From Deep Change to Lift

In the decade after Bob published Deep Change, he and his colleagues drew on the insights of others and a few innovations of their own to add power to the principles they were discovering, much as the Wright brothers had done. During this decade Ryan began a graduate program and eventually became a management professor as well. Also during this decade, both Ryan and Bob had the opportunity to participate in and to interact with scientists in both the fields of positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship—fields that ask unabashedly positive questions about human beings and human societies. For example, in the field of positive psychology, scholars ask questions about topics such as learned optimism, authentic happiness, optimal experiences, human strengths, and positive emotions. These are unusual topics for a field that has historically focused on depression, disorders, dysfunctions, and decision errors. Similarly, those in the field of positive organizational scholarship study topics such as high-reliability organizations, authentic leadership, psychological safety, high-quality connections, and organizational virtues. Both fields generate exciting insights into how we live and work.

In graduate school Ryan spent much of his time studying psychological states such as energy (a feeling of positive activation) and flow (high performance experiences that people describe with phrases such as "I was in the zone"). Although much of the research on topics such as these focus on how people come to experience these states, Ryan was equally interested in how an individual's subjective experience comes to affect others. As we discussed these types of states we also began to see how some of these states mirrored the quadrants of the competing values framework. We examined whether positive but competing psychological states could be captured by the CVF, and how people integrate these states in their daily experiences. We found that the CVF works very well for this purpose, as shown in figure 2.2. A purpose-centered state mapped well onto the competition quadrant because of its focus on results and achievement. An internally directed state mapped well onto the control quadrant because of its focus on the self-control required to live with integrity to one's values. An other-focused state mapped well onto the collaboration quadrant because of its focus on the feelings and needs of other people. And an externally open state mapped well onto the creativity quadrant of the CVF because of its focus on coming up with new approaches and learning from feedback. We began to share this framework with others, and it had a powerful impact, as the stories throughout this book illustrate. Evidence from research that Ryan is currently conducting with Bret Crane and Ned Wellman lends further support to the idea of treating leadership as a psychological state and of using questions to help oneself experience these states.