Peter Senge

It took me a while to work out that helping has more than one gear.

So this idea first landed for me in a book called Presence by Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, and their colleagues, and they were writing about doctors, about the different way doctors go about consulting with their patients and how those approaches sit at very different levels of sophistication.

And that got me thinking about leaders.

And out of that, I remember sitting on a plane, and I built this model that I've been using for...

It could be for executive function in classrooms, it could be for a variety of things to help people think more systemically to open their minds.

And so number one is we develop a hypo-- we sense an emerging field, you know, what Peter Senge calls an emerging social field.

And then if we think there's something there, number two, we would map it, and we still do this, and we use graduate student interns and other people, and we go around and we try and figure out who are all the leaders and the practitioners in this field.

And if we can find enough people, then we form a steering committee with some thought leaders because this is really-- it needs collective leadership.

Well, they are responsible to develop leaders, but so is everybody.

And I think it was Peter Sands who used to talk about building a learning organization.

And I love that, but I'm like, don't build a learning organization because a learning organization is where somebody's always teaching and everybody's learning.

I say, don't build a learning organization, build a teaching organization where everybody's expected to teach.

Today isn't really based on our opinions.

We want to make clear that today is shaped by decades of research by, you know, thought leaders like John Cotter and Michael Fullan and Peter Senge and Margaret Wheatley and others who have dedicated their careers to understanding how organizational change occurs and And I think one of the important things that we're going to focus on is that we know that a lot of folks will have their favorite change model.

They'll like this person versus that person.

What we're going to try to do today is synthesize because there are a number of characteristics that all change models tend to have, right? So this is shaped by the organizational change leaders that we are familiar with, but it is also shaped by our workforce.

It's not mine.

I've been using it for 20-plus years, but I believe it's originally from Peter Senge, and that is, People don't resist change.

People resist being changed.

And everyone theoretically wants to change to improve.

Yeah.

You know, I don't know that, you know, what was it? Peter Senge's old book that had sort of trust was an outcome, right? You have to do the environment, you have to do the processes, and you have to do the people, and then the outcome of that is trust.

So the only thing that I can help my team do, which I help them do a lot, is to become trusted advisors.

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