4. A LABORATORY FOR
CREATIVE DISCOVERY
THESE PAST TWO YEARS WE COULDN’T MAKE A WRONG DECISION. IT WAS EFFORTLESS. OUR PREMONITIONS WERE CONSISTENTLY CORRECT.
– Gary Wilson
We had allotted four months for the interview and research phase of the project. With the U-process Brian had shared with us, the balance of the interview phase flew by. During these months collaborating with Gary and his deputies, we created a design team consisting of managers from key business units across the Alliance. Meeting with the design team regularly over several weeks, we cocreated the learning process for the project. This was seen as an Action Learning program, engaging operating people, working on real Alliance issues in real time. The design team named the program “The Leadership Lab for Competing in the Digital Economy.” In the Alliance, it became known simply as the “Lab.” Twenty-three managers from twenty-one business units were selected to participate in this Innovation Lab. These managers represented a microcosm of the whole system.
In a memo to those selected for the Lab, the design team said that they saw the Lab as an opportunity to “create a new paradigm for executive learning.” It was designed to “model the concept of leader as teacher” and “leverage the learning of the twenty-three participants to all fourteen thousand employees, through acting as role models and creating subsequent living examples of profound innovation and change in their respective business units.”
The Innovation Lab enabled the team to create and propose new growth platforms for the Alliance, and, of equal importance, to develop the team’s skills to unleash and engage the full creative potential of their respective business units.
One refinery, for example, went “from worst to first” among the eighteen refineries in the Alliance. The refinery was losing, on average, $20 million annually and within two years, swung to a $38-million profit, directly due to people’s performance, not market fluctuations.
Gary Wilson, the deputy manager of the refinery, attributed his capacity to lead this transformation to the principles and processes he learned during the Lab experience. Referring to Brian Arthur’s process for reaching a “deeper region of consciousness” and “letting an inner wisdom emerge,” Wilson told me, “These past two years we couldn’t make a wrong decision. It was effortless. Our premonitions were consistently correct.”
Another participant, Dave Chapman, accepted the position as CEO of an Alliance business, Lease Trading, which had been underperforming for years and was to be sold. Instead, Chapman grew the business from a gross margin of $20 million to one of $60 million in three years, and he told me that this amazing growth was “as a direct result of understanding the power of and applying the U-process.”
After the Innovation Lab was concluded, Otto and I took stock of all that had occurred. We realized we had uncovered a process that could be enormously powerful, with implications not only for business applications, but for society as a whole. We decided that an important next step would be to publish our findings. We had documented all of our interviews, and a report had been prepared by the Shell facilitation team for internal publication. So at that moment, we started preparing a monograph, which ultimately became known within Generon simply as The Red Book. The Red Book has served as my guide, my “bible” over the ensuing years, as I’ve worked with the U-process.