Suppose you are golf crazy and are asked to give a talk at the Slieve Russel Hotel Golf & Country Club, set in a beautiful location in Ireland.

Enlarge picture

It obviously doesn’t take long to make up your mind. But reality rarely matches up to fantasy. After 2 ½ hours winding along narrow potholed and puddled roads, I finally arrived at my destination, only to be subjected to two days of wind force 5-6 and relentless horizontal rains. Just as well there was no time for a round of golf.

The invitation was from the Letterkenny Institute and concerned their annual course for senior public managers, both from Ireland and Northern Ireland. I had been asked to cast light on ‘Transformational Leadership’, which was the central theme that week. Drawing on my experiences at InnovationNetwork, I spoke about transformation processes in society and how we try to make these happen.
At the start of the session I asked the group to name the really hard-to-solve issues in Irish society - those issues that will probably still dominate the agenda in 10 to 15 years time if we do not change our policies now. The list was fairly similar to our own and included:

• Crime
• Healthcare
• Public transport
• Traffic congestion in large cities
• Climate change
• Energy

Everyone wholeheartedly agreed that the existing system, with all its vested interests, stood in the way of radical change. Back in 2001, it was this insight that prompted the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality to create a kind of bypass: InnovationNetwork. I explained how we tried to break down the wall of inertia, and cited various projects of ours – such as Greenhouse as Energy Source/New Utilities/Building with Green and Glass and Agro-Parks – to illustrate the strong resistance that change processes encounter.
After a lively debate, the public managers were split into groups to tackle one of ‘their’ obstinate issues. Their task was to design an organizational setting conducive to developing imaginative solutions. Interestingly, some groups skipped the organizational side of things and went straight for solutions. This sparked off an illuminating discussion about whether such a single-minded focus on solutions was the right way to tackle the fundamental causes. Particularly when dealing with obstinate issues, your first step must always be to establish whether the visible problem is the real problem. Because otherwise you risk curing the symptoms rather than the disease.

Between the sessions I managed to find some time to work on my own most obstinate problem: my golf swing - a one-hour lesson was enough to realize that getting my swing right will require more ‘transformational leadership’ skills than I am blessed with.