Downturn, Upturn? Or YOUR Turn to Cross the Great Chasm?
By Bernard Chanliau, Tuesday 03 November, 2009
If you think 2009 was a tough year, get set for 2010. We are on the leading edge of a shift in how humans organise themselves to accomplish purpose and it has only just begun. There is a growing awareness that what got you here won't get you through the paradigm shift that is occurring before our eyes. The key to traversing this divide is a radical transformation of mindset. We are not just talking about positive thinking or self awareness either, we are talking about stretching minds, coming out of our comfort zones and completely rethinking organisations and businessA view towards 2010 - 2012 By Lorna McDowell, Organisation & Leadership Analyst
Organisations who embrace continuous learning (strongly differentiated to "ticking the box" training!), who have a high level of awareness of the changing context, who have a well developed sense of identity and are thoroughly integrated, conversing and connected at all their boundaries and interfaces with the world around them and inside them, are more likely to come out the "other side" of this current crisis. Those organisations and people that cannot make the shift simply won't survive.
It is what is on the "other side" of the transition that this paper is concerned with, the difficulty in seeing it with conventional eyes and how to resource ourselves to make the giant leap across the great chasm. 2010 will take us deeper into the journey through further collapse. Humans don't usually enjoy change and only undertake massive shift when it's forced upon them, and this is the effect of the current crisis.
For many, current coping strategies are temporarily working so life goes on with a seeming semblance of "business as usual" as someone described it as thus recently. "Only", he said, "I'm working three times harder for three times less the money". Many others, on the other hand, are not experiencing "business as usual". They are already staring massive change in the face.
CV Tsunami Ahead.
As conditions worsen and access to resources dries up even more, the usual answers to problems e.g. reductionist coping strategies will simply no longer work, because there's nothing left to cut, when what is required is an injection of new energy and new thinking. Leadership may regress before it progresses, such will be the frustration and scale of the challenge, leaving a sea of exhausted and disillusioned people trapped in their own fear and denial like rabbits frozen in headlights, facing the inevitable. Sounds, Feels Gloomy? It's already happening. I've met these people in the corridors and cubicles of corporate life, they just don't talk about it publicly - they're too scared of being in the redundancy line, but they're busily burrowing away at their exit tunnels, sending off their CVs to other companies, and most importantly assessing companies for their integrity in treating their staff better despite the climate. They will vote with their feet as soon as they can.
The Penny Drops - Acceptance of Major Transition and Reframing Anger in Positive Renewal
Frustration and anger will remain through 2010, but let's reframe it as a very necessary and essential part of our transition - the letting go, the death of the old to let come the new - the essential labour of new birth. Swiss author and psychiatrist, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, has written extensively on this subject - how denial, frustration, anger, acceptance, readjustment are each natural and essential stages of transition in confronting death. It hurts and it's horribly tiring and confusing, but there will be new doors opening if we look for them outside of our normal patterns, experiment with pushing a few open and accept a few maybe revolving doors until a pathway emerges.
The point is that we need to realise this and resource ourselves and each other mentally and emotionally to handle this massive paradigm shift that is upon us. Any surviving cancer patient will heartily agree with this - you absolutely have to let go of old ways and the anger in order to get on board quickly to survival. And even when you've got the all clear, you know deep down that change could happen again at any time. Life is never that comfortable state of denial and ignorant bliss ever again. We can learn much by dealing with our own cancer as a society in 2010.
Letting Go to Let the Future Come - Working from the Future, not the Past
A modern version of Kubler Ross' theory, adapted for organisation learning, is Scharmer's Theory 'U'* which describes a similar process by which one must "pass through the eye of the needle" at the most critical stage of this transition. At this stage he says, "involves turning inside out and outside in" - an intense emotional journey. When you pass through the eye of the needle - the threshold at which everything that isn't essential must go - you shift the place from which you operate to those who are surrounding us, you begin to see from a different direction, to move towards yourself from the future not from the past. This is almost always a giant leap because you cannot see it if you are still attached to the past. A number of organisations are already using this theory to help reinvent themselves including motor manufacturers e.g. Harley Davidson and oil and energy companies e.g. Shell, who are experiencing the edge of their old paradigms and an urgent need to reinvent.
"The moment of insight usually comes after an intense period of frustration, it's an intense silence, and place of deep listening, that we must learn to get in touch with" says Kubler Ross. The problem in most organisations is that silence is awkward, it gets in the way of doing, or is taken as a sign or inactivity or laziness, so we tend not to think too much, just do as we've always done, do more of it count the numbers and then do three times more of what we've always done for six times less resources. That's truly unsustainable. Managing the Tensions of People at Different Stages of Transition.
In reality, people move through the change cycle in their own time, at different times, not always together, and thus the tensions between people at different stages of understanding and progress are huge. This is something I experience frequently as a consultant and a significant part of the role of consultants and coaches today is to help people manage these tensions between themselves as they progress through the change.
Beck and Cowan, developers of the Spiral Dynamics theory originally authored by Clare W Braves in the late 1970s, describe a social evolution of hidden social codes, called "memes" - a basic package of thoughts, motives and instructions that determine how we make decisions and prioritize our lives, that shape human nature, create global diversities and drive evolutionary change. Each "meme", attributed an identifying colour (see diagram in article), moves in cycles, like a spiral staircase entering a new level once it comes full circle. Beck and Cowan describe the current crisis as a giant leap of evolution from green, orange and blue "memes" which have been a process of gradual evolution over thousands of years to the radically different yellow "meme". New times demand new thinking, only this time new thinking must be more than the next regular step on the staircase - it's a huge leap of faith, consciousness and awareness involving the ability to grasp new concepts and intangibles and move quickly to embrace the changing context. The thing is, the problems that come at us in the transition can only be resolved by solutions that they, themselves create. Catch 22. Where do we begin?
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