They did a great job – but missed the participation target. Employee satisfaction moved up a notch with community participation cited as one of the top 3 reasons to work for their part of the organisation. The retail guys rolled up their sleeves, delivered some amazing projects, raised a record-breaking amount of money for charity and moved the dial on brand loyalty with some great local PR. ‘Engagement’ was defined as ‘the number of employees participating’ across a of programmes and a high target was set. There’s another aspect to this: using the iceberg model to remind ourselves about the influence the structures and beliefs can have on behaviours – and how creative people can be in delivering exactly what you ask for.Ī very large, global organisation wanted to increase ‘employee engagement’ in community investment across their offices around the world. “There’s a new mindset we understand things differently.” Case study B: Be careful what you measure We’re changing the format every time and asking who wants to get involved from the whole of the organisation.” They aren’t about putting ideas into practice any more they’re about practising being creative together. “Creative team meetings have a new lease of life. “You can’t underestimate the incredible difference moving offices made, and it already feels different, with a focus on conversation rather than email.” It seemed to unlock enough for people to begin to experiment in other areas. There were other dynamics and interventions but the hot-desking space was an important catalyst for change. The conversations shifted and the old beliefs about who was qualified to develop ideas began to dissolve – without us having to address them directly. People from other departments began to mix with ‘the ideas people’ and take part in the informal conversations leading up to the creative meetings. They wanted to put their energy into something that felt exciting and began talking about a new area in their building how they could set it up as a hot-desking space. We could however talk about their structures such as their processes of communication and collaboration.Ī shift happened after a systems game when I used the iceberg model to help them make sense of their experiences and open up a conversation about the experiments they could run in their organisation. It pointed to some organisational beliefs about creativity and the hierarchies that existed but neither of these were safe topics for discussion at the time. Some of the hidden dynamics were around the power structures underpinning the ideas process: whose ideas were taken seriously and the process by which ideas came to life. Our work is creative, about emotion and passion, but people were detached I was flummoxed as to why people weren’t contributing,” said the meeting owner. “People weren’t talking and the meetings weren’t functional. One of the ‘hot’ presenting issues was the pickle they were in with their creative meetings. This example comes from a transformation project I ran for an arts organisation. The conversation often starts with structures and flows into beliefs, and a richer picture emerges.Ĭase study A: finding the place to intervene in an arts organisation “Where do we have permission, agency and appetite to experiment?”
It often triggers new insight about what they’re experiencing and new ideas for how to intervene. A light goes on for people when they see the list of structures, the ‘levers’ they can pull. Its great strength seems to be that it puts the client in the driving seat in a conversation about the interventions to try in their organisation. It’s simple and easy to understand and seems to be at a ‘Mummy Bear’, medium level of abstraction – not so specific that it’s scary and not so vague that it loses all meaning.
It uses the metaphor of an iceberg to illustrate that our experiences are deeply influenced by dynamics we cannot easily see: the structures that form the framework within which we operate, and the beliefs we hold about how things work. This model is a very simple representation of a complex system. I have adapted it as I’ve used it with people. The original for this one came from The Systems Thinking Playbook by Linda Booth Sweeney and Dennis Meadows (thanks and respect – it’s a brilliant book). There are many versions of the iceberg model. The iceberg model and why people seem to love it You might find it wonderful and marvel at how it helps people shift to a more systemic way of looking at things. You might balk at its simplicity and the things it omits. You might not love this model if you’re a purist about complexity science or a stickler for precision. It happens every time I share it people love it. I offered a simple iceberg model and my client seized on it, waved it around and started using phrases like “going deeper in the iceberg”.