Mark Holmgren, CEO of the Bissell Centre, will deliver the Saturday AMA Conference 2015 Keynote Address on Upside Down Thinking. This method of thinking utilizes unconventional propositions to force us to redefine how we think and how we see our organizations. In anticipation of his upcoming keynote presentation, David Ridley, Executive Director for the Edmonton Heritage Council, met with Mark to discuss his work with Upside Down Thinking. Click here to read Part One of this interview.
DR: Some of these premises
that have emerged from your thinking are provocative and intended to prod
thinking. But there’s also a potentially demoralizing truth for those committed
to the work. The museum sector, when we’re being honest about it, has its own
counter-intuitive realizations that point to less than desirable results. How
does one go about Upside Down Thinking without hitting a personal or
organizational dead end?
MH: We have a lot of people in a lot of organizations that are
already demoralized. It varies depending on what field you’re in, but all of
the pressures of non-profit sector are no different: resources, talk about
transformation, and the need to reinvent ourselves. A good number of people are
already wondering - what is so wrong with what we are doing? For me, I am looking for tools to help people wrestle
with that. A series of wicked questions would help other people develop
dialogue strategies. Dialogue has a structure to it - it’s not just
communicating. So I’m really into how to develop tools to help people have
those difficult conversations.
In a sense, they are change tools, and the challenge when we talk
about transformation, for me, is that it is on the far continuum of change. Small
changes, incremental change, we’re pretty good at that. We can rearrange the
room and come up with a slightly better system or do something a little quicker,
but it doesn’t really impact us in a significant way. It’s just a little bit
better. It’s still not transformational. The struggle we have is that
organizations are owned by people and perpetuated by people. It’s hard to
change because your identity is all tied up with this stuff.
You can’t pose this as a way to make people feel bad; that’s why the
setup is so important. This is a go-forward kind of exercise, finding the core
of what we need to consider changing, and getting at it in a way that we
usually don’t. By proposing what we never propose. Once you identify them, you
don’t just say “that’s a lot of junk”, you say “we have something to work on”.
DR: One thing most organizations
don’t do is create that reserve for innovation. If we’re really forcing those
heretical thoughts and approaches, we should drill down into deeply held assumptions
about what we do and why we do it -- come up with some alternate hypotheses
about what we’re doing, testing it, why is this true. What are the experiments
we do with radical intent, to test things out or to try something new? That’s
something that, for many museums, or any organization, demands on resources
don’t allow. It’s about the human spirit of an organization and allowing people
to breathe and try new things on.
The radical part is interesting. Sometimes the way to tackle
becoming more innovative is to start looking at how we do things now - it’s too
easy to say we don’t have time or money. I was sitting with my Chief Programs Officer,
and I said to him, “our organizational structure does not allow innovation”. And that’s all I said. I didn’t say it was bad or silly. I just said I don’t
see innovation coming out of this structure. We talked about it and changed our
structure, and now I’ve got managers who are working laterally in ways that
they never did before. It doesn’t use up more resources and they’re getting more
done by leveraging each other’s programs and each other’s ideas for everything
from daily services to administrative stuff. Sometimes I have the opposite
problem where I manage just how much innovation we’re trying to do, which is a
much better place to be.
There are lots of way to get a radical conversation going, but one
of the ways I’ve done it in the past is to ask: the purpose of museums is what,
and what are your main functions? What if you couldn’t do any of your main
functions but you still had to meet your mission and mandate? How would you do
it? It wouldn’t be easy but I don’t think it would be impossible. Is there only
one way to do things?
DR: You write about the
“gospel of collaboration”, noting that “collaboration” has become an entirely
plastic word: we use it to describe everything we do (like wide use of late of
the word “curating”). What do you see as the greasy underbelly of collaboration
for organizations? What should we be realistic about in pursuing collaboration?
MH: So, it’s not about being anti-collaboration. My organization has
many partnerships, both formal and understood. I believe in that stuff, but
what happens with so many things - outcomes, collaboration, now collective
impact - the pendulum swings too far. There are too many people on a bandwagon
without knowing why they’re riding it or where it’s going. I was having a
conversation with someone and she referred to my organization as a partner and
I said we’re not your partner. We don’t have a partnership agreement, we have a
funding agreement. You’re a great funder and I support a lot of the things that
you do, but we can’t start calling everything a partnership. It becomes a
meaningless word. Sometimes things are just cooperative, or coordinated without
being full scale collaboration.
There are some that think collaboration will save us money. Research
or valuation cannot show they are more efficient, but they can be more
impactful. It’s the same with collective impact. Now they want to fund
collective impact, but what about the niche things or other small things that
should be funded that aren’t necessarily large scale collaborative change?
DR: The plasticity of the
word makes it lose its precision. It’s the equivalent of having 22 different
words for snow: it’s important in that environment. It’s important in our
complex environment as well, we’re starting to lose meaning.
MH: When people say they are collaborating, sometimes they are
competing, and it’s important to realize that. It’s not like for-profit where
we’re trying to put the other side out of business. I do try to position myself
as a top quality organization. We try to think about what sets our brand apart,
and so should other organizations. Those are more competitive activities that
people should be okay with. I go to any collaborative table with my personal
agenda, and so does everyone. That’s how we come up with collective agendas:
people sharing their own personal agendas and finding the match. Sometimes
collaboration becomes such a strong ideology that we don’t talk about how we’re
in a competitive environment.
DR: You have been
recognized as a National Thought Leader by the Tamarack Institute, whose goal
is to achieve collective impact on complex community issues. How does Upside
Down Thinking fit into Tamarack’s work with large scale change?
I wrote a piece called Collective Impact, Watch Out for the Pendulum Swing. I think the genius is in weaving together practices that they
noticed across numerous landscapes and identified them. The principles are
awesome, but I would say – if I was challenging collective impact (to make it
better!) – how can shared management destroy collective impact? Trying to get
people to look deeply into the main principles of it and find out why it might
not work and then fix that. Tools like this, as well as others that Tamarack
pitches, help people actually get to the meat of what their collective impact
initiative should look like. Does every collective impact have to have a
distinct backbone organization? Is it right for an organization to select
themselves as a backbone organization? I’m just trying to find ways to raise
those questions, and sometimes you have to raise them in a way that gets
peoples’ attention. That’s how it relates to what Tamarack is trying to do, to
give them tools to help them have positive skepticism. It’s too easy to get
into the flow and be positive about everything, but sometimes we have to get
into why it won’t work.
Even working with groups around thinking and what kinds of thinkers
you have in your organization– you need creative and critical, and know how to
blend the two together. Kids don’t get that in school. Some of it is just
creating a culture that helps people have those tools. Anyone can be a creative
thinker. It’s not just Upside Down Thinking, it’s creating a culture of change
and dialogue where people can be liberated to explore things they have never
explored before.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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