In the classic 1967 movie "Cool Hand Luke," Paul Newman plays Luke, the non-conformist with an indomitable spirit. Luke gets drunk in a Southern town and, for no particular reason, cuts off the tops of some parking meters. For this crime he is sentenced to the chain gang, which is under the oppressive stewardship of the captain. After one of Luke's escape attempts and the ensuing beating, the frustrated captain utters one of the most famous lines in movie history: "What we have here is failure to communicate."
There is, however, an even more striking line, although it has been largely forgotten. After Luke is again beaten and thrown into a hole that he has just dug, the captain says, "Luke, you've got to get your mind right." But Luke doesn't get his mind right, and, in the end, he is killed after another escape attempt. Luke dies heroically, but, in the end, he is dead because he refused to get his mind right.
In recent years, there has been a growing body of opinion that to effectively change organizations requires more than solid planning and a focus on execution. It often requires changing mental models. For example, John Kotter, a leading authority on change, now emphasizes the need to "feel" change. Changing mental models is a form of "getting your mind right." And the focus on changing mental models is a reflection of the frustration of seeing well-thought-out change efforts fail on a regular basis.
Why are so many organizations like Cool Hand Luke? At least in Luke's case, we can say that he died for a set of principles. Conversely, General Motors is not dying because its SUVs have relentlessly stuck to the highest quality standards. Nor do many non-profit entities shrivel because of their unwavering dedication to serving the poor. They are like Luke only in their rigidity. Their equivalent to Luke's unbending and ultimately self-destructive mindset is the organizational culture. And it is typically aspects of the culture — rather than market conditions or other externals — that lead to organizational decline and death.
Arrogance and leadership: What do we know about culture and the ability to change? First, mental models reflect the culture, and the culture reflects the leadership. As often happens in our times, the Bush Administration provides us with powerful negative examples. Arrogance is a mental model. It has been the hallmark of the Bush Administration and will almost certainly provide endless confirmation to Herodotus maxim that "All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears."
Arrogance produces insularity, which, in turn, produces blindness to trends and events that threaten the entity, whatever it is. The history of the American auto industry in the postwar period was one of insular arrogance, the results of which are the current death spiral and decades of lousy cars. Wall Street demonstrates the same arrogance, with the added quality of being able to bring us all down with them.
The Bush Administration has yoked arrogance to the innate cruelty of its leadership group, producing a moral death spiral within the administration and the sapping of our nation's moral strength. We now know that the top leaders of our country (Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell and Ashcroft) all planned specific tortures in intimate detail in White House meetings. Our national "mental model" must now be considered one that sanctions torture of other human beings, and then hypocritically parses the terms to avoid moral and legal opprobrium.
So lesson number one in changing mental models — in a positive direction — is to select the right leadership and avoid selecting bad, especially morally corrupt ones. This is as true of organizations as it is of governments. As Albert Schweitzer said, "Example is not the main thing influencing others, it is the only thing." While there may be an element of overstatement there, he certainly wasn't far off.
Mental models aren't mental: I recently worked with an organization whose core problem was "silos." Or so it seemed. Units that had to be effectively integrated were not. Everyone could see the problem as the organization's fundamental work processes constantly got screwed up. But to define this problem in intellectual terms was certain to lead everyone down a blind alley. The source of the silos was fear and mistrust, deep-seated emotions rather than intellectual constructs. Fear and mistrust are immobilizing emotions. While the status quo may be bad, an unknown future could be even worse.
Indifference is also an emotion. In contrast to the insecurity bred by fear and mistrust, indifference is typically a product of excessive security. In the Virgin Islands, it is clear to even a casual observer that the mental models that predominate in the public and parts of the private sector produce typically bad outcomes. These outcomes are not the product of fear. They are the result of systems and structures that make it virtually impossible to remove people for non-performance. These toxic emotions are also contagious. Indifference … poor performance … others thinking "why should I work when he isn't?" … overall lowering of standards.
Faulty assumptions: Wrong assumptions also block our ability to change mental models and improve performance: Nobody will ever buy little foreign cars; we have the best health-care system in the world; the supply of tourists willing to put up with bad service is endless; don't worry, we'll have plenty of time to deal with global warming, energy shortages, etc. These kinds of assumptions constrain our ability to create new models and visions for the future. The Virgin Islands, until the recent election, has been trapped in a set of unsustainable assumptions that have produced a downward trajectory for at least the past quarter century. At the heart of these assumptions was one based on a belief in the sustainability of a political, economic and ecological model that has produced mostly decline and unhappiness.
Albert Einstein once said, "Insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results." The starting points for breaking out of this pattern are facing reality and shedding illusions, selecting and supporting leaders who are willing to acknowledge problems and define them correctly, rejecting arrogance in favor of a more humble approach, being willing to test our assumptions and — possibly most important — describing alternative visions of a future that will look different and is worth taking some risks to achieve.
Editor's note: Frank Schneiger is the president of Human Services Management Institute, a management consulting firm that focuses on organizational change. Much of his current work is in the area of problems of execution and implementing rapid changes as responses to operational problems.
