management-body of mgmt final w-cover 09-04-17 - 10p

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The Body of Management

Robert Dunham


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2002, 2004 Robert Dunham. Enterprise Performance. All rights reserved worldwide.www.enterpriseperform.com

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The Body of Management by Robert Dunham

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hat do I do now? I had been a software programmer, writing code, and suddenly foundmyself a program manager for Four Phase systems, newly reporting to the VicePresident for Systems Development. I was now responsible for planning and

coordinating the work of two hundred and fifty software engineers and their managers. I hadntdone this scale of managing and leading before. I had led platoons in the army, and had led thesmall Hubble Space Telescope onboard software team of four people. But this was a new orderof management challenge. I wasnt sure how to go about this, and after several months was stillunsure about how I was doing and whether we were going to produce the products we wereworking on. I was anxious, uncertain, and straining. No one seemed to know what to tell me. Iattended the meetings, we agreed on doing things, but I was tense with my uncertainty aboutwhat would happen, and exhausted from trying to get other people to act.

What happened in this transition to a new, larger scale of responsibility for the actions of othersis a common experience for people who are promoted into bigger responsibilities in their careers.I discovered that I didnt really know what management is, and didnt find anyone who seemedto know better. Were we all faking it, working hard and hoping? What would good managementlook and feel like? This would become a driving concern for me in my life and career. Ive beenon the hunt ever since to find ways to work with others, to manage, to lead with clarity, impact,and a sense of feeling at home. This search and what it has found was fundamental to mysubsequent work as a vice president in several companies and ultimately led me to found acompany dedicated to building a discipline to address these challenges.

Lifeless Management, Organizational PainThat the current conceptions of management and teamwork are inadequate is clear by justobserving most organizations at work. Even companies that have a healthy bottom line do notoften have healthy organizations, people, and moods. There is tremendous human energy andpossibility being wasted in all but the very best organizations. Organizational life is for too manypeople a place of hope, then disappointment, of ambition, then resignation, of energy too oftenunused or misused, voices ignored and a sense of disconnection. I say this from over twentyyears of experience in line management, consulting to dozens of companies and executive teams,and working with hundreds of managers and executives to strengthen their skills in management,leadership, and producing organizational excellence.

Management is largely thought of today as a set of tasks and techniques, with a strong dose ofproblematic people issues. MBA programs teach a host of analytical skills, with perhaps some

active projects and communication training. But the available education tends to suffer from ourcultural intellectual tradition that has us abstract things, then try to understand them. Get thetheory, then apply it. But its one thing to understand and be able to talk about, say courage, orgenerosity, or open listening, or team building, and another to do it. In fact, we may think weunderstand courage, but when the time comes for action we may find that we are not able to actin a way we consider courageous. We cant apply a theory for courage, we must be able to actcourage, not think courage.

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In all actions that we assess strongly as virtues and vices we act from more than our heads. Weact from where we have to face our fear, our doubt, our tendencies, and our connection to ordisconnection with others. We have to feelour way to courage. We have to find what beingcourageous is, as with love. We dont do love. We find what loving is in our experiences, whatits feel is, its breath, and energy, then we learn to go there, and going there is a continuous pathof learning, and creating, what love is. In the same way, we must learn how to beleaders,

managers, communicators, team members and collaborators with others.

For most, management and organizational life are contained in a language of tasks, things to do,and results to achieve. Too often we have no language, awareness, or practices for care, forcommitment, ambition, or even passion. Our cultural common sense places us in a space ofthinking of using people and ourselves as mechanisms of production, not sources of energy,possibility, and drive. Too often leadership is seen as directive behavior that doesnt connectpeople to their own concerns and energy, but emphasizes a sterile discipline of effort andobedience. We need a leadership of connection. Connection to what people care about mostdeeply, to their generative energies, and to each other and their capacity to create together.

Toward Generative Leadership and ManagementThere is already a mass of current interpretations about leadership and management. Yet thereis a blind spot in this mainstream common sense. MBA programs, for example, expose people toleading thinking and frameworks for business and to functional skills like finance, marketing, andstrategy. But what is missing is a more fundamental perspective on how people interact, createaction and the future, since everything in business and organizational life flows from theinteractions of people (what else are sales, marketing, financial transactions, customer service orprojects?). What understanding does exist in the mainstream about this foundation isdescriptive, not generative. By this I mean that someone can describe, or recognize, leadershipor, say, effective teamwork, but they dont have interpretations or skills of how to generate them.We need a generative foundation for leadership and management.

The discussions of what happens in organizational life and business tend to be anecdotal innature, for example, case studies or abstractions of principles. However, the abstractions leaveout the foundation - what happens with people, what they really do, and how they really react.We wind up with ideas to talk about, but no insight into the moments of creation where peopleact and interact with other people.

My colleagues and I have developed what we believe is a generative foundation for leadershipand management. Its results demonstrate a powerful and effective framework for answering thequestion What do I do now? This foundation is built on awareness and attention to language,commitment, and how they are embodied in the body. It is based on making distinctions wherewe have been blind, and enables us to generate new actions that are recognized as leadership,management, teamwork, and satisfying work life. We cannot manage without the language of

management and the body of management. Language that produces action, coordination, andshared commitment, which cannot happen without the body that connects to others, producestrust, can listen and be heard. These dimensions provide a generative foundation that is missingin our mainstream common sense of management and leadership. This foundation gives us newanswers to the questions whatis leadership and management, and howdo we do them -answers that we can see, do, and learn. These answers, when engaged within authentic learningfor action, enable us to go beyond our current limits.


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Overcoming Our LimitsManagement, organizational life, and team involvement put us in contact with each other in waysthat our actions and interactions have consequences - the consequences of social identity, groupdynamic, and success or failure in career and business. Committing ourselves to leadership andmanagement places us in a posture of responsibility for the actions and outcomes of teams,groups, organizations, and communities of people. We must face the otherand interact inways that produce something that will be shared. In doing so we must first face ourselves, ourown limits, fears, anxieties, and resignations, and the impact of our energies, presence, andinteractions on others. Like marriage, family, and relationship, we share a part of our lives withdesires, hopes, and commitments for positive outcomes. We act and produce outcomes in ourinteractions with others, and then live in our accompanying stories, interpretations, and moodsabout all of that. We find our limits, and may interpret these limits as the restrictions of externalreality and the peculiarities of others, or we may look at the limits as products of our own waysof acting and being. When we look for the limits within us, we will find where we can shift ouractions and ourselves to go beyond them.

There are some very common kinds of limits that I have found people have in organizational life.What makes these limits so common is that most people fall into a common narrative about

themselves and what is, and is not, possible in their relations with authority and demand. Themost common manifestation of this limit is the inability to say no, or the inability to ensure thatthey only make agreements that they are confident they can fulfill. A common excuse is that Myboss wont accept my saying no. I might get fired. This fear and expectation then lead peopleto overcommit, overwork, under-perform, lose any hope of excellence in their own or theirorganizations work, and ultimately leads to dissatisfied customers and unfulfilled promises. Yetthe root of this dynamic is fear, distrust, and a lack of shared cultural standards for professionalhonesty. The result is organizations with a deck of cards of fragile commitments, withheldhonesty, and resignation anticipating failure and impending blame. Overcommitment is anendemic dis-ease in almost all of the organizations that I have worked with over the years.

Yet committing to what you are unsure you can fulfill, or sure that you cannot, is not a

productive strategy for success. If we learn to counteroffer, to negotiate sincerely with acommitment to satisfy those we commit to, we can produce a different future for all involved.

In one of our projects we worked with one of the largest software companies in the world. Theyhad decided to form an engineering group that would provide the software components sharedby all their major products. This would reduce duplication of efforts, make shared servicesamong their products easier to design and implement, increase the quality of the products andreduce costs dramatically. The team, about seventy engineers, was having severe difficulties.People were working eighty-hour weeks, yet they were delivering code months late, causingtremendous lost revenue. Their code was delivered with numerous quality problems, personnelturnover was rising in the group, and the organizations they were delivering to were upset andangry due to the poor performance and lack of communication.

The problem was that the group managers were committing to more than the group could deliverin the impression that they couldnt say no. First we had to enable the group managers toconfront this interpretation, and the fear and resignation that it produced. In conversations wedeveloped a different interpretation that committing to more than you can be sure of doing isnot taking care of those you commit to. This will lead to sure dissatisfaction and trouble.Instead, we opened conversations to produce trust, to demonstrate commitment to the needs ofthe requesters, and to educate them to the limits of capacity and of feasibility. Then in a moodof cooperative co-design, to figure out how to best produce satisfaction for the customer of thework within the limits of capacity, feasibility, and energy.


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To interact with requests and demands in this way is more than a change of ideas, it requires achange in the body, a body that can be settled, clear, and connected with demand and notdriven into fear and inarticulate collapse or acquiescence. It is a reappropriation of our capacityof choice where our smell of danger has us react. . We put the management team intoexercises to explore how to avoid overcommitment while producing trust with theircounterparts.

We followed up with coaching in the teams working meetings, and in the groups meetings andconversations with their internal customers. The group managers learned how to have a newkind of conversation, make a new kind of agreement, and shift their automatic reactions in a newdirection. This was not an application of ideas, it was practicing a new set of actions, skills,emotional reflexes, and blending them with other people.

As a result of learning to decline, counteroffer, negotiate, and co-design, as well as stay inregular conversations of taking care of their internal customers, the group produced a radicalshift in their management practices and the results they produced. Three months later, thegroup delivered its next delivery on time instead of late. The acceptance test found no softwareerrors instead of hundreds of them. The group members were working with livable work loads,they hadnt had to borrow from the work being done on the next release to make this one, andthe internal customers were satisfied and complimenting the groups management team. Thiscame from a new interpretation, new conversations, new practices, and new embodied skills indealing with their own automatic moods, emotional tendencies, and inclinations. They hadbecome more effective leaders, more valuable as a team, and produced a work life ofachievement and fulfillment, rather than anxiety, exhaustion, and failure.

To do this, they had to learn new skills in communication, new ways of speaking and listening.But they had to get past the words to a new embodiment of commitment and action.

The Language of Action and CreationWe must first become aware of the power of the language we live in. We create our future inlanguage. It lives in our interpretations, our expectations, and our commitments. These are allconstructed in our conversations and language. We also create action in our interpretations andlanguage. If we are the creators, the authors of our actions and future, why dont we do a betterjob of it? Why is there so much dissatisfaction, miscoordination, and unfulfilled possibilities?

Because most of us are blind to our capacity to create our actions and the future, and blind tothe creating that we are already doing. Our interpretations are so potent that when we build astory of what is possible and what is not, that is how reality shows up for us. To be specific, wecreate the future in our stories built around certain judgments of what is possible and what isnot, and in the commitments that we make based on those judgments. For example, if we saythat we are going to become a physician, we create a story of the future in which we arebecoming a physician, and our reactions to what happens will be based on whether we judge we

are successfully becoming a physician or not. We have created a future of becoming aphysician.

We create this possibility through declaration, and if we really own our declaration, then we takeactions based on it. We take pre-med courses, apply for medical school, study medicine, anddecide on the field we will take our residency in. We commit to these actions out of ourcommitment to become a physician. These commitments shape the future we expect, futureactions we will take, and how we will judge whether our future is turning out positively, ornegatively if we dont fulfill our commitments.


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We also create the future together. We may live in the interpretation that we will get marriedsome day. We see other people as possibilities or not as partners in some future marriage. Wefind ourselves spending time with one, or several, people which we consider candidates for alifetime partnership. We may invite someone to marry us, and make a commitment that changesour future forever, and if they accept, we are now co-creating a future together, in whateverstory we build with the other. When we build a team or mount a project, we are also building a

future with others.Projects are bits of creating shared futures. What are we going to do? What are we going toproduce? How are we going to do this? Who is going to do what? And so we create a future ofpurpose, action, and outcome.

We may be blind as to how we create the future, but we do so anyway everyday, moment tomoment in our thinking, speaking, and interactions with others. When we enter theinterpretation that we are creating the future, and learn to see the moves of declaration andcommitment we make, we see our world differently. We see where we can become moreeffective in creating futures we care about, where we can move with more power, and where wecan learn to better engage with others to create futures we share.

Leadership and management are ways of moving with others to create shared futures. Todevelop our abilities in doing so requires we become aware of what we are doing, imagine howto do it better, and enter practices that enable us to actually do what we imagine. We must alterour bodies, our embodied ways of listening, interpreting, acting and interacting.

Walter, for example, was considered a top-flight technical performer when he began to studymanagement with us. As is often the case, his excellence in his field was considered to qualifyhim as a candidate for management, even though the skills of management and the skills of histechnical work were largely unrelated. He arrived and seemed quite stiff and socially withdrawn.The projects he was being asked to manage were having trouble, the people working with himhad negative assessments of his work with them, and the customers his teams worked for werenot satisfied. Walter was a nice guy, but terse, literal, and technical.

Walter had a presence of remoteness, affability, and dry logic. He tended to go into his ownlogic when speaking to people and would lose them. He would argue for his points, but notconnect with the concerns of those he was talking to. He asked his team members to do things,but didnt get commitments. His body was stiff and speech chopped. The contracted way hemoved in his body led me to doubt the impact we could have with him in his learning. I thoughthe would be a project, and take up to two years to loosen up and embody effectivemanagement skills.

We worked with Walter in group exercises, and followed up with regular coaching calls. Weshowed him how to explore communication, how to look and open to the dimensions that histechnical information perspective was hiding from him. As we pointed out each new dimensionto investigate, it became time to learn anew.

He practiced different kinds of listening and speaking, orienting to commitment in his actionconversations, but interacting with openness to what his team members were saying, and notsaying. He softened, learning to extend and connect. He negotiated with people to design nextsteps. His teams performance improved, his customers started reporting satisfaction, and histeam members began to speak positively of him. The shift was fully underway in about sixmonths, faster than I had hoped for. But the shift came not from Walter learning in his prioranalytical way, getting ideas and then applying them. The shift came from Walter letting hisbody learn, from shifting his embodiment. Walter did not stay the same, and then apply new


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ideas. His practice shifted how he perceived, how he listened, how he spoke, and the energy ofhis presence. Walter shifted his embodiment, and with it his identity, results, possibilities, andhis future.

The Knowledge of the BodyOur culture has had a schizophrenic stance with knowledge for thousands of years that hides truelearning. We have two flavors of knowledge, the knowledge ofwhat we know understanding,and the knowledge ofknow-how the ability to act. Leadership, management, and living wellwith other people, in other words creating a meaningful and satisfying future, have remainedmysterious domains. We can describe them when we see them, but we arent clear what to doin order to generate these outcomes. I believe two major reasons for this cultural blindness are:1) we dont look in the right place to understand what is involved, and 2) what ideas we do haveare descriptive, not generative. What are the missing ingredients of our blindness? I have foundtwo in our cultural common sense: 1) the language of action and creation, introduced above,and 2) the role of the body in skillful action.

What is the role of the body in skillful action? First, you dont have action without the body. Thisis a fact that we are blind to in our cultural common sense. Management, for example, is taughtas abstracted principles like physics, or as anecdotes as though description is enough to producelearning. But we cannot embody abstract ideas, we must learn the experience of the idea, andtranslate concepts into the living shapes of our bodies in action. We must be able to articulatethe actions, show the actions, practice the actions, and observe and assess the actions if we areto learn action, not abstracted ideas.

Janet, a director of marketing for a major product at a large corporation, is an example oflearning new distinctions and practicing new actions that overcome obstacles and self-limitations.She was very frustrated with her manager, who didnt communicate in any regular way, gave nodirection, was rarely available, and when he did get involved seemed to mess everything up. Hedidnt coordinate the various departments who reported to him that had major deliverables dueto her. She grew increasingly dissatisfied and frustrated, finding herself blocked by hermanagers actions and inactions at every turn. Her commitments would not get fulfilled in thissituation, and her revenue based bonuses and job satisfaction were going down in her mindevery day. She got to the point she was going to resign and find another job. She was filledwith resentment and frustration.

Janet was coached to use the situation to practice new moves for herself. She could alwaysleave and find a new job, but we invited her to see the opportunity for learning in the situation.She reluctantly agreed, and found her embodied frustration was preventing her from seeing anyother option than being a victim of her bosss actions. We had her examine her tendency to fallinto resentful interpretations, to withdraw, and to avoid having honest conversations about theissues with her superiors. She found calmly putting her attention on her breath, an exercise for

directing attention, difficult for even five minutes. By talking through the conversations thatneeded to happen, and working with her managing her tension, attention, and sensations of fear,she was able to open the missing conversations with both her manager and her managers boss.We worked with her to make clear requests and complaints to her manager, which at first shecouldnt get herself to do. She learned to center herself and choose to take these actions ratherthan get lost in her resentment, anger, and fear. She found she could have conversations withher manager she didnt think she could have.


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After finding that her manager would make agreements, but not keep them, she overcameanother temptation to give up, and took a stand with her managers boss to get what she neededto do her job. Her reporting was shifted to another manager, and she was given permission tocoordinate directly with the organizations she relied on. She began a new practice of teammeetings with these other organizations, focused on clarifying and managing the promises ofthem as a team. She became an effective team leader through practicing listening, connection,

and the conversations of managing commitments and breakdowns. The project went fromapparent peril to a successful on-timeproduct launch. The product exceeded revenueprojections, received several industry awards, and Janet was given two other products tomanage. She was able to do this without falling into overwhelm by building strong teampractices and commitments. Through this process she went from a habit of long to reasonableworking hours, and made the time to get married and have her first child while continuing tomanage her team.

Learnings Shift of OurselvesTrue learning is a transformation of our body, of our language, of our Self. It doesnt happen

only in the domain of ideas, but in the domain of embodiment, where what we see and what wecan do shifts, where our habits are changed, and our transformation shifts how we show up, howwe see our future, and how we are seen by others. This is radical compared to the interpretationof learning as the acquisition of information, but it is a more accurate description of what ishappening to us all the time. Learning always involves a change in our bodies, our nervoussystem, and our embodiment. Our nervous systems structure is what enables us to see what wesee, interpret what we interpret, and take the actions we can take. When we learn, we alter thestructure of our nervous system; we see and interpret differently; and we can take actions wecouldnt take before.

In other words, when we learn, we become different people than before we learned. We aretransformed in our learning. The notion that we acquire information, or understand and thenapply theory, leaves out the crucial elements of learning: that we shift ourselves in ways thatshift what we see, what we interpret, what we feel, how we act, and what we can produce withthe impact of our actions.

How do we learn? We learn what we practice. We are what we have practiced, and webecome what we are practicing. Our practices shape our bodies and our minds, and have beenfor our entire lifetime. We learn as we practice and shift our awareness, attention,interpretations, skills and embodied capacity for action. It is important to become aware that wecan choose our practices. Because as managers and leaders we can practice connection andinteraction that produces commitment, energy, and passion for a shared future, or we canpractice our old habits. Or perhaps we learn to practice the common interpretations ofmanagement that turn people and ourselves into raw material and mechanisms for projects, turncommunication into the transfer of information, and separate our work from our care and even

from people so that our work becomes a place of sacrifice instead of fulfillment. In the work Ihave done introducing acts of commitment, listening, assessment, moods, and how theseproduce action, people find these perspectives valuable. They see the world with a newparadigm, see where they were blind before, and are excited with new possibilities for their ownaction.

What I have found, however, in companies where we worked, is that after a couple of weekswed find that people would have returned to their prior habits, and the new learning and itsvalue will have faded or disappeared. This is the symptom of intellectual learning, learning


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without the recurrent practice necessary to shifts habits, skill, and behavior. Most of our currentcommon learning and education tend to be this way. We orient to feed people new ideas, andperhaps produce positive ratings for edutainment, but dont produce competence in newactions and practices. The body will do what it knows, and without practice, it goes back to thehabits that have served it for a lifetime. We must learn to learn through practice, not justunderstanding. We dont learn to play the piano in one sitting, and we dont learn leadership

with new ideas we need to develop the embodiment of leadership skills.

But this raises the questions of what to practice? and how do I practice? We have sinceworked for many years in addressing these questions for leadership and management. We havelearned that the approach of how to learn through practices must include: becoming aware ofour current interpretations and practices, seeing what new ones are more effective, exercising inthe new interpretations and practices to experience what has to be learned, then practicing in lifeand work with coaching feedback on how you are doing.

The Future is Yours

We are the leaders and managers of our futures, more than we know, whether we work inbusiness, or whether we have a title of manager or not. The skills of leadership andmanagement are rooted in human capacities for action that we all share. Through practice wecan access the possibilities of our bodies and being and become more fully ourselves in ourexperience of life and acting on behalf of what we care about. Through learning we can expandour ability to shape our world and our future together through practices that connect us to eachother, to the wisdom of our bodies, and to our capacities to create the future.


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Robert DunhamRobert Dunham founded The Institute for Generative Leadershipin 1998 and the performance

consulting company Enterprise Performance in 1993. The Institute focuses on crucial executiveand management skills that are a complement to MBA programs and go beyond mainstreammanagement development approaches. Inspired by the challenges he faced as Chief OperatingOfficer for a technology company, and as a vice president in Motorola Computer Systems andseveral other companies, Robert has developed a discipline of leadership and management basedon action-generating communication skills, embodied learning, effective hands-on managementpractices and individual coaching that enable clients to increase organizational performance andproduce more meaningful and satisfying careers. He is the designer and leader of the nation-wide executive and management development programsThe Generative Leadership Program(GLP) (see www.enterpriseperform.com) and The Company of Leaders. He holds two degreesfrom Stanford University, co-holds two patents for workflow software. He draws extensively fromthe work of Dr. Richard Heckler in embodied learning and leadership, from the work of Dr.Fernando Flores in the field of Ontological Design, and from other leading thinkers that illuminatehow people communicate, coordinate action, learn, and author the future.

BibliographyThe Anatomy of Change, Richard HecklerThe Tree of Knowledge, Humberto Maturana and Francisco VarelaUnderstanding Computers and Cognition, Terry Winograd and Fernando FloresDisclosing New Worlds, Charles Spinoza, Hubert Dreyfus, and Fernando FloresMastery, George LeonardValue Dynamics, Peter Denning and Robert Dunham (book in progress)On the Internet, Hubert Dreyfus

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