An interview of Alan Briskin by Bob Morris

Alan Briskin

Co-founder of the Collective Wisdom Initiative, Alan Briskin is an organizational consultant, artist, and researcher. His co-authored book, The Power of Collective Wisdom, won the 2010 Nautilus Award in the category of business and leadership.  One of his other books, Daily Miracles: Stories and Practices of Humanity and Excellence in Health Care, written with Jan Boller, was chosen as the 2007 Book of the Year by the American Journal of Nursing in the area of public interest and creative works. Briskin, honored by Saybrook University as its 1997 Noted Humanist Scholar, is a leading voice in the field of organizational learning and development.

In 1971, he was part of an international community in Israel, founded on the principals of the communal kibbutz.  As an educator, he helped in the start up and development of an alternative school in Maine (1973) and was the first Director of Education for the Vermont group home that became the model program for deinstitutionalization of confined youth (1978).  His interest in alternative educational settings continued for over 10 years (1995 – 2005) while he served as the principal consultant to the George Lucas Educational Foundation. Briskin’s work with human potential and organizational learning continued as a specialist in prison reform and health care.  He was the first person to research emerging theories of moral development with prison inmates and led a model program aiding inmates to bridge the chasm between cell block and useful employment. As a health care consultant in the mid 1990’s, he helped design programs for practicing physicians to deepen their communication skills with patients. He is a founding member of the Relationship Centered Care Network. Briskin has been invited to speak on his work throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, England, Japan, and South Africa. He has a doctorate from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, CA and is a Professional Associate of the Grubb Institute in London.  His love of photography opened his inner eye to the beauty that enfolds us. Briskin lives in Oakland, CA.

Morris: Before discussing The Power of Collective Wisdom, a book you co-authored with Sheryl Erickson, John Ott, and Tom Callanan, a few general questions. First, when and why was the Collective Wisdom Initiative founded?

Briskin: It was founded in 1991 and funded by the philanthropic organization, the Fetzer Institute, after research we conducted demonstrated a growing network of scholars and practitioners interested in the question of group practices leading to creative breakthroughs and transformative change.  Our initial task was threefold: to enable this diverse global group to see and connect with each other, to help each other gain access to useful ideas, and to notice patterns and make visible this growing network of people and ideas.  On our website, two years before Facebook began, we posted photos and personal profiles of each of our network members.  We also commissioned original papers from scholars and practitioners, asking them to write about a topic they themselves were wrestling with, ideas still emerging in their own personal and intellectual life.  We had tremendous diversity, ranging from a physicist who worked with the Dalai Lama writing about love and community to a Jungian scholar writing about the ecstatic darkness in groups.

Morris: Years ago, you became centrally involved with the education of children, first in Israel and then in New England (Maine and Vermont). Please explain your interest in alternative educational settings.

Briskin: Well I had a wild idea that educational settings were places where learning could happen.  My interest in alternative learning began in the late 1960’s when I read about a small program in the South Bronx that successfully worked with high school dropouts.  The curriculum was based on their personal life experience and it made me realize the importance of learning as something personal, something to be experienced, something to get excited about.  For those who watched the movie Precious, the alternative school the main character went to had that quality.  It was messy, at times chaotic, but the kids knew someone cared about them and knew an adult believed in their potential.  And they also learned from each other.

Morris: Please explain what the George Lucas Educational Foundation is and does. Also, when and why did you first become involved with it?

Briskin: One of the things I appreciated about the George Lucas Educational Foundation was that it was not set up as a traditional charitable foundation.  Rather, it seemed to be driven by a series of evolving questions.  How do kids best learn?  How will changing technology and the digital age affect learning and learning institutions?  What is already happening in public education that deserves our attention and support?  My role as a consultant was to support both group execution and strategic vision.  Lucas had a vision of giving educators, politicians, parents, and school administrators “swords” that would aid them in cutting through the bureaucracy, specialization, and stupefying language that creeps into discussions about learning.  The Foundation did this by becoming a media hub for storytelling about what was working in public education and hired a full time documentary filmmaker to showcase these model programs.

Morris: Please explain what the Relationship Centered Care Network is and does. What are the nature and extent of your association with it?

Briskin: This was another example of the power of partnerships, collective networks, and inspired conversations.  Provoked by fundamental questions such as “where is the care in Healthcare?” and “how might compassion and clinical excellence be joined?” the Pew Health Professions Commission and the Fetzer Institute joined forces to promote an integrated model of care.  In 1994, they published a report that emphasized the primacy of relationships – between caregiver and patient and family, among practitioners, and between practitioners and their community.  And then in 1996, they convened six separate groups of twenty-five or so people in diverse areas of health care.  We met in Kalamazoo, Michigan – where Fetzer is located.  And we talked, told stories, and addressed questions about illness and transformation.  It was eye opening and emotionally engaging and celebratory – we were simultaneously learning from each other and learning about how health care could be transformed.  Later we began having annual conferences for the combined groups and other interested professionals and eventually over 1,000 people were in the network.  My book, Daily Miracles, written with stories drawn from dialogues with nurses at a community hospital over a two year period was a direct result of this experience.

Morris: Now please focus on The Power of Collective Wisdom that you co-authored with Sheryl Erickson, John Ott, and Tom Callanan. In the Foreword, Peter Senge suggests four reasons why he thinks the book is so important…and I agree with each. Please share your own thoughts about the reasons he cites. First, that the book “corrects a misconception that wisdom is not developable.”

Briskin: What Senge does so well is that he challenges basic assumptions and misconceptions that often go unchallenged in the business community.  The first is that wisdom is not developable, as if it’s a matter of luck or personality or genetics.  Well it’s just not the case.  Wisdom involves our accumulated knowledge about a subject but also a reverence for life, for an understanding that our immediate actions have long-term consequences, and for an appreciation that there are different ways of knowing and understanding situations.  When I talked about the Relationship Centered Network, I was speaking about a group developing wisdom.  And we do this by joining contemplative practices such as the use of silence, prayer, and consideration of a higher purpose in life with dialogic practices which engage us with others – making us consider differences and allowing us to find what is common among us.

Developing wisdom in community is to constantly learn and relearn that expedience in the short term – whether for efficiency or profitability – can lead to disasters in the long term in financial, ecological, political, social, and spiritual spheres.

Morris: Senge also suggests that the book is “about the capacity of human communities to make wise choices and to orient themselves around a living sense of the future that truly matters to them.”

Briskin: He is addressing a basic misunderstanding that wisdom is only about individuals. We often associate wisdom with individuals – the ancient figure of Solomon or great leaders such as Lincoln, Gandhi, King, and Mandela. But Senge is pointing out that is misleading for two reasons.  First is that these leaders are known precisely for their ability to catalyze and mobilize the wisdom of large groups of people, often in times of great conflict and conflicting viewpoints.  Second, the focus on the individual misses the point that it is in partnerships, small groups, and communities of shared goals that anything of lasting value is created.  The group is the fuel for completing tasks and getting things done.  And people in groups can accomplish almost anything when they feel connection to a higher purpose and an understanding of how their individual actions affect each other and the larger whole.

Morris: Sense’s third reason for admiring the book is that you and your co-authors show that wisdom “is all about results, and especially what is achieved over the longer term” and what has substantial “tangible impact.”

Briskin: This was personally very important for me.  Collective wisdom is too often dismissed as a “feel good” concept or used as an expression for insights that can occur in well run groups. But this misses the larger point that wisdom is also about sound judgment, not just consensus, insight, or simple agreement.  Wisdom in groups is earned by gathering useful data, exploring diverse perspectives, respecting different viewpoints, and then shaped through critical reflection on behalf of tangible outcomes.  We show this in the book through stories ranging from indigenous people basing decisions on the seventh generation forward to the creation of the United States Constitution by a cantankerous group of people coming together in Philadelphia – not even knowing that a new Constitution was needed.

Collective wisdom is about our capacity to recognize interdependence and to make decisions demonstrating that we have a stake in each other, that we can indeed care for each other and the physical planet we share.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

You are also cordially invited to check out the resources at these websites:

http://www.thepowerofcollectivewisdom.com/

http://www.alanbriskin.com/collective_wisdom.htm

Really Good News About Alzheimer’s – And Confirmation Of The Promise Of Wikinomics

First, the news, reported in Rare Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer’s by Gina Kolata in the New York Times.

In 2003, a group of scientists and executives from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the drug and medical-imaging industries, universities and nonprofit groups joined in a project that experts say had no precedent: a collaborative effort to find the biological markers that show the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain.

I’m sure you’ve heard the news about this project.  The researchers have discovered a spinal fluid test that is seemingly very accurate in predicting the onset of Alzheimer’s.  The article describes how it was made possible by the mass and generous of information.  And in the arena of science and research, this meant individuals and companies had to get beyond their own desire for credit and profit to make this available to all.  In other words, this was a genuine and true systemic/process breakthrough, enabled by the technology that makes such information sharing possible.

How successful was it?

And the collaboration is already serving as a model for similar efforts against Parkinson’s disease. A $40 million project to look for biomarkers for Parkinson’s, sponsored by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, plans to enroll 600 study subjects in the United States and Europe.
The work on Alzheimer’s “is the precedent,” said Holly Barkhymer, a spokeswoman for the foundation. “We’re really excited.”
and
Companies as well as academic researchers are using the data. There have been more than 3,200 downloads of the entire massive data set and almost a million downloads of the data sets containing images from brain scans.
And Dr. Buckholtz says he is pleasantly surprised by the way things are turning out.
“We weren’t sure, frankly, how it would work out having data available to everyone,” he said. “But we felt that the good that could come out of it was overwhelming. And that’s what’s happened.”

Now, let’s think about it.

Though this work on Alzheimer’s “is the precedent,” in fact other arenas have already made great use of this new collaborative approach.  We could start with Wikipedia, but the best description of this is found in the book Wikinomics.

So, what is the biggest benefit of this technological era?  I presented my synopsis of Wikinomics:  How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams back in May, 2007.  A.G. Laffey, CEO, Proctor & Gamble, in a “front of the dust jacket” blurb, stated why the book and its ideas are so important:

“No company today, no matter how large or how global, can innovate fast enough or big enough by itself…  Wikinomics reveals the next historic step – the art and science of mass collaboration where companies open up to the world.  It is an important book.”

Here’s a little from the book:

Call them the “weapons of mass collaboration.”  New low-cost collaborative infrastructures – from free Internet telephony to open source software to global outsourcing platforms – allow thousands upon thousands of individuals and small producers to cocreate products, access markets, and delight customers in ways that only large corporations could manage in the past.  This is giving rise to new collaborative capabilities and business models that will empower the prepared firm and destroy those that fail to adjust.

Peer production is a very social activity.  All one needs is a computer, a network connection, and a bright spark of initiative and creativity to join in the economy.

These changes are ushering us toward a world where knowledge, power, and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history – a world where value creation will be fast, fluid, and persistently disruptive.  A world where only the connected will survive.  A power shift is underway, and a tough new business rule is emerging:  Harness the new collaboration or perish.  Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated – cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value.

The lesson is clear, and simple:  no one knows as much as every one.  No one company, university, research unit, knows as much as all companies, individuals, research units.  Unless you can hire every professional and amateur scientist in the world, then for breakthroughs to be found at the fastest speed, this is the new model.  Throw your data out there.  Get any one and every one to start thinking about the problem, and looking for solutions.

This may be a bad model for “profit,” (the article hinted at that), but it sure does sound promising for people frightened about Alzheimer’s.  And, I suspect, and hope, this is only the beginning.

Bill George’s Perspective on the HP Tragedy: An Authentic Leader Loses His True North

Bill George

Here is an excerpt from Bill George’s blog. To read the complete article, please click here.

The Mark Hurd situation can only be considered a tragedy for everyone involved.

Hurd is one of the most outstanding leaders in the U.S. In 2005 he took over an ailing technology giant and restored it to greatness in just five years. He refocused HP on itsoriginal mission and values and built the company around its strengths – technology, customer service, and managerial discipline. He built a much stronger organization with excellent leadership at all levels, and unified a dysfunctional board of directors.

During a short span, he turned HP into the world’s largest technology company and expanded its revenues to $125 billion and nearly $9 billion in profits.  The markets rewarded his leadership, and HP’s market capitalization has doubled during a period in which the S&P declined in absolute terms. He leaves behind a company that is demonstrably stronger than it was when he took over.

So what happened here? Did the HP board act “in a cowardly manner,” as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison charged in his letter to the New York Times?

No, the HP board acted in a unified manner to address an extremely difficult situation. Most likely, the board was blindsided when it received the letter from Jodie Fisher charging Hurd with sexual harassment. The board did the responsible thing in conducting a thorough investigation that concluded there was no basis for the sexual harassment charges, but that Hurd had violated basic HP employee policies regarding expense reporting and other issues.

Should the board treat Hurd differently from other HP employees that had committed similar indiscretions? Its answer was “no,” that the values and principles of the company had to take precedence over any individual, no matter how well he had performed or how valuable he was to the company. So the board’s unanimous decision was that Hurd had to resign. Reports out of the company indicate that HP’s global employee base was overwhelmingly in support of the board’s decision.

As much as the HP board doesn’t want to go through yet another CEO search, at least this time around it has excellent candidates both within and outside the company.

Hurd has built a strong executive team with several excellent successor candidates. If the board chooses to go outside, it will have outstanding applicants lining up to be considered for the top job in Silicon Valley.

The question remains, how did an exceptional leader like Hurd let himself get into this position? We’ll never know how Hurd let himself get into this position, nor is it ours to judge. But his greater error was to dig the hole deeper. This is a classic case of Murphy’s Law of Compound Loss; i.e., when something goes wrong, individuals often compound their problems by trying to cover up the initial problem. For example, President Richard Nixon’s cover-up of the Watergate break-in is what compounded his problems and led to his resignation.

Hurd could have acknowledged his liaison in the first place and wound up with only a reprimand. Instead, he compounded his problem by submitting inappropriate expense accounts. Then, when the HP board initiated its investigation – which it was compelled to do by Fisher’s letter – Hurd made an agreement with her that kept her from cooperating with the board’s investigation. In business, we call this “hush money.” In criminal law the proper term is obstruction of justice. After his resignation was announced, Hurd allowed his close friend, Larry Ellison, to defend him by attacking the HP board.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Bill George is professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, the author of four best-selling books on leadership, including True North, and the former chair and CEO of Medtronic.