Category Archives: Robert Fritz

Personal Development on the Job

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Getting to the top of the ladder was the objective.  Now what happens?

Probably the hardest thing for us to recognize is that we are not our roles.  I rather like Robert Fritz’s idea that roles are rather like vehicles.  You can ride a Land Rover to the woods; you can also drive a BMW into town. We have many roles,  some of them simultaneous.

We normally come to a new leadership role lacking some of the necessary capabilities. So the first task is to take some time and training to acquire the new skills that we need, as well as delegating what we can to those who possess the requisite skills and experience..

One of the hardest jobs for a leader is not to take things personally. Leaders almost automatically become substitute scapegoats or lightning rods for those dissatisfied with issues.  As Ed Friedman observes, “Expect sabotage”.  It takes ongoing skills to differentiate the self from the role. For that reason, we need alliances with supportive people both within and beyond our own organization.

The pressures of leadership require that we seek sanctuary – not only of time and place but in reflection. For most of us, that requires scheduling it as an activity and giving it as much importance as any other daily appointment or habit.

In the end, leadership brings pain and one has to expect that.  What also needs to be recognized is that it also brings the joy that comes from creating value and meaning.  That’s what makes leadership worthwhile.

Structural Dynamics -Part 2

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As Robert Fritz observes, problems won’t organize you. You can solve your problems but still not have what you want. To do that you have to create a preferred outcome, recognize where you are now and then map actions to achieve that result.

Discipline isn’t natural, Fritz says. We want to avoid conflict so we often oscillate between the desired result and the current position. But if we know what we want, undertaking the necessary discipline to achieve it is the secondary choice we have to make to achieve the primary choice of what we want.

Fritz helps his workshop participants map these processes with charts – and you can now take the course Your Life as Art online at a very reasonable cost. You can even create your own project charts on the site and update them online. There’s more on that here

While the folks at Jump are making big bucks in trying to help folks become more innovative, I vote in favour of Robert Fritz’s wisdom. And as composer and winning film maker, the proof might just be in the pudding.

Structural dynamics

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Robert Fritz became associated with the consulting practice, Innovation Associates, in the late 1970’s. Its emphasis on system dynamics, later profiled in Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, was also influenced by Fritz’s concept of structural dynamics, based on Fritz’s own studies of musical composition. Recently the founders reunited to present their views.

During his address Fritz played a recording of musicians warming up for the audience – and noted it as a sound that any attender of orchestral concerts can identify with. He observes that the musicians doing this are nearly always competent professionals. Yet an orchestra warming up anywhere in the world sounds exactly the same.

Then the conductor steps onto the podium. Those who love to see the conductor as leader identify with this most hierarchical of figures. Conductor Ben Zander notes that the conductor is the last of the great dictators. But Fritz observes that it is not the conductor or the musicians that actually make the difference. It’s the composition. All are united in fulfilling its purpose.

What drives the composition is a musical hierarchy of values. The purpose of the composition determines how it literally plays out. And Robert Fritz observes that a similar purpose has to drive a business strategy or a management strategy. What one has to do, is to offer a product that is so great that everyone will want it. Anything else is snake oil, he says. It is killer products that bring killer profits.

A leader often has a concept that is compromised by others in the large company. Even in a micro company what is ultimately going to make the difference is the strength of character of the leader. He or she has to imagine what isn’t there and move toward its creation. Such imaginings, of course can come into being and later be replaced by even better ones. While Fritz doesn’t mention it when he references the replacement of the Sony Walkman by the Ipod, the Walkman in its own day was a real innovation. The CEO of the company went against his own advisors. They said, ‘No one will want to walk around listening to music’. He responded, ‘When they can, they will’ and he was right. But what Steve Jobs recognized was that such a product could also be a distribution company. It’s the downloads and the apps that are the real product of the I-pod, I-phone and I-pad.

(to be continued)

Back from holidays – and starting to take one

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So how did we do? Well there was wi-fi access for the phone but none for the computer, which apparently was never set up for it. Whether it is age or setup I didn’t know or care. A trip to the bank solved a bill paying issue and e-mail arrived by phone. Most of it wasn’t very exciting.

But there were compensations. there was time to read my entire website and tweak it a bit. There was time to read the only e-book on the laptop, Robert Fritz‘s Your Life as Art and realize again how good it is. My granddaughter and I had almost daily painting sessions. She produced several water-scapes to my three or four and one highly dramatic volcano, along with numerous drawings of her favorite things in the whole world, – horses. We took in the Goderich ON Celtic Festival and heard lots of good performers and groups, – the unbelievable Gareth Pearson from Wales who can make one guitar sound like a substantial ensemble and has incredible self parody to accompany some masterful playing, and Quebec’s DeTemps Antan and Newfoundland’s The Once among the favorites.

Back home, the multitasking starts almost immediately. While reading e-mail, the phone rings. Incoming news rates entering an appointment in the Blackberry. I’m not joined at the hip to Ipods or Ipads – yet. A short pause suggests playing a computer game while I wait for someone with an appointment to arrive. Technology is starting to control me again.

So I am turning everything off for a bit. There are a couple of projects that require some major thought. I’ll take a walk in the nearby ravine. I’ll do some personal writing that I have promised myself to do that is getting swamped by all this stuff. I’ll practice the penny whistle that I bought at the music festival. And I’ll produce a watercolour. These can’t be done by multitasking – and they are creative pursuits as opposed to entertainment. There are still two key meetings toward the end of the day. But the brain needs some focus and these alternatives are ways of letting some different neurons come out to play.

Feed the Brain

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Today’s Globe and Mail business section is filled with suggestions as to how to add good thinking to the workplace. One my own favorites is Robert Fritz who always provides hard nosed suggestions about creating. Here is a recent one:

“Here are a few ideas about feeding our mind so we can build our brain:

  • Don’t look for the answers to life.
  • Don’t buy other peoples’ answers.
  • Don’t believe things just because all your friends do.
  • Rid your mind of all concepts (we have stressed this idea for a long time now.)
  • Rethink everything you think you know, and leave your past experience and past conclusions at the door.
  • Create something more useful for the mind to do, so it has a better job than simply running around the same track.

This last point is essential. The mind will work to resolve any tension that it considers. By tension, we are not talking about stress, pressure, or anxiety. We are talking about discrepancy between and amongst competing thoughts.

For example, the mind is subjected to hundreds-of-thousands of data points every day. We are not conscious of most of the input, because if we were, we wouldn’t be able to function. We have useful filters that sort what we want to pay attention to, and what we do not want to spend any time on. Nonetheless, all of that input goes into the mind. The mind, left to its own devices, will try to sort out all of the information into a type of unified field theory, making it all fit into a large comprehensive puzzle. But mostly the bits do not fit together. The mind creates dream states that help it get a little leg up in its job of trying to create equilibrium. Dreams sort out some of the discrepancies by generating fanciful fictional films that function, from a structural point of view, to bring a little peace and quiet. Even nightmares, awful as they might be, can make the dreamer feel better in the morning.

The best thing to do is this: give the mind a job that feeds the brain. That best job is to create. Assign your mind structural tension, which is formed by knowing the end result you want to create, and the current reality you have in relationship to this result. Of course, there are actions to take, strategies to employ, tactics to use, insights to learn on the road from here to there, but, because of structural tension, the mind becomes the best ally in this process, and the brain is thankful for the nourishment. “

Good advice as always.

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