The level of group
Inquiring at the level of the group or group-as-a-whole means assuming the presence of a group mind - a pattern of organisation or a set of dynamic relationships, in which when a group member acts they are not only acting on their own behalf, but also on behalf of the group or parts of the group.
Inquiring at the group level.
When inquiring at the level of the group or group-as-a-whole, we begin to make sense of organisational events as originating primarily out of shared concerns or issues existing in a group of people. These shared concerns or issues can be conscious and explicit or unconscious and implicit. Conscious issues can be anything, from the assignment of roles and responsibilities, to questions or critiques pertaining to the reasons behind tasks, to emotions that accompany a shared context. Unconscious, shared issues can be many - concerns about rejection and acceptance, conformity and individuality, influence and efficacy, leadership and followership.
The challenges of working with this level.
Groups, by virtue of the number of people in them, and the power of both the conscious and unconscious concerns that need to be addressed, usually seek someone to represent or express those concerns. In a majority of the cases, the concerns are not in the conscious awareness, and the process for finding a spokesperson, someone to raise the issue of shared concern, is subtle and harder to observe. This other group dynamic, in which an individual expresses a shared concern that is disowned by others, is often misdiagnosed. As a result the shared concern often fails to be addressed. Therefore, the work of inquiring at the group level through exploration of connection to the "deviant,” “scapegoat” or “outlier” is the primary task. And this level of inquiry - the acknowledgment that the deviant in the group represents something in all of us, demands engaging in self-reflection to include the split away aspect of ourselves, discovering of the unexpressed shared issue, and then speaking up.
Improving the situation at this level.
Groups experience shared concerns or issues that may not be in any individual’s awareness, or individuals may not be aware that they are shared. Thus, anxiety in new situations is often not in each individual’s awareness unless or until it is publicly acknowledged. And even when individuals in a group are aware of their anxiety, it may take an explicit discussion for the members of a group to become aware that it is, in fact, a shared experience.
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The power of passion and purpose
Born in Milan in 1967 to parents originating from Puglia region, Luca De Meo developed a passion for cars at the age of seven. He was intrigued by the Italian pilot Arnaldo Cavallari, who took de Meo on a ride on his Lancia Fulvia HF. De Meo grew up to secure a degree in Business Administration from Bocconi University in Milan. And in his thesis at the time he had examined business ethics, one of the first dissertations on this subject in Italy. Between 1992 to 1998 he began his career at Renault in Italy and then France, prior to joining Toyota Europe. In 2009, when Luca de Meo joined Volkswagen AG as the head of marketing communication (by the end of 2010 he had become the CMO of the VW Group), his task was to transform a fragmented marketing department into an innovation powerhouse.
De Meo was energized by the ambitious goal that VW’s CEO, Martin Winterkorn, had set just a year earlier: to surpass Toyota and General Motors and be leading the industry within a decade. This goal was about something deeper than being number one: It was about leveraging a near-century of VW history to create cars that made the world better—by delighting customers, limiting environmental impact, and pioneering what it means to be a 21st-century automaker.
De Meo’s mandate was to build a marketing department that could support this audacious ambition. Although the Volkswagen brand was strong in many markets, de Meo knew it had more potential, including making the brand much more unified. It was perceived differently across the world, especially in emerging markets, where VW was looking for dramatic growth. As a former board chairman of Fiat and CEO of Alfa Romeo, de Meo knew, that a brand was built from the inside out. And its brand elements—innovation, responsibility, and value—had to be more than rhetoric. The company and its people had to live them day in and day out. To him purpose was not what a group does but who is in it or why it exists. Purpose was about a collective identity and it made people willing to take the risks and do the hard work inherent in transformation.
A quest for innovation
VW operated in 154 markets, and its marketing was highly decentralized. Most of the company’s marketers had worked only within their home countries and had had limited opportunity or incentive to interact with their colleagues in other countries or at corporate headquarters in Wolfsburg. The silos and the “highly linear processes” the marketers followed to do their work discouraged them from speaking with “one voice,” de Meo was quoted saying. Much more concerning to de Meo was that, at VW, innovation was considered the province solely of engineers in product development, not of people in marketing—a common problem often seen in engineering- and product-focused firms. To De Meo everyone at a world-class company had to be an innovator, a strategist, a global thinker - this belief he held deeply and strongly. For his team to create a powerful global brand, the marketers had to feel like citizens of a cohesive, collaborative community. Facing a desperate need for new capabilities and a ticking clock, de Meo nonetheless focused first on building that sense of community. Without it, he had learnt, people would be unwilling to innovate.
Developing capability to collaborate, experiment and integrate.
One of his first steps was to create Marketing Worx!, a series of two-day “codesign labs” through which he brought people together, many of whom had rarely interacted before. In these labs they were compelled to collaborate on marketing problems. De Meo believed that the mutual trust and respect needed to create a community could come only from interaction and dialogue. He wanted his marketers to grow familiar with one another and with the innovation process, from collaborating to experimenting to integrating ideas. But more than that, he wanted to put his people in new situations that would force them out of old behaviors and catalyze new patterns of interacting. There would be no PowerPoint presentations and few seated activities. Rather, the labs would be a place for prototyping, testing, and arguing until the best solutions came to life. Some attendees were enthusiastic, but many were skeptical. De Meo had to push them.
Through Marketing Worx!, de Meo encouraged his team members to reflect on what being part of VW meant to them. He learnt and felt how proud they were of the company’s history as the maker of the “people’s car,” of providing the freedom of mobility, of VW’s role in driving technological and economic progress, of its environmental focus (in the 1970s, long before “sustainability” became a buzzword, the company had established a department for environmental protection). They were excited to be part of an effort to build the industry’s leading brand.
de Meo also encouraged the team to think about the department’s reason for being. “Why are we all here?” de Meo would ask. A group purpose soon emerged: Marketing’s job was to reflect VW’s powerful legacy and build a brand that spoke with one voice around the world. This purpose lifted its work from “necessary but not crucial” to “strategic.” For de Meo “Brand is not fluff. There is very concrete evidence of what great brands do. It’s real business, not just magic.” At VW, which was trying to revolutionize its industry, de Meo’s team would have to play a central role.
Sustaining building a community
To form a community, members had to agree on what’s important. Values influenced individual and collective thought and action by shaping the group’s priorities and choices. de Meo encouraged teams to use the three components of the VW brand—innovation, responsibility, and value—to guide their work. At one Marketing Worx! session he encouraged a team to flesh out a sustainability initiative ultimately called Think Blue, a concept that unified VW’s previous efforts and focused its future ones. An expression of “responsibility,” Think Blue built on both the rich heritage that de Meo’s team cared about deeply and VW’s bold ambition for social, economic, and technological progress. At the end of Marketing Worx! all the participants signed a “manifesto” declaring personal commitment to Think Blue.
Together with purpose and values, a set of rules of engagement kept members focused on what’s vitally important by discouraging unproductive behaviors and encouraging activities that fostered innovation. After the success of Marketing Worx!, de Meo turned to changing the way his group did its ongoing work. Getting talented people to function as a team was far from easy, but Marketing Worx! served as a “positive shock,” he exclaimed, pushing people together. The tensions inherent in collaboration have the power to slow down progress, and worse, even threaten to tear a creative community apart. Rules of engagement helped control those destructive forces—for example, by keeping conflict focused on ideas rather than personalities. Generally, the rules of engagement fall into two categories.
The first is how people interact, and those rules call for mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual influence—the belief that everyone in the community has a voice and that even the inexperienced and less tenured should be allowed to influence decisions.
The second category is how people think, and those rules call for everyone to question everything, be data-driven, and see the whole.
The way VW marketing group revamped its approach to rolling out a new car is a case in point. It created cross-functional launch teams responsible for developing integrated marketing strategies for the entire life cycle of each new model. No longer would marketing operate like a bucket brigade, with separate teams responsible for each phase of a car’s maturity. One team, for instance, focused on a new model in the up! series of small cars. It reported directly to de Meo, who set high expectations but withheld specific direction. The team had never experienced that kind of autonomy and responsibility before. De Meo made it clear that the members were to take risks and play out their own ideas, according to the rules for “how we think.” Keeping them on track were key performance indicators that the marketers had defined in the codesign labs. After some time, when the team was unable to reach conclusions without the formal authority of a senior manager, de Meo named a young leader from outside the group to act as “the first among peers” and facilitate the decision-making process. The up! team delivered: Its 130-page plan was “probably one of the most integrated launch strategies done recently at Volkswagen,” according to de Meo.
Like all the other leaders studied by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback - researchers of Collective Genius, de Meo took a comprehensive approach. He transformed VW’s marketing department culture and capabilities—developing cross-functional teams, establishing centers of excellence, instituting quarterly roundtables to connect marketers globally. These steps by themselves are not particularly revolutionary. However, it is de Meo who used such seemingly mundane changes not as ends in themselves but as mechanisms with which to build a community. Over time De Meo’s efforts were having an impact. Marketing began to challenge other functional areas at VW and played catalytic role throughout the company worldwide. Think Blue grew into a guiding principle for the whole organization, with employees in other functions and more than 40 countries launching their own innovative Think Blue projects. Some 600 such projects were in the works by 2013. One, the Think Blue Factory—undertaken by the manufacturing function—aimed to reduce environmental impacts by 25% at every VW plant by 2018. “Blue marketing,” as de Meo describes it, is truly “at the heart of the organization.”
Guarding against industry-wide practices that compromise integrity
The Volkswagen emissions scandal, sometimes known as Dieselgate began in September 2015, when the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a notice of violation of the Clean Air Act to German automaker Volkswagen Group. The agency had found that Volkswagen had intentionally programmed turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engines to activate their emissions controls only during laboratory emissions testing, which caused the vehicles' NOx output to meet US standards during regulatory testing. After news broke out of Volkswagen cheating on diesel emissions, multiple other vehicle manufacturers got caught falsifying emissions data, as well as exceeding legal emission limits. This uncovered a greater industry-wide issue that went far beyond only Volkswagen Group.
Such corporate scandals in the past decade, including the one at Wells Fargo that broke out in 2016 and continues in some form or another — reflect the nature of wide-scale dishonesty that can eat away the progress made to grow through innovation. Making sure people in an organization are telling the truth and don’t distort or withhold the truth from one another is no small task. Ron Carucci, co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, and his colleagues conducted a 15-year longitudinal study and analyzed 3,200 interviews that were conducted as part of 210 organizational assessments intended to understand systemic factors that might influence whether or not people in organizations distort or withhold the truth from one another. Their efforts revealed four factors that predicted whether or not people inside a company would be honest:
lack of strategic clarity - when there is inconsistency between an organization’s stated mission, objectives, and values, and the way it is actually experienced by employees and the marketplace
unjust accountability systems - when the organization’s processes for measuring employee contributions is perceived as unfair or unjust
poor governance - when there is no effective process to gather decision makers into honest conversations about tough issues, truth is forced underground, leaving the organization to rely on rumors and gossip
weak cross-functional collaboration - when cross-functional rivalry or unhealthy conflict is left unaddressed and the difficulty of working across silos leads to dishonesty.
Each of the four factors is something that leaders need to address – and the research shows that doing so would guard against lapses in integrity.
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The power of experience and ability
Bill Coughran sees himself as a technologist who specializes in large-scale computing and networking systems with general management experience. Over the course of his long and illustrious career he has helped create and guide the development of numerous distributed systems, IP security projects, and applications of modeling and formal verification methods as well as converged (voice/data) network software, access, and switching products. He began his post-graduate career starting with individual research contributions in computational science and engineering and computer systems. Coughran’s original plan was to be an academic. After he got his PhD in computer science, he went to Bell Labs. At the time, Bell Labs was quite academic. Some of the work he was involved with—core modeling and computer systems work—shaped his thinking about how to build large-scale systems and designs for many years, and it’s something that served him well at Google. Because there he had the opportunity to work with some of the most sophisticated systems at that time.
After his time at Bell Labs, he co-founded Entrisphere in late 2000. That company was acquired by Ericsson after he left. He joined Google in 2003, just five years after its founding. The toughest challenge at Google then was managing a wide variety of special technologists, and then a broad scope of research and development groups. By the time Coughran joined, Google had already reinvented the way it handled web search and data storage multiple times. His group was using Google File System (GFS) to store the massive amount of data required to support Google searches. Given Google’s ferocious appetite for growth, Coughran knew that GFS—once a groundbreaking innovation—would have to be replaced within a couple of years. The number of searches was growing dramatically, and Google was adding Gmail and other applications that needed not just more storage but storage of a kind different from what GFS had been optimized to handle.
The quest for endless creativity and innovation
Google’s astonishing success now seems to have been inevitable. But in 2003, when Coughran joined, this unprecedented success was hardly imaginable, especially inside its systems infrastructure group. The company’s pathbreaking growth depended in large part on being able to innovate and scale up its infrastructure at a breathtaking pace. Bill Coughran, as a senior vice president of engineering, led the systems infrastructure group from 2003 to 2011. His 1,000-person organization built Google’s “engine room,” the systems and equipment that help us all to use Google and its many services 24/7. “We were doing work that no one else in the world was doing,” he says. “So when a problem happened, we couldn’t just go out and buy a solution. We had to create it.”
Building the next-generation system—and the next one, and the one after that—was the job of the systems infrastructure group. It had to create the new engine room, in-house, while simultaneously refining the current one. Because this was Coughran’s top priority—and given that he had led the storied Bell Labs and had a PhD in computer science from Stanford and degrees in mathematics from Caltech—one might expect that he would first focus on developing a technical solution for Google’s storage problems and then lead his group through its implementation. But that’s not how Coughran proceeded. To him, there was a bigger problem, a perennial challenge that is common amongst leaders who tend to think about building an organization capable of innovating continually over time.
Developing capability by working with radically different alternatives
As Coughran began talking with his staff about the need for a new storage system, two self-organizing groups of engineers emerged, coalescing around two promising alternatives: One wanted to add systems on top of GFS that would handle the new storage needs. This was the Big Table team. The other believed that Google’s new storage requirements were so different from those of search alone that GFS had to be replaced, not adapted. This was the Build from Scratch team. Coughran managed the two teams in a “deliberately loose” manner. He gave as much freedom as possible to his engineers, all the while “keeping the reins in enough so that we didn’t degenerate into chaos.” He and his engineering directors—a “brain trust” of tech-savvy managers and top engineers that he had assembled to help him lead the group—conducted regular review meetings “to force teams to assess their progress relative to their goals.” He avoided giving direction and instead tried to ask penetrating questions to “inject tension” and “intellectual reality” and to drive debate.
Coughran set certain clear expectations: that each team would move forward through rigorous testing of its ideas, and that its members would respond to challenges and disagreement with objective data. He rarely had to say “Don’t do that”—words that he believes destroy talent and motivation. Nor did he answer questions directly, in spite of his expertise. “You want to challenge people to think for themselves,” he says.
Fostering expression and managing abrasion
Coughran made sure that the review meetings were forums where ideas were put to the test. Honest discourse and rigorous debate were the goals. He encouraged both teams to grapple seriously with the apparent limits of their systems—scalability for the Build from Scratch team, and servicing an ever-growing number of applications with different systems requirements for the Big Table team. He wanted both teams to question their assumptions. Coughran was supportive, but he knew that if creative abrasion was to occur, he had to inject some confrontation into the system. He explains: “You don’t want an organization that just salutes and does whatever you say. You want an organization that argues with you.”
The two ingredients necessary for creative abrasion are intellectual diversity and intellectual conflict. Coughran encouraged diversity by allowing teams with fundamentally different approaches to move forward. He ensured that conflict was productive through his intense questions and challenges. He and the other leaders decided to remain “deliberately vague.” He realized that “90% of the value of having the engineers speak with me was the fact that they did not know what I was going to ask,” he says. “If they knew I was going to ask 12 specific questions, they’d be less likely to ask themselves broadly, ‘What are we doing?’” Coughran was also sensitive to the drawbacks of bringing the two teams together for debate too early or too often. “If one team was building the perfect left-handed thing,” he says, “and the other was building the perfect right-handed thing, and you put them in the same room, you might not get anywhere, even with a respected mediator.”
Nurturing freedom and managing constraints
Coughran expected the members of both teams to proceed through the three phases of creative agility that is common among leaders who lead innovation. First, he pushed them to pursue new ideas quickly and proactively with multiple experiments. That involved some planning, but he placed much greater emphasis on gathering data about how their ideas actually worked. Second, he expected them to reflect on and learn from the outcomes of those experiments. Third, he expected them to adjust their plans and actions on the basis of the results and to repeat the cycle incorporating this new knowledge—until a solution ultimately emerged or it became clear that the basic approach was not going to work.
After two years, Coughran had to admit that Build from Scratch was not stable enough for Google’s needs, and Big Table couldn’t handle the growing array of Google apps, including YouTube. However, he believed that the Big Table approach was more viable in the short term. His conclusion was a tough call. “It was easy to make a decision when something failed completely or succeeded completely,” Coughran says. “The ambiguous cases were the hardest to deal with, and that was where a lot of the complexity of our systems showed up. We were constantly considering and reconsidering our systems. Something that worked well at one scale would likely fail at another. There were few certainties, and since Google was pretty unique in terms of computing resources, there were no precedents.”
Grounding creativity in reality
Coughran enlisted Kathy Polizzi, his engineering director for storage and a member of his brain trust, to help him persuade the Build from Scratch team that its system had major limitations. The two encouraged the team to test its approach and “bump up”—as Coughran loves to say—against reality. Polizzi pressed the team to bring its system to a semi-operational state and to run performance and scalability tests. She set a time frame within which it would have to eliminate concerns about its system’s ability to handle the massive scale at which Google operates. She also put team members in joint meetings with the operations teams that were responsible for keeping Google up and running—the people whose pagers summoned them in the middle of the night when something went wrong. As Polizzi says, those people “put a human face” on the problems, issues, and priorities that any new storage system would have to deal with. Finally, she says, “the team started to see the limitations of the system they were building.”
Ultimately, the storage stack developed by the Big Table team was implemented throughout the company. But Coughran confronted his initial challenge anew: This system would be able to handle Google’s storage requirements for only a few years. So he asked the two most senior engineers in the systems infrastructure group to work on a next-generation system that would eventually replace it. He invited the Build from Scratch team to join the effort, and indeed, some of the ideas developed by its members played key roles in the next-generation system—for example, by allowing it to handle a dramatically larger set of data objects and files than had ever before been possible, and by safeguarding data in the event of drive or server failure.
By taking the course Coughran did and avoiding a top-down decision, Coughran helped the company develop the best solution to its near-term problem. He also made progress on creating the disruptive new storage system Google would need for the future. But to him, the most important concern was fostering a community that would be capable of innovating time and time again. “I never wanted to pull rank and tell a team to stop working on something they were passionate about,” he says. “We hire innovators, and if I were to forbid a motivated team to do something, it really would misuse their talents.”
