BMA eBook - Manual / Resource - Page 75
Intervention and Leadership
6.1 Regulating the Heat
A key element in the art of intervention is the ability to determine how ripe an
issue is and whether or not your intervention should and will increase or lower
the heat of the group: that is does the group have the capacity to tolerate the
pressures that the intervention, be it a question and observation or an
experiment, will raise and have you interpreted the level of distress it will
generate accurately. All systems have a default level of distress above which
they will not move easily or willingly and generally this level is set low; one
way systems have of restraining change. A well targeted intervention will assist
a group both develop capacity to tolerate more heat so that it can more
productively examine the issue it faces including what losses it may need to
consider, as well as explore the competing interests of the factions.
A question frequently asked by those trying to lean leadership, as well as by
those attempting to exercise it is “can’t I do this without annoying other people
and creating distress?”. Unfortunately, the answer usually is no. It is not as if
you are setting out to create distress or heat; it is not your goal. But conflict,
distress or the generalized term, disequilibrium are a by-product, a
consequence of difficult issue being addressed, where inevitably there are
differences of opinion and different capacities, let alone different adjustments
and losses that may need to be experienced. Without some degree of pressure
there is no incentive to address adaptive problems but equally if there is too
much it is also unhelpful.
Copyright Vantage Point Consulting Pty Ltd 2010
Not to be reproduced without the author’s permission
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