Another Communication Boundary: How Far Can You Self-Disclose?

Organizational learning requires the ability — and willingness — among members to self-disclose. Senge and his colleagues use tools such as “Left-hand Column” and “Ladder of Inference” which require a member to be aware of, and to publicly describe, how one thinks. That includes many things: how one reasons out, what doubts and uncertainties one entertains, whether one agrees or disagrees and why, what one does not know or what is the extent of one’s ignorance, what facts or observations led to one’s conclusion, the meaning of a word or label one uses, etc. Below are two slides from a PowerPoint presentation on Senge’s “Five Disciplines” that I show my KM graduate class at the Technology Management Center, University of the Philippines, which lists things that members of a learning organization must be able and willing to talk publicly about.

Double-loop learning is more demanding: it requires self-disclosure that can bring about strong emotional content: personal likes and dislikes behind a behavior or pattern of behavior, personal fears and desires that affect work performance, tacit patterns of inefficient or ineffective behavior one is unwilling to talk about, etc. The strong emotional content itself can inhibit self-disclosure.

How far one is willing to be candid and public about his own thinking and feeling processes — which are normally private or personal things — is another form of communication boundary. This “self-disclosure boundary” delimits what one is willing or comfortable to tell others; just as the “communication boundary” we discussed in the previous blog post (“Announce Your Communication Boundaries”) delimits what one is willing or comfortable hearing from others. In both cases, discomfort is the signal that tells one that his boundary is being breached. These boundaries vary from person to person, and from context to context, but watching at what point the discomfort begins is a useful way to be aware exactly where one’s boundary is.

Browse through the profiles of your contacts in Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or other similar social networks. You will notice the differences in the willingness to self-disclose. In fact people who are “very private” will not even join such social networks. You must be a “social person” or one who is less guarded about your “private space” or “personal life” to join and enjoy participating in them.

In the plane ride from Beijing to Manila last Tuesday, I sat next to a young man who visited his Chinese girlfriend. Wow! He disclosed to me — a stranger — much more than what I expected about him, his girlfriend and what they did in the two weeks he was in Beijing. He showed me their pictures in his laptop. He is a body-piercer. He told me so much about how he does it to minimize the pain in his clients. He described where (=what parts of the body) and which way he had pierced his lady clients as well as gentlemen clients, etc. He showed me the piercings in his face, mouth and head (he had temporarily removed the rings in them).

Willingness to self-disclose is not enough. Some may be willing to self-disclose more than others, and a few may be like my plane seatmate. Most people assume that they know everything about themselves — why they think, feel and do what they keep thinking, feeling or doing or NOT thinking, feeling or doing. This is a wrong assumption. Most people are actually unaware about much of their internal states. For example, most people are unaware of their “blind spots” or “blindfolds”. A willingness to self-disclose is not enough; self-disclosure to be productive of learning must be accompanied by self-knowledge that comes from years of constant practice of double-loop learning and “conscious living”.

Chris Argyris, who introduced double-loop learning, said: “Leaders and subordinates alike… must all begin struggling with a new level of self-awareness, candor and responsibility.”

In the February 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Bill George and his associates wrote about learning how to be an inspiring and empowering leader. They asked 75 members of the Advisory Council of the Stanford Graduate School of Business what is the most important capability that leaders must develop. Their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness!

I believe that extending the envelope of organizational performance can be achieved through three steps:

1. The first envelope is through better technology: this is the easiest.
2. The second envelope is through better management: this is not difficult as there are numerous management tools for this purpose.
3. The third envelope is through better psychological-behavioral technology: this is difficult because the tools in this area are still works in progress.

According to Management Today, “Peter Senge’s advocacy of the learning organization helped begin a revolution in the workplace. And, the relevance of Senge’s work is growing rather than diminishing over time. As more businesses go global, the need to overcome psychological barriers to necessary organizational change increases.”

PETER SENGE

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How We Form Judgments of Other People: Female Circumcision, Lying, the Jury System and the Scientists’ “Sacred p<.05"

This afternoon I was watching a BBC news report about the new Egyptian law banning female circumcision — the traditional practice of cutting off the clitoris of young girls. A survey revealed that 70% of Egyptian women respondents say they were circumcized. Westerners judge such practices as barbaric. Interviewed by BBC, an Egyptian mother entertains an opposite judgment, namely, that uncircumcized females are unclean. “They must be cleansed. Who will marry them if they are not circumcised? It will bring shame to the family.”

Some of our judgments of people were clearly culturally-dictated. Others were the result of obscure personal decisions we made sometime in the past.

What is your answer to this question: “After how many times that you catch a person lying when you conclude that the person is a liar?”

Once?

Twice?

I asked many of my friends this question. The answer ranges from once to thrice. It is rare that people wait for four or more occasions of lying before concluding that the person in question is a liar. We make a judgment on trustworthiness after we see a behavior pattern repeated only one to three times.

That is how quickly we make conclusions about a person’s untrustworthiness. We are quick to judge untrustworthiness. Trust, on the other hand, takes longer to build. This means that for most people, they do not like to bear the (material) risk or cost of trusting someone whose future action shows he is not trustworthy. To them this cost is more important than the (goodwill) cost from not trusting someone when in fact he is trustworthy. Material costs seem to be more important to most people than goodwill costs.

In the American jury system, if only one juror in twelve entertains reasonable doubt, a man cannot be condemned for a criminal offense. In Scotland, there are fifteen jurors (thanks to Michael Heaney for pointing this out). The reason is that Western legal systems consider the cost (to the individual accused) of condemning an innocent person to be more important than the cost (to the rest of society) of not punishing a guilty person. In the Western mindset, an individual’s rights are paramount.

In modern scientific practice, a conclusion is not accepted for publication if the probability that that conclusion is wrong is more than 5%. This is the “sacred p<.05" criteria among scientists. Scientists' criterion for acceptance is stricter than the jury system. To scientists, getting at the empirical truth is a more strict procedure than establishing criminal guilt in a Western jury system.

There is a big problem from this scientific practice.

If accepting vs. rejecting a scientific hypothesis entails very substantial economic and social consequences (e.g. global warming, cancer from cigarette smoking, etc.), insisting on the "sacred p<.05" criterion is foolish. The social costs of making wrong decisions on hypotheses about the sex life of fruit flies is miniscule compared to the social costs of making wrong decisions on hypotheses about the global climate or cancer from cigarette smoking.

What I am saying is that the p<.05 decision rule is incomplete. It must be weighed by the total planetary costs and benefits of making wrong decisions: the costs and benefits of accepting a hypothesis when in fact it is wrong and the costs and benefits of rejecting it when in fact it is correct.

But back to how people construct their mental models.

Our judgments and assumptions about other people, and the process by which we adopt them, are often unconscious and obscure. Here is a practical way to make them explicit for conscious re-evaluation. Only if these judgments and assumptions are made explicit can we revisit them and ask questions such as: How have they been (unconsciously) affecting my decisions on the person? Are these judgments/assumptions still valid? If not, how do I revise them?

Select a person with whom you have problematic communications or relationship. Let’s call him Reuben. Fill in the following incomplete questions:

Reuben should… (enumerate)
Reuben should not… (enumerate)

What I like about Reuben are… (enumerate)
What I don’t like about Reuben are… (enumerate)

Reuben has a bad habit of… (enumerate)
Reuben has a good habit of… (enumerate)

Just list whatever comes to your mind, without editing or censoring. The objective is to make these judgments and assumptions explicit so that the owner of these judgments and assumptions can objectify and examine them, and see whether they are still valid and scrutinize whether they are based on deeper assumptions that can be further re-examined.

Not doing the above could mean that our communication with the person will continue to be problematic. Since we cannot identify possible root-causes within ourselves, then we continue to be the victims of our own assumptions and we cannot resolve the problematic communication.

These are tools in personal knowledge management and organizational learning. Ability to manage one’s mental models is one of the five disciplines of a learning organization, according to guru Peter Senge.

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L16- Concepts Can Block Learning

“From the moment you teach a child the word ‘tree’ he can no longer fully experience a tree” said Anthony De Mello from India.

Concepts are fine tools for organizing and communicating our experiences of the world. Concepts and mental models also enable us to recognize what otherwise we hardly notice. Mental models are just that: models of reality. But if concepts become rigid beliefs or we equate them with reality itself, then concepts can imprison our thinking. If we invest our ego in our concepts, they become our “pet concepts” or “pet theories” and close our mind to other or new theories. We stop testing concepts against our experience and the experiences of other people. And we cease to learn. I wrote a blog on “We found the enemy: our own concepts!”

Religious and political concepts can possess and control minds. As a matter of survival, religious and political institutions preserve concepts (e.g. doctrines and beliefs) and impose sanctions on its members against thinking freely and challenging those concepts. As a result, it takes years, decades or even centuries to unlearn concepts that no longer work. Theological concepts can control our thinking and block achievement of the very purpose and essence of religion. De Mello also said,

“The final barrier to your vision of God is your God-concept. You miss God because you think you know.”

In a doctoral defense by a graduate student at the Asian Social Institute, I sat in the faculty panel which included a monsignor (a rank between priest and bishop). At some point in the defense proceedings I pointed to the difference between “God as a concept” and “God as personal experience”. The monsignor’s subsequent remarks revealed to me his surprise at recognizing the difference seemingly for the first time.

A learning conversation is possible when people talk about their experiences, but unlikely among people attached to their respective concepts. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn edited such a learning conversation on “Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: An Ecumenical Dialogue”. Mystical union is a personal experience of God; which is different from theological concepts of God. Do you think a learning conversation is equally possible between a Jewish theologian, a Christian theologian and a Muslim theologian?

Working with mental models is one of the five disciplines of a learning organization, according to guru Peter Senge. Below is a slide from one of my presentations on organizational learning, which lists some skills in working with our own mental models.

Staying too long in a professional area of practice or in an academic discipline or in a type of work poses the danger of being stuck with the concepts in that area or type of work. One way of continuously refreshing one’s repertoire of concepts is to shift or learn a completely new area of professional practice.

It worked for me…several times.

After a bachelor’s degree in physics, I took an M.S. and Ph.D. in physical biology. The new concepts in the life sciences were completely new and different from those of the physical sciences and mathematics. After I earned my doctoral degree I practiced through consulting in environmental management, which added the human and social dimensions. Afterwards, I accepted a position in policy studies in a university think tank, which introduced me to governance and equipped me to later accept an appointment in the Philippine government as Assistant Director General for Policy of a government body that directly provides analysis and policy advice to the Philippine President. For seven years I was immersed in the real world of politics and governance. What a change! In shifting from the academe to government, the learning opportunities opened before me were literally vast! When I went back to the academe, my interests went to development and non-government organizations. I co-founded CCLFI, a non-profit foundation for organizational learning and change, knowledge management (KM) and knowledge-based development. That was 13 years ago [as of August 2011], when I practically started KM in the Philippines and at the University of the Philippines. What a learning journey!

I learned to:

• Shift my area of professional practice several times, thus preventing me from being stuck on the concepts of one area;
• Compare, cross-fertilize and synergize concepts of one discipline with those of another;
• See that different principles from two or more disciplines are actually the same principle, e.g. the Weber-Fechner law in psychology is essentially the same principle as the law of diminishing marginal utility in economics, and the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics is parallel to Hawthorne effect in sociology;
• Integrate knowledge across disciplines, e.g. see the different forms of capital across economics, ecology, psychology, organizational development, law, political science, etc. and call them “metacapital”; and
• Discern trans-disciplinal patterns, e.g. trans-societal Megatrends #1 (see blog Q14) and Megatrend #2 (see blog Q26), or “connect the dots” across seemingly unrelated facts, e.g. the growing importance of intangibles (see blog F2).

Cheers!

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The Reflective Knowledge Worker

If self-reflection (or similar internal listening skills; see my last blog post on “Learning How to Learn”) is a key to successful business leadership, then self-reflection is also a key to success for knowledge workers.

• Productivity is improved by technology and by management tools such as the Deming cycle, TQM and KM, but — according to Chris Argyris — the limits or envelope of productivity can be pushed even further by double-loop learning which requires the skill of self-feedback (see blog posts “D17- Single-Loop Learning versus Double-Loop Learning” and “Practice Internal Double-Loop Learning”)
• The “Ultimate Warrior” is the soldier that possesses both technological mastery and self mastery (see blog post “Q10- “Power of the Third Kind” for Political Conflicts”)
• According to learning organization guru Peter Senge, two of the five disciplines in organizational learning are personal mastery and mental models. Both require internal listening skills. Senge and his colleagues had developed tools for explicit group management of tacit individual thinking processes, such as “left-hand column,” “ladder of inference,” systems dynamics diagrams, etc. Tools for dialogue developed by Senge’s student, William Isaacs, similarly require the skill of reflection (see blog post “D19- Debate versus Discussion versus Dialogue”)
• Personal KM is at the foundation of effective organizational KM (see blog post “Can We Manage Knowledge?”) and personal KM requires internal listening (see “Learning how to learn”)
• Unlearning is a difficult skill that depends on awareness of one’s assumptions and mental models. Mankind’s track record in unlearning is dismal: it takes decades for people to unlearn paradigms that no longer work for them (see “Q8- Wanted: Workable Tools for Voluntary Paradigm Shifting”)

What is the first practical step in learning self-reflection? From my experience, the doorway to learning internal listening skills is conscious moment-to-moment control of attention.

Practice it now. As you read these words, your attention is on the computer screen. If a phone rings now, your attention will be diverted to the telephone and to what the caller is saying. After the call, you revert your attention to reading this blog post starting from where you left off.

All of these are externally-focused and externally-driven attention. As much as 99% of our attention at the workplace is external.

Practice being also aware of how your mind is responding to what you are reading now. Is there agreement, or doubt? Does your mind shoot off on something you remember that is related to what you just read? Is your mind now making a silent internal conversation stemming from the ideas expressed here? Are you noticing any discomfort triggered by a word or phrase? Is your interest level moving up or down?

It all starts by your decision to consciously control where you focus your attention. There are times when your mind — without your conscious control or decision — shoots off in a different direction while you are attending, say, a meeting. In each such occasion of absent-mindedness you miss what is being said for several seconds.

The mind — the prime tool and asset of knowledge workers — is often like a poorly-tamed horse that literally gets off-track every now and then. And worse, the horse rider (=we) fails to notice this most of the time! Control of the horse begins with conscious attention: the horse rider must direct his attention on his horse consciously and every moment along the way.

The knowledge worker depends very much on his horse; therefore he must be a constantly alert horse rider.

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Q28- Recap of KM Virtues and Gaps, or Will KM Disappear?

This Q Series had been a successful one; 16,267 hits came in since it started. We end this blog series with this summarizing post. To better appreciate an item that strikes you, I suggest reading the blog which explains that point. The blogs are accessible from this post through embedded links (which appear as colored text). While pressing “Ctrl”, you can click on the colored text to create a new tab to read the previous blog post referred to.

Virtues of KM and OL (organizational learning):

• In the global knowledge economy, value is being created more by intangible assets, which include knowledge assets, than by tangible assets. KM can help managers address value creation more effectively and comprehensively.
• A value added from KM is an integrative framework that cuts across HRD, IT, QM, etc. — management tools that look at “slices” of organizational reality.
• Examining the validity of our often unstated or unconscious assumptions and beliefs that affect our decisions and actions is a valuable process in OL. This is true whether applied at the individual, corporate or international level.
• Innovative OL tools developed by Senge and his colleagues are in the area of innovation itself: sensing the emergent, and actively participating in bringing the emergent future into present reality.

Gaps in KM and OL practice:

• The use of the common word “knowledge” predisposes to much confusion and misunderstanding because among KM practitioners “knowledge” has a specific meaning different from the common meanings of the word.
• KM focuses on cognitive factors, and tends to ignore affective, including motivational factors that also determine performance.
• KM does not address the more important and prior question of “for whom?” and “what for?” KM to support creation of market value could lead to different management decisions from KM to support creation of social value. KM for the development sector is complicated by the different interests and goals of the many actors involved.
• Some KM practitioners fail to align KM to organizational goals. They use supply-driven KM instead of demand-driven KM, or knowledge-push instead of knowledge-pull approaches. Good KM that starts with what internal and/or external customers want is not always practiced.
• Corporate KM can unwittingly support sub-optimization, or corporate value creation that entails social costs outside the corporation.
• Double-loop learning is well-known as a concept but its practice seems rare. Double-loop learning looking at internal root-causes of a problem is an even rarer practice. OL has tools to bring out people’s unconscious/semiconscious limiting assumptions, yet it seems the practice of those tools is also rare.
• The plethora of KM frameworks is confusing. Examples are the knowledge cycle and maturity models where explicit alignment with organizational objectives is missing. We need a KM framework generic enough that it can be applied at the organizational, community, national and planetary levels.
• The intellectual capital framework is excellent for pointing managers’ attention to intangible assets. However, there are many other forms of assets or factors that contribute to value creation than the three categories of intellectual capital.
• Some qualities of human capital (e.g. corruption) and of social capital (e.g. factionalism, conflict, ill reputation) result to value destruction.
• Knowledge is not the only ingredient for effective action and value creation. Intent is the second ingredient that KM practitioners must also recognize and manage. This is the reason why KM practitioners discover that (a) motivating knowledge workers often should accompany KM, and (b) power relations affect KM outcomes.
• Managing knowledge that is already there is not as important as creating new knowledge; personal and organization tools for accelerating innovation are important.

What we need next, a new KM or the next discipline after KM:

• KM is about improving how team members work together. We need smarter ways of sensing and understanding each other’s meanings and values in order to better work together or at least to avoid wasteful conflicts.
• If KM is about seeking “what works better”, then we need a kind of KM that looks into how we structure our institutionalized goals. For example, a “triple bottom line” works better for the greater majority of the population than a purely financial bottom line.
• Mankind’s unlearning cycles take years, decades and even centuries. We need new and better tools for voluntary and conscious paradigm shifting.
• Learning in a group context is potentially superior to individual isolated learning. We need more and better tools for group learning particularly in groups that consist of people with diverse interests or conflicting values.
• For the sake of individual and world peace, we need new and better tools to enhance bridging social capital: generative dialogue, dialogue of civilizations, bridging leadership, etc.
• Since KM is for effective action, we need a deeper KM that can extend the limits of human performance, such as by extending the ability of a person to control his own inner states.
• We need a new and better OL which can extend our individual capacities to learn from daily life. We need a “finer-toothed comb” for maximizing our individual processes of learning, for understanding the broad scope of learning and for improving our operational knowledge of group memory and intra-organizational knowledge flows.
• We need to understand the deeper nature of human creativity and innovation, and apply that in solving many serious problems in our planet.
• Because power affects KM outcomes, we need a new analytics of power in relation to value creation and value destruction. Social innovations can be better understood in terms of a scale of value creation/destruction.
• Innovations most crucial for solving serious world problems lie along tacit-group processes, which I labelled “indigo practices.” We need a new science and technology for innovating indigo practices. New paradigm shifts are required for this to happen, including at the very foundations of current scientific practice and current left-brain dominant educational systems.
• The term “knowledge management” may not last long but I believe the underlying need to create and manage intangible assets in the new global economy would stay much longer (74% of Gross World Product is created by intangible assets).

We will start the new L Series on “Indigo Learning Practices” in the next blog. Stay tuned in!

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Tacit-Group Processes in KM

Tacit-group processes and factors in the lower left quadrant in the expanded KM framework (see diagram below reproduced from the previous blog post) are often the weaknesses in KM initiatives.

Expanded KM framework at the planetary level

The following are examples:

• An e-group for knowledge sharing is set up, but knowledge sharing hardly occurs because the intended users hardly know and trust each other and do not share similar goals.
• A knowledge fair organized by a vice president is hardly attended by staff under another vice president because of factionalism between the two vice presidents.
• A know-it-all CEO shoots down new ideas, generating an organizational culture of anti-suggestion and anti-innovation.
• Communication and productivity of a team suffered after an egotistical new member started to ruin the working relationships among the team members.
• An organization-wide KM program was not fully accepted by all senior managers and started to falter; a mid-course evaluation by an outside consultant diagnosed the problem as lack of change management that should have accompanied the processes of design and roll-out of the KM program.

The lower-left quadrant is about TACIT-GROUP processes and factors: trust, shared goal or mutual agreement, unity (or factionalism), shared vision (e.g. Gaia consciousness), organizational culture, teamwork, mutual understanding of a group work process, general acceptance, etc. “Ba” of Ikujiro Nonaka belongs to this quadrant.

According to philosopher Ken Wilber’s integral framework, there are four types of knowledge. There are “Four Faces of Truth.”

Compare Ken Wilber’s integral framework with the expanded KM framework. The two frameworks are consistent (I wrote about this in a paper to be published by EADI/IKM).

Now, back to the importance of tacit-group processes. Without Gaia consciousness among earth’s inhabitants, I doubt how they can solve common problems such as the global environmental crisis. Ken Wilber said that resolution of this crisis lies in tacit-group processes:

“Before we can even attempt an ecological healing, we must first reach a mutual understanding and mutual agreement among ourselves as to the best way to collectively proceed. In other words, the healing impulse comes from championing not functional fit but mutual understanding and interior qualitative distinctions. Anything short of that, no matter what the motives, perpetuates the fracture.”

Peter Senge summarized his best-seller book “The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization” by affirming the fundamental importance of tacit-group processes:

“The central message of The Fifth Discipline is… that our organizations work the way they work, ultimately, because of how we think and how we interact.”

With apologies to Peter Senge, what is the message when we replace the word “organization” with “planetary society”?

The central message of The Fifth Discipline is… that our planetary society works the way it works, ultimately, because of how we think and how we interact.

Is ours a “learning planetary society”? If not, are we getting there?

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