On Making Progress
ARTICLE
Our work and lives are now busier than ever, yet we seem to make little to no progress on our most pressing and important challenges. Organisations are struggling to implement digital transformations and exploit new technologies, cultural change agendas are lacking momentum, and the pace of complex reform and regulatory agendas is leaving a wake of failures and questions about viability of organisations, institutions and sectors.
It’s not just happening within organisations. Progress on global issues is also frustratingly slow or non-existent. Challenges like slowing global warming, meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, making meaningful improvements to the lives of Indigenous peoples, creating societal norms that value ageing and caring for the frail, dealing with homelessness and child poverty and addressing violence against women persist despite the focus and efforts of many.
Why is it so?
A cursory look at the average person’s workday will reveal a jumble of meetings, at least some of them back-to-back, an inbox clogged with requests and a list of compliance and operating requirements, and risk assessments as long as your arm. At the same time, these big collective challenges are not easily ticked off a to-do list – they are complex, adaptive and contested. Our organisations are built on hierarchies and are often ill-equipped to unleash ideas, free up potential, and spur innovation. We persist with mechanistic hierarchies that breed activity for activity sake, and demand that people wait for higher authority before acting. They are not designed for novel experimentation or for challenges that cross siloed boundaries. It’s no wonder we’re feeling exhausted and floundering. Our workplaces are simply not enabling the conditions, headspace, time or capacity to engage in the types of work essential to making progress on our most complex challenges.
Think about your own context and the work that is the most difficult to progress. This work probably has a few things in common:
It is contested – not everyone has the same view about how to proceed and yet it requires collaboration, agreement between and efforts by multiple people or groups
The context around the work is changeable and unpredictable, making decisive action difficult
Applying “best practices” or established solutions doesn’t yield results
There are interpersonal challenges in the form of undiscussables, hidden motives, legacy conflicts, work avoidance, pluralistic ignorance and politics and messiness.
The context of geopolitical instability, the real threat of climate catastrophe and the potential of further and worsening global pandemics.
A challenging phenomenon we see is that people are reassuring each other that progress IS being made, when evidence indicates otherwise. In these instances, the reassuring pull of toxic positivity is strong. It’s tempting to believe we are tackling the real issues, but in reality we may be settling for the satisfying feeling of task completion at the expense of making real progress.
At the very time when we need to shift towards models that can accelerate collective progress, we are perpetuating old habits that make the work harder instead of easier. In our work at the Centre for Collective Leadership, we keep hearing people talk about their work as being like the experience of “walking in treacle”. For example:
Holding a regular meeting with the intention of bringing people together on shared challenges but the meeting does not automatically translate to collaboration.
Waiting on positional leaders to make key decisions or provide permission before taking action results in lengthy delays.
Sourcing “answers” from experts can feel satisfying but because expertise isn’t being combined from multiple sources and contextualised, the expert answers aren’t always contributing to progress.
We also often hear the worrying view that an increasingly individualistic focus is creeping into our organisations – where “my career” is more important than realising real outcomes, impact or innovation. This may be a function of despair, competition and economic headwinds. But when combined with the effort, investment and skill it takes to bring people together on complex challenges and with many of us still experiencing a state of post-pandemic languishing, we have a recipe for inertia.
We have seen so many examples of this in organisations recently:
A group charged with leading an integrated program drawing from multiple government agencies with different legislation, funding arrangements, and program guidelines was frustrated with what they saw as a lack of engagement of colleagues from other agencies despite a regular 30 minute online forum to report and update on progress. In turn, they tried to exert more centralised control over the work program, pulling rank on their colleagues by escalating non-progress to higher level officers, and internally blaming the other agencies for their low engagement.
A cross-sector leadership development initiative didn’t deliver on its potential because senior leaders were reluctant to share their challenges for fear of being judged by others, or their failures being weaponised by competitors.
A large private sector organisation’s leadership team struggling to compete in a shrinking market with new entrants of smaller more agile businesses, convinced themselves that this was a passing phase and things would cycle back to “normal”. The solution - just ride it out. This meant staff did not have the will or the mandate to experiment with innovations, novel ideas or new ways of working.
A large agency with a highly qualified, experienced, and ambitious workforce unable to shake their culture of competitiveness, siloed structures and individual needs for power and control failed to deliver on a substantial integrated program of work resulting in millions of wasted dollars, over-runs and missed opportunities for real impact.
How can we refocus and realign our efforts?
We recognise there are many and varied views on this, and no definitively right or wrong answers. Here are some we prioritise in our work, and have found helpful in building and maintaining momentum and progress:
Foster leadership everywhere – progress on tough challenges requires the facilitation of genuinely collective work and distributed leadership. “It’s the logic that all of us are smarter than any of us… The role of organisations and leaders fundamentally is to facilitate and create a space for participation … rather than either to command or to serve.” Jon Alexander, Co-Founder of New Citizenship Project
Undertake small experiments, learn from the results and adapt strategies as needed (Dave Snowden often talks about exaptive and novel practice when describing responses for complex challenges)
Use double loop models for review so that learning and adaptation is built into the rhythm of complex programs of work. Chris Argyrus’ work “Teaching Smart People how to Learn” is a good reference point to understand the power of double loop learning cultures and practice.
Use and adapt methods like the Most of Significant Change to build a culture of story gathering and sharing. Creating opportunities for shared learning and insights that enable adjustments and improvements to be made quickly rather than waiting for a formal evaluation and the associated hefty report.
Find the “zone of productive disequilibrium” as Ron Heifetz puts it, to continue to make progress through the discomfort and difficulty of working with complex, adaptive challenges.
Be consistently curious about your specific context, others’ perspectives and how things are changing and adapting in response to action (and inaction!) across the system. As Einstein said – “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
Reflect on your own responses and the role you are playing. The Inner Development Goals (IDG) Framework provides a good starting point for this and the IDG movement provides a growing source of inspiration and education about the role our inner lives play in facilitating change
Replace reactivity with responsiveness – sensing and responding to emerging needs and unexpected consequences as new information and new issues arise. The days of setting a detailed plan and following it to the letter are long gone.
Have a propensity for action – at a recent event Dr June Oscar AO spoke on the need for urgent progress for a more equitable future for Indigenous Australians “Learn by listening, then get on with the doing, its time.”
"Transformations towards a world in balance require a new narrative of leadership as stewardship - the ability to responsibly and cooperatively shape the future so that vitality and resilience are attainable for everyone."
Dr. Petra Kuenkel, Author, Future competence stewardship
Making progress in complex challenges is not easy. Our urgent collective challenge is to move away from old habits, biases, paradigms and social norms that are no longer serving us so we can make the real progress essential for our times.
Busy-work and inertia are the enemies of progress. The leadership work ahead of us is collective, creative, responsive, and courageous. It is work performed by everyone, everywhere and it doesn’t have time to wait for perfect solutions. It is experimental, and underpinned by curiosity and perpetual action through taking the “best next steps”, and then reviewing, iterating, and trying again. If we’re going to break the cycle of busy, productivity focused work that isn’t getting us where we need to go, we really must make substantial and sustained shifts in our organisations and institutions as a matter of urgency.