AKEPT Leadership Series

June 5, 2017 By Leave a Comment

On May 24 and 25, 2017, Claire and Dick Knowles were invited to lead a workshop on the theory and use of the Process Enneagram© for the Higher Education Leadership Academy of the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education.

The Academy has a series of training programs for University Administrators and Professors from all over Malaysia. Dick talked about the theory and use of the Process Enneagram© and Claire talked about applications (for example, how she had used it for helping the Western New York Women in Higher Education to improve the effectiveness of their networking events and mentoring). Our round trip from Tampa to Chicago to Tokyo to Kuala Lumpur was quite an experience and went well.

Professor Kamal, AKEPT Director, and others at the Academy are interested in using the Process Enneagram© as a tool to help them plan for and develop better succession planning processes for several Universities in Malaysia. This is a complex problem with many interacting variables so the Process Enneagram© is an ideal tool to enable them to solve this complex task.


Richard N. Knowles &
Prof. Dr. Mohamad Kamal, Director

Dick & Claire

About 75 deans, provosts and professors from all over Malaysia attended the two-day workshop with us. They connected well with the Process Enneagram© and sees its power in helping them to solve complex problems.

The Process Enneagram©, which we created over 25 years ago and have used in hundreds of workshops around the world, is the only known tool that bridges complexity theory and practical applications. The challenge of developing a better succession planning process involves many people in a changing, dynamical environment.


Richard N. Knowles talking at the AKEPT Conference
Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, May 25, 2017

Malaysia is a highly-diverse society where people have learned to get along well together. About 55% of the people in Malaysia are Muslim. There are Hindu, Christian and Buddhist people, as well. Everyone treated us very well – helping us at every opportunity. Our stay was terrific. We will continue our work with the AKEPT people using virtual tools to communicate and share information.

 

Filed Under: Safety for Business, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: , ,

Working with Multi-Generations in our Workplaces – Safely!

October 10, 2016 By Leave a Comment

Historical context:
workerConsider the Golden Gate Suspension Bridge (San Francisco) built between 1933 and 1937, an architectural marvel, thought to be impossible because in order to bridge that 6,700 ft. strait, in the middle of the bay channel, against strong tides, fierce winds, and thick fog, meant overcoming almost impossible odds. But it was built, with a grand opening in May of 1937, deemed, at the time of its completion, to be the tallest suspension bridge in the world as well as the longest. A man named Joseph Strauss engineered many new ideas, including developing safety devices such as movable netting, which saved 19 lives; though in all, there were 11 men lost during this construction. Thousands of men – workers of varying ages and from varied ethnic groups – came together to complete this project. (They had to listen and learn to be successful together.)

high-scalersConsider the feat of building the monumental Hoover Dam (1931-1936) – a miracle of technology and engineering. No dam project of this scale had ever been attempted before. There were 21,000 people working at that site with approximately 100 industrial deaths. The walls for this structure – that would uphold the weight of the dam – required workers called “high-scalers” who excavated the cliffs, dangling on ropes from the rim of the canyon. Can you even fathom this?

niagara-power-projectConsider the great Niagara Power Project (1957-1961). During construction, over 12 million cubic yards of rock were excavated. A total of 20 workers died. When it opened in 1961, it was the Western world’s largest hydropower facility. Many people, including from the “greatest generation” and the “traditionalist generation,” worked together on this project. It was a 24/7, multi-year project.

Note that the Niagara Power Project, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam construction (detailed above) all occurred before OSHA was in existence – the protections were sparse so people (young and old) had to especially look out for each other! Each of these great projects, nonetheless, took lives – workers that did not come home to their loved ones.

Today’s multigenerational Workplace – with Greater Safety Emphasis and Engagement

Fast forward to today…to your workplace…a different time and place…where people of multi-generations also come together for a purpose – to complete the work of your respective business (safely). Managing multi-generational workforces is an art in itself.

  • Young workers want to contribute and make a quick impact, valuing inclusion
  • The middle generation needs to believe in the mission – it has to make sense – they have to see the “why” of it
  • The older employees don’t like ambivalence; they’re looking for clarity, straight-forwardness, and no wishy-washy explanations

Does that make success (together) impossible? Absolutely not. The common denominator is that all people, regardless of their labeled generation, want to be accepted for who they are, to have their contribution valued, and to feel a part of the team/business endeavor. All want to go home from work safe. The need for their brother’s/sister’s keeper remains paramount.

In today’s workplaces, we often have a co-worker population that can represent age ranges of forty-plus years. With that range comes a host of different experiences, expectations and perspectives, and technology prowess. (All good; all offer ways to learn from each other.)

Everyone in the workplace came to there because of the employment opportunity – the opportunity to make a living – in order to provide for themselves and their families. (That’s a collective no-brainer…and the place to start in safety-mindedness – so we can all keep earning a living with all our parts, hands, toes, eyes, ears, etc. all in-tact, every day, regardless of what generation we touch.)

Granted, there are some differences in how teamwork is viewed, loyalty to the job and dealing with change, work-life balance, diversity, rewards and recognition, decision-making, personal growth and development – yet all of these differences are surmountable. Consider too, that all of these differences pale in comparison to the generations that went before, who demonstrated that when working together, toward a clear purpose, were able to complete the type of monumental projects described earlier in this article. To do what they did, required extraordinary teamwork.

I’m reminded of the (illustrative) story of four people going gulf fishing in a boat – a Traditionalist, a Boomer, an X-er, and a Millennial. All of a sudden the boat’s captain fell over dead with a heart attack and, in that process, did something destructive to the boat’s motor key mechanism as he fell over, as well as hitting the radio – breaking its channel mechanism. The boat stalled – dead in the water. Fully adrift.

So the combination of four people had to figure out how they’d get back to shore. Each of them devised a workable plan and got to work. The Traditionalist quickly determined what he could salvage from the boat to make more workable oars for paddling back to the shoreline and readied safety flares for expected overhead helicopters or airplanes; he also knew, instinctively, their directional status, fully understanding the sun’s position in the sky.

The Boomer hunted for and found the boat’s engine manual and was troubleshooting the starting mechanism, and how to bypass it – to restart the engine – plus was troubleshooting the boat’s radio, etc.

The X-er immediately used his phone’s GPS coordinates and was preparing to call in to the Coast Guard for help. The Millennial quickly text messaged an SOS to the Coast Guard with emphasis for HELP!

We often resort to solving problems with the technology to which we are most accustomed. In this illustration, each method had value. Each had potential to solve the problem and return the group to shore! Each person, regardless of his/her generational label, has something important to offer – a way of thinking about things. We each have ideas to offer for solving problems in our workplace; we are each other’s brother/sister in the workplace. We are all in the same boat!

We all can learn from each other, especially in safety. We all can listen to each other. History teaches good lessons. We all can share our concerns, our expectations, our perspectives, our technologies…for the betterment of the success of whatever it is that we came together to do (together).

We, at R.N. Knowles & Associates, work with leaders, teams, organizations, and businesses, helping them to solve their complex problems (together). We know that complex situations require new ways of thinking and being. We also are keen on the use of the Process Enneagram© because it is the proven “tool of complexity” that helps leaders and their teams resolve their complex issues (together and quickly). It allows for extensive input, ideas, perspectives, realities, understanding, and acceptance of various ideas, sharing and learning…so that we bridge perception differences and viewpoint gaps around any complex issue that you are facing. When we learn from our individual talents and work as a team, there is no limit to our potential achievements – including our collective safety!

Call us at 716-622-6467and we’ll show you how it can work for your organization, too.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: , , ,

Complexity & Change are the New Normal: Leading the Way

June 10, 2016 By Leave a Comment

Those organizations that are achieving safety excellence recognize that they must:

  • Abundantly share all information about their safety, environmental and business performance,
  • Engage openly and honestly with everyone building trust and interdependence and,
  • Help everyone to get a sense of their collective whole and see their part in achieving total success.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand is on the pathway to safety excellence. We worked with Carl Stent, the NIWA National Manager, Safety and Wellbeing, in a series of 7 full-day workshops involving over 100 managers and scientists to develop clarity and focus on the best ways to help their people working remotely, like in the Antarctic, to make the best possible decisions and work safely – every day, every task.

National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research

This (picture above) is their Operations Leadership Team who met with us in Wellington for two days at the beginning of our work with NIWA. We helped them to see that organizations are complex, adapting, self-organizing networks of people. Using the Process Enneagram©, our proprietary complexity tool for having the focused and disciplined conversations, they were able to effectively address their opening question, “How do we build and sustain an effective safety culture across our organization?”

The energy and excitement built during the day as information, ideas and breakthroughs emerged during the workshop. The Process Enneagram© map they created is serving as their living strategic safety plan.

We conducted workshops in six NIWA Centers across New Zealand, giving us an opportunity to meet a lot of outstanding people and to see a lot of their beautiful country. We also conducted one public and one private workshop which were also extremely successful in opening people up to the ideas of complexity and to approaching safety from this perspective. With Carl Stent’s ongoing, excellent support, NIWA is on the road to safety excellence!

Filed Under: Safety Leadership Process, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: ,

Awakening the Third Force – In Safety – It’s time!

March 10, 2016 By Leave a Comment

No, this isn’t about Star-Wars! And it is not about following the Jedi Path. This is a way of thinking with roots going back to Maslow around unifying forces.

For our workplaces, this is about the way we think about safety, the way we engage around safety, and the way we bring a third unifying force to the whole culture of safety.It’s the missing link in our respective workplaces. Without it, we tend to stay engulfed in a culture of compliance, yet despite trying and trying, we never reach excellence. Without it, we keep repeating the same mistakes – round and round we go.

With it, however, we intentionally move forward. We establish the culture that is committed to safety, inclusively cares about and connects with everyone, continually learns, and develops a depth of safety.

With it, safety has a constant aliveness. Without it, safety remains a by-the-way.

Read on to learn more about this “IT”…the Third Force of Safety!

The Awakening of the Third Force

I spoke at the American Society of Safety Engineers, Region IV, Professional Development Conference in Tampa, Florida on February 27, 2016.

Dick Knowles with Pamela PerrichI spoke about Partner-Centered Safety™ and the importance of this as the quickest way to achieve sustainable safety excellence. As many of you know, I have written and spoken about this many times over the last several years. The information and data I share clearly shows that this approach to leading safety is very powerful, producing improved results quite quickly. Many of you have seen the terrific results the people at the DuPont, Belle Plant achieved. This approach has a very strong scientific basis in complex adaptive systems theory.

It was exciting to see and hear one of the speakers at this PDC also beginning to talk about improving safety using a complex adaptive systems approach. This speaker had heard Sydney Dekker speak about this way of engaging the organization at an ASSE National PDC in 2014 and had gone to Australia to meet with Dekker. While they like the ideas of this approach, they do not have the tools to make the connections and bring the networks of people effectively connect with the physical work and come to life.

Several other speakers spoke about the importance of working more closely with the people, developing more trust and interdependence. There is developing excitement about this way of working together.

The Awareness is Growing!

There seems to be a growing awareness that working with the people makes a positive difference. While no one has developed the tools to actually engage and bring the people together into a highly focused and purposeful conversation as we do using the Process Enneagram©, a positive shift to fully engaging the people and achieving safety excellence appears to be starting to happen.

In my presentation, that was very well received, I introduced a new diagram about bringing the safety and business technology together with the people side of the enterprise releasing the Third Force (Partnering) to achieve Total Business and Safety Excellence. For over 100 years, the business, productivity, and the safety technology (the quantitative, rules, procedures, machines, etc.) of our work has driven our organizations. The people have often been pushed and driven to function like they were just parts of a great machine. When we shift our way of thinking and doing, we can effectively bring the people into the work using a complex adaptive systems approach and specifically the Process Enneagram Safety Excellence workshops, a whole new level of sustainable performance is created.

Total business excellence

In the Safety Excellence Workshops, using the Process Enneagram© (seeSafetyExcellenceForBusiness.com and RNKnowlesAssociates.com), the people discover and co-create new ways to work together and develop the excitement and commitment for sustainable safety excellence to be achieved.

The Third Force in Safety is Partnering – bringing the strengths of our business and safety knowledge and tools together with the goodness of and power of the people to achieve sustainable, excellent results. It is an active force, a compelling force – collaborative, focused, conversational, committed, and caring…and it works!

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety Leadership Process Tagged With: , ,

It is NOT Just Theory…It is Practical!

November 28, 2014 By Leave a Comment

The Safety Leadership Process is firmly based in complexity science, where organizations are seen as behaving more like living systems than machines.

Safety Leadership ProcessBut, the machine view of organizations is the dominant paradigm right now. We direct the people to work in tight procedures. We manipulate them to do things right. We punish them when there is an injury or incidents. We look for root-cause. We think that if we can take things apart and understand the parts that we can understand the whole. Almost all the effort is engaged in doing things TO the people as if they were just interchangeable parts of a machine. Most people push back against authority in this paradigm. This is a win/lose environment.

When we see organizations as if they are living systems, we focus on the whole system where all the parts are interconnected and interacting all the time. Change is embraced. Information needs to be freely flowing so that all the parts are working in harmony. Trust needs to be built so that people can depend on each other and work more effectively together. Each person helps the others do their work more effectively. People from all levels PARTNER together for the good of the whole – rising above their own selfish needs and goals. This is a win for safety, a win for the business, a win for the people.

Dr. Sydney Dekker, an Australian safety expert and leader, spoke at the ASSE Safety 2014 Conference. He is a leading thinker in trying to bring the complexity science paradigm into the field of safety. In his talk, he emphasized that while great improvements in reducing injuries and incidents has been achieved over the last 50 years, the injury rate improvements are getting smaller. By shifting our thinking to the complexity paradigm, we can achieve excellence.

This is what I was advocating in my talk I described above. The Safety Leadership Process puts the complexity paradigm into the organization. This is what I used as a plant manager and now as a Safety Consultant with excellent results. The Safety Leadership Process is a robust, proven, easily understood, low investment process that leads to sustainable levels of safety excellence.

A core part of the Safety Leadership Process requires everyone to get clear on their assumptions, values and priorities. I have often found that various members of management are not clear and aligned, which results in mixed messages and inconsistent results.

A powerful complexity tool called The Process Enneagram© is used to bring the people together to struggle with the hard questions like “Is safety #1?” or “How do we get everyone engaged in helping to improve our safety performance and sustain it?” Here is a link to sign up and receive free access to a recent webinar I held to describe this tool and its use.

I speak, conduct workshops and coach people in organizations on how to significantly improve their safety performance. This flyer provides a lot of information regarding my offering. Please call me (716-622-6467), if you wish, to explore what is possible.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: , , ,

Teaching Point: Talking together, with each other

October 30, 2014 By Leave a Comment

In order to build a culture of safety excellence, information needs to be widely shared in a way that it is credible, clear and understood. Talking together is so important.

Treating people with respect, showing them that we care about them and their safety, listening to them as they share their hopes, concerns and ideas, is vital to building a culture of safety excellence.

creating a safety cultureAs managers go into their workplaces, walking around watching, listening and sharing with true authenticity and interest, trust and interdependence build. People learn to open up, to share, to point out possible areas for improvement, and to realize that they are a critical part of the whole safety effort. A huge, positive shift in the safety culture occurs. The people close to the actual, physical work are often in the best position to see potential hazards that are not visible to the managers. The managers often need to push to meet production schedules so it is easy for them to miss these potential hazards. Therefore, having the active help of those closest to the work is an important piece of the total safety effort. This is one way we avoid disasters like the Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire.

Yet, many managers find that talking like this with the people in the organization is difficult. In the early days of my career, I also was reluctant to go into the workplace and talk with the people. This is a participative process and sometimes you can get tripped up. I found that I needed to get very clear about the safety messages and their importance so that I was able to be coherent and credible as I engaged with every one. Once I had the ideas about safety clear and cogent, I could easily talk with people. I learned that I did not have to have the answers to every question that was asked. When I didn’t know the answer, I’d say I did not know and would get back to them as quickly as I could. This actually made the encounters more effective since the people could see that I was listening and learning as well. People want to get to know their managers and see that they are truly interested in them and their safety.

So, I strongly suggest that the managers get clear and coherent on their safety messages, get out of their offices and into their workplaces, talking together, listening and learning so problems can be avoided and potential improvements identified. Then get going with the people to solve the problems and make the improvements. This takes time and effort, but over the long run, time is saved and leading gets easier as we avoid the dreadful mistakes and injuries.

This way of communicating with the people is highly effective and a key part of The Complexity Leadership Process. While much of my focus is related to workplace safety, this Complexity Leadership Process can apply to all aspects of organizational life since organizations are complex evolving systems.

Safety is very complex with all the interactions of people, technology and varying conditions; this tool enables the people to have the necessary conversations for them to come together in partnership and achieve excellence.

The fundamental basis for the Complexity Leadership Process we use in moving from compliance in safety performance to excellence is a powerful tool called the Process Enneagram©.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: , , ,

The Safety Leadership Process©

October 10, 2014 By Leave a Comment

The Four Simple Steps to Safety Excellence

    how to improve workplace safety

  1. Get clear, focused, and determined.
    Co-create the Safety Strategic Plan© using the Process Enneagram©. Keep it posted, talked about, and used.
  2. Build trust and interdependence.
    Develop the shared, co-created Principles and Standards of behavior that are needed to achieve safety excellence. Live by them in doing the work on the Issues that need to be addressed to improve safety performance. Hold each other accountable. Let everyone know you deeply care about safety and everyone going home healthy and in one piece. Make this work open and visible for everyone to see and to model in his or her own work. Trust and interdependence emerge as people learn to work together this way.
  3. Talk with everyone, share information openly, and listen to each other.

    Walk around, talking and listening, every day. As people get to know you better and see you being honest and keeping your word, trying to improve yourself and admitting to mistakes when they are made, trust builds.

    (Since over 95% of all injuries and incidents are the result of the actions of people, go look at what people are doing. Do Safe Acts Auditing to see and keep track of how people are working. Show the people you really care about improving safety.

    These audits give a quick indication of what is happening in the safety culture, providing clues to changes; a drop in the Safe Acts Index (SAI) indicates a potential injury is about to happen. The patterns of behaviors that are seen indicate areas of strength and areas of weakness that need to be addressed. Perhaps there are bad habits or more training is needed, or there is a confusing mixed message or a deeper systems problem needs to be straightened out. When people see and become aware of what is happening, focused attention can be applied.)

  4. Quickly take the appropriate actions on new information that is created to correct the problems that the patterns of unsafe behaviors observed indicate. Remember that the information developed in these Audits is for learning about how to improve the safety performance. If this Safe Acts Auditing tool is used for punishment, the integrity and value of this process is lost.
    Evolve steps 1, 2, 3 and 4 all at the same time as the Safety Leadership Process™ develops. They are all interconnected and interacting all the time. Do them over and over again.

    • It takes the courage to hold each other accountable, to have the difficult conversations, to make decisions, and to act.
    • It requires the care to do every thing as well as you can.
    • It requires the concern for the impacts for all the changes on all the stakeholders.
    • It requires the commitment to stay the course in both the good and difficult times, day after day, month after month, year after year!
    • This is the essence of safety leadership.

Most companies and the people in them want to have a safe place in which to work. Cynics who exist, must be stuck in really poor companies, at the low end of the distribution curve. Life for them must be dark and gloomy. Come into the light with The Safety Leadership Process©.

Filed Under: Safety for Business, Safety Leadership Process, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: , , ,

The Process Enneagram©: Essays on Theory and Practice

September 19, 2013 By Leave a Comment

In my previous Blog on The Complex Systems Leadership Process© I’ve been thinking that it would be better to name it The Complexity Leadership Process© since it really is not a system as in systems thinking.

The Complexity Leadership Process is another name for Self-Organizing Leadership©. These are adjustments to my thinking relating to these ideas.

Self Organizing Leadership This Blog is focused on my new book, The Process Enneagram©: Essays on Theory and Practice. I am the editor for this book that was just published by Emergent Publications. It can be purchased directly from their website.

This book grew out of the call for papers for the Special Issue of Emergence: Complexity and Organization, Volume 15, Number 1, March 2013 on The Process Enneagram. In that call for papers I received 9 papers from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom. Since we could only publish four of them in the Special Issue of Emergence, for space reasons, Kurt Richardson, Director of Emergent Publications suggested that we publish all 9 papers in a book.

The book begins with a brief Introduction by me of the Process Enneagram. The 9 essays include two of an historical and theoretical nature by Tony Blake and Cameron Richards, one describing the use of the Process Enneagram at a Managing and Engineering Complex Situations Workshop to help a group of engineers get a better sense of the complexity paradigm and one paper is about using the Process Enneagram with groups of people in industrial organizations helping them to address their complex issues. There are two papers describing the use of the Process Enneagram with graduate students to help one class design their classroom experience for the semester and the other class to get a better understanding among a class of engineers of the flow of technology developments over the last few years from the perspective of complexity. Another describes the use of the Process Enneagram in helping to develop more cohesive, effective teams over a three-year period. Another paper correlates the energy flows in the Process Enneagram with those in an ancient Chinese cosmological, leadership model. The last paper uses a card trick by a famous magician to illustrate how one feels while moving through the work of the Process Enneagram.

These widely ranging essays open up a broad scope of richness in The Process Enneagram helping people to see and learn more about it from these widely ranging perspectives.

Sometimes I have referred to the Process Enneagram as a tool, but this is misleading in that it is not something like a wrench. I see it more and more as a series of nested processes that help guide important conversations and reveal the patterns and processes that are running within the organization. In using the Process Enneagram with people deeper understanding and better communications develop.

The importance of the Process Enneagram is in its use to help people work with complex, wicked problems, build the social connections they need and build the emotional energy and commitment to do their work.

One area where I have used The Process Enneagram is with people in organizations to help them improve their understanding of all their safety issues and develop a living, strategic plan for them to use going forward to sustain their work. Using The Process Enneagram is the first step in the Complex Leadership Process helping the people to get clear, focused, coherent and energized. As people develop and use The Process Enneagram they experience two levels of transformation. One is their own personal transformation and the other one is the transformation of the organization.

When the leaders from across the organization develop their strategic safety plan, and engaged in the transformations, they can take it to all the others in the organization to share and further develop it. If people are willing to be open to learning and growing The Process Enneagram always works in amazing ways.

In the previous blog I describe the Complexity Leadership Process and you can see the important role at the start of the work that it plays.

Filed Under: Safety Leadership Process, Self-Organizing Leadership, The Process Enneagram© Tagged With: , , ,

LEADERSHIP of Complex System and the Growing Interest in The Process Enneagram©

August 28, 2013 By 1 Comment

This blog-post is NOT about Safety, but rather it is about the larger arena of Leadership.  For those that know me, Leadership and Complexity are important to what I teach, what I apply in my Workshops, and what I often write about.  The focus today is on the growing interest that is developing around the Leadership of Complex Systems…and The Process Enneagram©, which is a tool of complexity.  Please read on….to learn about how this increasing interest is showing up!

There is a growing awareness of the science of complexity and how to apply the insights gained from this work in organizations. This is showing up in various places like the Linkedin Group discussion boards. There is also a growing awareness of the Process Enneagram© and its usefulness in helping people to solve complex problems, build the social connections they need to get the work done and create the emotional energy and commitment to do the work quickly and well.

The Journal “Emergence: Complexity and Organization” asked me to Edit a Special Issue of their Journal devoted to the Process Enneagram. This Special Issue was published in March, 2013. (Emergence: Complexity and Organization, Vol. 15 #1, 2013).

In the call for papers for this Special Issue a total of nine papers were submitted. This was too much for the Special Issue so all nine papers were recently published in a book. The Special Issue and the book, “The Process Enneagram©, Essays on Theory and Practice” are both available at Emergent Publications.

Beverly G. McCarter and Brian E. White in “Leadership in Chaordic Organizations”, (2013, ISBN 978-1-4200-7417-8) write a large section on the Process Enneagram and say that it seems to be the missing link between complexity theory and practical application.

International Top 100 Magazine just listed my biography in their “Who’s Who in Consulting” in their August 2013 Issue.

There is a growing interest in my book, “The Leadership Dance, Pathways to Extraordinary Organizational Effectiveness”. Even though it is 11 years old and has sold about 1,500 copies, Claire, my wife and partner, was able to do a book launch on my 78th birthday on August 8th and it became a #1 Amazon Best Seller and remains a Best Seller 15 days later as this is being written. This book is now considered by many people as a classic in organizational transformation.

The Process Enneagram is being used by many people around the world, especially in New Zealand and Australia where I have done a lot of work over the last 15 years. It is also being used by Datuk Mary Yap Kain Ching in Malaysia to study the leadership of head teachers in their most successful schools. Ms. Ching was recently elected to Parliament in Malaysia and is now the Deputy Director of the Ministry of Education in her Country.

A series of videos is being prepared for The Center for Self-Organizing Leadership website to introduce more people to this way of leading and to determine interest levels for developing a webinar on the Process Enneagram and its use.

Interest in Accreditation is developing in New Zealand, Australia and the US so I am now working with a number of people who are interested in becoming Accredited in the use of the Process Enneagram©. (If anyone reading this Blog is interested in becoming Accredited, please contact me.)

The Center for Self-Organizing Leadership website is being up-graded and many articles that I’ve written will be available and new products are being created.

My work in the application of complexity theory and The Process Enneagram to helping organizations achieve excellence in their safety performance progresses. My understanding of these tools and their application continue to develop. A description of my new Complex Systems Leadership Process© can be found in my previous blog.

This Process has three simple rules:

  • Share all information.
  • Build trust and interdependence.
  • Help people to see how they fit into the organization and the importance of their work to the success of the whole.

There is also a simple 4-step process for the people to use together to achieve and sustain excellence in their safety performance.

Having pursued this vision of the Process Enneagram and its value and importance, it looks as if things are beginning to come together. I thank all of you reading this for your help in this long journey.

 

Richard N Knowles, Ph.D.

Filed Under: Safety Leadership, Safety Leadership Process, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: , , ,

When the Safety is Right, Everything Else gets Right!

July 1, 2013 By 1 Comment

I recently read a book by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, The Three Laws of Performance. They have studied leadership in many organizations and developed Three Laws of Performance and three Leadership Corollaries for these (P.212).

The First Law
How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.
Leadership Corollary 1
Leaders have a say, and give others a say, in how situations occur.

The Second Law
How a situation occurs arises in language
Leadership Corollary 2
Leaders master the conversational environment.

The Third Law
Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.
Leadership Corollary 3
Leaders listen for the future of their organization.

These three Laws and Corollaries are almost identical to what we do in Self-Organizing Leadership as we use the Process Enneagram© with the people. In using this tool in conversations with the people we co-create the future with everyone having a say in it. We spend a lot of time in the organizations talking with and listening to the people seeking new and better ways to do things.

For some people in leadership positions, talking with people, seems to be quite hard. Yet it is as simple as for example;

“Hi Mary, How are things going today? I hope everything is going well on the home front. You look like you really know how to do this task. I’ve never done it before, could you show me how you do it? What are the safety challenges and rules? Is there a better way to do this? Is there an easier way? Let’s talk about that. If I help you, can you take the lead to develop the idea and see if it really works as well as you think?”

This conversation shows how the Three Laws of Performance play out. Mary usually gets pretty pumped up as she is listened to, respected and asked for a better, safer way. This may be the first time she’s been treated this way by management.

As this simple interaction occurs, over and over throughout the organization, the culture shifts to becoming more positive, resourceful and creative. When the people see that management is really listening and trying, when they see the manager as real people things open up. Ideas about things beyond the safety arena emerge and big savings develop for the company.

When I was the Plant Manager at the DuPont Belle, WV Plant, working this way with about 1,200 people we made huge changes that endured for many years. For example, injury rates dropped >96%, emissions dropped 88%, productivity rose 45% and earnings rose 300%. Together we achieved world-class safety performanece with total recordable injury rates running at 0.3 or less. They maintained this excellent performance for 12 years after I left for another DuPont assignment.

Zaffron and Logan have a case study in their book about New Zealand Steel near Auckland, New Zealand. The mill was struggling and the management decided that they really needed to change the culture to survive and grow into their future. In just 2 years New Zealand Steel transformed themselves. Injury rates dropped 50%, productivity rose 20%, costs dropped 15-20% and return on capital rose 50%.

As I was reading the story I realized that I knew the people they’d named and that Tim Dalmau, my associate in this work, and I had led the transformational effort using the Self-Organizing Leadership approach. The Process Enneagram© was the key tool we used to help the people have the important conversations and discover their future.

These two stories of the transformations of the DuPont chemical plant in Belle, WV and the New Zealand Steel plant in Auckland, New Zealand clearly show that the work with the people to shift the safety culture is the leading edge of change for the entire organization.

Filed Under: Safety Excellence, Safety for Business, Self-Organizing Leadership Tagged With: , , , ,