Challenge: You have well-defined business strategies and a history of success. However, lately the competition seems to have the edge. Your key personnel seem out-of-step with the changing economy, communications are “appropriate” but in service of personal or departmental agendas, and deployment of strategic initiatives is bogged down. This scenario or one like it needs an increased awareness to illuminate the dynamics affecting desired outcome.

Solution: You need insight into the behavioral changes necessary to: clarify agendas, open the dynamic to new initiative, and to bring about effective, rapid and sustainable results.

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Reduce variability and improve performance:
Develop a consistent method to assess your interaction with others and maintain a disciplined approach to managing and improving your performance.

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“It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Worry is rust upon the blade.”
- Henry Ward Beecher

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I trained with a Hindu Brahmin along the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi, India. This is an ancient town, brimming with life; merchants, holy men, travelers, and families. It is webbed with dark alleys opening to an expansive avenue leading to one of our most sacred rivers. It is embraced on one side by this sand-colored town were monkeys romp on the tile roofs and on the other shore by an infinite expanse of flood plain surrounding this heart of mother India. The training involved pre-dawn yoga and meditation on the sun as it peaked over the horizon moving from red, to orange, to yellow and finally white. The teachings were a daily rigor for a three month period. Perhaps we worked together for six hours each morning with afternoon and evening discussion and meals. What was remarkable about the hours I spend with this man, Anand, was that all of our conversations where accomplished in an abbreviated sign language. He had lost his hearing at an early age to smallpox.

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“The best way to think about epiphany is to imagine working on a jigsaw puzzle. When you put the last piece into place, is there anything special about that last piece or what you were wearing when you put it in? The only reason that last piece is significant is because of the other pieces you’d already put into place. If you jumble up the pieces a second time, any one of them could turn out to be the last, magical piece. Epiphany works the same way: it’s not … the magic moment that matters much, it’s the work before and after” (Berkun, 2007, The Myths of Innovation, p. 8).

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For some time, you have been aware of a manager who is underperforming or of a situation involving disruptive personality conflicts. You may have several initiatives in place to address what has now become a critical issue. And still you end up thinking, over analyzing, even talking about it – yet with little forward movement. The problem is consuming too much time, energy, and consideration, yet remains unresolved. You need to maximize your people’s talent and leverage their resources and it is time to recognize that help is required to achieve the desired results.

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The process behind placing expectations on others requires that you act as if you do not know the future and consequently are attempting to control their behavior to get the outcome you are after. This is like driving your car, slowly and cautiously, with a limited depth of vision – waiting to experience the road as it twists and turns, adjusting accordingly.

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“You can kiss your family and friends good-bye

and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.”

-Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

As quoted in: Young, William P. (2007).The Shack Newbury Park, CA: Windblown Media

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Interdisciplinary Resonance is a term I use for making sure that when you sit at the table, you – the manager, the designer, engineer, facilitator, leader or design thinker are capable of speaking the same language and embodying the same feelings that others are using to interpret your message.

Acting from isolation, while looking like you are collaborating, is not only confusing but counter-productive to the flow of the communication. Resonance, on the other hand, is a felt sense that we are only part, albeit an essential part, of the formula for successful communication. The other person is, of course, as important. Each of these crucial elements, self and other, needs to self-adjust and self-maintain to ensure that we participate in equal measure so that our communication is successful.

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With regards to a healthy organizational structure, I view it as a living system. It is organized, yet maintains the capacity of self renewal. It finds its integrity and stability through reciprocal expansions and contractions; a living and breathing entity. This processing structure maintains its form over time, yet has no rigidity. It is identifiable and consistent, yet ever changing and evolving. This is nicely illustrated in the concept of autopoiesis – “The characteristic of living systems to continuously renew themselves and to regulate this process in such a way that the integrity of their structure is maintained.”
(Jantsch, 1980, 7) as quoted in Wheatley, 1994, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World p. 18)

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