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More Evolved Thinking About Organizations

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More Evolved Thinking About Organizations

These are exciting and encouraging times, if we can find the courage to allow them to be.

 

Almost since the time I entered the field of organization development I have been driven by the desire to help people bring more of who they are to the work they do. Nothing irks me more than hearing people talk about being one way at work and another way altogether when at home or with friends. Invariably, these people report that they leave some, often significant, part of themselves at the door when they enter the workplace.

How much are we missing out on and how much is lost because we don’t feel like we can be who we really are at work?

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Clarity on the Golf Course

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Small talk leads to a breakthrough insight

 

A few days ago I was on the golf course, and one of my playing partners was asking about my work. On the 5th tee, he pushed me to go past the usual bland commentary and asked why he might hire someone like me.

That got me thinking.

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Uncertainty, Fear, and Learning

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Fear is a signal you might be about to learn something

 

In an earlier post, I wrote about the connection between uncertainty and learning. There I tried to make the point that uncertainty is a condition that is pre-requisite to learning, and that the present moment is the most uncertain place we can inhabit because we never know what is going to happen next.

There is another aspect to uncertainty, one that has to do with our reaction when we find ourselves confronted by it.

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Group Awareness and Being in the Moment

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What is the opposite of certainty?

 

I’ve started to play around with an idea I’m calling “group awareness”. My working definition is in two parts. A collection of people has group awareness when they have developed 1) the ability to learn about where they are and what they are doing at any given moment, and 2) clarity about what they want to do next.

This seems so simplistic.

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Back to the Future

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It’s all about the learning.

 

For some time now, I’ve been noticing a change in the way teams operate. When I was first learning my craft, the typical metaphor for a high performing team was often a sports team, or a symphony orchestra, if I was in a place where drawing parallels to sports was unwelcome or misunderstood. These metaphors are less and less applicable in many of today’s dynamic organizational environments.