A Purpose And A Place
Harmonizing Elements to Create an Organization with
Rhythm
The challenge of finding new ways of working
together is ever-present in today’s global
marketplace. Geographical boundaries have been
virtually eliminated, redefining our workplaces and
workspaces. We are now able to work from home, but in
many ways we are struggling to see beyond the fences in
our backyards—beyond our departments, companies,
fields of interest and expertise. If we truly want our
work to be effective, productive and innovative, we
need to create a sense of unity and connection by
organizing a space that brings many together for one
purpose. How do we create this shared space? Frank
Heckman’s approach: move things. Move people by
identifying a common goal, move each other by
recognizing each person’s strengths and move the
organization by aligning all of these elements to
create an organization that can dance. Heckman stresses
the importance of pursuing a common purpose—the
rest will naturally flow.
Heckman’s ideas integrate his experience as
a writer, consultant, athlete and Judo, Aikido and
Csikzentmihalyi master. He is currently one of the
leaders in applying open systems thinking and
participative design methods in Europe and the United
States. This approach is meant to support the creation
of active, adaptive workplaces and communities. Heckman
has also worked closely with the Dutch Olympic
committee to support and mentally prepare athletes and
coaches for the Sydney Olympic games.
News for a Change caught up with him in
the Netherlands where he is currently working on the
human resources portion of the giant multi-nation
European merger of Renault and Nissan automobile
companies. In this interview Heckman shares his unique
perspective on connecting people, places and movement
to create organizational rhythm.
NFC: The topic
today is helping leaders and managers create and
support teams and create the appropriate environment
for them. Starting teams and using team-based
management almost always involves training people. Your
approach to designing and training the people who will
be members of the teams is somewhat different. Could
you share with us how and why?
Heckman: My
notion on teams is something larger than putting people
together and training them how to work together. I
don’t think that we really need to do that. I
think it’s hard-wired into human nature that we
can work together. It’s much more important to
identify what it is that we want to work together
around. You don’t need a team first, you need a
topic. Get an idea, a question, a need, a prototype to
build, and then you create a shared space—a place
where people can elaborate on this idea, state their
views and start to build that prototype. Out of that
idea you begin to realize what the knowledge,
experience and brilliance is of the people in your
specific organization, community, etc. and they will
gather around that idea.
NFC: Not everyone
has the same understanding of what you mean by
“shared space.”
Heckman:
Traditionally you think it’s just a department or
a place where a group of people can work together.
It’s not necessarily bricks—it can be
clicks. I’ve used the example of a mother in
Australia running a farm. She gets her supplies through
e-mail ordering. She has a child that she doesn’t
understand and she sends an e-mail of concern out to
the world and people pick up on it and realize this
woman is talking about a child that is very possibly
autistic. They respond to her and there’s ongoing
communication and within months there is a site where
people all over the world are discussing autism. All of
a sudden, this mother has a shared space in which she
has learned how to deal with her own child. Shared
space can also be an actual place, whether it’s
virtual or networked or whether it’s real bricks,
that’s one thing. A place where people can
elaborate and work together on something is another
thing.
NFC: Back to what
you were saying about the notion of teams and working
together...
Heckman: Most
organizations are still quite traditional. I work in
Holland, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy and the United
States. There are some changes from culture to culture
but we’re all struggling with our way of working
together, which I call organization. Organization is
more of an active form rather than a noun. Looking at
new ways to work together is the real key to effective,
productive and innovative organizations. But if we go
in a more traditional form and build teams, those teams
sometimes are just new wine in old sacks.
NFC: It’s
like the example of asking people to be cucumbers, but
when they are put back in the same old pickle jar they
become pickles again, real quick. Something else has to
change.
Heckman:
That’s right. I can give you wonderful examples
of things that seem progressive and new but really
aren’t. I work with one of the fastest growing
cable technology firms in Europe and maybe the world.
In order for them to sell their product, they need to
certify at an international level. Basically, they need
to specify every single step in the construction of the
new technology and go through an international board of
examiners. It’s a very hard, trying process. You
need to be fast because if you lose your certification
or you don’t make it, then the second round is
six months later and your competitors may be ahead of
you. The firm was doing this unsuccessfully and they
missed their first round of international
certification.
When I came in to look, they had their hardware
teams, software teams, logistics people and their
testing people working day and night and through the
weekends—young people, engineers from India,
Greece, America, Holland, and France. I looked at the
groups and then I asked management, “Will you
allow me to give this group the power to see if they
can actually make their deadline?” They said,
“Frank, do anything you can as long as we make
the certification.” I brought them together and
basically asked if they could make week 43. They said,
“No. We can’t make it.” And I asked,
“Then why do you try?” They said,
“Because management says we have to, but we think
it’s unrealistic.” Then I asked them,
“Why don’t you take a day and see if you
can make a realistic plan. And then we will hold that
plan against the deadline one more time.” They
collectively designed a new plan, looked at that
deadline again, and after a day and a half, they said,
“We can do it.” The teams started to work
in an entirely different way. I’m talking about
four teams that were one team and they had never worked
together, they had always passed the buck on to each
other.
NFC: So the only
difference was that they discussed all of the
scheduling and a new plan together rather than
separately.
Heckman: It was
an integral approach. It seemed as though they all had
one goal, which was trying to get the technology to
work to be certified. They looked at their technical
problems and started a whole new way of
working—breaking some paradigms just out of the
group conversations they had. They found, without any
interventions from the outside, that their professional
hang-up was that they thought when you made a good
amount of money and had a nice leased car, all that
stuff, that if you had a technical problem you were
supposed to solve it by yourself. They realized that
doesn’t always work. There were many times when
people were sitting on problems for 2-3 days because
they thought they needed to master it. And out of these
sessions, they realized that they could put colors to
problems: red—get help and green—go ahead.
If they had a hard time defining a problem, they always
looked for a second person. When the definition was
there and you couldn’t see a good procedure, they
went to a third person. So they tackled their issues
head on and solved more technical problems in six weeks
than they had done in the last seven months. It’s
a different way of opening up an organization.
Teaming works best if the organization is
prepared to put talent above the structure. If
management is prepared to say, “These people know
their business and if we pool that intelligence around
real issues, then we will figure out how you should
organize yourself around the project with real outcomes
and real deadlines.” This is very different from
priming people to work together and giving them special
skills hoping that this will add to the outcome of some
kind of process, product or service.
NFC: You’ve
been meeting with coaches and managers involved with
the Dutch Olympic teams. Are their problems the same?
Some of those sports are called team sports but
they’re really not. What’s different about
that sort of thing? What have you learned?
Heckman: I feel
that it’s the adaptive relationship that the
individual needs to make in his most direct work
environment, within his organization, within society.
These adaptive relationships are very critical in the
workplace today. Individuals, whether they’re top
athletes or in the workplace, can no longer go on a
cosmetic charge. By that I mean it’s no longer
about the functional task that you perform well in your
organization. Even an organization puts the emphasis on
task and function. What we do is strongly appeal to a
person to understand that each and every one of us has
a gift—core qualities that are very personal and
individual and these need a chance to be expressed so
that function and expression somehow become one. We use
a process in which people write small essays about
achievements in their lives. Sometimes I call them
“flow” experiences and I bring in the
theory and practice of Csikszentmihalyi—meaning
that people have certain moments in their lives where
they are completely immersed in their activity and at
the same time they bring out the best. These
reflections, upon those best moments in their lives,
are very critical to the work. People exchange these
stories without being interrupted in small groups. The
participants listen very carefully and they write down
the talents and qualities that they hear surfacing
through the story. They feedback those qualities to
each other and that’s their gift to one another.
That’s also a foundation of having people share
and actually become aware of their core qualities. This
personal piece is very critical because it’s the
adaptation between the individual and his or her direct
work environment, direct team, family, friends,
whatever it is.
NFC: You’re
charged with an individual task and you get stuck.
Whether you’re working on electronics or running
hundred-meter hurdles, what you know is that you can go
to your teammates. I go to John, who knows nothing
about hurdling, but he does know something about
training. And he may be able to help me out.
Heckman: I was
asked to do some work with a group of athletes just
before the Sydney Olympic games. I brought 30 athletes
together from all different disciplines; Judo, skating,
rowing, track and field. I asked them the question:
“Reflect upon a time in your life when you had an
extraordinary experience—a full experience in the
match, the game or the race that you were in.”
Those events when you had an ultimate challenge that
you could meet with enough skills, butterflies in your
stomach, and all of the sudden you went—you were
in flow—you had that wonderful experience where
you felt you were just going, somewhat on an automatic
pilot. They shared the quality of the experience in
small groups of four. The group members were from all
different sports and disciplines, but there were
amazingly similar kinds of elements that came
out—also some surprising ones. All of the sudden
they realized that they could learn from each other. It
was a unique way of looking at sports across the
boundaries of your discipline, which was hardly ever
done.
NFC: They ended
up doing the same as your group of engineers. Were the
coaches involved?
Heckman: I did
the same thing with the coaches. There were coaches
from the national hockey team who won the gold, coaches
from track and field and a Judo coach who won the gold,
I asked them the same question. It was very interesting
what people were saying because they were surprising
themselves about what they thought was really important
in those experiences. They’re very result
oriented. This is a business where you’re either
a good coach or a bad coach. And it has nothing to do
with who you are as a person, but it has everything to
do with who wins. So this is a different focus. Then,
the coaches went into the theory of teams and of what I
call the new way of working together. And I put out a
few statements. One of the statements was:
“People in isolation cannot develop.” A lot
of work paradigms and the way we organize work are
based on separating out and fragmentation. Many of the
coaches, put the specialists out—the software,
the hardware people—just as much in the
workplace. The marathon runner goes off with his coach
to the right environment, or a better training program,
and then they work hard. And I said, just to take track
and field as an example, “How many of these
athletes would not have a great benefit of sharing
experiences and having shared spaces where they can
actually work out together?” And one of the
coaches started to laugh and he said, “Frank, you
hit it right on the nail. Because we didn’t want
this, but this year we’ve been forced by our
athletes. They’re saying, ‘We want to train
together’ And we say, ‘No way, we’re
doing it our way, they’re doing it their way.
I’m not going to share my kitchen with somebody
else with a hidden agenda.’ And then they said,
‘Okay, you guys don’t come, we’re
going to train together.’”
So there is a notion that they want to break with
that ancient way of always separating out. And this is
just track and field. Flow is a very key concept
because it really puts an emphasis on the quality of
experience, how to make sense out of it and how to use
the data to help each other and learn.
NFC: In thinking
about how you got to where you are now, how much do you
think you’ve drawn from your earlier involvement
with martial arts, Judo and Aikido? Did that have any
impact on how you approach these kinds of
problems?
Heckman:
It’s very interesting. I was interviewed
yesterday for a journal called Quality of Life and the
title of the article is going to be “Moving in
Freedom.” I think in a sense these are two
parameters that I look at. Movement and freedom have to
be friends somehow. If there’s no freedom,
there’s no movement. We’re stuck. When I
look at organizations I always look at movement in a
sense. An organization that’s healthy has
movement, but not just haphazard movement. It has a
distinct rhythm. Small entrepreneurship or a small,
fast-growing, high-tech company has a very different
rhythm than a ministry or agriculture.
NFC: You’re
talking in terms of movement or motion, and I directly
relate that to music. One group’s motion or
rhythm might be jazz, and one group’s might be a
string quartet, symphonic or flamenco. But it’s
distinct. We use the term that each organization has a
culture.
Heckman:
That’s right and that culture has a specific
rhythm and it is not just a rhythm that is in
isolation, but it is a rhythm that makes sense in the
context of which they need to produce and provide their
services. So that rhythm is in sync, there is dynamism
between their rhythm, their market and their
society.
NFC: Actually,
when you watch dance, it’s a combination of music
and the physical movement. I’ve heard you talk
about the organizational dance.
Heckman: If you
asked me what my background does, it is a very simple
thing. If things don’t go very well, something is
usually stuck and doesn’t move. I think I have a
good sense of feeling where things are stuck very
quickly and not trying to loosen it up and do a
piece-meal solution. If you move something into a wrong
rhythm or to a wrong measure, it may screw up an entire
organization. It’s like when you want a group of
soldiers to go over a bridge, you don’t want them
to walk in a march rhythm because they can actually
destroy the bridge. If you just move something that is
stuck without the context of that organization and the
rhythm of the music that you’re hearing, you may
create more problems than you think. It’s very
important to see it in the context of the whole to
understand what rhythm is needed. In martial arts,
it’s the same thing. It’s a continuous
environmental scan that you do by looking at your
opponent anticipating and moving in rhythm with that
opponent.Basically, if you are able to crawl into the
skin of the other, which is ultimate
communication—fighting is often seen as hard and
one against one, but in fact it is ultimate
communication—if you can do that then
you’ve reached what they call a master
level.
NFC: Which means
to go forward doesn’t always mean going straight
ahead.
Heckman:
That’s absolutely true.
May
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My Kingdom
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