vision with this issue was to help expand our own capacity to respond more richly to the complexity that surrounds us and to invite everyone to honor the artist in each other. “The world of knowledge and the world of arts and science do not sufficiently interpenetrate,” he stated, “The artist can stimulate and legitimize our own aesthetic sense and teach us the importance of beauty in all elements of our lives. Analysis of how the artist is trained and works can produce important insights into what is needed to perform, and what it means to lead and manage.”
As he was retiring from his founding editor role and looking back to distill lessons learned from this venture in the past four years, Ed remarked: “Occupational communities develop strong subcultures with own beliefs, values, and language, this was a more formidable task than I imagined” and explained “Knowledge gets entrapped in its own occupational subculture. The difficulty arises from each group claiming to know the truth because it works for them in their own environment. We stumbled because the professional and occupational subcultures of these groups were too strong or too self-referential.”
Lessons for Life
Separation between the research and the subject causes the researcher to miss important aspects of what is studied. Often managers’ purpose and tacit knowledge of why they do what they do can only be uncovered through reflection and joint sensemaking.
In 1999 we also traveled together to the Academy of Management Conference for a symposium focusing on joint sensemaking between academics and practitioners (as the Academy refers to them!) and exploring conditions necessary for successful joint sense-making. Many attempts to foster knowledge sharing often don’t succeed because the type of knowledge produced by academics remains tangentially relevant to the type of knowledge needed by managers. While academics must continue to produce cutting-edge research, there is a need to make it relevant and applicable to executives. Often there is the expectation that managers should practice what researchers hand them whereas managers often find the results of academic research of little practical relevance for solving real and important issues in organizations. We argued that joint sensemaking between researchers and managers can lead to better theory that is informed by practice as well as improved organizations (informed by theory). But it is easier said than done as such a process is constrained by distinct operating models, deeply embedded assumptions, attitudes prevalent in both communities, pressing business needs, the absence of institutional infrastructures to support long term partnerships.
Many of the questions we began addressing in that symposium (which also included leading scholars such as Peter Senge, Jean Bartunek, and Teresa Amabile) are still very relevant after 25 years, including: how to sustain the collaboration between the communities, how they can support each other and sustain the learning, what are the conditions for creating such communities where we can jointly develop a theory for practice.
While it was remarkable to witness the master at his craft as Ed framed many of the dilemmas that arose in joint sensemaking during the symposium, the real lesson learned for me was later as we took a moment to reflect on the session over a cup of tea at the lounge in the airport. After listening to my recap of the events his remark was: you are very emotional, aren’t you? And I guess he must have immediately observed what then pursued. As I am a product of an uprising where emotions were not to be displayed, as I always took pride in being rational, here I was struggling big time how to respond as tears began to form. It is what I heard next that was a game changer – that is a great, he said, and took the hour that followed before boarding the plane to explain the importance of understanding one's emotions and developing a repertoire of emotional responses and the capacity to adapt to what comes our way. And he underscored the importance of learning to listen to oneself before one really understands others. Truly a life changing lesson that has guided me ever since in everything I do.
Another important lesson was creativity and bringing out the artist in me (“the engineer”). This started out with the creative process of designing the reflections issues and the editorial comments we shared but really stuck with me with the issue where our focus was aesthetics and the role of the artist. Once again challenging the notion that only artists were creative, he put the spotlight on how we were all artists and illustrated how creativity played into all we did. He helped me realize that whether you are a teacher in the classroom or a consultant in the field you are a performing artist, and he pointed out the many parallels of the underlying training and practice across the communities. In his short essay concluding the issue on the role of arts, he states the following: “Many of the exercises through which artists learn to see better are highly applicable to human situations we mismanage because we have not learned to see what is really going on. Art does force us to look at what we normally avoid because it is disturbing, anxiety-provoking, and politically incorrect.… It allows us to surface feelings that we may not have been aware of in ourselves.”
Most important of all he concludes that the artist puts us in touch with our creative self: “The important part of reality, the part that matters, is the part that we create for ourselves through those activities we own and in which we express ourselves.” Ever grateful for his unending guidance, I have humbly attempted to do so with this essay.
