Background

In the early 1970s, after studying political science in college, I learned about the politics of everyday life on the streets of Boston, where I worked with kids for ten years. In those days, people like me met kids where they lived—on the streets, at their schools, in the courts, and in their homes. When you’re up this close and personal to kids’ lives, you see things most people never see. In my case, I saw how these kids failed again and again, not because they didn’t care or didn’t try, but because one system after another failed them: schools, peer groups, courts, even families. The last—families—were especially troubling to me, because this is where these kids looked for the most, yet often got the least.

Puzzled by this paradox, I entered a yearlong program at the Cambridge Family Institute in mid-1970s to learn more about families and how to help them. There, under the tutelage of systems theorist and family therapist David Kantor, I discovered it’s not always what you see on the surface that wreaks the most havoc. More often than not, it’s what lies hidden in a complex system that no one person can see but each person unwittingly perpetuates.

After a year, I was intrigued and wanted to learn more about how systems worked and how you could change them. Luckily, at the time, Harvard had a small, interdisciplinary program that focused on all types of systems from families to groups to organizations to communities. It was perfect. For the next several years, I worked closely with extraordinary thinkers like Chris Argyris and Donald Schon, whose early work on organizational learning defined the field, as well as Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton, whose seminal work at the Harvard Negotiation Project transformed the way people think about conflict and negotiation.

Though very different, all of these thought leaders had three things in common: a refusal to accept defeat when faced with a thorny problem, a passion for finding new ways to break through old barriers, and a talent for creating powerful new ideas—ideas people can use to transform whatever system is blocking their potential, whether it be families, groups, organizations, or governments.

Twenty years ago, it was on their very broad shoulders that I launched my career working with leadership teams in the corporate and not-for-profit sectors. Since then, their passion for learning and their refusal to accept defeat has repeatedly spurred me on to look more closely and to listen more attentively whenever my own efforts come up short.

That’s how I uncovered the role relationships play in shaping the fate of people and their teams. Relationships, I discovered, are as important to teams as they are to families. The sooner we grasp that essential fact, the sooner we’ll be able to put it to work.