work, are you open to trying something new? If you're moving fast, wouldn't you like to be sure you're headed in the right direction? If you're feeling stuck, are you ready to break free? There's never been a better moment to launch your team, your organization, and your business on the river of growth and transformation.
PART 1 Framing the Conversation
Organization. Business. Growth. Transformation. If you've picked up this book, there's a very good chance that those words mean something to you. But what exactly do they mean? Have you ever stopped to think deeply about what those terms represent? And do they mean the same thing to you as they do to the other people you're working with? If you want to embark on a transformational journey together—to engage in crucial conversations that will carry you forward—it's essential to be aligned around the core concepts, frameworks, and ideas that will shape that journey.
What is an organization? What is a business? And what does it mean for organizations and businesses to grow and transform? Each of these questions opens up a rich set of meanings, metaphors, and models that can help a team or an organization get on the same page about what they are a part of and where they are going. These are questions to which I've given a great deal of thought and consideration. The Growth River Operating System and the Seven Crucial Conversations are all built upon a specific way of thinking about organizations, a unique model for understanding businesses, and a particular perspective on how they grow and develop. Understanding these foundational concepts will set the stage for the journey and frame the conversations to come.
Language is foundational, which is why I spend so much time in this book defining terms and explaining foundational ideas. The terms, models, and metaphors that we use to visualize systems and situations have a profound impact on how we approach them. They shape our expectations of what's possible and the solutions available to us. Languages are the building blocks of human systems, and our ability to collaborate and organize in sophisticated ways around a shared purpose depends entirely upon our ability to communicate. I always say, organizations evolve at the speed of conversation, but we can't even have a conversation—let alone engage deeply in crucial conversations that lead to transformation—if we don't speak the same language. And too often, we may think we're speaking the same language, but actually have very different ideas about what the words we're using mean. That's a major contributor to the frustrating experience of the Swirl.
Throughout this book, you'll see the Growth River definitions of terms called out, with precise interpretations of words and phrases you may never have stopped to think closely about before. (A compendium of terms is also included in the Glossary.) But certain foundational ideas require deeper consideration and discussion: Organization. Business. Growth. Transformation. That's what we'll be doing in this part of the book. As leaders take the time to be more deliberate about how they use these terms, they bring much-needed clarity and direction to the organization's journey, creating a shared narrative. As team members begin to have a truly common language that describes their interactions and endeavors, as well as revealing new possibilities, they find themselves more easily able to align around their shared purpose and direction. So let's take the time to ask these questions: What is an organization? What is a business? And what does it mean for organizations and businesses to grow and transform?
CHAPTER 1 Understanding Organizations: Social Systems, Not Machines
A company is a multidimensional system capable of growth, expansion, and self-regulation. It is, therefore, not a thing but a set of interacting forces. Any theory of organization must be capable of reflecting a company's many facets, its dynamism, and its basic orderliness. When company organization is reviewed, or when reorganizing a company, it must be looked upon as a whole, as a total system.
—Albert Low Zen and Creative Management
“If you to want truly to understand something, try to change it,” the psychologist and organizational development pioneer Kurt Lewin is said to have declared. Over the course of the past few decades, my colleagues and I have tried to change numerous organizations—from small startups to well-established mid-sized businesses to massive multinational enterprises.
In the process, I have indeed come to understand a thing or two about these strange beasts. It's not the most elegant way to learn, especially when starting out, since the true nature of an entity is often revealed as it resists efforts at transformation. It's only when you start trying to move the pieces that you see how they're all connected, what keeps them in place, and what animates them. And more often than not, what you discover forces you to rethink your approach. I'm still learning, to this day, but what I can say with confidence is that the more I've learned about what an organization is, the more effective I've become as an agent of change. It is my hope that this learned knowledge may enable me to reverse that quotation for my readers and help you to avoid at least some of the trial and error. If you want to truly change something, try to understand it first. Otherwise, you won't get very far. At this point in this book, I invite you to pause and consider the question, What is an organization?
Many leaders think an organization is just a business, and their job is simply to run it. If only it were so simple. In fact, the strictly “business” part of an enterprise—the shared work we do to develop, sell, and deliver a product or service to customers—is only part of the endeavor. (That doesn't mean it's not critical—we'll come back to this definition of a business and how to optimize it in Chapter 2, when we introduce the Business Triangle®.) If you're a one-person company doing everything yourself, the business may be all you need to focus on. But the minute you want to grow or scale your company, you have to do something else. You have to deal with people. You must persuade people to join you and motivate them to come along on the journey with you. You must figure out how to inspire people to cooperate, to collaborate, and to become leaders in their own right. And, newsflash: people can be messy, complicated, and difficult—especially when you're dealing with groups of them. There is no getting around this truth.
But along with all of that messiness comes incredible potential. That's why, when we want to achieve things that matter, we form organizations: because we know that we can do so much more together than we could ever do alone. And not just by bending others to our will, but by working to unleash their creativity and intelligence. People can be difficult but they can also be original, innovative, caring, and independent. They can be complicated, but they can surprise you with their commitment and capabilities. Which brings us to the question that has spawned a thousand books about leadership: How do we get from messy, complicated, and dispersed to capable, creative, and aligned? If an organization is much more than a business, what's the best approach to managing it, leading it, and growing it? The answer starts with how we see it.
Metaphors matter. As storytelling creatures, when confronted with a complicated, multidimensional, somewhat abstract entity like an organization, we tend to look for images that help us to describe it and make sense of it. We need something we can visualize. And these metaphors we choose will inevitably shape not just the way we talk about our organizations, but how we respond to them and how we lead them.
For example, it's common for leaders and change-management experts today to talk about organizations as if they were machines or computers. Machines have parts, which either work or break down, in which case they need to be repaired or replaced. They have inputs and outputs. Sometimes, they need tune-ups, new engines, or software updates. It's a convenient metaphor, pleasingly concrete. There's just one problem: actual organizations don't work like machines. Businesses are not body shops. And people don't respond well to being treated like parts that either function well or are deficient. If you think simply replacing all your dysfunctional parts or installing the latest trendy management theory like a software update is the answer to building a high-performing organization, you will be in for a long, difficult journey.
One
