Posts from — September 2007

The vast majority of my work in OD is custom-designed; however, in the last couple of years, I’ve created six workshops which ‘formalise’ some of the approaches and tools I’ve been using in my consulting engagements into personal development courses.

For details of content and learning outcomes, download the pdf ‘Six Powerful Courses…” and let me know if you’d like to talk more about them.

Recent Courses include:

APRIL 2&3 EMBRACING THE FUTURE: THRIVING IN GOOD TIMES AND BAD

They tell us it’s going to get tougher: how do we find new levels of resilience amidst change?

APRIL 23+24 POSITIVE POLITICAL SKILLS AT WORK: CHANGING THE CULTURE ONE CONVERSATION AT A TIME

Advancing, getting-on, being successful in an organisation need not mean a sacrifice of personal values…

…which ones do you play?

Organisations are intellectual products. They are complex webs of beliefs and knowledge, the result of how people agree to think about such things as customers, the future, business processes, buildings, competition. Organisations are also social creations - they are webs of convention, rules and behaviour, the result of how people agree to relate to each other. To change an organisation you need to challenge both the intellectual and social assumptions that underpin it.

We need as a role model someone who already has lots of experience of thinking and acting in an unconventional way and, just as crucially, someone who is not afraid to speak up about it. Here is such a model: The Corporate Fool.

Fools have existed in all world cultures throughout history. Fools speak out against those who have power, question accepted wisdom, embody controversy and taboo, cast doubt in the face of certainty, bring chaos to order, point out the obvious when everybody else is apparently too scared to, throw a spanner in the proverbial works, turn the world upside down. It’s the best job spec you’ll ever read - unless you happen to be a Bad King.

But what would a Fool (as opposed to a fool - the distinction is important!) do all day in a modern organisation? Well, here are ten roles that we badly need in times of change and which we always seem to leave to somebody else (with the result that nobody ends up doing them). They are ten challenges to the intellectual and social traditions which obstruct change:

1. ALIENATOR, representative of otherness
2. CONFIDANTE, of the king
3. CONTRARIAN, challenger of the norms
4. MIDWIFE, generator of creativity and problem-solving
5. JESTER, entertainer and ‘humorist‘
6. MAPPER of knowledge
7. MEDIATOR of meaning
8. SATIRIST, deflator, pricker of pomposity
9. TRUTHSEEKER, teller of the truth
10. MYTHOLOGIST, maker and breaker of myths

Which do you play?

…and so living it needs care.

The history of business has been the history of division. We have long emphasised the head-based skills of separation: logic, analysis, control and measurement. It was these very same skills that gave us the industrial and technological revolutions and with them the power to manipulate our physical environment. We have transmuted that desire to manipulate into our relationships with others, characterised as they are by our struggles for power and dominion. And, seemingly encouraged by our success in bringing ourselves material comfort, we have taken this urge to separate inside ourselves, placing our faith in the rational and scientific and ignoring or belittling the energy of our own emotions, bodies and spirit.

The drive towards separation has brought environmental crises to our outer world and psychological and spiritual crises in our inner worlds. There are strong signs now that we are waking up to these outcomes and beginning to understand that it was we who caused them through the choices we made. We have forgotten our place in the undifferentiated web of life which connects us to nature, each other and ourselves. It is time to put ourselves back together again - to re-member.

The central idea of Sacred Business is that uniting in a whole that incorporates the wonderful diversity in our organisations will help us learn, grow and do better business, without the stresses, tension and imbalance that living in detachment brings.

“People draw together by their very nature, but habit and custom keep them apart…” Confucious

What are your experiences of wholeness in organisations, as compared with fragmentation and silo-thinking?

It’s always struck me as odd that someone would earn a living at something that didn’t bring them joy as well as cash. Occasionally maybe, but not their whole career…

Years ago, when I was doing the promotional tour for How to Make Work Fun!, more often the not the interviewers would assume that I was American, work-as-fun being, I guess, a ‘not very British’ aspiration. And yet still I meet managers who genuinely want their company, or their projects, to be fun as well as delivering value and making money. They want it to be a both/and.

I’m still interested in the concept because it’s one of those things where everyone thinks they know what they mean, but do they? What does fun mean at work? What does it look like? How would we show it? How would it help?

The answers to those questions will no doubt vary from company to company, and, for me, that’s part of the value. Open up a conversation about work being fun in your organisation and you will open up a passionate discussion which touches on many aspects of being human in modern society, its constraints as well as its freedoms. Or at least that’s my experience!

How would the conversation go in your organisation?