Thoughtful leaders urge members of their organization to learn more about themselves and their organization while in the process of enacting their project and achieving their goals. They will be effective learners, however, only if they assess what is happening and compare their performance to that of previous work groups. Calibration, in other words, is married to learning. A learning organization is aligned with a measuring organization (STS) if the learning is to be based on fact-based analyses rather than wishful (but fabricated) narratives.[xvi]
Appropriate Uses of Strengths
The thoughtful (yellow) leader offers wisdom to his organization and assumes that the questions he possesses are often just as important as the answers. These questions produce a pause in the organization. Kahneman’s slow thinking is engaged, while the usual (habitual) and often self-fulfilling fast thinking is set aside at least temporarily. Frequently, the questions being asked by the thoughtful leader encourage a reconceptualization of the problem being addressed. This reframing process is particularly important in a world filled with complex and often paradoxical problems. The thoughtful leader recognizes that the meaning of any event or problem depends on how this event or problem is framed.
We find that work teams involved in STS initiatives are often involved in this reframing—especially because members of the team are themselves intimately involved in the organization’s daily operations. They know which questions to ask and which assumptions to challenge because they know what’s really happening day-to-day in their organization. These workers are realistic and Golden Yellow reigns precisely because they are fully engaged in this reality. There is no sitting on the fifteen floors in the C-Suites. Reality is right there. It is only a matter of getting sufficient distance on occasion from the immediate operations to do some measurement and some slow thinking. Best Practice 5 is engaged, and Tangy Orange leadership is walking hand-in-hand with Thoughtful Golden Yellow leadership to bring about and sustain effective workplace democracy.
We can get more specific about this reframing process as it relates to Best Practice 5 and Purposeful Tangy Orange. Many difficult problems can be reframed as incentives or goals, so that people are motivated to try harder or create something new and innovative. Alternatively, the problem can be framed as a symptom of some much deeper issues. Perhaps the organization should quit providing this particular service or manufacturing this particular product. What if we quit serving this troublesome customer and looked elsewhere for a more appropriate clientele? Thoughtful leaders also realize that it is very difficult in complex and often fragmented situations for any one person to have all the information or knowledge about the organization.
This is where the STS emphasis on teamwork and collaborative measurement makes sense. Information and knowledge tend to be gathered from diverse sources, using diverse methods. This information and knowledge, in turn, is widely dispersed, leading the thoughtful leader in collaboration with all members of the organization to focus on asking the questions and helping to identify appropriate sources for receiving valid and useful information upon which responsible answers can be based.
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