Positive Turbulence

Positive Turbulence

This month, I am working with a collaborator on the topic of Positive Turbulence. Stan Gryskiewicz literally wrote the book on Positive Turbulence and we will apply the concepts he established to the practice of strategy crafting. Over his career, Stan was instrumental in founding the Center for Creative Leadership and the Association for Managers of Innovation as well as creating significant organizational impact as a consultant and coach. You'll hear more from us in the coming weeks and see a full article by the end of the month. Here, we review the concept of Positive Turbulence (PT) and discuss the assumptions and context important to understanding the concept as applied to organizations. We then move on to explore how you can create Positive Turbulence and use it to help drive strategy and organizational change. The final section gets specific about the role of Positive Turbulence in Strategy Crafting.

What is Positive Turbulence?

Turbulence, Generally. Taken literally, we observe turbulence all of the time in nature; it is a property of physical systems observed in fluids like air and water. Turbulence is characterized by irregular changes in pressure and velocity. It is the opposite of smooth, laminar flow. Imagine a slow flowing stream. In drops a leaf and as it moves downstream, its steady motion allows one to make a good guess at where it will be in 10 feet or even 100 yards downstream. Now the leaf passes under a wooden bridge and gets stuck in a small, swirling eddy behind the pillar that holds up the bridge. The smooth flow was replaced by something unexpected and we can no longer predict what will happen. The flow of the water became turbulent, the leaf experienced the unexpected, and we as observer were surprised.

We see turbulence daily and it is commonly observed in natural phenomena such as water moving in our kitchens, in nature as surf or flowing streams, or in our atmosphere in clouds which we can feel during a bumpy flight. In the mind of the physicist, turbulence is caused by large amounts of motion energy within moving fluids that transforms the fluid system from laminar equilibrium to one of chaotic behavior. From this chaos comes turbulent flow, friction, drag, and unsteady swirls and vortices on sizes of varying scales. All hell breaks loose on the level of small particles in the fluid. It is nearly impossible to predict the future state of material caught in turbulent flow. Begin to imagine this metaphor applied to organizations.

There are three important characteristics of turbulence. One is irregularity – turbulent flows are always highly irregular and turbulent systems lack predictability. Determinism falls apart. We must think about the past and future of turbulent systems in terms of probabilities and forecasts, not calculated predictions. A second characteristic is diffusion - turbulence is accompanied by energetic forces that act to mix diverse things together rather than keep them separated in like groups. The third characteristic is chaos - turbulence is accompanied by disorder and confusion. Turbulent environments behave so unpredictably that they sometimes appear random. Other behaviors come with chaos such as sensitivity to small changes in initial conditions, fractal geometry, dynamic equilibrium, nonlinear system aperiodicity, and most importantly emergence. See Curves that Matter for more about these properties of nonlinear complexity and how they apply to organizational strategy and change.

Positive Turbulence (PT) brings us back to the prediction part. Recall the leaf. Something happens when we move from smooth flow to turbulence, and indeed, the lack of ability to see the smooth flow and predict our outcomes can make many nervous. The insight is that sometimes, the outcome of unpredictability puts us in a better place in a more positive position. The true power of Positive Turbulence may be emergence. A property of a system is emergent if it cannot be explained by the properties of its components. The term emergent properties was coined by Broad in the 1920s "for those properties that emerge at a certain level of complexity but do not exist at lower levels". An example of an emergent property is that sugar tastes sweet although sweetness does not exist in the tastes of the individual carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms that form sugar. Reductionism and analysis cannot explain emergence, as these properties can only be examined holistically. Emergence was an issue that baffled Newtonian scientists for decades. In fact, it was the search for the roots of the emergent properties of matter that led physicists to understand the quantum nature of reality. Those that study complexity continue to identify more and more emergent properties in natural systems and many theorists now contend that phenomena such as new species, personality, consciousness, group behavior, culture, and life itself may well be emergent properties of natural systems.

Accelerated change is the destiny of the of the leaders of the future. It will not be an easy role to fill. Finding their way through complexity and making decisions along the way will require access to information which comes through open channels of turbulence. The leader’s function will be to make difficult yet correct choices. In any society or organization, “those who chose the most have the most reason to feel free.”

– Harlan Cleveland

Positive Turbulence and Complex Organizational Dynamics. Our focus here is on organizations, cultures, and communities not clouds and streams, however these are good metaphors to help us understand turbulence at play in more complicated social phenomena. To move from natural to organizational systems, we can borrow a potent lens from the work of Gareth Morgan that he employed in his book Images of Organization. Morgan explored the nature of organizations through a collection of metaphors such as the Machine, the Living Organism, Brains, Cultures, Political Systems, Psychic Prisons, and Flux and Transformation. Two of these metaphors are useful to us here, that of the machine and that of flux.

The machine metaphor of organization is all around us. It is the industrial paradigm. It is Taylor’s scientific management. It is Weber’s theory of bureaucracy. It is command and control. It is still the way that many managers and leaders wield power, seek control, and flail and fail hopelessly in modern organizations. We know that this worldview is limited and faulty, but still we find a preponderance of organizations managed this way. Turbulence is one of the many phenomena we know about that provide evidence for the lack of completeness and usefulness in the machine metaphor.

Morgan’s flux and transformation metaphor of organization posits that organizations are complex adaptive systems rife with chaos and turbulence. While harder to understand and apply, leaders and manager that operate from the perspective of complexity experience greater success in their organizations over the long run. The perspective of complexity gives leaders potent tools and one of these is Positive Turbulence.

Positive Turbulence describes a climate that values and seeks novelty. Positive Turbulence mixes novelty with the known and the familiar resulting in an energizing tone compatible with change by providing stimuli to motivated people who are looking for ways to make their own contributions to the renewal and success of the organization. Leaders who foster creativity in organizations create a culture that values and seeks novelty from the outside.

Positive Turbulence includes outside forces that impact change that an organization must be aware of and use in order to stay ahead of the competition and remain a coveted provider of relevant services. These outside forces can include a changing marketplace, the economy, new technology, the competition, shifting demographics, social–cultural–political, and others that may be unique to any single organization. Any organization that keeps on the lookout for these changes in peripheral forces, brings the awareness in and channels these forces into innovation. Thus Positive Turbulence becomes a source for innovative products, services, and processes.

Positive Turbulence is an energizing climate that draws organizations towards a directed change. It provides stimuli to motivated people looking for ways to make their own contributions towards the success of the enterprise. Creative leaders set the tone for this culture by recognizing the need for an environment that produces change. Creative leaders manage change before change manages them. While many traditional managers and leaders focus intently on their own organizations, we recognize that many of the sources of change come from outside their organizations. The sources are troublesome because one may have little of no control over the changes they bring.

Creative leaders create the meaning, set the tone for this culture, and help guide a climate compatible with change. This reality has always been present but now that we operate in a global context with accelerating technologies, the changes come faster and from more exotic sources than ever before in history. Positive Turbulence begins with the recognition that change is inevitable. It then provides ways to keep change manageable and apply it to an organization’s strategic advantage.

Learning About Positive Turbulence. So far, we have explained what turbulence is generally, described the kinds of turbulence that are positive, and set our discussion firmly within the context of organizations. Now, let us add a few more terms and conceptsto help round out the description.

• Difference – incorporating programs and information that is new and unexpected.
  
• Multiple Perspectives – divergent viewpoints to see in new ways.
  
• Intensity – speed, volume, and force and ability to manage their intensity coming in to the organizational system.
  
• Receptivity – how individuals respond to the turbulence that includes their style, flexibility, and tolerance of ambiguity.
  
• New Possibilities – A turbulent environment can be seen as a reservoir of new ideas. A growing group of practitioners (beginning with the military) call it a VUCA environment – volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous. Sort through the turbulence experienced in your organizations and turn that into a positive force for renewal. The behavior is to welcome variance, expand your field of of vision, see opportunity, and learn to embrace change.
• Acting in Fresh Ways – Creativity, innovation, and change do not have to be dictated by having problems to solve, patchwork repair, and chance. Creative leaders can put in place organizational structures that provide more predictable, ongoing sources of information that can be used for renewal. This means putting mechanisms in place for bringing in new information, then making relevant sense and producing new and useful ideas.