Foreword
My first experience of Kurt Wright’s extraordinary understanding of questions occurred in 1989 when he invited me to participate in a 12 hour long “Dialogue for Visionary Leaders.” He engaged six of us in a most insightful dialogue around the question, “When was the last time you can remember giving all you’ve got to achieve some goal or complete some task?”
I came away with a greatly heightened appreciation of the power of intuition and the role of properly framed questions in the intuitive process. I’ve always had a good appreciation of intuition, but found it most encouraging to realize there is a systematic way for us to increase our use of the intuitive mind. I think it is easy to overlook its tremendous power to sort and organize, and to find patterns and where things fit. I found it particularly important to appreciate the intuition’s ability to convey to our rational mind a solution or a way forward to fulfill our vision. As a practical matter, these are things we do not get by relying on the rational mind alone.
My second experience with Kurt came when he conducted a team dialogue with my division operating committee at 3M Pharmaceuticals. That was probably a major turning point—for me as well as for the whole group of people who worked very closely together—because we came to appreciate what was needed to take advantage of the intuitive power of our team. It built the trust considerably and helped us create an environment where people did not have to be defensive. This greatly strengthened relationships among everyone on our management team.
We all learned to embrace the whole notion of working to find the value in everyone’s contribution. We also learned the importance of attributing no negative value to the things we didn’t necessarily agree with or didn’t feel made a strong contribution. It was okay to attribute a kind of zero value to something, but the whole interaction becomes more productive when we are all looking for the positive value that can be created. The resulting trust level fueled a creative synergy within our group that allowed us to achieve much more than we could have ever done using a more conventional approach.
Using the material Kurt presents so effectively in Breaking the Rules, we were able to build an environment in which team members weren’t penalized for what they put out. People came to feel as if they could just give their best with no prospect of a negative situation or a penalty being associated with that. We each came to trust that others would be looking for the value of our contribution. It was getting that set of behaviors and expectations into a group of people who already had a great deal of mutual respect for each other that really enhanced the overall productivity and effectiveness of that group. It moved us to a higher level of effectiveness.
Our resulting ability to create a common vision was something that really provided the focus for our management team. It was one of the greatest benefits we extracted as a team from our work with these principles. The elements of high trust, building on strengths and then having a common vision that the whole group could really subscribe to made a large contribution to our success within the division.
Without the trust, we may have been able to create a vision, but we wouldn’t have had the environment in which we could put everything into realizing it. It’s the ability to achieve wholehearted commitment, and a sense that no one had a territory to protect that made the difference. It became a very shared undertaking with a real feeling that we were operating in a cultural relationship where we could all just open up and contribute fully without constraint and pull things together from the group to provide the maximum forward energy.
This is the picture of potential benefits I would paint for readers of Breaking the Rules. There is a power here that will help you to be more effective, to be a higher performer, and hopefully have less pain associated with that. There is also a power here that can help you become an effective member or leader of high performance groups.
I believe that if your desire is to establish a high performance group, or to put yourself on a roll personally, reading Breaking the Rules can show you how. You will come away knowing that to do so, you must learn to ask the questions and establish the kind of high-trust mentor-coaching relationships that Kurt describes. Even greater value could be achieved with entire teams working through this “rule-breaking” material together.
W. George Meredith
Executive Vice President
3M Company
St. Paul, Minnesota