Categories
General

Embracing Your Craziness

I’ve been trying to keep an eye on the results of this years Peter Drucker Forum and based upon what I’ve seen so far, it appears that things haven’t change much from last year. While it does seem like more and more people are seeing the changes needed to transform the way work works, it seems as though many do not want to accept these changes and then act upon them. Now if it sounds like I’m being judgemental of these people, I’m not. If anything, I want to show how this is completely normal behaviour.

What I’m talking about here is how people deal with paradigms, as described by Joel Arthur Barker within his book Paradigms: The Business of Discovering the Future. Paradigms effectively act as physiological filters that can prevent us from seeing things, even if they are plain as day under our very noses.

You are quite literally unable to perceive data right before your very eyes.

But it is not just visual. You listen but do not hear. You touch but do not feel. You sniff but don’t smell. All the senses are mediated by the Paradigm Effect.

But as I noted above, I think people are finally beginning to see things. What’s holding them back though is that they still don’t believe what they are seeing. It just still seems too crazy. And that is where the greater problem lies for many. We are fearful and afraid of being seen as crazy by our peers. Any yet to move forward, we need to learn how to embrace this craziness and make the leap.

Making The Impossible Possible

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Alice in Wonderland

You see I’m realizing that the more we ignore what we are seeing, the more crazy and agitated we become. Therefore,  paradoxically it is only by accepting and believing the craziness that we can prevent ourselves from going crazy. If this seems ludicrous then you just have to remember where we are going.

The world is changing rapidly and we must change rapidly with it. We need to let go of the Old World that is dying and step forward into the New World that is emerging. Only by letting go can we grasp and take hold of the new. Therefore, to step into this New World, you pretty much need to be crazy because everything within it has been shifted and works differently than the Old World. In effect, the whole system has changed.

It’s Hard To Let Go

To give one example of this, I keep laughing every time I see a discussion around the problem of managers. They are a social artifact of management that is no longer needed because management, while still existing, transforms and shifts to the entire organizational body with everyone self-managing themselves and the organization as a whole.

Some of the recaps of the Drucker Forum have pretty much stated this outright as well (i.e. everyone is a manager) but in the same breadth of saying that managers are no longer needed, they continue describing how managers should work within these new organization. This only shows how strong a hold the old ways of work are so ingrained in our minds that it is almost next to impossible to let them go, even when we want to do so.

Leading By Example

Finally, the most humorous thing I noted of all about these recaps is this foreboding sense of “What now? Who’s leading the charge?” In effect, for those who do seem gung ho about stepping into this future, it seems as they don’t want to be the ones taking that messy first step and landing flat on their face. But that’s the only way to move forward because every first step is always a difficult one and that’s how we learn through failure.

Therefore, the people leading the charge will need to be everyone everywhere to make it a collective momentum and tipping point. This in turn is the future of leadership and how it shifts to the entire collective or organization as well.

To close things off, I’d like to enclose a quote below that I wrote back in 2013 after last years Peter Drucker forum. While people are finally starting to grasp my first two points about everyone being a manager and leader, it appears that it still might take another year before they understand how everyone is a customer.

Transforming work. Everyone is a manager. Everyone is a leader. Everyone is a customer.

Nollind Whachell
Categories
General

When The Many Become One

In the past, I’ve tried to express that I keep seeing all of these patterns around me and I’m noticing that these patterns are converging into a greater narrative. For example, I keep seeing all of these notable people writing books around seemingly diverse different topics. Yet if you go deeper below the surface of what’s being said, all of these books are talking about the same thing but just from different perspectives or disciplinary languages.

Today, I feel like I’m going insane with the weight of what I’m seeing because I keep seeing all of these patterns around me and they are almost everywhere I look now. Why it’s overloading is because of the repetition of the pattern. It’s like a tornado approaching me and everything is being picked up and tossed into the air. You don’t know which way is up anymore because you’re overloaded by all that you see.

Copernicus’ Solar System from De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium

And yet what I’m slowly realizing is that all of these patterns have a commonality in that they overlap and connect with each other. The best way I’ve tried to describe this in the past is imagine what it was like being an early astronomer studying the heavens. At first, you just saw a jumble of patterns that seemed chaotic. But over time, after seeing the patterns over and over again, you begin to see a relationship between them and behold the chaos transforms into a unified and integrated order of our solar system.

The Web of Life

Now while the above patterns are almost effortlessly for me to see on a daily basis, the difficulty of course is trying to explaining what I’m seeing and put into words. One thing that I can be sure of though is that this greater narrative goes way beyond just business and changing the way work works. It almost goes to a more universal level and changes the very notion of what it means to be human and our potential both individually and collectively.

To put this another way, I’m seeing how this greater narrative relates to both not only organizational development but also personal development. In effect, the pattern and approach is the same for both. Therefore collectively combined together, it is a social development approach that can help humans take the next step in their evolution.

Therefore just as our organizations today are trying to break down their silos and boundaries to release their untapped potential, so too are individuals doing the same very thing. As I’ve said in the past, I don’t want my identity to be tied to my job title because my past jobs have never adequately encompassed all that I am. Therefore, I’m trying to express myself, all that I am, in a new way by taking all of the seemingly fragmented aspects of myself and making them one integrated whole.

Value The Marginal

Now while this may seem grandiose, it doesn’t feel this way to me. If anything, it feels simply essential. And more importantly, it is not something I’m so much creating as something I’m just seeing emerging. Therefore I more often feel like a messenger than a creator, witnessing this emergence. And in terms of communicating, my struggle is in trying to simplify what I’m seeing and trying to put it into words that anyone, even a child, could understand because I want it to be understood just as universally as I’m seeing it.

What I’m also realizing is that this is not something new. In effect, life is cyclic in nature and to me it seems like we are not discovering but instead rediscovering these development approaches, just in the same way that we are rediscovering ourselves. In effect, some of our best potential often arises from the aspects of ourselves that we have discarded within ourselves in the past because society didn’t deem it of value.

It is only when we take these marginalized aspects of ourselves and of our society and integrate them completely together that the many fragmented parts finally become one purposeful entity. This relates to what I’ve said before about the need for leaders with sight and vision. It is not about recruiting new talent out there. It is about seeing the potential and talent already within your organization and already within you in your personal life.

Use edges and value the marginal.

Permaculture Principle #11
Categories
General

Integrating Ourselves

While starting to read the book No Boundary by Ken Wilber, I stumbled across something that I’m surprised I never noticed before. In the opening of the book, Ken describes five levels of consciousness which we traverse through in struggling to identify ourselves. This wasn’t that new to me because it mirrors closely with what I’ve learnt from action logics.

What did differ though was how I was looking at the different stages of action logics. I was perceiving them as a linear line or arc of progression. In reading Ken’s elegant description though, it became apparent to me that these stages weren’t a linear line but rather a circle. In effect, our progression is like Life itself, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning.

I find it elegant because it removes this sense of levels, of one person being higher or elevated over another if they are at a different stage of development. Instead it creates this sense of a circular 360 degrees of awareness instead (which fits with his usage of the word spectrum). Thus the more stages you achieve, the greater your sense of awareness and perception of the world around you. This reminds me of a documentary on Ancient Egypt and how they perceived an evolved and empowered individual.

Moving Beyond The Deconstructed World

What also struck me as interesting is the way Ken described this progression. Over our lives we create more and more boundaries between things as we further analyze ourselves in relation to the world around us and even within us. For many of us, this is the world we grew up within and learnt of from history. In effect, the world is like a machine, a great clockwork with many separate parts.

Yet this isn’t reality. It is paradoxically everything and yet nothing, all at once. Thus we struggle to make whole again that which we have ripped apart through analysis. This is the synthesis we desire, not only to make sense of the chaotic world around us but also the chaos within us. We seek to be whole again, integrated, rather than something with so many pieces that we feel like we are going to dissipate into nothingness like some ethereal creature.

Opening, Exploring, & Closing from Gamestorming by Dave Gray

And in thinking of this, it struck me how poignant Joseph Campbell’s cyclic Hero’s Journey is and how it relates so closely to what Dave Gray describes in his book Gamestorming. The first “opening” part represents analysis, a breaking down of things, until we enter this middle limbo world of chaos, where we don’t know which way is up because we are swimming in so much information. The final “closing” part represents synthesis, a reforming of our ideas, our world view, and of our very selves, as we re-enter the world once again, albeit a completely new one, having crossed the “bridge”.

Designing Your Life

I think this is what I’ve always found lacking in so many books that I’ve read. Many of them are technically focused on business or design, yet what they are missing is that their techniques can actually enable people to design their own lives. For example, Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work has a section which talks about “Stock and Flow” which is just another way of describing the flow and emerging structure in your life.

Stock and Flow from Show Your Work by Austin Kleon

For many of us, we seek out flow states because that’s when we seem happiest. Yet we are happy not because of the flow state itself but because of what is created from that flow state: structure. In effect, we’re productive and have created something that flows from the creative expression of ourselves, our sense of identity. Thus we have not only created something, a product for example, but in the act of creation we are creating ourselves.

And like Life itself, this structure doesn’t just magically appear overnight but instead slowly emerges via emergence which is how larger complex things arise from simple patterns and interactions. This mirrors with my Connect, Empower, and Inspire mantra of creation whereby Connecting is about seeing patterns in the flow (which is the easy part) and Empowering is seeing the structural relationships between the patterns (which is the hard part) until it all comes together like a map and Inspires you into action (because you finally see the way).

Moving Forward By Letting Go

Now here’s the final icing on the cake. While some might say that an emphasis on analysis has caused the “break down of this world”, I don’t think it is something that should be discarded but rather it should be seen as a stepping stone in our development. In effect, for synthesis to occur, you have to have analysis first. Therefore the deconstruction leads to the reconstruction and the transformation as a whole.

To put it into another perspective, without this ability to deconstruct ourselves, we lack the ability to flexibly adapt and reconstruct ourselves for the changing times. Thus this analysis and synthesis combined together allows us to make the evolutionary leaps we need to continue growing and surviving.

And we do survive. We are not disappearing and we’re not starting over from scratch, losing our identity in the process. Instead we are reshaping and transforming ourselves, our identities, for the times, so that our story can continue. Paradoxically by letting go of what we were, we become more of who we really are.

Categories
Authenticity

The Courage Inside

It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.

W.B. Yeats