Wonder is underappreciated, So much of our creative and innovative potential flows from the simple act of wondering ‘what if’.
When I put together the Value Maturity Model of Collaboration, I had worked with people in organisations as they move from using collaboration platforms for communication then to solve their problems and on to creating new problems by asking curly ‘what if’ questions. Employees would ask “what if we did this another way?” or “how could we better meet customer needs?” or even “what if we didn’t do this at all?” The resulting conversations and work built on that wonder and drew others into the complex work to scale and sustain change. The last stage of the model, Innovate, is driven by that curiosity, creativity but above all the power to wonder about what might be.
As children, we have direct drive imaginations that can apply a sense of wonder to anything in our environment and beyond. As adults we don’t loose that capability, we just layer on top of it other pressures – power, social, work and time that make it less commonly applied. The questions are still raised and still there we just don’t as often take the time to share them with others or work on bringing these wondrous ideas to life in community.
Rekindling wonder in the organisation for the benefit of innovation involves engaging with those pressures and giving employees back the time and the freedom to dream a little more, to work a little differently and to come together in the pursuit of a purpose. The Value Maturity Collaboration Model reflects this because it recognises that for employees to feel ready to wonder they need to:
Be aligned on shared purpose and feel safe to share their ideas
Have the context to understand the organisational capabilities, work, priorities and issues
Have the agency and freedom to make choices about their work and their contribution to the organisation
Have time and resources to wonder, to collaborate and to create
In our lives, wonder can be prompted by an unusual sky, a dark wood or the site of another person going about their lives. We want that same curiosity in our organisations because that attention, effort and creativity is the heart of great customer service, creative problem solving and the ability of our organisations to adapt sustainably to change. Just as importantly, that wonder is how employees discover their potential and improve their performance by reaching for something not yet achieved or not yet done. In the transactional performance oriented hurly burly of our organisations, we need to invest time and effort to help our colleagues to wonder. We can’t loose the human magic of curiosity and a creative imagination. The rewards are as manifold as the paths that our curiosity and imagination may take.
Ask a ‘what if’ question today and take your colleagues on a journey of adventure, dreams and discovery.
Our emotions are complex ambiguous, shaped by many factors and influences. Much of the time we have choices as to how we shape our own and other’s experience of our emotional state. We need to bring presence and emotional intelligence to all our interactions more than ever.
A New Dawn
I was recently reminded of Nina Simone’s Feeling Good. As is so common with Nina Simone’s amazing talent, the song is beautiful, engaging and highly evocative. From its spare ambiguous opening the song ramps to a big band celebration of the potential of ‘a new dawn, a new day and a new life’ to bring the chance to feel good and find new freedom. The listener is taken on a journey as Nina Simone leads us through the discovery that she does indeed feel good and that better times are as real as the natural beauty referenced in the song.
As human beings, our emotional state is influenced by narratives of our own making. We carry emotions from day-to-day and moment-to-moment reinforcing both negative and positive emotions based on the stories we are telling ourselves, telling others and creating as we go. At times, the emotion we experience whether a high or a low can be widely divergent from the circumstances of our situation. As social creatures, we can also be drawn into the contagion of the emotions of those around us.
Those narratives play a major role in our emotions but there are also times we can choose to drop them or swap them. Finding that moment of choice, that new dawn, is often about our ability to find presence and see with new eyes and think with new thoughts.
The House of the Rising Sun
Presence is an opportunity for us to reset our emotional narrative, escape our bubbles and its cascade of self-confirmation. Presence gives us a chance to choose which of our own personal ‘Big Lies’ we continue to carry and which we discard. Remember in emotions we are always both experiencer, giver and receiver. Staying present helps us make choices as to how the ‘decisive element’ of our emotional state plays out for others and ourselves.
Discovery of the emotions lying beneath the narrative can be a powerful learning opportunity. Dissatisfaction can be driven by the power of yearning, as an emotional state that signals to us the need to change, to act and to move toward something new. The emotional energy that comes from new and different conversations can signal more work that can be done and will be productive.
Not everyone gets to choose their emotional state. For those that have the option, we should take care to explore presence and how we can be a constructive influence for our own development and those around us. After all, what we think and feel underneath the imposed stories and unnecessary ones, is one form of agency that can never be taken from us whatever we may be obliged to perform. Finding that also enhances our unflappable power to make change. Our emotional comfort gives others confidence and is often confused with wisdom.
so they wouldn’t do anything except listen to the songs in their heads which were sad ones like nearly all good songs and watch this feeling rolling in, sunshine or rain, we don’t know yet, it’s a good one, it’s the best one, though it has no name.
So much of life, business and management is the art of survival. However, we rarely discuss the importance of hanging in against the odds and outliving the competition. We suffer from a survivorship bias. We are disproportionately focused on the outcomes and methods of those that survive as if they delivered success but rarely consider what actually enabled them to survive long enough to succeed. Survival becomes invisible.
Surviving to the Second Half
Riding off into the sunset
I worked with a leader who constantly reminded his team that “the white hats only win in the second half of the movie”. While that is a neat summation of dramatic narrative, it is also contains a few reminders about life:
success is not easy: there will be ups and downs and shocks along the way. There will be moments when it feels like it is over or when the opposition to your success is too much.
survival counts: you have to survive to the ‘end’ if you want to be on the winning team. Persistence and resilence matter but so do other survival techniques like husbanding your resources, picking battles and even playing for time. If luck comes occasionally, the more you hang around the luckier you will be.
survival isn’t always doing: Survival is mostly being, still being. It can be a matter of who you are, who you know, where you are standing, what you have and so on. Health, networks, wealth and wellbeing can be as important as your strategy for survival. This is what success and privilege have strong correlations – privilege increases the resources to survive.
each story is just one part of phase of play: beginnings and ends of movies are chosen for narrative reasons; the most interesting bits of action lie in between. However, there is always a lot that goes on before, after and off screen. Much of that uninteresting stuff is the work of survival and only makes it into the movie version in passing or a quick montage – preparing, accumulating capabilities, learning and practising skills, winning support and waiting. It is also important to remember to leave enough to survive beyond the ‘end’.
Looking Beyond the Frame
I had an insight into the value of survival in the 1990s dot com crash. I was working for an Australian ecommerce player in the lead up to Christmas, the biggest sales period of the year. Our business had capital to survive to the new year and spent it carefully. We watched our two highest profile competitors run out of money in the month up to Christmas spending money aggressively to win. Because of their spending, they needed more capital and investors had become nervous because of a number of high profile global collapses. All of sudden we were the largest remaining player. We had the market almost to ourselves, we had time to adapt and it propelled that business to survive for years afterwards. Our willingness to ‘lose’ the battle for Christmas online was our winning proposition.
When we start to look at the role of survival in success we see other examples where our studies of successful individuals and organisations suffer from a survivorship bias that we rarely consider:
The Talent that Leaves: Most successful people benefit from better talent leaving the organisation for better opportunities or because they couldn’t stand the culture. No CEO profile mentions their luck in this regard.
Competitor Stumbles: Almost all success stories have examples of competitors who were better placed at some point but stumbled opening an avenue for the survivor. In many cases, that is all the difference between success and failure. Execution matters but it can also be that relative execution is what matters.
Survivable Setbacks: Setbacks are not evenly distributed. Some get small setbacks early and big ones later when they are better able to handle the challenges or manage the impact on reputation. Big setbacks early can drive people and competitors out of a game before they get a chance.
Adaptation takes time: Successful businesses and people have had the time to recover from setbacks. Others don’t always get the time and space.
Risk Avoidance: Many survivors avoid risks but benefit from the risks taken by others to propel them or their organisation forward. You can look like a star just by having your peers crash around you and leveraging their work to propel the organisation to success.
Delegating Danger: Leaders who view their teams as expendable and fungible resources will have a tendency to delegate danger to the team or another business to protect themselves. Those who try to save others are rarely as well rewarded for their efforts as they should be and often blamed for their involvement in a problem that they did not create.
Study Failure: We can learn from failure, but we rarely deeply consider the drivers of success let alone failure. Our temptation is to quickly adopt a heroic narrative. Once the white hats go on, the outcome was inevitable.
We better understand strategy, success and failure if we seek to understand the role of survival in life and in business. Working out how to hang in there and prepare to survive is an important skills. We can also help to address inequities that are lost in the narrative when we only study survivors.
Every Friday morning at 8 o’clock I have a event in my calendar. That event is marked by the word Gratitude. It is a reminder to me before the week ends to reflect on those things for which I am grateful and to express my gratitude to those who have helped, support or inspired me during the week.
That reminder has been in my diary since 2015 and has really helped me find more time to recognise others. Importantly, the consistent reflection and the giving to others also helps my mood. Taking time to find what is going well and is helping matters. Reinforcing that in your key relationships is important. I have been stunned how many people weren’t expecting thanks or did not realise the value of their work to me.
I never have to invent gratitude. When I stop and reflect there is always a lot for which I am grateful. There are always others to whom I owe my thanks. Making sure I tell them is a simple thing.
We don’t go through life alone. Take the time to thank those who are making your life better. That has never been more important.
Gratitude is a simple gesture. Everybody gains. Let’s practice more gratitude in all aspects of our lives.
The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.
George Burns
Ever considered that we use the same term for delivery of our role expectations and acting? Performance is a big part of our organisations. Are you getting the performance you expect or a show?
I saw a recent post by a thought leader that was advocating leaders focus on authenticity. That post defined authenticity as ‘creating the appearance of transparency, sincerity, and authentic behaviour.’ I thought it was a remarkably authentic definition of the focus of much of the discussion of authenticity in organisations. Instead of being who they are, the goal is to teach people to perform as if they are who they should be. All the rough and inconvenient edges are smoothed away. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.
Playing a role is a major part of any employee’s experience of an organisation. Oddly, that role is rarely defined or even considered in the employee experience. Employees are left to work out that part of the employee experience for themselves. The roles we perform to fit in are usually undiscussable. A great deal of the psychological stress of any organisation is the art of ‘faking it until you make it’, exploring the required performance of the role before you even consider doing what the role requires as achievements.
In Erving Goffman’s work on performance theory he explicitly used a theatre metaphor to examine how people managed the impressions that they created in others. In his work, people seek self-preservation by managing others favourable impressions. These characteristics are not unrelated to the key ‘theories in use’ of behaviour that Argyris describes in Teaching Smart People to Learn. Consider how favourably we view these behaviours:
Remaining in control
Maximising winning
Avoiding emotions
Appearing rational
We hire people because they look the part and we let them develop to success because they continue to look the part while the results have not yet arrived. This performance is a major barrier to the career success of diverse candidates who may not look the part or take longer to understand the subtleties of performance due to cultural or other differences in experience. Bear in mind this assessment has nothing to do with talent, potential or delivery on role expectations. We are adjudging performances.
Unreality, illusions and undiscussables are major barriers to achieving real outcomes in organisations and a major barrier to adaptation. The performance dynamic that Goffman discuss and that lie behind the Burns joke are real social human behaviours. Ignoring or banning them won’t help us. Demanding authenticity just increases the art form to another level. Moving beyond this, requires us to make the performance explicit and end the willing suspension of disbelief. We do that by helping employees understand the explicit domains and expectations as openly as possible.
Performance is a part of the employee experience so include it in the handbook. In this experience economy use the tools of theatre to design an experience that explicitly engages performance and guides the employee. This includes:
Defining the different situations in the organisation and how each context has different expectations and actions. For example, does your organisation behave differently with clients or in industry functions to internal conversations. It is wise in this process to reassess if these differences are valid or required.
Build flexibility into the scenes and acts in those situations to enable employees to improvise and adapt. Help your employees understand that real life is more like improvisational comedy or street theatre than classical theatre of any culture.
Make characters, behaviours & successful scripts explicit and shared. If people have to act, at least give them a script and ensure that script is really agreed by the audience who judges the performance. Throw out any outdated behaviours that don’t reflect actual ‘theories in use’ and review the validity of those in operation in the organisation.
Create space off-stage and back-stage to enable employees to escape their roles and prepare for the next performance. If there needs to be directors, set designeers, propmasters, dressers, lighting, sound and others to support the performance, include and celebrate these roles.
Focus on outcomes, not performance. Reward outcomes and not performance. Review all the systems in your organisation that are performance oriented, like recruitment, talent and promotion to ensure that you aren’t getting those who best fake it.
Maintain an open dialog around the effectiveness of the performance to the situations and a low tolerance for the unreal.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
WB Yeats, The Second Coming
Somewhere out there
For some it feels as if things are breaking apart or about to do so? The 2020s have shades of the 1920s, but on top of political turmoil, nationalism, economic crises and stock market enthusiasms we have other monsters at the gates too. Can we be saved which in reality means can we find the wherewithal to save ourselves? I am an optimist enough to believe we can but a realist who can see the headwinds.
So what do we do when we are unsure if the world is breaking apart?
We accept the world is always in transition. Grieve the losses. We foster what works better now.
The Headwinds of Change
Economy: once a net, now a handful of holes. Economy: what a man moves with when, even in sleep, he is trying to save all there is left to save.
There’s a daunting list of the headwinds of change to address the monsters at the gates. Some of these headwinds like information bubbles & misinformation, income inequality and the breakdown of social connection are getting worse. Sectors of society can’t even agree on the utility of wearing a mask, let alone tackling climate change.
However, we must remember that news thrives on bad news. If noting else, humans are adaptable and long term fundamentals, like global lifespans, reduction in global poverty and so on, remain on an upward trend. The challenge is to sustain this into the next generations and give them more time to adapt. The headwinds are why we need to set to work now.
Adaptation
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
Attributed to Charles Darwin. It is unlikely he said this or would endorse it.
If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.
Jack Welch. Definitely said it but look at GE since his tenure.
The above quotes are extraordinarily common in corporate thought leadership. They suggest that adaptation is the challenge. All an organisation needs to manage is its speed of response and it will survive and likely even prosper. So much work and effort has been invested in speeding up the hamster wheel as a result. That speed, complexity and the disconnections in our system are increasingly issues for organisations. Faster change can also be a faster path to the end, just ask all those clever ideas that rapidly scaled themselves beyond their capital trying to win a planned future raise.
Quoting Darwin brings the illusion of science and particularly evolution, but that quote ignores how evolutionary selection works. In evolutionary selection, everyone dies. It’s just that some mutations in the creation of the next generation enable some of future generations to continue with advantages. Nobody chooses to adapt. Nobody changes themselves. Nature supplies the change and the harsh and deadly selection process. As I have previously pointed out on the latter quote, it is no longer possible to outpace a connected global market.
Adaptation can be important at an individual level and some longlived organisations have undergone long and slow change to survive for generations and even centuries. However, many of our organisations are too big and too wedded to their current practices to adapt. Critically, many will not abandon or destroy their current model of success to do so. They lack the context to understand competition that threatens their overplaying of a past success, reliance on a fundamental process or overdependence on a core historical metric. Many individuals struggle with change for the same lack of perception asking “how can I need to change? I am doing it the way that always worked before”.
Foster What Works Now
There’s nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet
DH Lawrence, Nothing to Save
We all die in the end so what should we do? Grieve for the losses. Foster what works better now.
There is so much that needs to be done it can be overwhelming. However, big solutions aren’t always the answer. We are tempted always to go for Moonshots (or Marshots). Our focus on scale, growth and speed suggests to us that there must be one magical answer that addresses everything. Life is more complicated than that. More importantly, the path forward is unclear enough that it’s not yet time to be boarding the rocket to Mars with any certainty.
Gall’s Law proposes that all complex systems evolved from small systems that work. It comes with the helpful proviso that not all small systems work. We won’t find one action that fixes everything. What we can do is start small, do what works and build forward from there.
If our organisations cannot adapt through these small changes, then at least the work on these transformations will enable us to discover others who think the same and develop an ability to build new organisations to leverage the learning. The Berkana Two Loops Model of Change is a powerful framework for how to consider this kind of large scale change in systems. This model reflects the likely scenario that a new system will grow from something small and replace the current system, instead of adapting the current system to the change.
Things feel uncertain, liminal and transitional at present. What we struggle to see is that the feeling is a good thing. Our world is never settled and secure. It is always changing. We are in a phase where that change is very visible and very needed. We should embrace the uncertainty and focus on the small steps we can each make to bring about a change for the better. Collectively those efforts will discover new paths.
…”What is strength for, that has endured much, but to endure more?”
Repeat after me: These are not normal times. Be prepared to offer more emotional support to friends, family and colleagues. Consider the emotional context of your work and changes and allow others to share their responses or risk surprises and disappointment.
Not Your Usual
As the Australian summer ends and the work year begins again, I’ve heard a lot of stories that sadly don’t surprise. Many people have had emotionally charged experiences with relatives and friends through Christmas, New Year and the summer. Relationships have been highly emotional even with Australia’s relatively benign conditions for the pandemic, perhaps even because there are relatively benign conditions.
Christmas is an emotionally charged time in families in the best years. Many experience add pressure because it is a time of taking stock, work pressures and financial stress. This year the experience has been supercharged by separation, deferred celebrations and the residual emotional issues of loss, isolation and strained relationships. It’s little surprise that emotions can boil over.
Many others have expressed to me the sense that it is difficult getting back to the normal level of activity and energy. People have lost outlets for leisure and relaxation. Some feel guilt that things have gone well while others struggled. Work is a now major part of family and the home. With major changes in the way we work and its pressures, people are reflecting again on work, its rewards and its challenges. For some there are significant changes to be made that bring stress and risk.
A global pandemic has ways of messing with our life, our work, our hopes and dreams. During that experience, we are focused on just living day to day and getting through it alone and ideally together. For some crisis breeds solidarity and for others a suppression of our emotional options as we focus on survival.
As we move on beyond the crisis phase of the pandemic to live with as an ongoing part of our lives, then new and complex emotions arise. All the moods come all at once.
A Time For EQ
In business we tend to discuss emotional intelligence as an abstract and occasionally useful skill that we use in between or around work. In this time of heightened emotion, emotional intelligence is a core skill in all relationships. Emotional intelligence isn’t a training course. It needs to be a part of every work and social interaction. This is not a time to delegate EQ to HR or the team ‘people person’.
Begin meeting with a check-in for all participants. It is a simple step to give teams a chance to share how they are feeling. It also helps teams identify those who might need more conversations and support especially in remote work scenarios.
This is a time to ask ‘Are you OK?’ and wait to listen actively to the answer. The story may not come out at first but if we take time to understand and invest in our relationships then there will be rewards in the depth of engagement and reduced risks.
Whether coaching, mentoring or management, now is the time for one-on-one discussions with team members. Invest the extra time for regular conversations with your team, your colleagues and other important relationships. Make sure you understand what is going on for these relationships in their important relationships. Family and relationship stress is contagious.
Difficult emotions when unaddressed rarely improve on their own. Annoyance can become resentment and explode into anger. Frustration can grow or subside into lack of engagement and even depression. Even an excess of enthusiasm and a cheery disposition can be a part of a coping mechanism to mask deeper challenges. Earlier conversations are likely to be easier than later ones. Earlier help can be transformational for people struggling with the complexity of emotions at this time. Modern organisations have a lot of support for employees mental and emotional health but too often it goes unused because people don’t feel able to take it up.
All our work and social relationships are with humans. Those carefully chosen people come with talents and potential but they also bring a rich, diverse and complex emotional history. Those emotions may well be at the fore at this time. Ignoring the richness and diversity will cost you in individual and team performance and it will mean you likely fail to realise the potential of people you have carefully chosen in your work and life. If ever there was a time to engage with the moods of your unique collection of humans, it is now.
Be careful where you build walls. They can take on a life of their own defining work, belonging and othering in complex ways. Encouraging teams and organisations to live with permeable and adaptable boundaries gives them a better chance to deliver value and realise their strategy than hard walls.
The Other Side
Humans are tribal. Walls shape the perception of the edge of our tribe, determining things like who belongs, what we believe and who we trust. A wall is a dramatic manifestation of the difference between the in-group who belong and the out-group who don’t.
Put a wall in the wrong place and it can have severe consequences. We are familiar with the battles between silos in our organisations. Those silo walls determine the limits of where power runs, information & resources are shared and who is trusted. Whether marked with glass, plasterboard or invisible lines, those boundaries are fiercely defended. Much of the dysfunction of our organisations occurs when these silo walls rise up between teams or become tall enough to be seen from outside. I suspect some organisations silo walls can be seen from the Moon.
More dangerously, I’ve seen companies that put their customers or suppliers or community on the other side of a wall as untrusted enemies and then wondered why their business struggles and employees make poor decisions. Far too many organisation install a glass wall, a door or a whole separate floor around the senior executives. The world inside those walls soon became its own bubble distinct from the rest of the organisation, customers or anyone else outside. Safety inside a wall can be very dangerous when you no longer understand the world beyond the wall.
From Walls to Permeable Boundaries
Tribalism attaches to even the flimsiest walls. Walls exist to separate and prevent exchange and interaction. Information flow falls, collaboration drops, conflict increases at these hard boundaries of power, resources or information. Before long people who need to work together and interact will see only the Other. Instead of walls we need permeable and adaptable boundaries that shifts with the demands of customers, the work and the changing circumstances.
As our organisations inevitably become more diverse and reflective of a connected global planet, we need to remember that diversity can lie in tension with trust. Difference can be creative but it can also undermine trust and collaboration. New walls can spring up in the organisation around the smallest barriers and differences. The answer is not to be less diverse. Misguided notions of ‘cultural fit’ are a path to failure. The key is to remember that diversity is inevitable and building relationships across an organisation needs to be a full time task.
Restructures are time consuming and destructive of trust and value. Avoiding the commitment to silo walls that will inevitably end up in the wrong place and need to be pulled down is a great saver of time and money. More importantly, encouraging your employees to see boundaries as adaptable where required ensures that internal barriers never get in the way of customers and that the external barriers of the organisation won’t become stultifying or impermeable too.
The simplest way to make your organisational boundaries more permeable is to engage your teams in a shared sense of effort. Building an enterprise-wide sense of community is a key underpinning capability and creates a framework for ongoing adaptation. Alignment to the organisational purpose and strategy provides a context for trust and understanding and a counterweight to unique teams. That same strategy helps define the relationships that matter beyond the organisation as well through suppliers, customers and community.
Relationships built across and through the organisation punch holes in the walls that do exist and enable people to develop the agency to make adaptation happen. Increasing alignment, transparency and purposeful agency drives exponential rewards in organisations far beyond the removal of waste, duplication and dysfunction.
One of the consequences of our machine metaphor of work is a transactional view of tasks. We see work as moving inputs to outputs moment by moment through our actions. The human engagement in our actions can be lost in the business. A transactional view of collaboration is one that will have limited success. Collaboration exists in relationships and fostering those relationships in groups and communities is key to ongoing value creation
Bringing Relationships to the Fore
Imagine a total stranger from your organisation approaches you at work and says ‘let’s collaborate’. Your immediate reactions are predictable:
Connect: Who are you? For what purpose would we collaborate? Why should I bother?
Share: Tell me more. I need some context.
Solve: How can I help? What do we need to achieve together?
Innovate: What do you need to do differently? What capabilities are missing?
Developing a relationship through work
Expecting someone to collaborate without addressing at least a minimum answer to these issues is relying on their inherent human generosity. Not everyone at work begins an interaction with a stranger as a good samaritan with time, capability and resources to spare. Our transactional focus at work often pushes the exact opposite mindset of husbanding our information, resources and capabilities for our own work.
A stranger demanding you collaborate transactionally is not an opportunity. It is a threat. That threat is not solved by simply designating people a group, a project or a team. Before we can bring about effective and valuable collaboration we need to start fostering the kind of relationships that engender connection and community.
Relationships Means Time
Relationships are reciprocal. A one-way relationship is no relationship at all. All the parties that need to come together in collaboration need to have the time and effort put into establishing the necessarily level of relationships. This effort is one reason why collaboration activities are rarely overnight big bank launches. The community that is expected to collaborate needs to spend time together connecting, sharing and solving problems towards the greater goal.
No matter how safe you assure people collaboration will be they want to see it in action. No matter how much value you promise people from sharing information they want to experience the value themselves first. No matter how big the benefit of collaborating on problems, people want to see the successes and the benefits before they commit their time and effort to strangers or even their immediate colleagues.
The Collaboration Maturity Model above is underpinned by its focus on these human relationship dynamics of alignment, trust, capability, agency and reciprocity. The steps of the model describe only the phases. The detailed work in each phase is how we realise new levels alignment, trust, agency and reciprocity.
Because we can’t turn on collaboration when we need it, the work of leaders is to be continuously building the relationships and capability across the organisation. The use case and benefits of collaboration exist in your organisation today. What is lacking is the relationships that bring that capability to bear on your organisations strategic problems and enable your employees to contribute directly to the success of your organisation. Building enduring collaborative communities in your organisation gives you ways to leverage this talent to achieve your strategic goals.
Finding a photograph to represent wind is a challenge. There are plenty of photographs of storm clouds. You can have the mime act of a person walking into the wind. There are lots of photos of things that use the wind: gliders, yachts and balloons. The challenge is tough because the wind is invisible until it bends you out of shape with its long years of assault.
Headwinds is one of those corporate terms that has a vague explanatory value hinting, but not defining, forces impeding progress towards a goal. Like many such terms, its value is as an excuse without specificity. Why aren’t things going well? Headwinds. Whether those winds are expected or unexpected is unaddressed. Use of the term ignores that headwinds can be of value; pilots deliberately land into headwinds to increase lift and control of the plane. Headwinds challenge is to be better, more adaptable and more flexible in the achievement of our goals.
Much of the time, we are like a tree bent by the prevailing winds. Our life and training either teaches us to bend or brace against headwinds. Some winds are stronger due to prejudice, lack of privilege or other disadvantage but there is always some form of headwind, light breeze or howling gale. In our current predicament, much of the opposition feels like a gale. We all enjoy the rare moments of relief from pushing against the force of invisible opposition. The test is not how well we rail against the wind but that we find ways to brace ourselves against its worst blowing and slip our way forward, if only on hands and knees.
Tailwinds are rare. When they exist, we need to be ready to take maximum advantage of the momentum they offer. Preparing ourselves for these rare opportunities is a life’s work. The sooner we escaping our headwinds brace to take the opportunity of a tailwind the more we achieve. Some never do. Take care that your stiff brace and determination to fight headwinds does not become a barrier to opportunity.
Invisible headwinds will always oppose our progress. The world may bend to wind but it doesn’t bend to our will. We can always find a way to edge forward, flex and adapt.
Wind sings in its whirling, water murmurs going by, unmoving stone keeps still. Wind, water, stone.
Each is another and no other: crossing and vanishing through their empty names: water, stone, wind.
