For most people it’s a barrier. It means that we are stopped and can’t act where we don’t know. We wouldn’t have a person do surgery on us if they didn’t know surgery. So why would we pursue something if we don’t know, haven’t been trained in it, or have no experience with it?

This approach is prudent for standard practices, like surgery, where there are standards and people who meet them. But what about going beyond the standards? Or inventing something new? Or learning in a field? Or creating relevant new possibilities, not only for ourselves, but also in the world?

We can actually become skillful with creating from not-knowing. In fact it is a skill fundamental to leadership. It’s fundamental for growing your professional success. It’s a life skill for a good life. It’s a skill that goes beyond expertise, comfort zones, or ready answers. But we have to break the habit of having to “know to act.” We have to learn to “act to know.”

We need to go from having to “know to act” to learn to “act to know”

There are many standard practices for not-knowing being the starting point of a process. This is true for designers, inventors, entrepreneurs, learners, and even mature roles like product managers. When they start, they don’t know — they have a question or concern. But they also have a process for exploring what they don’t know, for designing what is possible, and creating new possibilities. The first step is openness and curiosity, followed with inquiry, exploration, learning, or reflection.

My first career was in writing software, then managing software product development. It gave me the gift of a practice with the unknown. Our process was to start with a conversation of “requirements,” to figure out what the request was. We didn’t yet know the specifics of the end point or how to get there. We didn’t yet know the design or the product. We only knew that we had to figure out how to create something that someone wanted. There was a phase of listening, of exploring possibility, a phase of the unknown, where we were going to create something new from possibilities. I’ve since entered many domains of not-knowing, now including internet marketing and Chinese inner wisdom traditions.

In my coaching, teaching, and consulting I have found that most people have the default barrier of “I must know to act.” It tends to show up in some particular area as paralysis, fear and contraction. It’s a barrier that we often face with desperation or consternation, then with resignation. We then go back to the old comfort zone, the familiar future, even the one we had hoped to escape. We don’t know, so we don’t know what to do. We tranquilize ourselves with busy-ness, and avoid the temptation to look over the barrier. We accept the world where the future is going to look like the past.

We also see rare people who are extraordinary leaders or entrepreneurs, people with extraordinary talent, or who are “creative” in ways that we aren’t. They bring something new. They solve a big or longstanding issue. They make something happen that was stuck. They create new possibilities for the future. They started with not knowing, too, but they found possibilities from their not-knowing.

We can learn how to have not-knowing be the start of creating new possibilities. But it usually requires a change of context for us, the context that lives inside our skin.

First we need to shift from not-knowing being a barrier, a place of fear, to have the unknown be the territory of new possibilities and new value. This is not just a conceptual shift, but also an emotional and embodied shift. We need to experience the mood of openness, the body of relaxed curiosity. We need to learn to have new kinds of conversations. And we need to organize ourselves in new ways for the exploration.

Most of us don’t have these practices. After all, our calendars are full, we are already tired, and the to do list is always bigger than our capacity. We don’t have time for such possibilities. We turn back to what we know, to our comfort zone, to the demands we must respond to, or sink into overwhelm.

We have to fight common assumptions and prejudices of our culture. One is that we have to go solo. School taught us to do our own work — don’t cheat. It doesn’t count if you get help. But in life this just keeps us small. Big possibilities come from connecting and coordinating with others in teams, organizations, and communities.

Going solo we find ourselves with our same old boring thoughts and perspectives. But when we engage with others we can have new conversations. With the right conversations and practices we can explosively expand our world of possibilities rather than just share what we already know. We can coordinate new actions to produce new outcomes. We can make bigger and more valuable promises together.

Another prejudice is that we have to have the exclusive right answer and produce the correct outcome, rather than take a journey of discovery in creating the best outcome. We want to banish the uncertainty of possibilities with something that won’t change on us.

When we learn to go into the unknown with the openness to possibility we can bring new practices for creation

But when we learn to go into the unknown with the openness to possibility, even excitement, using our interactions with others as expansions of our horizons, we can bring new practices for creation. First is the Conversation of Care. What do you Care About? For the sake of what are you creating? What is the gap between your current reality and taking care of what you care about?

Next is the conversation of Speculation, also called the Conversation for Possibilities. Brain storm, create with abandon, don’t clamp it down or close it up with judgments. Dream. Envision. Play around. Taste a different world, even feel a different You. Create new stories. Get bigger than your opinions, to do list, and fear. Spread your wings.

Then we can begin to select possible scenarios. Try them out with audiences to see what happens. Experiment. Get feedback. Learn. Prototype. Design with erasable designs. See what begins to cohere as Taking Care of what is cared about.

Then, and only then, do we go to assessments, feasibility, trade-offs, and design constraints. Going prematurely to this step sends us back to the past. Waiting until authentic dreaming and caring has happened opens new possible outcomes.

Then we negotiate our actions. And even here we have possibilities. We can propose, counter offer, continue to create towards the valuable future. Then we settle on a commitment, focus on execution, but execution that is still navigation to a new future. We harmonize updating our possibilities with the discipline of focus. What is the best outcome in the space of possibilities that we have created? The art is to focus on execution and keep open to improvements along the way.

Our culture has trained most of us to be competent to execute something as good producers. But we have little or no training to create possibilities. Creating possibilities is a practice. If we produce regular time for the practice we can build our skill and power.

The steps to integrate value creating possibility, action, and results are:

· Clarify what we Care About

· Speculate with Abandon

· Explore scenarios for Taking Care

· Assess the best options

· Negotiate our Destination and Path

· Navigate to the New Future.

I invite you to make a regular time for possibilities, to go into the unknown with anticipation and curiosity instead of uncertainty or anxiety. Build a rhythm of your practices that allows possibilities to be cultivated, born, and nurtured to actions and results. Integrate these skills with your abilities to execute.

We are born creators

We are born creators — kids are masterful at it. We can build these muscles through appropriate practice. If we say we are not creators, then that is what we create. If we say “it’s not possible,” then that is what we create. If we practice resignation, that is what we master.

But with a context of exploring new contexts, new possibilities arise. With new conversations, new futures become possible. We are already creating, the only question is what we are creating. So let’s learn to create the future we care about, rather than the future our default stories give us.

Go out and create the future, because you are anyway.

This article is a summary of key points taken from the paper The Power of Not-Knowing, used in the Generative Leadership Program (GLP), and the Coaching Excellence in Organizations (CEO) program from the Institute for Generative Leadership.

We are going to dive a bit deeper to look at the “what” and “how” effective leaders get intended action and results from others. What is their people power, and how can we learn or strengthen it? What are we missing in our understanding of the art of people in leadership?

If we look at common interpretations of leadership they tend to focus on a leader’s actions, like “produce a vision and then give people what they need to fulfill it.” This way of articulating leadership focuses on describing the leaders actions and intended outcomes, but leaves out how they make their interactions with others effective. For example, how do you inspire people to adopt your vision? How do you motivate them to take ownership of fulfilling it?

Doing leader-like actions doesn’t always mean you get leader results. You need to provoke the right actions and results from followers. The issue is not what we do as leaders, but the results we produce in shared actions with others. We must illuminate blind spots in our mainstream culture to make people power accessible. We need to look at areas we usually ignore, including:

· Internal to External: understanding how our internal states lead to our effective external actions

· Concept to Skill: going beyond understanding to how the embodiment of new skill is achieved through practice

· Connection and Resonance: illuminate how coordination and collaboration are based on the quality of our connection and resonance with others, and

· Leadership, Management, and Teamwork as Performance Arts.

First of all our culture tends to describe actions in terms of what people do externally that we can see, and the outcome of those actions. You “do this to get that.” But describing what an effective leader does doesn’t mean that I can do it. I may need to change my actions. Yet our ability to perform effective external actions arises from appropriate internal states.

These internal states are currently a blind spot in our mainstream articulations of action and skills. By leaving out these internal states, it tends to make activities like leadership mysterious and unclear — “how do I do that?” BEL names the unavoidable dimensions of these states that arise both internally and externally: B- Body, E-Emotions, and L-Language. For effective leadership and human interaction we must become aware of and skillful in these dimensions. In fact we are already skillful with them in the areas where we are competent.

Second, our cultural frame and practice of education considers learning to be synonymous with understanding. However, understanding does not enable us to be skillful in action. Learning music theory doesn’t make us a singer. Learning leadership concepts doesn’t make us a leader. We must embody skills, not just understand concepts and models. We learn skill through practice. Effective learning comes from effective practice. In fact we cannot avoid practice — we are practicing and embodying behaviors everyday just by doing what we are already doing. We want to become aware of and observers of the actions and practices we are already in, their internal states, and what they produce. Then choose where we can learn new practices to produce new outcomes that we care about.

Third, our focus on what to do externally in action tends to leave out how we produce connection and resonance with others. We know when we feel “connected” with someone. We feel a shared sense that we will call “resonance” when we are flowing together in shared action. This is not just a metaphor — neuroscience shows how people’s physiologies tend to harmonize in states of resonance, leading to assessments of safety, trust, and willingness to work together. People are attracted to work with leaders they resonate with, not distant experts or order givers.

Finally, we need to understand that leadership, management, teamwork, and even communication and relationship are performance arts learned through practice. We want to be effective leaders, not just scholars of leadership. Effective leadership arises from our practices, where we practice our internal states in order to enable our external actions. We are already doing this even if we are not aware of it. It is a new place for our attention for most of us. How to practice well and support our learning is why mentors, coaches, leaders, and exemplars are so important.

Connection and resonance enable more effective collaboration. Collaboration is the kind of interaction with others where we are acting with the intent and sense of working together to produce mutually valuable outcomes. Without shared intent our interactions turn into negotiating for advantage, acting for dominance, or withdrawing for safety.

One key leadership skill is “holding the center.” Where “center” describes a physical state of balance and the ability to choose our actions in difficult moments. Being off-center means that our actions come from reaction rather than choice. By “center” I also mean the holding of intent, commitment, and care for a future outcome. Often as leaders we must hold our center, and connect with others to help them hold a shared center, in the face of resistance, breakdown, and surprise. This ability begins with our internal skills to manage our own fears, doubts, and physical reactions. This skill enables us to assist others with their internal states and produce a sense of resolution to act from commitment rather than reaction in facing the future.

The discipline of Generative Leadership is a field where these blind spots are explicitly addressed in a body of distinctions and practices to enable us to take our leadership to the next level. It is a discipline of people power. If we are to take our leadership impact to the next level we must illuminate our blind spots. We must pay attention to what is essential in human interaction and coordination. We must practice with our internal states and how they enable our external actions. We must become aware of what we already practice in our habitual behaviors and internal states. We must focus on our next step of learning through new practice. We must focus on our capacity for connection and resonance, sometimes called “presence.” And we must bring all this to bear in our own performance art of leadership, coordination, and collaboration with others, and living a good life.

People power is a skill and a path of practice. It is the practice of connecting more deeply to our core humanity and care, and learning to bring that to our shared vision, commitments, and actions in the world.

Let me share some key learning about these issues that come from over three decades of addressing them in our teaching, consulting, and coaching. In many organizations the current top individual performer is promoted when a manager or team leader slot opens up. But many of these top performers fail.

When a great performer goes down in flames as a manager or team leader it is usually because being first violinist in the orchestra does not qualify them to be the conductor. The roles and skills are very different. By “performer” we mean someone who is qualified to make and fulfill promises as an individual. By “manager” we mean someone who is qualified to make and fulfill promises with a team.

The challenge is to go from violinist to conductor. And if a performer doesn’t know what management is, then they do the best they can. Here’s a list of some common failures people make after being promoted:

• Try to do the manager job in the same way as when they were the great performer — but you can’t conduct the orchestra from the first violinist’s chair.
• Act as the expert, giving orders and direction — they produce a team that doesn’t bring ownership and commitment, just compliance.
• Avoid or don’t see the new skills of coordinating conversations — they think it’s only about the doing, whereas the team must coordinate the doing.
• Avoid dealing with breakdowns, particularly the people issues, and these begin to tear down the team — instead of learning from the breakdowns, they blame them.
• Stay in their old comfort zone — they aren’t comfortable with negotiation, declining, holding people accountable, declaring and managing breakdowns.
• Keep everything in the expert’s frame of acting from knowing, and don’t learn to deal with what they don’t know and learn it.

Once a person is past the first promotion, being the expert rarely works — it becomes about coordinating others where you are not the expert. Experts tend to fail as managers at this point. Some performers fail as managers without being fired as managers. They hang onto the manager’s role, but just become bad managers. Top team members leave, the remaining team members don’t grow, and the mood is of minimal compliance rather than a passion for excellence and learning.

In these cases the performer doesn’t invest in learning to manage as their new profession. But if performers are going to learn management, we need to ask “what is management?”

It’s a question that is usually not asked. Answers today tend to be shallow technique. Without a powerful answer to the question of “what,” the question of “how” can’t have a powerful answer either. Any profession needs to have an effective answer to the “what is it” question. What are we dealing with, what are we doing? Without these answers we are blind to the territory. Our blind spot dominates our performance.

This blind spot is not just a personal issue — it is a cultural blind spot. Management should be a profession, but in today’s mainstream it is not treated like a profession. Performers are promoted without training and without certification. The training that is available is usually conceptual, procedural, and technique oriented — not real substance. As a profession management is still early in its development. For example there was a time when physicians had a day job — they were barbers. It took time, development, and historical innovation for the profession to develop.

We live in a similar era, where we have a blind spot about the constituting distinctions for management and leadership. What we need is what we call a “generative” answer. This means that our answer is an interpretation that articulates what we can see, do, and learn through practice that produces the desired results. Here’s a generative answer for what management is:

The manager’s profession is to grow teams that coordinate action to make and fulfill promises of value to the team’s customers. This requires skills in conversation to produce the needed coordination. Technical skills are needed in a team, but the manager’s role is to make sure that the team has the right conversations that produce effective results.

Management is also a performance art. This means the new manager must learn the conversational skills of management. And by conversation, we don’t just mean words or language. Conversation and communication is a full body contact sport. Conversation includes the dimension of emotions and body. It is the coherence of body, emotions, and language (BEL) that determine how a conversation is listened to and what it produces. The power of the conversation is not what we say or what we know, but how we produce a committed outcome with others.

This generative foundation for management skill allows us to better understand what it takes to successfully make the transition from great performer to manager. A successful transition requires the following:

• Taking the management role seriously as a profession, and taking action to develop skills in this profession.
• Seeing the role is about the team’s success, not your personal expertise.
• Learning that the team exists to make and fulfill promises of value to the team’s customers.
• Learning the conversational and interactive skills to enable the team to fulfill its mission — learning the conversations for action of an effective team, including the dimensions of body, emotions, and language.
• Taking breakdowns as part of the job and embracing them to resolve and learn from them.
• Focusing on growing your team members, not just directing their work.
• Learning to listen, and listen for commitment — all action arises from commitment.
• Learning to make and accept trustworthy promises, don’t play the “yes to everything game” — learn than appropriate “no’s” are more valuable than “yes’s” in some situations
• Learn to have not-knowing be the beginning of effective action, not a barrier to it — go from expert to leader. This prepares you for bigger responsibilities.

Management as a profession will always conform to fundamental principles and effective practices. Learning these and developing them is our professional responsibility. To produce skill we must practice. And we are always practicing anyway — but what are we practicing? If we practice the wrong things we get very good at what doesn’t work, usually with a lot of explanation of why the situation, system, boss, organization, or world is to blame.

Management is a profession — are you ready to develop these professional skills? Are you ready to practice? If you do take on management or team leading as a professional path you will find this is where effective personal coaching is invaluable, whether from your boss, a mentor, or professional coach.

Once we learn that all management and leadership is rooted in conversation and interaction, then we are prepared to see the territory of management conversations that constitute effective: teams, planning, projects, management of breakdowns, customer satisfaction, value creation, strategy, innovation, meaningful and healthy work, and much more. Each conversation has it’s own structure, and each adds to your potential for impact as a manager and leader.

As a warning, there is also a third form of failure as a manager that some great performers fall into. They actually become pretty good as managers, they are effective, and they get promoted and take on bigger responsibilities. But they have lost the spark of joy and engagement that they originally had as a great performer. The management role becomes a burden. They succeed on the org chart, but fail in living a meaningful and fulfilling life. They are candidates for burnout or the emptiness of sacrificing their aliveness.

The successful transition from great performer to manager is an opportunity to clarify your career goals and what you care about. For the sake of what will you lead — what is your calling to serve? How will it help you and others to live a good life?

The responsibilities at the executive level are much greater than at the manager level. The promises are bigger, and the consequences of success or failure have a much bigger impact on the organization as a whole. Helping new executives succeed is crucial for an organization.

If you are looking to advance your career to the executive level, being properly prepared for the challenge is also crucial. Not only is there the risk of failure, but generating successful organizational results can often be done in the “work harder” mode that results in overwork, overwhelm, exhaustion and burn out, as well as extreme sacrifices of health, family and personal life. This is not a successful career outcome.

What does it take to be successful at the transition from manager to executive? Let me share some of the crucial lessons we have learned at the Institute for Generative Leadership (IGL) from our decades of assisting managers, businesses, and organizations with this transition. Although we are constantly learning and refining the criteria, skills, and development path for this challenge, we have discovered a fundamental set of principles that apply in all situations.

The best way to understand the “how” of a successful transition is to understand “what” is involved. Trying to succeed in a new domain or level of action doesn’t work if we rely on the thinking, distinctions, actions and skills of the prior level. What are the skills and responsibilities of the executive that are different than those of the manager? How do we prepare for a new level of action before we get there?

The first principle is that executives are responsible for a different class of promise than managers. Managers are responsible for excellence in execution, for growing effective teams, and making and fulfilling promises with their teams that generate competitive value. The focus is on execution, production, with some attention to projects for improvements.

Executives are still responsible for excellence in execution, but they also have to develop managers to create this, not just lead teams by themselves. They also have the responsibility for the culture of an organization. And perhaps most important, they have the responsibility to lead into a changing future, to create new value, and to innovate. Executives must grow the capacity of an organization or team to not only face competitive change, but to produce it. Notice with this interpretation we are not identifying the word “executive” as a title, but as a role. Many people in “executive roles” don’t meet these criteria. From these criteria we would call these people “senior managers”, not executives.

What is fundamental to both the roles of manager and executive is that they are executed in conversations with others. The manager role focuses on the conversations of the coordination of action to produce excellent results. The unit of work is the agreement, the function is coordination of action. Executives must in addition lead the design and execution of new strategies, winning games, and the creation of new value. The executive role is responsible for the culture of the organization and how it faces and generates change.

The challenge of your leadership career goes beyond just developing increasing skill in one area over time. The leadership career path requires transitions to totally new skills at several points. The skills of the super-performer will not produce success as a manager, at least not after the second promotion. In the first promotion, you may be managing in the area of your expertise, and you can compensate your managing by being an expert. This is almost impossible at the second promotion and beyond, where you are asked to make promises where you do not have expertise. You need to go from expert or decision maker to coordinator of teamwork. It requires new conversations, presence, and interactive skills.

In the transition from manager to executive you face a similar boundary — the old conversations, ways of looking, and skills for coordinating action are insufficient for the design and creation of significant new value. Again, it takes new conversations, presence, and skills for this new level and its new promises.

The manager’s focus is for good, perhaps, great work, shown by good or great results. The executive function, however, must go beyond expertise, knowing, hard work, and producing. It demands skills of entering the unknown, inventing what is missing, constant learning, and bringing possibilities to any breakdown. The executive must create new value, and in a changing world good may not be good enough. What does it take to learn to create great value?

The lucky manager is exposed to the new conversations he or she will face as an executive by being involved with executives in their work. If you are not included in key executive conversations, or if your executives are not highly skilled, you won’t learn what you need to learn.

Another possibility is to get coaching, or have a mentor. But again, they must bring the right eyes to show you what you must see, and be able to coach you in the new moves and conversational skills. We call these necessary skills for the role “generative,” meaning you can see, do, and learn the moves that produce the desired results. As both a manager and executive, for example, we must know the moves of coordinating action to produce excellence in action. The executive then must also have a generative interpretation of value, value creation, innovation, and the human element of a culture.

Our experience with leadership development is that developing these skills takes time and practice and it may take years. Yet the key is to practice the right things. What follow is some of what we’ve learned about what to practice. The successful executive:

1. Connects well with people, produces safety, trust, and authenticity in interactions, and encourages the voice of others

2. Listens well to what others care about

3. Knows what they care about as well, they are not just production drones, but have a vision for the future that brings meaning to their work — this inspires others

4. Knows that action comes from commitment, that commitment enables coordination through clear agreements that can be trusted, and all this happens in conversation

5. Is curious about their world and always looking to learn as a way to open possibilities

6. Brings a centered presence possibilities to any breakdown, they know we can always take action from where we are

7. Takes Not Knowing as the starting point of new action, not the barrier to it

8. Coordinates in conversations to speculate, design, experiment, and create something new, not just follow old formulas — is an innovator

9. Creates value by listening to its source, the assessments of customers of new possibilities and promises

10. Lives in a permanent posture in the world that links possibility to action to value as a meaningful contribution to others — value producing

Developing these capabilities is a path of practice, of seeing the world through new eyes, and of always being a beginner at the edge of the unknown. It’s a path of building the emotional and embodied strengths to hold the future, to meet fear without giving away your power to it, and to take care of yourself and others.

Some common career mistakes on this path toward executive skills are to: wait until you are promoted to learn; go solo, instead of with help and collaboration from others; assume that your skills at the current level are enough for the next one; look only to learn for job requirements, instead of being curious about the unfolding world.

In your leadership journey, I invite you to explore what constitutes leadership at its many levels of scale, and to explore the challenge of the manager to executive transition. This will help you, and help you help others. The world needs leaders, and the leadership challenges of our world are growing. We must meet these challenges by growing our capacity to create.

Note — Resources For You:

The Innovator’s Way — this book I co-authored is an example of making a challenging area of human action generative and actionable. In it Peter Denning and I show how innovation conversations work, and how to learn them. These conversations also overlap with leadership conversations, and are important for executive capabilities.

Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, identifies only a small number of companies that create an extraordinary level of success compared to the mainstream. It’s possible, but rare.

There is an even bigger challenge for teams and organizations — survival. The business literature is also full of stories of successful companies that don’t sustain their leadership. Pan Am, for example, was once the number one airline in the world, but it no longer exists. The seeds of losing a leadership position are planted when you are on top. Past success doesn’t guarantee future success over longer periods of time. Things change.

From our work with the perspective and skills that we call “generative leadership,” how do we help high performing teams elevate their level of success? How do we enable them to avoid the pitfalls of success that eventually lead to decline?

Let’s begin by noticing that when our actions succeed again and again, even spectacularly, we can become convinced that our skills are the root of our success, the world is stable, and our approaches will continue to produce success. The dangers of success for a high performance team or organization include these assumptions and the moods they produce of complacency, arrogance, and the loss of curiosity. We take a perspective that only shows the world that we succeeded with in the past, and we focus on applying the approaches that worked so well before.

In our work with leaders, managers, teams, and organizations over the years, we have found a number of fundamental perspectives that help with these challenges. We look at conversations as the place where actions, and their results, are initiated and shaped. This makes observing, assessing, and even intervening quite accessible.

There are two important classes of conversations that drive team performance: conversations for action, and conversations for possibility. Teams that can continually increase their ability to create value must be excellent in both conversations. But our cultural tendency is to focus on results and therefore execution. We tend to be addicted to an action and production focus. When things begin to not work as well as planned — when we face a breakdown — the usual reaction is “do more,” and “work harder.” This leads to blindness as to what is going on, shuts down curiosity, and eventually winds up producing exhaustion.

What we need when the prior success formula isn’t working isn’t just harder work, but the ability to call a time out, take a step back, and look at what is different about the situation. We need to determine if the engine needs a tune-up, or do we really need a new engine, or perhaps even a new vehicle. This takes us to changing our work processes, and perhaps even how we frame the situation. We need to design something new, and use a design approach that produces better outcomes. This requires skills in the conversations for possibility. Distinctions that are very powerful for this kind of design are “value” and “waste.” This enables us to evaluate the outcomes of actions, processes, and practices as valuable or wasteful. My colleagues and I have found that how teams have conversations can be a major source of both value and waste.

But what if the available options, and even the available redesign approaches, don’t work. Then we are facing a bigger scale of change, what is sometimes called a “complex” situation. In my career I remember the times I worked hard at redesigning a process without success — I didn’t realize that my design approach was inadequate for the challenge. Again we have to go to conversations to possibilities, but in this case not directly go to a design approach. Instead we need to find out more about what is different in our world. This requires experiments, usually high volumes and frequencies of them. We need to reinterpret the fundamentals of our world and our response to them, and then develop a new design approach.

Another valuable perspective when we are in possibility and design is to understand the dual roles of conservation and adaptation. Conservation is keeping what is necessary and valuable; adaptation is letting go of something to produce adaptive and valuable change. The art of this perspective is not to become overly conservative, nor overly adaptive in how we modify our relations to our world. In addition the repertoire of productive change must include the capacity to “pivot.” This is the capacity to change directions, sometimes radically, when the situation demands it.

The process of making productive change can be understood as innovation. Invention is coming up with something new, and innovation is getting people to adopt it. In the book The Innovator’s Way, my colleague Dr. Peter Denning and I lay out the essential practices of successful innovators. There are eight practices and all involve particular conversational skills. I won’t unpack those conversations here (see www.innovators-way.com), but the point is that getting new value and practices to be adopted by teams, including high performance teams, and by customers is a process that is observable, executable, and learnable.

I invite you to explore the power of conversation, a power that is already shaping your successes and failures. As leaders, coaches, and teams we have the opportunity to go beyond hard work and the formulas of the past to new capabilities to create value. That future takes us to a path of curiosity and observation, design, experimentation, adaptation, and innovation.

Growing a Culture of Value Creation

If we are going to grow a value creating culture, we need to see that organizations exist to create value, not just to get things done. If what we are doing isn’t valuable, then it likely is waste. As leaders we want to help our teams, organizations, and communities go from cultures that focus only on excellence in execution to cultures of value creation.

While “value creation” may be new to people and sound exotic or sophisticated, it is a field of action that has structure, process, and skills. It’s something that can be learned and grown over time, and it is becoming more of a competitive necessity in a changing world.

To be effective we must have a generative interpretation of value and its creation, meaning we have an interpretation that shows us actions we can take rather than just explanations we understand. We need to make value creation a practice and a skill.

The key is to realize that value is an assessment by a customer, not a characteristic of our product, service, or actions. This takes us to the need to listen well to our customers and prospective customers, whether they are customers who buy our products and services, or people internal to an organization that have to “buy into” an action, strategy, or approach.

We have created value when people buy or buy into; when they accept our offers and take actions we have invited them to. There is a new field emerging explaining how startups create value by “discovering” it, and by developing customers, not just products. Books like Four Steps to Epiphany, Lean Startup, and Running Lean are laying out a rigorous process for how experiments and the customer’s response to them allow organizations to discover value rather than trying to figure it out.

These books lay out the process, but in the process we must develop skills: how to “listen” — listen for value — and how to design the next step in testing our value proposition with customer responses. Our experiments must reveal to us the world of our customers and what they care about.

Here’s my generative interpretation of value: value is the customer’s assessment of whether our offer takes care of what they care about, and whether they are willing to commit their resources to enable that offer compared to other offers that they can choose. This involves listening for their care, their standards, and what choices they face in their world. And it usually makes our biggest competitor their choice to do nothing. This give us the questions to explore in discovering value.

Once we see value and how to create it as skills of interaction and discovery, then we have the elements of a culture of value creation. But we also need a generative interpretation of culture — what it is, and how to grow it. Notice that I’m not saying “build” a culture, but “grow” it. Culture is like a garden, we can plant the seeds and cultivate them, but we don’t “build” it like a wall.

When people don’t see something that is observable, we call that being “blind.” And we can dispel blindness with new distinctions for awareness, observing, paying attention, and practices for reflection. We dispel blindness and become a new observer when we learn professional skills, for example. And a major blindness in our organizations today is the missing ability to observe waste and value, as well as to do something about it.

One reason for this is that our bodies adapt to see what is usual and recurrent as “normal.” When a non-threatening situation keeps presenting itself, whether it’s a positive experience or a breakdown, eventually it loses its intensity and power to draw our attention. We develop a standard practice for it, such as ignoring it, coping with it, or just letting it go by, but it ceases to be something that we pay attention to. We are built to pay attention to exceptions, surprises, threats and opportunities.

In our normal routines we go into automatic behaviors and we respond to expected situations as “transparent,” not needing attention. When we drive a car, for example, we don’t put attention on our feet unless there is something wrong with them or the pedals — they become transparent when we are skillful at driving, and they are no longer in our attention.

The problem is that we can be conditioned to accept as normal what shows up as “everyday,” such as boring meetings, a bad boss, an untrustworthy co-worker, impossible objectives, or a time wasting procedure. We fall into the mood of resignation — “that’s the way it is and there’s nothing I can do about it.” By waking up a new way to observe we can begin to see the waste or opportunity in these situations, rather than accept them as unchangeable “reality.” And often small changes can make a big difference freeing us from the everyday mud that we slog through.

The entrepreneur and innovator, for example, cultivate the sensibility to notice and hang onto a sense of what isn’t harmonious, or what could be different. They have the skill to not just fall into acceptance or resignation about the way it is. They are on the lookout for waste and value creating opportunities.

As leaders and coaches of leaders, we can develop and bring this sensibility to our teams and organizations. We need to sharpen our capacities to observe and reflect with curiosity, rather than get buried in our full schedules and awaiting to-do lists. When we develop this skill with our teams, we begin to see a different world show up, a world ready for changes, offers, improvements, and new value.

Some well known processes rely on this skill of observing, noticing, and questioning, such as kaizen in process improvement and lean thinking. In the discipline of generative leadership we develop the ability to observe the effective coordination of action and value creation as conversational skills. Results are always preceded by the conversations that shape them, good or bad. We learn to see healthy and productive conversations, and can then see what is missing when results are not healthy or productive. We can learn to see missing or incomplete conversations, and envision new conversations and practices of coordination that would produce different outcomes.

We have found many everyday breakdowns that can lead to breakthroughs. For example, a common breakdown in organizations is to request or agree to actions without clear specified times of completion. This easily leads to overcommitment and a culture of overwhelm, dissatisfaction, and blame. Not being clear in agreements about what constitutes satisfactory outcomes often leads to frequent dissatisfaction and a culture of resignation. Teams that aren’t invited to give honest feedback on their project plans often don’t believe in or own the success of their projects.

These kinds of problems are too commonly an organization’s “normal.” The changes that are called for are not complicated, but they do usually require boldness, if not courage — in other words: leadership. In this way of looking we can learn to see and address — for both individuals and organizations — how people coordinate or don’t coordinate, why certain dissatisfactions are common, prevailing wasteful moods (such as distrust, resignation, anxiety, and resentment), what productive possibilities are seen or not seen, and how to cope with change and breakdowns.

By paying attention to what conversations and coordination practices are generative or not we can help our teams and organizations shift from what is considered normal “mud” to more productive coordination, value creating actions, and innovative practices.

Most people in our culture have been educated and trained to know things, to develop reliable skills, and to act out of their competence and familiarity with what they do. We study to pass the test, and not knowing is a negative result. Yet in real life most of what we face is what we don’t know. The world is complex, what can be known is far beyond what one individual can ever know. And at the same time everything is changing.

And so we specialize and keep our work and actions in the zones that we have become familiar and competent with. As a project manager, for example, we approach projects in our frameworks for projects and go to work with what we know to do. We do this as a marketing or sales professional, or technology professional, or financial expert, and so on.

As long as our skills are effective in the changing world, and we are competitive with our offers, we can continue our work in what we know. We can define our work inside our comfort zone. We do this until our skills — and our promises — are no longer competitively valuable; or until we get promoted beyond our competence; or until we must enter new territory. We face change, we find ourselves at our edge, and we face the unknown.

Perhaps we see that we can go beyond our edge to new possibilities, new skills, and a new future if we engage in learning. But if we don’t see we have the time to do that, then we are stuck at our edge. Not sure what to do, hesitating, or really wishing we could be somewhere else. Perhaps we contract and focus on what we know and what we are comfortable with. And hope someone else will handle the edge for us.

Yet we see some people who seem to have skills at the edge. They don’t contract from the unknown. They actually see the unknown as possibilities, and may even love the unknown. They move skillfully in the unknown — they are curious. They explore, they analyze, they speculate, they design, invent, innovate, and plan. They show up as leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, and explorers.

We all went through the unknown with learning in our careers. When we took on a new job, new skills or responsibilities we may have found the learning challenging, difficult, or exhilarating. As we developed competence we became more comfortable in our knowledge and skill. We may have then found that our work became a repetition of the past, losing its zest and aliveness. And yet we may still have had the tendency to stay in the comfort zone and what we already knew.

What can we learn about entering and re-entering the unknown and going beyond our fear? What can we learn about making the unknown a place for generating new possibilities, new actions, new outcomes, and a new future? For most in our culture, not-knowing stops us — we must know to act. In generative leadership not-knowing is a place to begin action — where we act to know, and then to invent new value.

Taking action with not-knowing is a skill, and one that is fundamental to leadership. Leadership is not being the expert who knows, it is the person who can generate the conversations in which a team can design and realize a new future. The skills at the edge are first emotional and somatic. We must be able to notice the fear and contraction that “I don’t know” can produce, and learn to make fear our friend. My friend and teacher Bert Bennett says “fear is just your body telling you that you are not organized for the situation.”

If we can go from being afraid, to having fear, then we can observe and engage with the fear from a place of choice. Awareness creates choice. If we develop this awareness then we can develop essential skills at the edge for us as leaders, professionals, and human beings. By becoming aware of our body reactions and emotions we open the path to learning how to engage with them and to shift them. These are the skills of centering and recentering.

When we manage our reactions at the edge, we can hold the unknown as a sea of possibilities for what we care about. We can embody the skills of creating from the unknown with practices of exploration, experimentation, design, invention, and innovation.

In expanding our capacities, and the capacities of our teams, to go beyond the edge we are opening our capacity to go beyond the old comfort zone. We can go beyond our fear and burst out into new possibilities. We can master the old, unexamined tendencies that come from our past. We can go beyond the old patterns of keeping ourselves safe by avoiding and protecting the thorns of old pains. If we can be present with our fears we can find the power of choice, we can relax and open instead of contract, and rest into curiosity, experimentation, even fascination in the unknown.

This is a path of learning in which our body and emotions learn, not just our mind. We shift who we are, not just what we know. We cannot go beyond our fear with concepts. If we can learn in this way then we will go beyond hesitation to generation, to create our future rather than be a victim of it.

For most people it’s a barrier. It means that we are stopped and can’t act where we don’t know. We wouldn’t have a person do surgery on us if they didn’t know surgery. So why would we pursue something if we don’t know, haven’t been trained in it, or have no experience with it?

This approach is prudent for standard practices, like surgery, where there are standards and people who meet them. But what about going beyond the standards? Or inventing something new? Or learning in a field? Or creating relevant new possibilities, not only for ourselves, but also in the world?

We can actually become skillful with creating from not-knowing. In fact it is a skill fundamental to leadership. It’s fundamental for growing your professional success. It’s a life skill for a good life. It’s a skill that goes beyond expertise, comfort zones, or ready answers. But we have to break the habit of having to “know to act.” We have to learn to “act to know.”

We need to go from having to “know to act” to learn to “act to know”

There are many standard practices for not-knowing being the starting point of a process. This is true for designers, inventors, entrepreneurs, learners, and even mature roles like product managers. When they start, they don’t know — they have a question or concern. But they also have a process for exploring what they don’t know, for designing what is possible, and creating new possibilities. The first step is openness and curiosity, followed with inquiry, exploration, learning, or reflection.

My first career was in writing software, then managing software product development. It gave me the gift of a practice with the unknown. Our process was to start with a conversation of “requirements,” to figure out what the request was. We didn’t yet know the specifics of the end point or how to get there. We didn’t yet know the design or the product. We only knew that we had to figure out how to create something that someone wanted. There was a phase of listening, of exploring possibility, a phase of the unknown, where we were going to create something new from possibilities. I’ve since entered many domains of not-knowing, now including internet marketing and Chinese inner wisdom traditions.

In my coaching, teaching, and consulting I have found that most people have the default barrier of “I must know to act.” It tends to show up in some particular area as paralysis, fear and contraction. It’s a barrier that we often face with desperation or consternation, then with resignation. We then go back to the old comfort zone, the familiar future, even the one we had hoped to escape. We don’t know, so we don’t know what to do. We tranquilize ourselves with busy-ness, and avoid the temptation to look over the barrier. We accept the world where the future is going to look like the past.

We also see rare people who are extraordinary leaders or entrepreneurs, people with extraordinary talent, or who are “creative” in ways that we aren’t. They bring something new. They solve a big or longstanding issue. They make something happen that was stuck. They create new possibilities for the future. They started with not knowing, too, but they found possibilities from their not-knowing.

We can learn how to have not-knowing be the start of creating new possibilities. But it usually requires a change of context for us, the context that lives inside our skin.

First we need to shift from not-knowing being a barrier, a place of fear, to have the unknown be the territory of new possibilities and new value. This is not just a conceptual shift, but also an emotional and embodied shift. We need to experience the mood of openness, the body of relaxed curiosity. We need to learn to have new kinds of conversations. And we need to organize ourselves in new ways for the exploration.

Most of us don’t have these practices. After all, our calendars are full, we are already tired, and the to do list is always bigger than our capacity. We don’t have time for such possibilities. We turn back to what we know, to our comfort zone, to the demands we must respond to, or sink into overwhelm.

We have to fight common assumptions and prejudices of our culture. One is that we have to go solo. School taught us to do our own work — don’t cheat. It doesn’t count if you get help. But in life this just keeps us small. Big possibilities come from connecting and coordinating with others in teams, organizations, and communities.

Going solo we find ourselves with our same old boring thoughts and perspectives. But when we engage with others we can have new conversations. With the right conversations and practices we can explosively expand our world of possibilities rather than just share what we already know. We can coordinate new actions to produce new outcomes. We can make bigger and more valuable promises together.

Another prejudice is that we have to have the exclusive right answer and produce the correct outcome, rather than take a journey of discovery in creating the best outcome. We want to banish the uncertainty of possibilities with something that won’t change on us.

when we learn to go into the unknown with the openness to possibility we can bring new practices for creation

But when we learn to go into the unknown with the openness to possibility, even excitement, using our interactions with others as expansions of our horizons, we can bring new practices for creation. First is the Conversation of Care. What do you Care About? For the sake of what are you creating? What is the gap between your current reality and taking care of what you care about?

Next is the conversation of Speculation, also called the Conversation for Possibilities. Brain storm, create with abandon, don’t clamp it down or close it up with judgments. Dream. Envision. Play around. Taste a different world, even feel a different You. Create new stories. Get bigger than your opinions, to do list, and fear. Spread your wings.

Then we can begin to select possible scenarios. Try them out with audiences to see what happens. Experiment. Get feedback. Learn. Prototype. Design with erasable designs. See what begins to cohere as Taking Care of what is cared about.

Then, and only then, do we go to assessments, feasibility, trade-offs, and design constraints. Going prematurely to this step sends us back to the past. Waiting until authentic dreaming and caring has happened opens new possible outcomes.

Then we negotiate our actions. And even here we have possibilities. We can propose, counter offer, continue to create towards the valuable future. Then we settle on a commitment, focus on execution, but execution that is still navigation to a new future. We harmonize updating our possibilities with the discipline of focus. What is the best outcome in the space of possibilities that we have created? The art is to focus on execution and keep open to improvements along the way.

Our culture has trained most of us to be competent to execute something as good producers. But we have little or no training to create possibilities. Creating possibilities is a practice. If we produce regular time for the practice we can build our skill and power.

The steps to integrate value creating possibility, action, and results are:

· Clarify what we Care About

· Speculate with Abandon

· Explore scenarios for Taking Care

· Assess the best options

· Negotiate our Destination and Path

· Navigate to the New Future.

I invite you to make a regular time for possibilities, to go into the unknown with anticipation and curiosity instead of uncertainty or anxiety. Build a rhythm of your practices that allows possibilities to be cultivated, born, and nurtured to actions and results. Integrate these skills with your abilities to execute.

We are born creators

We are born creators — kids are masterful at it. We can build these muscles through appropriate practice. If we say we are not creators, then that is what we create. If we say “it’s not possible,” then that is what we create. If we practice resignation, that is what we master.

But with a context of exploring new contexts, new possibilities arise. With new conversations, new futures become possible. We are already creating, the only question is what we are creating. So let’s learn to create the future we care about, rather than the future our default stories give us.

Go out and create the future, because you are anyway.

This article is a summary of key points taken from the paper The Power of Not-Knowing, used in the Generative Leadership Program (GLP), and the Coaching Excellence in Organizations (CEO) program from the Institute for Generative Leadership.

Innovation has been described as a “race to the future” where there will be drivers, passengers and road kill [ii]. We have so many interpretations, models, and processes for innovation, yet mostly we see road kill and passengers. Innovation is one category of human action and interaction that seems mysterious, along with leadership, effective teamwork, management, and even communication. Why are these skills so unclear and rare? These are symptoms of a cultural blind spot. We need to awaken to something essential that is currently missing in our understanding.

My colleague Dr. Peter Denning and I spent seven years researching the blind spot of innovation and published our findings in the book The Innovator’s Way [iii]. What we found is that there is a pattern to successful innovation shared by all successful innovators. By studying the stories of successful innovators and serial innovators we were able to distinguish a pattern of necessary actions and skills that generate effective innovation. We were able to distinguish what’s missing in the standard approaches to innovation.

Invention is coming up with something new. Innovation is getting people to use it

Among our discoveries was that people tend to confuse invention with innovation. Invention is coming up with something new. Innovation is getting people to use it. Coming up with an invention does not mean you have produced an innovation. We articulate innovation as getting a community to adopt a new practice.

While there are many processes for invention, research and development that produce an avalanche of new products and inventions, the mainstream approaches and processes for getting these inventions adopted are largely unsuccessful. The large majority of patents never generate enough revenue to cover the cost of their filing. While marketing and sales address getting people to buy things, innovation overlaps these fields but goes beyond them. Innovation includes getting a community to adopt new practices, an organization to change its processes, a team to learn new behaviors, a professional to learn new skills, and a profession to adopt new standards.

The innovation process always includes the steps of

• Revealing and considering the value of something new,
• Trying out the new practice,
• Committing to adopt the new practice,
• Learning the new practice, and then
• Integrating the new practice into our current set of practices.

This process can be as simple as buying a different product, or as complicated as entering years of professional study. The process always encounters some sort of resistance along the way.

The size of the challenges we will face and the level of resistance we will encounter is largely related to these questions:

• How basic are habits that have to change?
• How fundamental are the beliefs and prejudices that have to change?
• How big is the gap between the skills of old practices and new?

Sometimes the resistance is just discomfort in new behaviors. Sometimes the resistance arises because the new practice changes old roles, identities, and power structures.

Part of the blind spot of innovation is that our culture focuses on the externals of action, figuring out what to do, and then manipulating something out there to get something done. However, innovation requires internal learning, shifting not just concepts, but also embodied skills and emotional repertoires. We need to change behaviors, not just ideas.

We need to change behaviors, not just ideas.

When innovation is easy and doesn’t perturb our comfort zones, then it doesn’t require a big shift in our internal patterns. But big opportunities often require big changes that take us outside of our comfortable old patterns. We have to learn new frameworks and new emotional skills. For example, it can be a huge opportunity for entire organizations or cultures to perform better if they can learn to say “no” when it is appropriate, rather than saying the automatic “yes” that cannot be fulfilled. But it requires new emotional skills, for leaders and staff, to create safety for honest conversations.

What is the new frame of distinctions and attention needed for innovation? It is the frame of human interaction, coordination, and communication. When people interact and coordinate new actions, or decide to change how they coordinate actions, it always happens in conversations. The unit of innovation is the conversation. But we found it takes particular kinds of conversations, and these conversations require particular skills.

Innovation requires particular kinds of conversations, and these conversations require particular skills.

We found that there are eight conversational practices, or skill sets, that underlie effective innovation. By conversation we don’t just mean particular words or speaking, we mean the skillful interactions that produce a particular reaction in a listener. Conversation is a performance art, but it does have structure and criteria that allow it to be observed, learned, and practiced. And this structure includes the emotional tone and body reactions of the conversation.

Another blind spot of our culture is that we don’t take seriously the power of conversation to generate outcomes. We tend to think of communication only as the transfer of information rather than the coordination of action, the creation of the future, and the articulation and provocation of care and commitment. We call this capacity of conversations to generate actions and outcomes its “generative” capacity. This is the basis of our use of the term in “generative leadership.”

In the case of innovation, there are eight conversational practices of effective innovation. We refer to them as practices, since they are skills that we learn through practice, and have a structure in application — the practice. Each is unfolded in detail in The Innovator’s Way, but the point we can clarify here is that each practice is observable, actionable, learnable, and produces a desired outcome in a structured set of steps. This structure of steps is essential and unavoidable, and allows us to see what might be missing or possible in our innovation efforts.

In the case of innovation, there are eight conversational practices of effective innovation.

Let’s see how the eight practices reveal the steps and skills for effective innovation. The first five practices are a high level set of steps. Sensing is the first practice, the entrepreneurial skill to sustain our attention on a possibility that is not clear yet. Second is the practice of Envisioning — telling the story of the future that shows possibilities that are valuable and worthy of consideration. Third is the practice of Offering, how to make an offer that is designed to be valuable enough to be accepted, at least for a first try. Fourth is the practice of Adopting. This practice is the conversations to commit to and engage in the new behaviors of the innovation to achieve the value it produces. And fifth is the practice of Sustaining, of integrating the new innovation into the ecology of prior practices.

The other three practices are skill areas that are fundamental to the effectiveness of the five steps. One is developing the capacity for producing and coordinating actions. Second is somatic, or body based, learning. This is key to go beyond understanding concepts to produce skill in action. And third is leadership, the specific conversational skills to maintain focus, commitment, and produce trust and followers in conversation.

If you want to go deeper into specifics of the skills, standards, breakdowns, and learning practices for each of these conversations then I refer you to The Innovator’s Way. But the point here is that there is a structure, it is observable and actionable, and it can be learned through practice. In fact, it must be learned through practice. That is how learning for skill happens, instead of only learning for conceptual understanding.

The conversational path is essential and unavoidable. The path to skill is the path of learning. The path of learning is the path of practice. This particular path is also the path of leadership. You notice that leadership is one of the essential practices for innovation. Yet all leadership involves innovation as well. The conversations overlap — new commitments and new actions to a new outcomes and a new future.

To lead innovation is to lead conversations

To lead innovation is to lead conversations — having them, helping others have them, and creating trust and value for new commitments, learning, and behaviors. The challenge for us as leaders is that when we start something new, or go beyond our edge to new territory, we are beginners. We make mistakes, and learn through experimentation and exploring where we are not competent. Effective learners find coaches and guides. As leaders we need to show others how to learn. Then we can learn innovation skills.

If we are willing to be a learner, rather than an expert; if we are willing to be uncomfortable for the sake of new value, rather than staying in our comfort zone; if we are willing to practice instead of just understand; if we are willing to learn in new territory instead of fitting the new into what we already know; if we are willing to bring courage to stand for new possibilities; if we are willing to face resistance and face questions with no immediate answers; then we are ready to lead innovation.

There is a path that is not mysterious — it is the innovator’s way.

Leading innovation is first leading ourselves on a journey into new possibilities. Then we can lead others. There is a path that is not mysterious — it is the innovator’s way. On the innovator’s way we can invent, learn, and embody the skills to create a new future, to take care of what we care about, and to create a good life.

[i] BusinessWeek, Get Creative!, August 2005.

[ii] Prahalad and Hammel, Competing for the Future, Harvard Business School Press, 1994.

[iii] Denning and Dunham, The Innovator’s Way, MIT Press, 2010.

Is the MBA a similar sale? The MBA was originally a degree in “Business Administration,” and delivers on the promise of presenting business and organizational studies, but is also sold as “management and leadership.” Some business schools call themselves Schools of Management. Does the MBA have management clothes?

Many professors in business schools think not. Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor in the Stanford School of Business reviewed dozens of studies of the results of business school education, and concluded “There is little evidence that mastery of the knowledge acquired in business schools enhances people’s careers, or that even attaining the MBA credential itself has much effect on graduates’ salaries or career attainment…A large body of evidence suggests that the curriculum taught in business schools has only a small relationship to what is important for success in business…. there was too little attention given to developing leadership and interpersonal skills, and too little emphasis on communication skills.[i]”

Warren Bennis and James O’Toole wrote in the HBR article How Business Schools Lost Their Way: “Business schools are on the wrong track…business school faculties simply must rediscover the practice of business.[ii]” Henry Mintzberg, Professor of Management Studies at McGill University, and considered a leading expert on strategy, wrote a book called Managers Not MBAs, and wrote “The trouble with “management” education is that it is business education, and leaves a distorted impression of management…we need to build the craft and the art of managing into management education and thereby bring these back into the practice of managing…conventional MBA programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences.[iii]”

Although some business schools have responded with more courses on communication, emphasis on team projects, and a focus on “capstone projects,” the practice, and hence the skills of management are not designed into or delivered in MBA programs. Executive MBA programs tend to produce more relevance for participants since the participants are practicing managers and executives, and there is a greater focus on case studies and applications in the participant’s companies. But the foundations of the practices of management, the coaching in those practices and the focus on meeting standards in performance of those practices is still missing. We don’t train physicians this way.

I taught in a business school, Presidio School of Management, for three years. Presidio focused on integrating courses on sustainability into the curriculum, but beyond one course — 5% of the course work — had no focus on management practice or skill. I found the faculty and administration did not find the conversation of the importance of management practice and skill relevant as a promise of the school or a fundamental purpose of the curriculum.

Why does this gaping blind spot exist, and how do we to find the learning venue for actual management and leadership skills? Bennis and O’Toole claim in their article that business schools have become dominated by academics that have organized the school offerings to support their scholarly careers. And the market for MBA’s is not educated to the criticisms of the programs. MBA students, around one hundred and twenty thousand of them in the US alone, are looking for the currently valued credential for their careers. Perhaps they assume they are getting the skills of management they will need, or know that employers and HR departments recognize the MBA, not actual management skills in their hiring. Developing management skill is left to on the job experience, and the filtering of the promotion regimes in companies.

I hope to see a focus on management skill development in business schools in the future, and it was in fact my purpose in teaching at Presidio to promote that. But there needs to be a new conversation in the business school industry for that to happen, and a more educated clientele for management development.

However, the development of management and leadership skill, actual hands on skills that make a difference in the performance of teams, organizations, and companies has been the focus of the Institute for Generative Leadership (IGL) since 1993. I hope to see the discipline of Generative Leadership — where these skills are developed — in business schools someday, but for now it is only available in the Generative Leadership Program offered by the Institute. The program is designed to elevate the measurable leadership impact of participants through management and leadership skills in the performance of teams, organizations, companies, and communities. The development of skill is done through practice working with the real work and life commitments of participants with their teams, provides personal coaching, and organizes participants into leadership and learning teams. The program allows participants to integrate new practices and skills into their repertoire, from team building and breakdown management to power, politics, and organizational change. Already successful leaders produce the greatest results from their learning in the program.

[i] Jeffrey Pfeffer, Professor Stanford Business School, and Christina Fong, PhD candidate, The End of Business Schools? Less Success Than Meets the Eye, Academy of Management Learning and Education, Volume 1, Number 1, September 2002.

[ii]Warren Bennis and James O’toole, How Business Schools Lost Their Way, Harvard Business Review, May 2005.

[iii] Henry Mintzberg, Professor of Management Studies, Managers Not MBA’s, Henry Mintzberg, Barrett-Koehler, 2005.