Vedere Consulting

I did something a while ago that I regret. I joked about Richmond (the one in Virginia) being a place where the Civil War is still taken very seriously. If you know Richmond you are probably wondering why something like that would bother me. After all, the Civil War is taken very seriously in this former capital of the Confederacy. But it’s not all about unreconstructed Rebels wishing the South would rise again. It’s a complicated conversation that stirs many emotions. At its best, though, the conversation about the Civil War is an attempt to “integrate and salvage the national story.”

I first saw that phrase in an interview in the Richmond Times-Dispatch with University of Richmond President Ed Ayers. It captures perfectly what I believe is a necessary step in the evolution of our nation and, importantly, in every organization faced with difficult and long-ranging decisions.

I’ve heard people say that we just “need to get over it and move on.” Moving on is a good thing, but moving on without understanding how we got here in the first place keeps our understanding incomplete, our focus small and our options narrow. This is true because the world we live in is the result of decisions made and actions taken in our collective past. We assume many things are simply “the way they are” without understanding that something happened to make them that way in the first place. If we know what that something is, our minds are often opened to new ways of thinking.

Dr. Beverly Fletcher and Dr. Billy Wayson offer a course at the Federal Executive Institute called “The Long Shadow of Slavery.” Their goal is not to rehash old wounds, but to help us look at our past with open eyes so we can see the policies and the reasons for the policies that shape our way of thinking today. Such an examination makes it possible to “heal the future” –to create solutions to long-standing problems. If we see our problems as decisions made long ago, it makes it easier to see the decisions we can now make, individually and collectively, to make things better. Such an honest examination makes it easier to see how our opponents (as well as our friends) came to draw the conclusions they’ve drawn, and then to see new and creative options.

All organizations have difficult, knotty issues to tackle. Often there are conflicting viewpoints about how those issues can be best addressed. I believe that executives need to understand the collective past before they decide on the corporate future. They need to know, not the rosy corporate history fashioned by the communications department, but the organization’s unvarnished understanding of itself.

How can they get this viewpoint? The best way is to ask. Not one person, but lots of people. Marv Weisbord and Sandra Janoff (www.futuresearch.net )created a strategic planning methodology, the future search conference, which brings all the stakeholders of an organization together to create a picture of its future. During the first part of the conference, participants create a collective timeline detailing the significant events and decisions in an organization’s history. This timeline creates a collective understanding of “how we got here” and begins to spark conversations and ideas of how to go forward.

Future Search Conferences are one way an organization can learn about its past. It’s not the only way. However, executives would do well to learn from the Federal Executive Institute. FEI is devoted to developing executive leadership in the federal government. It believes that federal executives need to understand our “national story” if they are to understand the context, the environment, in which they have to lead. Such understanding makes leaders—government and corporate—far wiser and far more effective.

Labels: Executive Leadership