An interview with Richard N. Knowles, PhD

Citation

(2013), "An interview with Richard N. Knowles, PhD", Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ccm.2013.13620baa.008

An interview with Richard N. Knowles, PhD

Article Type: Implementing care in Organizations From: Cross Cultural Management, Volume 20, Issue 2

By: Kristine Marin Kawamura, PhD, Lead Editor and Interviewer, Professor of Management, Director of MBA Programs, St. Georges University, Grenada, West Indies, e-mail: kristinekawamura@yahoo.com, Tel.: (1) 310 567 7603.

Interview date: 10 December 2012

Background

Richard N. Knowles worked in the Du Pont Company for 37 years, where he obtained 40 US Patents for his groundbreaking research in agricultural chemicals, industrial chemicals, animal repellents, process development, and flame retardants. In his later years at Du Pont, he focused on organizational change in various leadership positions such as Plant Manager, Director of Community Awareness, Emergency Response, and Industry Outreach. Dr Knowles is author of the The Leadership Dance: Pathways To Extraordinary Organizational Effectiveness (The Center for Self-Organizing Leadership 2002), in which he describes the Process Enneagram© Model he created. He has worked in numerous industries across the globe, including: steel mills, sugar mills, brick and tile factories, pipe and beam factories, wall board factories and quarries, accounting firms, public institutions, school boards, and nonprofits around the world, and helped establish industry/community dialogue groups such as the Industrial Liaison Committee in Niagara Falls and the Belle Community Advisory Panel. He served on the National Institute for Chemical Studies Board, in the EPA Office of Chemical Emergency Planning and Preparedness, and on the Board of the Berkana Institute. In 2001, he and wife, Claire Knowles, founded the Center for Self-Organizing Leadership™, a consulting firm that helps people develop personal and organizational coherence and improve organizational performance. Among his awards are the Du Pont Agricultural Products Crystal Award for the Championing of Human Potential and the EPA Region III Chemical Emergency Planning and Preparedness Partnership Award.

Summary

Dr Richard Knowles describes the foundation and use of the Process Enneagram© to create more coherent, energized, committed, and creative work environments and results. The Process Enneagram© is an organizational change model that is based on the philosophical and scientific understanding of living systems and the living patterns and processes of work. Leaders may transform themselves and their organizations by knowing, using, and integrating Self-Organizing Leadership, Strategic Leadership, and Operational Management Processes embedded in the Process Enneagram©. When we treat organizations as living systems, people at all levels of the organization are able to self-organize in purposeful ways around their work, become more leaderful, perform better, and find more meaning in their work and lives.

Interview

You’ve done transformational research into organizational systems and how people engage in their work. You have laid out a model called the Process Enneagram© that you have used to help leaders create healthier, and more human, effective, and creative organizational environments. What is the Process Enneagram©?

The Process Enneagram© is an archetypal pattern and reveals the processes of the way people interact and behave in organizations – and treats organizations as if they were living systems. It’s a simple rules-based process – present in all the organizations and cultures in which I’ve ever worked – that reveals the dynamical, flowing patterns and processes of life. (It is important to note that the use of the Process Enneagram© is quite different and separate from the use of the Enneagram of Personality.)

Organizations behave as if they are living systems. All living systems, [in fact,] obey a natural, pervasive tendency to “self-organize.” Nature displays this phenomenon at all levels of scale, from tiny bacteria to large ecosystems. People are self-organizing all the time: they experience this tendency when they gather to talk, work, or play. It’s so pervasive and subtle we don’t usually even notice it. The healthiest organizations are consciously centered in self-organizing processes which [exert] a powerful and natural force. As leaders and managers, we can learn how to engage with this force to create better, healthier, more sustainable organizations.

Leaders can use [the Process Enneagram©] to see, understand, and talk about the interactions and dynamics of people and organizations – so in part, it gives them a way to have a structured conversation. And, if they can begin to get a grasp of what they, along with their teams and organizational members, are actually doing when they work, they can then be able to use the Process Enneagram© to co-create their future together.

The enneagram was first introduced to the West in about 1915 by Gurdjieff in St. Petersburg, Russia. He believed that the enneagram was a tool for the conscious evolution of man. After reading numerous books about it, I modified it and created the Process Enneagram© in order to apply it to two problems I had been struggling with as a plant manager. My first question was, “Why do people get so tangled up in the way in which they work?” My second question was, “What happens in a crisis that enables these same people to quickly shift and work in extraordinarily effective ways?” I extended my studies to Meg Wheatley’s work relating to chaos and complexity and to the field of Systematics, developed by John Bennett.

My mission has been not only to make the Process Enneagram© work, but also to make it accessible to people. It’s fun to watch people come alive as they are using it – and the more you use it, the more alive the model becomes. I am constantly learning new things about the model; my learning process is never completed. Some people use [the Process Enneagram© patterns] intuitively – the people who do are wonderful to work with. It’s hard to learn from them, however, because they don’t have the language to help you see the model working; if you just watched them as if you were an apprentice, it would take ten years to understand what they are doing so naturally. What we have with the Process Enneagram© is a way that says, “Folks, here are the visible and invisible processes for how an organization works. We need to be mindful of them, and if we are, we can learn and get ever-so-much better.”

As an example of its use, I just got a note from my stepdaughter this morning that she had done a presentation at work on some financial things on which she was working. An outside consultant who was auditing their whole process was talking about how good her work was and how it needed to be recognized by [management] at the company. [My stepdaughter] told me she had used the Process Enneagram© to help her think through the financial process and design it so that it would work. So you can use the [Process Enneagram©] by yourself, as a team, or as an organization. You can use the Process Enneagram© on yourself – looking at yourself as a process. I like it because you don’t have to know 10,000 different models.

Could you describe what the Process Enneagram© looks like?

The Process Enneagram© model shows the patterns and processes of how living systems actually work (Figure 1). This is revealed in three patterns: a visible pattern that we have on the perimeter [of the map] which is described in nine points, an invisible pattern of self-organizing that underlies all work (which is [comprised of] Points 0, 3, 6, and 9 on the map), and the pattern that represents how specific work actually gets done (which is comprised of Points 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, 7, and back to 1).

Figure 1. The Process Enneagram©

So we have three systems that are all moving and functioning at the same time. The nine points on the circle are each unique attributes of the whole system.

Let’s start with the nine perspectives on the perimeter of the circle. What are they?

These perspectives are seen when you walk in the door of any organization. You can define all of these by asking a couple of questions. For example, Point 0 is Identity. Here you can ask people, what is their identity? What is their history – individually and collectively? Point 1 is Intention. Here, you ask, what are they trying to do? What are their intentions? What is their future potential? Point 2 is the Issues they are facing: what are their problems, dilemmas, paradoxes, and questions?

Point 3 is Relationship: what are people’s relationships like in the company? How are they connected to others in the system? What is the quality of these connections? Are there too many, or too few of them? Is there trust and interdependence? Point 4 is Principles and Standards: what are people’s principles and standards of behavior, their ground rules? Which ones are not talked about, but are always repeated? Point 5 is Work: what is the actual work being done?

Point 6 is Information: do people know what is going on in the organization? How do they create, handle, and share information? Point 7 is Learning. At this point, people may ask: what is the learning process in the company? Are they learning anything? What is the future potential that is opening up and emerging from this learning? Point 8 is Structure and Context: how are they organized – is their hierarchy deep or flat? Where do they get the energy that is used to make things happen in the organization? What is the context, or surrounding environment, in which they are living and working? Point 9 is their New Identity: as they have moved through these questions, how has their identity changed? What new things do they know? What new skills have they obtained?

If an organization is operating as a machine, rather than as a living system, people’s work will usually follow the nine points, in order, around the circle. While people may be conscious of some points (i.e. Points 1 and 2), they may also be unconscious of – or may ignore – others (like Points 3 and 4). If the organization is operating as a living system, however, the two other subsystems become really important to understand, and the actual living patterns and processes of work are different.

What does the subsystem of “self-organizing leadership” involve?

Self-organization is the deepest process that is always occurring in an organization, regardless of the specific work taking place. Self-organizing leadership has three parts: sharing information, building relationships, and clarifying identity and intentions. If you look at the Process Enneagram© Map, these parts are reflected in Points 6 [Information], 3 [Relationships], and 0 [Identity].

Leading is an activity. So if you’re leading an organization [or team], the first thing you have to do is to get out of your office. Step out. Don’t just sit in your office and hide – but make sure you know what you’re doing and have a clear message before you step out. When you step into your workplace, talk with people as people. Ask them things like: tell me about what you’re doing? Is there a better way to do this? How can I help you? What new things are coming to mind, for you? For many people working in an organization, [being asked questions like these] is a brand new experience, because they haven’t traditionally been treated this way. In the process of walking around, talking, and gathering information, you are developing relationships. And because it’s important to develop trust and interdependence in relationships, you have to be honest, you have to tell the truth.

The second thing you have to do is to give people the information they need to do their jobs. Don’t hoard or hide it. Open up the pathways. Let information flow freely. You want people to fix their own problems; you don’t fix them for them. There are some limits here, as there is always proprietary information or personnel information, things you cannot share. But by and large, you can share practically everything. The third thing you have to do is to help people see where they fit in – help them know their own as well as the organization’s identity.

When these three elements are in place, you are creating an environment where people are engaged – you will free people to be at their best, to make good decisions, and to make changes when and where they are necessary and positive for the organization. You will still have to make autocratic decisions sometimes, especially if problems or tensions come up and you have to address them quickly. You should address problems promptly, and work your organization back into self-organization when you are past [the problem].

How does self-organizing leadership relate to the leadership dance that you refer to in your book [The Leadership Dance (The Center for Self-Organizing Leadership 2002)]?

The Leadership Dance refers to three patterns of leadership that you can actually trace on the Process Enneagram©. Leaders must constantly use Self-Organizing Leadership, Strategic Leadership, and Operational Management Processes for the organization to be coherent and to function well. If you want to introduce something new, like develop a new quality program, you’ll want to use the Strategic Leadership Process which is comprised of Points 1 [Intention], 4 [Principles and Standards], and 7 [Learning and Potential]. If you want to implement the new quality program, you’ll want to use the Operational Management Process, which involves Points 2 [Issues and Ambiguities], 8 [Context and Structure], and 5 [Work]. If you overuse Strategic or Operational Management, or if you fail to connect to the Self-Organizing Processes of real work in the organization, you’ll create problems – you’ll drive the organization into incoherence.

The Leadership Dance means that leaders will “dance” among these three processes in a dynamic way – and they will consciously bring out what’s needed in each situation. If leaders can use all three of these processes, then they can create an alive, energized, and bubbling work organization. They can then help everyone in the organization be more conscious, pay attention to what’s happening inside, and outside themselves and their organization – and really engage in their work.

This sounds like a living system!

It behaves as if it is a living system.

Can you also describe the actual work that occurs in organizations – which you describe as “a living pattern and process of work?”

Sure. First, to have our work processes go well, we need to begin with a clear question that relates to the specific work we want to do. [This question] is developed by the workers involved, and it must be compelling enough in order for them all to have the interest and energy to get the work done. For example, they may ask, “How do we improve customer satisfaction in our organization?” “How do we improve safety?” “Who should be in our partner in this new market?”

Then the work follows the pattern of Points 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, 7, 1 [on the Process Enneagram© Map]. We move from first asking the question and identifying the need (Point 0) through all the next steps: Intention, Principles and Standards, Issues, Structures and Context, the Work itself, Learning, and then, back to Intention.

This pattern is moving in and out of the people on the right side of the Map, and it’s moving in and out of the organization on the left side. So there’s always an inside piece of work and there’s an outside piece of work, and it’s moving back and forth. The leader works with both sides to lead a transformation.

So “internal” means inside the organization’s walls, and “outside” means the external environment?

Internal can also mean “internal to the people,” because people make commitments to each other – inside of themselves – and they commit to hold to the ground rules so they can do the best work they can. It’s not about people always liking each other. Sometimes people can work together and do extraordinary stuff even if they don’t feel good toward each other. They can rise above that because the work they are doing is so important that they’re willing to set aside some of those negative feelings. So when they do work like this, it has to be work that’s important to the organization – it can’t be trivial.

You said that the Process Enneagram© can be used to hold a structured conversation. In your book, you stress how important it is to start with Identity and Intention and then go to Principles and Standards before you talk about Issues – the things you’re grappling with. Why is this so important that you follow this process when you’re working with an organization?

Okay, let’s assume our organization is a healthy family. We have tension between the mother and father. Neither of them sees the world in the same way. Neither of them understands things the same way. Yet, they have a great set of agreements together. They’re going to be faithful. They’re going to talk about things. They’re going to love [each other]. They’re going to say they’re sorry when they’ve messed up. They’re going to hold each other. But it is an unhealthy family if they don’t have an agreed-upon set of principles and standards – we hear about this every day when the tensions overflow and someone kills their spouse. So an agreed-upon set of principles and standards is paramount to the success of the family – and any organization. In another example, the tension issues in manufacturing (that never go away) are production and safety. Some people say, “Well, we can’t have good production if we have good safety.” I don’t, however, agree with that. If we get in there and talk about it together – and we understand what the goals are and how we are to do it – then things can turn out well. My experience at a large chemical plant in West Virginia, USA, was that while we were told we couldn’t reach excellence in safety performance, our leadership team [used the Process Enneagram©] to drop injury rates by over 95 percent and increase earnings by over 300 percent! We started the process with a conversation.

Often when there’s an either/or situation, people will argue and pull back-and-forth. Finally, [the situation] gets settled because [people] get tired. They compromise. If they do this, they will come out with something worse than what was possible.

Either/or situations can be seen as dyads. In many cases, like the production/safety dyad, the situation can be greatly improved by introducing a third force. If you begin with principles and standards such as: we’re going to risk with each other. We’re going to really try to understand what’s being said. We’re going to help each other. We’re going to tell the truth as best we can. Now, you can have a discussion about production versus safety [and make decisions to improve both areas at the same time]. The introduction of a third force usually results in a solution that is much better than anyone thought was possible at the start of the conversation. Many organizations are not able to have this kind of conversation, so they fall back onto existing values and habits; things really don’t change.

So it’s important that an organization has a well-defined and clearly-communicated vision, mission, and set of values, and these are part of everybody’s work and conversation, right?

Yes. And everyone needs to be involved in co-creating these. As a manager, I need input from all the people in the plant – from the girl who works in the laboratory to the clerical person, from the production, and maintenance people to the managers – and we talk about their inputs. My job as a manager was to help people to co-create the conditions – the principles and standards – under which the whole environment could improve, and then to serve as a referee to hold everyone accountable as we learned together.

In a self-organizing organization, we can have a lot of variety in how we do things, but we have to be pretty firm on why we do them and stick with that. Different people can do their work in different ways – and many of those ways may work! What you need is to have a strong – and well-understood – Bowl. As long as the Bowl is well understood – which is what I was trying to create as I walked the plant – people can work with a great deal of freedom. They get a big kick out of it; it’s important to them.

What is the Bowl?

The Bowl consists of the agreements that we develop together in ongoing conversations and as we create different iterations of the Process Enneagram©. They include our conditions for working together – things like a clear sense of our shared identity and intention, the operational behavior principles and standards of performance we’ve developed (based on our shared values), our key issues, our vision and mission, our strategic intent, values, and expectations. When people have a good sense of these, there’s a higher level of trust. People support each other. And when someone makes a decision, it is done within an environment that supports the organization.

This Bowl combines order, focus, and freedom for people in an organization. When I was a manager at Belle, for example, I discovered that I could back away from giving detailed directions to people – from acting in a “command-and-control” style. People could do almost everything themselves. A cycle emerged. As people operated with more freedom in their jobs, they found new ways of doing things, better ways of doing things. As they made a difference in their work, they got more meaning in their work – and with more meaning, much more energy and creativity began to flow than before. With this set up as an established work process, my role as manager became one of coaching and teaching.

When we treat organizations as living systems, the people in them will self-organize and, in turn, become more leaderful. And when an organization becomes more leaderful – when we treat organizations as if they are living systems that are comprised of the conditions, the principles, the standards, the vision, the mission where people have a good sense of it – there’s a higher level of trust. When people learn that they can do things, themselves, they get a kick out of it because they’re making a difference.

This is also a learning process. Life is difficult. We’re all trying to make sense of it; we’re all trying to make a difference, in some way. Even the crustiest folks are trying to make a difference and bring meaning into their lives, but they don’t know how to talk about it – they usually don’t want to talk about it.

I used to watch people at the plant who were just mediocre in their work, but outside the plant they ran church groups, community task groups, all kinds of stuff. They worked for Du Pont to make money so they could do what they really wanted to do! I began to realize that what was meaningful for them was outside of work, and thought, “Let’s make meaning here in our work!” I knew it would take some effort since there were so many people living like this, but I wanted to try.

How do you think work and the “rest of life” got so bifurcated – and work became something people only did to make money??

I think it starts when people are making decisions over what they want to do with their lives and work. Initially, they are just involved in making decisions about how they want to invest their time and energy. At work, they just work, and they don’t make any decisions because the manager will tell them what to do. But this will eventually lead to taking the meaning of people’s work away. It’s “do what you are told,” with the idea being that “you keep to yourself” and “we’re not interested [in you].” That’s the message that a lot of organizations are giving their people. It’s terribly [demoralizing].

When we begin to ask people questions and then to really listen [to them], people begin to bubble up; they rise up. Most people love to talk and show you what they are doing.

One reason the Process Enneagram© works so well [when I’m working with a group] is because “we make [the participants’] comments visible.” When people’s comments get put up on a chart [at the front of the room], they think, “Wow! I said that. And nobody sat on me! And they didn’t change it!” That’s why I’m always very careful to reflect what people have said in a meeting – I want to make sure I have [captured] just what they meant. When I’m writing on the charts, they start looking really messy, like some of the ones in my book. We don’t try to compress things down to one or two statements because too much gets lost. It’s the feeling of what they are saying that’s [as important] as the very words they are saying.

As a leader, I began to realize that all I could do was to create the conditions and the environment so that people could flourish. It all gets back to information, relationships, and identity. Share information. Work hard to build a healthy understanding of identity. Work on relationships that are based on trust and interdependence. Help people see that what they’re doing is important, and is a key part of the whole. People like that and they need that.

Maintaining the integrity of the Bowl can sometimes be rough. I was supervising some people a while back, and it was a tough sort of a day. There were a couple of men and four, maybe five women outside smoking their cigarettes. One of the [men] started talking about sluts and whores which of course the women didn’t like. I got involved. I called the man into my office and I said, “What would you say if someone was talking about your wife like that?” He said, “I’d punch ’em in the mouth.” I said, “You know that these women are somebody’s wives and daughters. So you have a choice. I’m either going fire you, or you’re going to go around, quietly, and give a talk to every group in the plant on sexual harassment. This is what you were doing.” He ended up doing the talks. It was a giant step forward in improving the [working] conditions in the plant. You could sense the difference. Sometimes you have to make firm decisions about setting conditions and not just let everyone do what they feel like – and some will do that.

Why is the self-organizing process so important to understand?

People are self-organizing all the time. It’s so prevalent that we ignore it, like gravity. You can see it when people are clustering in groups that are forming, and reforming, over and over and over. Just think what would happen if you walked through a wedding reception and you blew a whistle and said, “Okay everyone, breakup your groups. I’m going to reorganize you so it’s going to be right!” You’d feel the energy just fall to the floor. Yet managers often behave this way in organizations!

If you engage this self-organizing force in a way that’s purposeful – if you share information, build relationships, and let people know where they fit in – they will naturally engage this natural force. It’s like trying to run a river in a canoe. You’re a whole lot better off if you use the energy from the river, rather than fighting the current. If you try to fight it, then you’re going to get crushed by the current.

Here’s a funny story. When I first began to talk about self-organizing systems with Meg Wheatley back in 1992, we asked, “How do we get people to self-organize?” because we didn’t understand that it was happening all the time. I actually heard a top manager from a large bank talking about some of the good work they were doing. At the end of [his talk], kind of as an aside, he said, “I wonder how people will feel when they discover we’re self-organizing them?” (Laughter) A lot of the people missed it. One of the guys across the room and I looked at each other and shook our heads. Wow! That’s an astonishing statement!

You’ve consulted with hundreds of organizations and talked to hundreds, if not thousands of people. Do you have some examples of what you’ve learned in the process?

These are the common threads that run through everything I’ve done. I met a fellow in Florida, a naval officer, Ben Simonton, who had never heard of what I was doing. He was an exceptionally good officer; he was known for extraordinary results. The other day he said that there were five things that people needed at work: to be heard, to be respected, and to have confidence, autonomy, and relatedness. That’s how he came at it. So, first, you listen to people and talk with them. To be respectful is the relationship piece; given the right context and environment for people, they can become confident. They need some autonomy so they can make decisions – which makes an organization what I call leaderful. When they see something that needs to be done, they do it. If they can’t do it themselves, they get someone in the organization to help. That’s okay.

I also tell a story in the book about a female shift worker, Becky Dixon, who was involved in our site-wide environmental teams. She called me one morning because she was upset by a radio show, on which people were criticizing our plant for emissions. They had seen the white plumes in the moonlight as they went to work and thought that these [plumes] were toxic chemicals. Becky knew that the plumes were steam. She then told me she’d invited these people to come to the plant for a visit to learn more about what we were doing. She told me what I should talk with them about, and said that she’d take care of the rest of the visit. It was extraordinary! When my public affairs person at corporate heard about this, he pretty nearly had a stroke. I said, “Don’t worry about it. Becky will do fine. Don’t mess it up. It’ll be alright.” It made him really nervous! Becky did great! She was the leader and I was the follower.

We had a good Bowl. It’s important to create a good Bowl, because when you, as a leader, treat organizations as living systems, the people in them do self-organize and they become more leaderful.

You’ve talked about organizations being autopoietic systems? What does this mean?

Autopoiesis is the pattern of organization of living systems and the defining characteristic of life. It’s an idea that was developed in the late 1960s by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela; they also wrote a wonderful book about this called, The Tree of Knowledge (Shambhala 1987). An autopoietic system is one that is constantly changing to maintain its identity. (This is actually the source of most ambiguity in living systems). The system is working to take care of itself, and it’s constantly paying attention to the environment. In fact, it doesn’t react to everything, but instead, it’s choosing when to react to the environment – and it makes the changes in a way that it still maintains its identity.

Organizations act as autopoietic systems. Here’s an example. Back when I was young, we all saved our dimes to give to The March of Dimes to cure polio. Polio got pretty well “licked.” The March of Dimes changed itself, then, to work on birth defects in kids, not just polio. It changed so that it could maintain its identity.

It’s just like what happens in the human body, where all the parts are aware of all the other parts – there’s a dynamical balance going on between all the parts and processes. Awareness and communication about this is always taking place, but most of it is happening unconsciously. If the body gets out of whack, we hurt. We’ll then try to bring harmony back into it. An organization is like a living system in this way.

How does an organization that’s operating within a machine paradigm differ from one that’s operating within a living system paradigm? Why is it so important for leaders and managers to move to this new paradigm?

A mechanical system splits the mind and body. Its characteristics go back to Newton and the laws of motion. It’s based on a reductionist view of the world, where the world is seen as a machine that’s made up of a collection of parts. If we take a machine apart, then we’ll get an understanding of the parts – and taking them apart and reassembling them is a stepwise process. When we do this, we can understand the parts but we can’t understand the relationships and interactions among them. When Ford was putting the assembly line together, for example, he broke the work process into a sequence of steps. If each step was done properly, the machine would work. He did time-based studies and paid people based on a piecework system.

In the machine system, people are viewed as cogs in a sequence of steps. If you want to reorganize an organization, you just have to move the players around. You treat them as interchangeable parts. If people get worn out, there’s a tendency to throw them out. Look at our language. We use words like “employees” – which is a hierarchical term because it always implies they have a boss. “ Leader” is also a hierarchical term, because he or she sits at the top of a pyramid, and information only flows up and down.

With the machine paradigm, there is also a belief that the world is stable – and related to this, that change is a nuisance. Most people hate change, thus there is always a resistance to change and it must be imposed from the outside. Machines also don’t have renewal capabilities. People’s feelings aren’t addressed or involved in work – people, of course, have feelings, but they pretended they don’t. Information isn’t shared. In this paradigm, managers tell people what to do: if I want you to sweep the floor, you’ll sweep the floor – and don’t talk to me about it!

When we work with the self-organizing leadership process we co-create our future together. When people are co-creating change, they don’t resist it.

It’s not until we began to learn about principles of complexity and chaos that it became acceptable to say that the living systems moved around in circles with lots of feedback processes. Furthermore, the world is self-organizing all the time. The galaxy, the great weather patterns, the hurricanes – just who put them together? Nature is self-organizing all the time. Based on the second law of thermodynamics, we should not have increasingly complex things like a rose or human body since in one version it says that everything should be falling apart. The second law relates to closed systems like the universe, where the entropy continues to build up. But, within this closed system, living systems are open and entropy is exported to the larger system. Since the entropy is exported, the living system can become more complex. The entropy is there in the larger system so energy is conserved according to the laws of thermodynamics. But the subsystem will export energy. It will import positive energy from the environment, and so you can have something like a body or a rose develop. It’s highly organized.

When we look at a living system, we also find all the parts interact with each other, and each is necessary. If I cut a cake in half (as it is not a living system), we will have two parts that taste the same. If we cut a cow in half, we have a dead cow.

In your book, The Leadership Dance, you share your personal story of transformation – from a command-and-control leader to a self-organizing leader. It seems to me that you began to treat yourself as a living system rather than as a machine, as well

I think that’s right.

How do we help leaders recognize the living systems that are part of organizations as well as themselves? How do we help them transform as leaders? Reflection seems to be an important part of the process

I think we all have to learn to do things differently. I know that in looking at myself, I couldn’t do it alone. I got help in a number of ways. It’s a journey.

At the end of my book, there’s a poem that I really love. Let me tell it to you: “Appolinaire said: ‘Come to the edge.’ It’s too high. ‘Come to the edge.’ I might fall. ‘Come to the edge.’ And I came. And he pushed me. And I flew” (Anonymous).

It’s what happened to me. I learned I didn’t need to be afraid. I had to learn I could fly.

Do you have anything else you would like to share with the readers of Cross Cultural Management?

Yes, I do. I have worked with the Process Enneagram© with people from many different backgrounds, nations, and cultures. I believe that it is valid for use across many cultures because it operates below the social level of culture. It’s valid at a deep level, yet particular details revealed during its use will also reflect the individual culture in which the work is being done. When the Process Enneagram© has been applied around the world, I have often realized that the root of an organization’s lack of performance and growth was not cross-cultural communication problems. Rather, it was the hierarchical, top-down management approach that was acting like a blanket to smother the performance and energy of people and the organizational system. When this kind of management approach shifted, new insights, energy, and commitment emerged across the organization. The cross-cultural communication difficulties were merely one part of a much bigger picture. I believe the Process Enneagram© is a tool that leaders and managers may use to help them reframe their view of their organizations, people, and themselves to one of a living system that may be tapped into in order to create healthier, more creative, and more sustainable results.