MANAGEMENT SPECIAL....What the Body Tells Us about Leadership (PART I)

MANAGEMENT SPECIAL What the Body Tells Us about Leadership

In this Thought Leader interview, social presencing theater innovators Otto Scharmer and Arawana Hayashi describe how to develop your management skills through physical awareness.

Time and time again, senior executives are challenged to transcend their personal limitations. This often relates to the way their behavior is perceived. They may be brusque with people, or somewhat disorganized, or easily distracted, or they may act out of their depth in some other way. They discover they must change if they hope to keep the loyalty of the rest of the enterprise. They have to learn to communicate and make decisions in new ways that may feel uncomfortable at first.

To grow in this way, leaders need to think of themselves in terms of the whole person: the intellect, the emotions, the relationships, and even — or perhaps especially — the physical body. That’s one of the insights inherent in a form of organizational intervention known as social presencing theater (SPT). With roots in contemplative practice, dance choreography, and organizational culture work, this practice is yielding insights into the nature of managerial prowess. It gives leaders a way to think about the relationships that have formed in the enterprise around them, their own unconscious role in reinforcing those relationships (even if they’re destructive), and the example they as leaders set for others. All these elements have to adapt and shift in unison.

An SPT session is like a human sculpture, in which members of the organization arrange themselves as a model of the system they work within. They are assigned to play the part of one another onstage, and to stand and move in ways that evoke the unspoken but real tensions and connections of the enterprise. Suddenly, they see who’s not communicating with whom (but needs to be), which supposed allies (who claim to share the same goals) actually oppose each other, and where the isolation and frustration points prevent high-performance work from getting done.

Several methods similar to SPT exist, going back to the psycho-drama methods developed by Austrian psychiatrist Jacob L. Moreno in the early 1900s. Today, C. Otto Scharmer and Arawana Hayashi are prominent among researchers in the field. Scharmer, originally from Germany, is a senior lecturer at MIT and a Thousand Talents Program professor at Tsinghua University. He is the author of Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges (Berrett-Koehler, 2009, rev. 2016), which presents a theory of leadership transformation based on the relationship between awareness and action. Hayashi is a choreographer and acharya (teacher) of meditation affiliated with the Shambhala tradition of Buddhism. A pioneer in the use of body awareness to facilitate leadership development, she is credited as the main developer of social presencing theater.

Scharmer and Hayashi are cofounders of the Presencing Institute, a global action research network created with, among others, Peter Senge, the influential organizational learning theorist. Scharmer and Hayashi also co-created (along with six others) an MIT MOOC (massive open online course) called Leading from the Emerging Future, designed for people seeking to be at the forefront of profound environmental, social, and personal transformation. The course has attracted 100,000 registered users since 2015. Scharmer and Hayashi met with strategy+business at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., in late 2016, and updated the interview with us in mid-2017.

S+B: The current interest in deep personal interventions such as social presencing theater suggests that leaders are beginning to realize they’re not equipped for the challenges they’re facing. Are the challenges really tougher than they were in the past?
SCHARMER: Certainly there is a higher level of global scale and interdependence. Businesses and governments collectively create results that no one wants — in terms of environmental destruction or economic inequity. People are burned out, or they feel a lack of real connection or anxiety in some profound way. Whether or not that’s different, many decision makers are aware that a different approach to business and government is necessary. But they don’t know exactly how to change their approach, and the professional schools don’t teach the personal skills you need to address these challenges successfully.

For example, the government of Scotland, which is considered an innovator in public-sector practices, is trying to address the problem of income inequality in its communities by changing the way services are delivered. Government representatives are going directly to local communities and helping activate the capacity of people and groups who live there. They call that process asset-based community development (ABCD). ABCD requires complex community development practices — as opposed to each government agency operating in a silo and managing its local groups directly.

Two new skills are required to achieve this. One is bringing the right kind of stakeholders together in each local community: nongovernmental organizations, businesses, government. The second is applying process and leadership techniques that allow all of these stakeholders to work together effectively, focused on the well-being of everyone in the system, not just their silo.

S+B: Some leaders have a knack for this. But you’re talking about broad­ening the skill to a much larger group of people.
SCHARMER: That’s exactly right. One of the main problems of leadership, particularly in the United States, is that it’s seen as an attribute of individuals. It should be seen as the capacity of a system to sense and actualize emerging future possibilities. In other words, you need to activate collective leadership capacity. If you’re a business executive, for instance, you cannot be successful without influencing the behavior of other stakeholders, inside and outside your company. Many of them cannot be controlled through your hierarchy. That means the most important mechanism you have is the quality of your relationships. You build that through a higher quality of listening and conversation. These so-called soft skills are even more relevant when you deal in complex global activities.

And if we, as a society, continue going through disruption, then these skills are essential. Major systems will be reinvented in the face of the ecological, economic, and political crises going on today. There is also arguably a spiritual crisis: People feel a disconnect from the possibilities of the future. They experience this disconnect as burnout, depression, and maybe the risk of suicide. The old business models, which in many cases were based on continued marginal innovation, won’t work in this context. Business leaders need to step back, look at themselves and their current reality from new angles, and then prototype new approaches. That’s what we have used social presencing theater for.

A Map of Emotional Experience

S+B: How do you define social presencing theater?
SCHARMER: It is a method for helping organizations and larger social systems get in touch with the knowledge they already have about the deep interpersonal structures that inhibit real change from happening. It’s not the only method, but it’s one that we have found very effective. Business leaders often lack a map of the emotional experience in a situation — who is in the center, who is ignored, where the blind spots are. Social presencing theater creates a shared map that people can use as a reference point in visualizing some of the deeper systemic issues that inhibit progress. People feel a stronger emotional connection to the system as a whole. The method shows where groups are stuck today, where they could be going tomorrow, and what the real issues are in moving from here to there.

HAYASHI: We ask the individuals involved in a difficult situation to come into a room and express their part of it by making a shape with their body. They don’t play themselves — they volunteer for the roles of others, including key people in the organization; departments; and categories of people like suppliers, union members, and customers.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

After the first participant poses in the body shape he or she has chosen, we ask, “If your body shape had something to say about this person, what would that be?” The reply is one sentence from the perspective of the role being played: “I am just settling into this company.” Or “I don’t know where to look.” Or “There’s a crushing feeling.” Or “I am very far away from everyone and ignored.”

Then the second person comes in, finds a place in the room relative to the first person, makes his or her body shape, and offers a sentence. Then the next person, and the next. Each one has to make a decision about how big or small to be, and what vertical level to occupy. They can stand on a chair if they want, lie flat on the ground, or sit in the middle. They decide where in the sculpture they belong: In the center? In the periphery? Which direction are they looking? Sometimes people feel so disconnected, they stand in a far corner of the sculpture, not even in the playing field.

After all the players have entered the current reality sculpture and spoken their sentences, we give them a chance to adjust to fit one another’s presence. They go through a little reflective process: seeing where in the sculpture they are, getting a deeper sense of their experience, letting go of any thoughts or plans, and remaining in an open space of not knowing and of possibility.

Lots of thoughts are coming up and we try to suspend them — that is, consider them and let them go without reaction or judgment. We ask participants to feel their physical body, the space they’re in, and their relationships with one another, without too much analysis. Sooner or later, somewhere in the sculpture, someone starts to move. They might stretch or adjust their shape, or perhaps move up to somebody else and put a hand on their shoulder. You can’t predict what that first motion will be, but it sets everyone else in motion. They all move for a bit and then they crystallize into another sculpture, with different positions. The shift is based on a body-knowing rather than on a head-knowing. This new sculpture offers insights, surprises, and more clarity into the possibilities for change.

S+B: Because they’re becoming more aware of themselves?
HAYASHI: Maybe. Maybe it’s that they’re a little more honest. Or maybe they are simply expressing their own sense of affection and appreciation for life.

We finish by asking each of them to speak one sentence, from their new body shape and place in this second social sculpture. After each one speaks, others can debrief, but only with direct perceptions of what they saw, sensed, or did. “When I saw you turn aside, I felt angry” or “I saw that the customer moved very quickly to the periphery.” We wait until this debrief is complete, and then we conduct an open dialogue about what happened and what it meant.

S+B: What do the shapes and the movement of the bodies tell you?
HAYASHI: One thing I love about the work: It’s beautiful. Most of these people don’t have any background in dance. But they make gestures and shapes that express so deeply what it is to be a human being with other people. You can feel the groundedness of people, how much they attend to others, how they’re listening to one another — or not. It’s not like a literal interpretation of body language, where one type of movement is supposed to mean strength and another means weakness, or whatever. It has more to do with the quality with which each person gestures and then waits in his or her shape. The overall sculpture tells you so much about what it is to be a human being in an organization with others; then, with any luck at all, the final sculpture shows you something that’s more sane, healthy, and well-connected.

CONTINUES IN PART II

by Art Kleiner

https://www.strategy-business.com/article/What-the-Body-Tells-Us-about-Leadership?gko=f5217&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20180320&utm_campaign=resp