On the edge of my curiosity

Peggy Holman shares her change-is-changing insights with Lucy Garrick (OSR 12). Peggy is co-author of The Change Handbook, now in its second edition, and is the keynote speaker for the OSR Annual Conference on Saturday, June 28.

LG: What brought you to change work?

PH: I come out of the world of software. During the early days of the cellular phone industry, my company brought in a quality expert to help us with a project that was in trouble. I’d never seen a professional facilitator before and as I watched what he was doing I thought, “If I knew more about that we’d be better at delivering software systems.” I spent the next three years engaged in a company-wide adoption of Total Quality that made us the best in the industry by virtually every measure.

Thinking I understood change, I started to do some work and instantly fell flat on my face. That’s when I actually started to learn what change work was about. By then, our vice president of quality had hired me to find out what was on the leading edge of change and learning organizations. It was shortly after The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge came out. I ran into new practices like dialogue, appreciative inquiry, open space technology and future search. I looked for places inside the company where we could experiment.

Later, when I was doing quality work at Weyerhaeuser Company I found internal consultants interested in learning about the whole systems change practices. They were asking practical questions, like “What are these practices?” “How do I prepare myself?” “How do I prepare my managers?” “How do I choose among these practices?” There weren’t good ways to find those answers and that’s how the first edition of The Change Handbook came about.

My thought was to have the creators of the practices speak in their own voices and to put their practices in a format that answered the questions people were asking me. The second edition came about because people were asking for more up-to-date stories and to hear about new practices in the field.

What is the underlying question that defines your work as change is changing?

I carry questions with me all the time. Right now one is, “How do we seed grow, and evolve inspired organizations and enlightened communities?”

Many of the systems that sustain us, for example, health care, education, governance, are fracturing, making it critical to develop capacity and skills to change whole systems. We are being called to work at greater scale and depth — across organizations, industries, sectors, cultures and other dimensions, not just across functions within organizations.

The context in which we work is also changing. It is a time of discontinuous change demanding complex adaptive approaches rather than incremental and linear ones. We cannot know in advance what useful solutions will be so it is more productive to focus on a field of meaningful possibilities from which unexpectedly productive outcomes can emerge. I have found that successful processes engage individuals and the collective in more inspired ways of being and doing.

What advice do you have for communicating these ideas to traditional organizations? How can we help executives understand the practical values of whole systems change?

First, don’t try to sell it. Be discerning about whom you take as clients. If you choose people who want your change work to serve their old assumptions and purposes, it is unlikely to be a happy engagement. Look for leaders who are comfortable with themselves and willing to be curious about the unknown or are desperate for real change and willing to let themselves be changed by the experience. Like any good consulting relationship, it requires experience and a trusted partnership between client and practitioner.

Doing this work is not trivial; the greater value comes through outcomes that emerge from inviting the whole system into the challenge and believing that this will exceed the goals set by a leader on behalf of the system. One example is a pharmaceutical company I worked with awhile back. They were faced with a common challenge: work/life balance. Their management had set specific targets that were not being reached. They invited employees from across the organization to a gathering to address the question. Not only did they uncover a variety of solutions, many completely outside the frame of reference of the leadership group, but in the process, they discovered a number of previously unknown thought leaders among the employees to actually put the ideas into practice simply and quickly.

How is your personal experience informing your professional practice?

Since entering the unknown, a given when doing transformational work, often creates dissonance, I believe a personal practice to stay centered and grounded is essential. I do my best to maintain a meditation and exercise practice three to five times a week. I also use an affirmation I developed out of my personal sense of calling which, repeated daily, keeps me in touch with that core place in me.

A great part of my time is spent working on my own learning edge and living in the questions I carry. Sometimes the questions seem paradoxical.

For example, “How do we take conversational practices to scale?” I doubt this will happen through professional change agents getting groups of 300, 500, or 700 people in the room. It’s not fast enough. So what are the viral dynamics that enable conversations that matter — those about the challenges and aspirations that inform our world — to travel easily and have sufficiently broad impact?

My counterpart question is, “What are the deeper patterns? What are the theories that inform the effectiveness of these practices that enable us to do something useful together?” Going viral will require professional work to tease out these patterns powerfully enough to pass on the work in ways that make further professional interventions unnecessary. This tension keeps me continually working with both theory and practice as each informs the other.

What can you say more about the relationship between how change is changing and collective wisdom and trauma in social systems?

It is a big question. We see collective trauma in sky rocketing prices, job loss, loss of health care or natural disasters. Still, I’m tremendously optimistic because these challenges have stimulated a lot of exciting collective experimentation just below the mainstream radar. My work with journalists is an example.

Traditional media is being shaken to its roots by the remarkable growth in citizen journalism and in all kinds of online experiments. One example is a project that came out of Journalism that Matters. The Common Language Project puts a human face on international stories. It was started by three people in their twenties. They are telling the stories that aren’t being told about the developing world and connecting them in ways that people in this country can relate to them. These young people traveled to places like Pakistan and Africa. They are telling stories through very human eyes — about issues like water and land and connecting the issues to local communities in such a way that they are getting picked up by larger media outlets such as National Public Radio. I call it possibility journalism. In addition to asking the “who, what, when, why and how” of traditional journalism, they are also asking, “Given all that’s going on, what’s possible now?”

They suddenly open the door to stories of hopes and dreams and aspirations. Here is an undercurrent of possibility that is shifting an industry that’s losing its audience and it’s advertisers.

As I have incorporated new practices into my work, each has brought me different learning and new inquiries. For example, Sandra Janoff told me that the essence of Future Search is that it provides a lived experience of the system. This opened me to an inquiry about the ways in which whole systems practices can help us discover ourselves as one facet of a system.

I have found a pattern that reflects the natural dynamics of emergence that I work with to increase the likelihood that collective wise action will occur. By asking powerful, attractive questions from the unexpressed heart of the system’s need, people show up authentically and receptively. Through the often messy sharing of diverse stories and perspectives, a tapestry of connection is woven that makes visible the common threads of experience and longing. As people discover that what is most personal is also universal they begin to take responsibility for what they individually and collectively love as an act of service. With practice, they begin to recognize that the places of tension and conflict are opportunities to get curious and ask yet another powerful attractive question. At that point, the pattern comes from within the system rather than as a designed activity brought by a consultant.

What kind of innate strengths are most useful for this new kind of change work?

The capacity to deal with differences successfully; to welcome disturbance; emergence requires the “not known.” I think these are skills that can be learned. This is a place where personal practice really matters.

What about change excites and connects you to your deepest self?

I have been saying that emergence is the learning edge of evolution. To be able to dance in the messiness of the unknown is where I feel most alive — a system finding it’s own natural path rather than doing specific steps for a specific outcome.

What is most intriguing about the projects you are currently working on?

I have found myself following my nose for projects. How do we create social, economic and spiritual well-being in social systems? How do we bring together the diverse voices from a lot of different settings and add a compassionate base to creating conversation circles? How do we go out and hold conversation circles and then come back and share what we are learning?

How would you like to be available in the field of change leadership?

I can be of most service where my curiosity edges up to the evolutionary demands of our times. If someone is looking for partners to change whole systems, contact me. I will continue to write and am happy to talk or speak about what I am learning.