Category: General

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.

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.

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.

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.

Over the past few years, I believed that my passion in life was systems and my purpose was to heal or integrate these systems. Looking back on my life this has made sense to me because I’ve seen these patterns within it, as I shifted from one system to another.

Growing up, I was immersed within and loved nature as an ecosystem. Later I fell in love with roleplaying games and computer games, both of which are basically social systems. Through computer games, I became fascinated with computers and eventually the Web which are technical systems. Finally through building communities in games, I became fascinated with organizations which returned my interest back to social systems on a much deeper level (i.e. culture, aka values, beliefs, behaviours).

Inspiring People

But recently, after discovering Simon Sinek and listening to him speak about his passion, something changed. I related to his passion which is inspiring other people. This in turn reminded me of my mantra from years back (i.e. Connect. Empower. Inspire.) and made me realized that this was a cyclic way of playing, learning, and working through life.

Still, something didn’t feel right though. I related to him wanting to inspire people but using Simon’s own methodology of discovery, I asked why were we so interested in inspiring people? After thinking about this for a while, it dawned on me that I wanted to help people feel alive because this is what sparked my own quest and hero’s journey of discovery. I wanted to feel alive in my own life.

But still, again it felt like something was missing. I knew that figuring out your passion, purpose, and vision in life, helped you to authentically and creatively express your whole self and thus made you feel alive. But what was the singular word that encapsulated this all and symbolized it?

Reconnecting With The Past

Luckily, just the other day, I was fortunate enough to meet up with an old client and friend of mine who I had helped when I did web design work. During our conversation together, I couldn’t help but see the synergy between us both. Normally when I have conversations with people, I’m seeing things at a deeper level than they are but with Peter, he was completely on my level. That’s because Peter understands and teaches the secret of business which is relationships (real ones that is, one’s that involve empathy at their core).

But during our conversation Peter mentioned a couple of things that stood out for me. He mentioned that my conversations with him during the discovery phase of his website design really helped him to understand what he was all about at his core. He also humorously said in a third person narrative way that, “Nollind was my litmus test for authenticity, consistency, and absence of hype or fluff.” I loved that he said that (so much so that I’m going to use it as a referral quote) because it spoke at the heart of what I was trying to do with my web design clients. I wanted to help them to authentically and creatively express what they were all about in a simple yet powerful way, without any superficial flash or hype.

Sparking Conversations

After the conversation, when I was reflecting upon a lot of what he had said, that’s when something sparked within me. All of this time, I had been reiterating that systems were my passion. And I knew that the trinity of systems were relationships, information, and identity. Even more so, I knew that these trinity of words formed a narrative themselves. People connected and formed relationships, empowered themselves through this shared information, and then finally inspired themselves to action when they saw the collective identity and purpose they were all trying to work towards. In effect, the many become one entity, one collective identity.

That was my passion. Identity. Suddenly when I realized this, many things started making sense and falling into place. It explained why I always loved building characters (i.e. character development) within roleplaying games (both online and off), so much so that I laughingly remarked I could spend the rest of my life doing it. It also explained why I loved playing roleplaying games when I was younger and being the game master within them. I loved putting epic challenges and conflicts before people to see how they would rise to the occasion and react to them which in turn revealed their real identities (i.e. conflicts define us).

This also explains to me why so many people love playing online games today. They get to participate in and contribute to solving epic challenges and conflicts that brings out the best in them, their social potential. No wonder it’s so addicting for them and why they feel so alive doing it, in comparison to a job where they are just told to pull a lever like a robot and they can’t really contribute their own ideas, their own creative self, as a human being.

My Emerging Identity

All said and done, with this new understanding now, everything makes sense with regards to my identity and what value I can bring to others. It even makes sense with regards to seeing myself as a bard whose archetypal characteristics are playfulness, wholeness, and uniqueness. That’s because I help people to see the hero in themselves by playfully discovering their unique identity, thus making them feel whole, epic, and alive in turn. And when that happens, that’s when the social potential within the singular individual and the collective organization are released like a tsunami of social change.

For those who occasionally visit my journal here, to see what I’m up to from time to time, you’ll probably notice that I haven’t been posting here very much lately. The reason for this is that I’ve been experimenting and exploring elsewhere, primarily on Google+.

Google+ has been very good to me. It has connected me to people and allowed me to participate within deep and meaningful conversations that I probably wouldn’t have found anywhere else. In effect, it has shown me that there are many people out there just as passionate as myself in wanting to bring about social change.

But that said though, the more I immersed myself within its conversations, the more I felt like I was losing myself, my focus. Don’t get me wrong though. This had nothing to do with the people within these conversations. It had to do with me and what I was specifically searching for and what my intuition was trying to tell me I wasn’t finding there (yet).

Economic vs Social

What made me finally realize what was wrong was reading a new book by Marina Gorbis entitled The Nature of the Future. Within the book, a chapter on money discusses the differences between economic power and social power. It even emphasizes that our primary focus on money is causing our loss of social. And more importantly, there are things that can’t be achieved by economic power alone but require social power.

When I reread some of these points the other morning, everything seemed to click and make sense, not only with regards to the Google+ conversations but with regards to the conversations with myself over the past ten years or more. The crux of the problem was this all consuming focus on money.

It All Comes Down to Money, or Does It?

But what’s wrong with that you might ask? We need money to survive, don’t we? Well that’s just what The Nature of the Future is trying to tell us. Not only is the way we work changing but the way we are rewarded for our work is changing as well. Social power or capital will let you achieve and acquire things that wouldn’t be possible with just economic power or capital alone. It is the Social Era remember.

But again this is why the conversations on Google+ felt wrong to me. People obviously wanted social change but it seemed like the heart of every conversation eventually led to figuring out a way to make money from this social change. But again I was no better than others, as this was always my focus over the years as well, primarily due to internal and external pressures. Therefore if I wasn’t figuring out a way to make money, I felt like I was societally irresponsible and unreliable.

Missing the Deeper Connection

I think this is why for the most part I couldn’t really connect with people on a deeper level because money was a blockade to creating that deeper connection. For example, I’ve repeatedly told some people that I know that I’d like to create a social group, like a guild, that connects, empowers, and inspires us all with a specific intent. For most people though, they don’t see the economic value in it, as it just seems like a waste of time since “time is money”. Even for myself, this has been a big piece of the puzzle that I couldn’t figure out and articulate to people, that is until now.

I now realize that this social company of people isn’t primarily about making money. It is the deeper social value and support that it brings to all of our lives and what we so desperately need right now to overcome these hard economic times, just as the family of Marina Gorbis had to endure while living in the harsh economy of Russia when she was younger. Even more so, it is this social aspect of our lives which gives us meaning in a seemingly meaningless and chaotic time, as we transition and try to make sense of our way from the old world to the new one.

Moving Beyond Money

What I find remarkable about this is that years ago, when I put my resume online upon Craigslist and indicated I was an online community developer seeking a caring company to help, I actually got a wave of very positive responses. Two of those responses in particular were from small companies, one a non-profit, that I connected with on an extremely deep level but they didn’t have the funds to pay me initially. At the time, I chatted with them a bit but eventually parted ways saying I need money to pay the bills. Now I realize, in looking back, I actually gave up the chance to do something socially meaningful in my life, regardless of the economic value of it.

Going forward now, I’m much more aware of this and will not determine my work on money alone. Like Marina Gorbis indicates in The Nature of the Future, there are other ways of trading and barter services that can just be as beneficial. Of course, it doesn’t mean I’m not going to work for money at all. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. For those organizations who can pay, I will be charging a substantial fee because I believe that I’m worth it. More on that in my next post and what value I believe I can bring to my future clients.

I have been seeing a variety of very talented people around me lately that are in conflict with the world, who truly need to love and value themselves first before they can love others and contribute to the world. In seeing this though, I’m realizing that we are all on this journey but just in different stages of it.

For the most part though, I think people just want to take the shortcut and prefer someone loving them so unconditionally that they will finally start seeing the value in themselves and thus finally love themselves. But the problem is that it doesn’t work that way because by not living their true nature internally, they continually become angry and frustrated very easily and end up pushing others away from them in the process. And in a way, I was still somewhat at that point a couple of weeks ago as well.

Searching for Love

You see I was listening to a song the other day by Rihanna called Where Have You Been and when she sings “Where have you been all my life”, I couldn’t help but think that that was me talking to myself. Basically I’ve been spending my entire life looking for this person within me that I can truly love and be happy with.

Now here’s the funny thing that I just realized. Often when people look for love, they find someone but then strangely try to change them to be more like them. But you can’t do this, otherwise you risk losing the essence of that person you fell in love with in the first place.

What I find you have to do instead is try to understand that person and their differences that make them unique. When you do that, you begin to see the real depth of them and why they are the way they are.

Don’t Change

In loving ourselves, I believe it’s the same thing. Often we continually try to change ourselves to make others happy, so that we can appreciate and love ourselves. But we only end up losing our sense of self in the process, thus frustrating us and tearing ourselves apart from the inside. What we need to be truly doing instead is fully understanding ourselves, our nature, why we do the things we do.

When we do this, achieve this deeper understanding, that’s when we truly value the relationship with ourselves and begin to truly love ourselves as we are, with all of our beautiful imperfections. In a sense, it’s when we truly start working with ourselves in harmony rather than working against ourselves. So it’s not about changing yourself to be like someone else but understanding yourself so you can change your externally influenced behaviors back to more natural internal ones that are in harmony with your true nature and self.

Revealing the Beauty Beneath

For myself, the first step was years ago when I realized I wasn’t the problem but the solution. But I didn’t understand fully how I was the solution, so I began exploring and conversing with myself to figure it out. Through that personal dialogue and conversation, I’m slowly revealing who I truly am, like a sculptor chipping away pieces to reveal a beautiful sculpture that’s always laid dormant and waiting beneath the surface. It just needed the opportunity to reveal itself.

And funnily enough, just like a sculptor, the first pieces you chip off are easy. Yet as you get closer and closer to your true self, the work becomes more refined and detailed, thus taking more and more time. We can’t rush it though. We need to let it reveal itself and emerge naturally, as those final minute details create the essence and aesthetic of who we truly are, like a spirit infusing an empty vessel.