Adventure
Articles to support the adventures
Adventures in AI
How can we navigate the ever-expanding jungle of AI without feeling lost or overwhelmed, and instead find inspiration and opportunity at every turn?
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Adventures in AI is a series of fun activities to help people better appreciate the range of what AI can do for them and to provide them with quick and simple steps by which they can try them out and feel inspired by the possibilities it opens up.
The AI Jungle
AI is advancing all the time. Each week new tools are released and each can do more than it did the week before. This can seem daunting. The reality is that it is impossible to keep up with it all, and unhealthy for people to attempt to do so.However, recognising that we’ll never map the whole jungle, shouldn’t prevent us from getting a lot out of exploring within it. Each pathway can offer us new insights and opportunities, if we adopt the mindset of an adventurer. The Adventures in AI posts are all about stimulating and developing that perspective.
Why is this needed?
Technical advancements from literacy in the fourth century BC, through the Industrial Revolution, computers, the internet, mobile phones, and now AI, each fundamentally change the nature of work. In the past that change, that evolution, took place over one or more generations – but there were still those who adapted and those who were left behind.The AI revolution is different:
- It is happening much faster
- It contains within itself the capacity to support us – if we let it
If we do not grasp the evolving potential of AI to augment what we do daily, or fail to support others in doing the same, our organisations may soon find they can no longer commercially support the same number of employees doing the same jobs, when AI is doing half of it for them.
It would be a tragic loss if we were making people redundant because we did not properly equip and encourage them to evolve themselves and their roles to find fully productive opportunities in the future of work.
What are the Adventures in AI blog posts?
AI has the amazing potential to teach us what we need to know about AI. The Adventures in AI blog posts are a regular set of very brief activities that serve to illustrate, through active engagement, new opportunities to engage with AI on different aspects of our thinking and our work.These blog posts are intended to encourage experimentation and confidence, offer entry points into AI, and help people think differently about their work. Some of these will be about making our current work more efficient. But if our roles are to evolve, we need to make sure that some are finding new ways to add value through our roles. If all of our focus is about saving time, eventually we will not have a job left to do.
Follow these blogs on Linkedin – via the author, or via the Leading by Adventure group.
Adventures in AI workshop – from illustration to transformation
However, the blog posts will not work for everybody. Not everybody who works in your organisation will yet appreciate the points that have been made above. Furthermore, it is still a significant step to move from interesting illustrations and exercises through to strategically rethinking our roles in order to prepare those roles fully for the future.For this reason, we have also created a one-day Adventures in AI workshop. This gives people practical experience of working in teams to break down their roles as series of tasks and then prioritise those tasks in terms of their readiness for greater efficiency or for increased value add. It is important to note that supporting people through this change is not so much a technical challenge, as a human one.
The workshop is highly participative. Within a single day, participants engage quickly through accessible framing, identify tasks in their role to focus on, use simplified design sprint thinking to generate prototypes, and test their ideas in practice. We have found from experience that this approach not only builds skills, but also confidence and a sense of shared purpose.
Experiencing the Workshop
As a result, people develop their own vision for AI in their role, gain experience in the tools and techniques that enable them to do that work themselves, build relationships that help them sustain the journey, and demonstrate practical success they can replicate in future.
Will it work? How do we remove any concern you might have about trying it out?
We have developed a short (up to one hour) taster session to help people better appreciate how the workshop works and what it can do for them and their people without incurring cost or taking up much time.
The Adventuring Environment – managing change and momentum
If you are concerned that empowering a wide range of your people to embrace AI and change their roles in small groups or individually could lead to a different set of problems, then you could be right. Will it be anarchy? Supposing the changes conflict with each other? How do you maintain momentum?While we believe that getting people started is the bigger problem, we do recognise that these questions need to be addressed at some point as the uptake of AI within your organisation grows. To help you think these questions through, we have created a white paper based on best practice thinking and strategies around the management of an AI environment. You can find out more about the Adventuring Environment here, or download the full whitepaper by clicking the image on the right.
Join the Adventure
Start with following the blog-based mini adventures and trying them out. Join one of our no-cost workshop taster sessions. Download our white paper to reflect on your options to accelerate your progress. Every step counts. Let’s begin.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Helpful Resources: Adventures in AI Blog Posts
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
The Adventures in AI Workshop
How can organisations truly transform their relationship with AI—moving beyond technical adoption to a deeper, strategic partnership that inspires innovation, efficiency, and growth?
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It is important to note that the biggest challenge organisations face with AI is not technical, but human. While AI tools become more powerful and accessible every day, most teams are still only scratching the surface of what’s possible. The real barrier isn’t the technology; it’s how we think about and engage with it.
The Human Challenge of AI Adoption
Too often, AI training focuses on the technical aspects—the tools, the prompts, the features. But the real transformation happens when people shift their mindset from seeing AI as a tool to seeing it as a partner in their work. This isn’t about learning to use AI; it’s about learning to work and evolve with AI in a co-creative partnership.
A Different Approach to AI Transformation
The Adventures in AI Workshop was designed with this human dimension at its core. Rather than starting with the technology, we start with the people. The workshop experience is built around shifting mindsets from fear to opportunity, building confidence through hands-on experience, and creating a culture of experimentation and learning.Participants are encouraged to develop practical skills that can be applied immediately, but more importantly, to see themselves as active partners in shaping how AI is used in their work.
What Makes This AI Workshop Different?
We have found from experience that sustainable change requires more than technical know-how. The workshop is led by an experienced organisational change specialist, emphasising the human side of AI adoption. This unique perspective ensures that the changes stick and grow within your organisation.
Rather than simply learning about AI, participants apply it to their actual work. By the end of the day, each team has identified specific efficiency opportunities, developed new value-creation ideas, created practical prototypes, and established clear next steps.
The workshop builds lasting change by fostering team-based support networks, developing shared language and understanding, and establishing practical implementation plans that build confidence through success.
The AI Workshop Experience
Over the course of a single day, small teams of people use Agile practices to embark on a highly interactive journey. They discover the true potential of AI through hands-on experience, identify opportunities in their current work, prototype practical solutions using AI, and plan their implementation journey.The workshop blends individual reflection, team collaboration, and practical exercises, with each activity designed to build both skills and confidence. The result is not just new knowledge, but a shift in how people relate to AI and to each other.
Tangible Results
The impact of the workshop is tangible. Organisations can expect payback within the first three months. Participants report immediate practical applications in their work, sustainable behavioral change, and the formation of team-based support networks.
Clear implementation plans emerge, and the confidence to pursue further innovation grows.
Who Should Attend the AI Workshop?
This workshop is ideal for teams looking to transform their work with AI, organisations seeking to build AI capability, leaders wanting to drive innovation, and anyone ready to embrace the future of work. The approach is adaptable to a wide range of contexts and organisational needs.
Next Steps
The best way to experience the power of this approach is through our one-hour taster session. This gives you and your team a chance to experience the workshop methodology, see the potential for your organisation, ask questions about implementation, and plan your full workshop.The investment in the full workshop is typically recovered well within three months, through time saved on routine tasks, new value created through AI augmentation, improved team effectiveness, and enhanced innovation capability.
Take the First Step
Contact us to schedule a taster session or discuss how the Adventures in AI Workshop can transform your team’s relationship with AI. The future of work is here—let’s make sure your team is ready to embrace it.
“The real power of AI isn’t in the technology—it’s in how we choose to work with it. The Adventures in AI Workshop helps teams make that choice with confidence and purpose.”
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Helpful Resources: Adventures in AI Blog Posts
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Adventuring in AI: Building the Right AI Environment for Success
Creating the perfect AI environment for your adventuring – where human creativity meets AI capability
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What if the key to AI success isn’t the technology itself, but the environment we create around it? We’ve found that the most successful AI implementations aren’t those with the most advanced tools, but those that create the right space for human creativity and AI capability to flourish together.
The Human Element of AI Success
Creating an environment that truly supports AI adventuring requires more than just providing access to tools. It demands a carefully crafted ecosystem that balances freedom with guidance, experimentation with safety, and individual creativity with collective purpose. This environment becomes the vessel where human potential meets AI capability, transforming both in the process. But what are the walls of this vessel?
Current research identifies six key elements which contain, kindle, and focus this energy:- AI Fluency and a Co-Creation Mindset
- Human-Centred AI Workflows
- Strategic Frameworks
- Facilitative Leadership and Resources
- Cultural Transformation
- Effective Governance Models
The following are extracts from section 4 of our whitepaper ‘The Personal AI Revolution‘
AI Fluency and a Co-Creation Mindset
To harness their people’s full potential, organisations must invest in AI literacy programmes that build understanding, skill, and confidence in working with Personal AI.For full effectiveness, people need to understand the probabilistic nature of AI—how fundamentally simple its processes are, yet how remarkable the results can be. They should recognise their role in shaping these outcomes and develop both the conceptual frameworks for thinking critically about what they want the AI to do, and the prompting skills to apply them effectively in practice. And they need to experience success to grow their competence and confidence in this and, through experience, to appreciate all of ‘what is possible’ and best-practice examples to deliver it.
For an example of this take a look at our Workshop.
Human-Centred AI Workflows
But Personal AI proficiency is much more than simply getting the ‘right answers’. It is about finding ways to ensure that those answers dovetail effectively with other people’s working patterns; that they add real value to the organisation, its stakeholders, and their collective future; and that they actually deliver in practice.
Therefore Personal AI proficiency needs to provide experience and engagement in: working as part of an AI empowered team; using design thinking and design tools (both within and outside AI) to fully test and refine potential solutions; utilising design sprints and other best practice processes to ensure customer and stakeholder satisfaction; and a prototyping paradigm to hone the best solutions.
If we are really going to empower our people to grow and improve our future, we need to equip them with the knowledge and resources to do it responsibly.
Strategic Frameworks
Maximising Personal AI’s value requires clear alignment between grassroots innovation and the organisation’s broader strategic goals. The best organisations create structured frameworks that enable everybody to see how the organisational vision breaks down into the work and aspirations of each team and individual.The best examples of such frameworks use matrices which deploy the goals down into each process, or sub-element and engages each team, at every level, to map their own ideas and ambitions for making it happen. These matrices drive a balance between efficiency and innovation, and provide living digital twin of the organisation’s emerging future; not just reconciling potential at every level, but evolving each level, and even the structure of the organisation itself, to best deliver that potential.
Facilitative Leadership and Resources
AI, opportunities, issues, and the world in general are now evolving too fast, and becoming too complex, for leadership to understand and involve themselves in the detail. It is therefore essential to empower and equip people and teams to make the best decisions autonomously. This requires that leaders adopt a meta-perspective on what is happening – looking for patterns and trends, and how they are working.
For those organisations who exemplify best use of AI, the leadership role has become one of systemically improving those patterns and trends; using facilitative skills to draw people into making their own adjustments, and developing their own oversight. This includes curated recommendations of the best Personal AI tools for productivity, ideation, collaboration, research, and data analysis, including guidance on how to select the most appropriate tools.
Cultural Transformation
An organisation where everyone is augmented and supported by their use of AI – continuously developing and growing their role and their potential – is totally different to one where they don’t. Such development and growth are only possible where levels of empowerment, experimentation, knowledge-sharing, openness, trust, vulnerability, and acceptance of mistakes, are much higher; and where the culture embraces these.Leadership must drive cultural change, but widespread adoption depends on engagement at all levels. For this reason, it requires more than modelling the right behaviours, it requires an inherent (and eventually intrinsic) set of rewards and motivations to be thought through and implemented. Much of this arises naturally from the other changes in this section, but this should not be taken for granted.
Effective Governance Models
To mitigate security, compliance, and ethical risks, organisations must establish robust AND empowering ethical frameworks and compliance protocols. These should include clear and appropriate guidelines on data privacy, responsible AI use, and regulatory adherence.
It is important to design these policies and practices in a way that avoids setting up an adversarial relationship between governance and creativity. There are too many examples of policies focusing so heavily on preventing potential problems that they inadvertently stifle the very innovation they seek to encourage.
Instead, governance should be designed to work with the creative process. And regular audits should be used to evaluate the practice around these standards, and ensure not only that these practices maintain the required levels of security and ethics, but that also safely enable good levels of creativity and progress.
To read the rest of the whitepaper, download it here.
The perfect environment for AI adventuring is not a destination but a journey.
The Leadership Challenge
The most successful AI environments we’ve seen share one common characteristic: leaders who authentically embrace the potential of AI. When leaders find time to play with AI themselves, developing a genuine passion for its possibilities, something remarkable happens. Their enthusiasm becomes contagious, spreading throughout the organisation. This isn’t about forced positivity – it’s about genuine curiosity and excitement for what’s possible.
The perfect environment for AI adventuring is not a destination but a journey. It requires constant attention, regular adjustment, and ongoing commitment from all levels of the organisation. The reward is an environment where human creativity and AI capability combine to create new possibilities, drive innovation, and deliver meaningful impact.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Helpful Resources: Adventures in AI Blog Posts
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Empowering the Disadvantaged: AI as a Catalyst for Change
What if a simple AI tool on a battered smartphone could transform livelihoods in the world’s poorest regions?
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AI represents the greatest opportunity to address the inequality afflicting many areas of the world, from the favelas in Rio to the increasingly arid farms north of Nairobi and the slums of Delhi. Years of neglect and disinterest have left over a billion people economically and educationally disadvantaged, struggling to survive.
The Struggle for Financial Independence
To support their families, they try to generate subsistence-level income through small-holdings and micro-businesses—the only viable alternatives to crime or charity dependency (where available). However, many struggle due to a lack of basic financial understanding. Some even confuse income and profit, leading to the rapid depletion of microfinance loans.
some even confuse income and profit
A Training Programme That Sparked Hope
Fifteen years ago, I created a basic training programme for such situations in the Katwe slum in Kampala.
At the time, it was the only free, cascaded training available without electricity, and it worked surprisingly well.
It spread to Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, South America, India, Nepal, and even Mongolia. However, it required translations, paper resources, and its examples were somewhat fixed.
AI in Action: Transforming Lives in Kenya
Recently, I took it to Kenya. While there, I visited several cooperatives in the semi-arid region east of Kiritiri.
While they wanted basic business skills, their biggest challenges were related to their crops: irregular rains and increased pests due to climate change. 
Their limited income was being spent on pesticides.
I am not a farmer, but I gathered details and input them into ChatGPT. It provided useful suggestions on interspersing and crop rotation.
When I translated the information into Kikuyu and shared it, they were amazed. They had learned farming from their parents but were unaware of these strategies.
Three of them had basic, battered smartphones. I set up ChatGPT on them with appropriate warnings and left them enthusiastically exploring all sorts of questions.
Unlocking AI’s Potential for Learning
Later, in Thika, I met a group of 40 young adults who had come up through a care charity. All had smartphones, but only one or two had used ChatGPT before. After a brief explanation and some basic guidance, they quickly grasped it.
I soon realised that all the training material I had spent months developing could be recreated within ChatGPT by feeding it a business plan template and the right prompt. It regenerated the entire training, using their examples, in their language, and at their reading level.
From Experiment to Scalable Solution
As you might expect, once back in the UK, I began developing a GPT (a tailored instance of ChatGPT) based on the business training framework. This is now being evaluated by friends in Nairobi.
Why ChatGPT? At present, it is the only personal AI that allows you to create publicly accessible GPTs via a URL. But perhaps this misses the point, should I really be limiting them to business answers? Should I be limiting them at all?
Shouldn’t my GPT be training them in how to use ChatGPT for anything—how to craft the right prompt for each need, whether in business, farming, carpentry, welding, crafts, or even for their own education by acting as a coach and mentor.
my GPT should be training them in how to use ChatGPT—how to craft the right prompt for each need
The Accessibility of AI: Breaking Down Barriers
ChatGPT has a robust free version, though I initially worried about data costs. However, I recently downloaded my entire chat history—over 450 days of discussions, over fifteen hundred A4 pages in PDF form. The entire file was under 10MB.
As long as smartphone access continues to grow and ChatGPT or another provider maintains a free tier, AI has immense potential to close educational and economic gaps, empowering people worldwide to reclaim their potential and reconnect with systems, services, and society that others take for granted.
Bringing AI to Those Who Need It Most
I have now created two prototype GPTs. One is tailored for disadvantaged communities, but since many people here at home lack the understanding of how to access the full potential of personal AI, I also developed a version for business professionals and Western users. My hope is that it will:
- Help people realise the immense untapped potential of personal AI. Many of us barely move beyond asking it to write things or check what we’ve written, missing 98% of what it can do.
- Provide direct, objective feedback on how the GPT might be improved—enhancing both versions and ensuring I receive critical insights from users.
If you’re interested, click this link: Prototype AI Mastery GPT. Share it widely and explore new possibilities. I hope it expands your skills in using AI and that you will provide feedback on what works and what doesn’t.
And if you know networks in disadvantaged areas that would benefit from the simpler version, please share this link: GPT for areas of disadvantage. Encourage them to provide feedback as well.
AI has immense potential to close educational and economic gaps, empowering people worldwide to reclaim their potential and reconnect with systems, services, and society that others take for granted
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
How the world works – Exploring worldviews
Are our worldviews holding us back, individually and corporately, from making the world a better place?
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I love it when I am listening to someone and, all of a sudden, a lightbulb goes off in my head. Something clicks, and I see the world differently. It happened to me recently when Ruth Wilkinson shared how she used PAS 808 to drive and frame conversations about worldviews. I realised that if we want to change the world (and I think we do), we need to delve more deeply into our individual paradigms about how it works.
Understanding the importance of worldviews
Our worldviews (and how we see ourselves in that context) affect our behaviours, and thereby the behaviours of our organisations, which, in turn, have brought the planet and its people to where we are today. Conversations about recycling, carbon footprints, and inequality are important, even existential. But the biggest existential question—“Why am I here?”—is all too often assumed, unresolved, and taken for granted.
So I wondered, how would I begin to engage people in such a conversation?
A framework for exploring worldviews and their implications
This led me to develop a kind of maturity model, based on how individuals might see themselves in relation to the world around them, and how this might translate into organisational behaviour and future implications. For this model, I drew upon concepts of progressive stages, influenced by models such as those proposed by Wilber, Kegan, Maslow, and, of course, the many people I have met throughout my life.
The idea of such a model is to give people the opportunity for self-reflection and, through discussion, to gain new insights, recalibrate their thinking, and inspire themselves and others to aspire toward growth. It provides a vocabulary and a framework by which people can gain new perspectives on their thinking and its implications, and work with others to make adjustments.
But why?
Purpose driven | worldview driven
My thinking is that for change—including ecological and humanitarian change—to be sustainable, these behaviours must be rooted in an accurate narrative within ourselves: of who we are, who we want to be, and why. By reflecting in this way about who we are and how we are, we have a better basis for thinking about how our organisations should operate and how we might want to change them. It’s about change at the level of who we are rather than simply what we do—but one will follow the other.
So, I would like to share the model with you. The abridged model can be found on the right, but if you would like a fuller set of descriptions, the complete model (about twice as long) can be downloaded via this link.
Using the model
This model is designed not as a judgment but as a tool for reflection. Where do you and your organisation sit on this spectrum? What drives your decision-making, and how might your worldview be influencing the way you approach responsibility?
I know that many in business may feel that the higher stages—Committed Altruism and Selfless Dedication—are out of reach. But there are organisations operating at these levels already. They don’t always call themselves businesses, but they are purpose-driven, profitable, and making real change. And because they exist, I wanted to ensure they were included in the model.
There may be others reading this who are right now asking, “This is all very well, but how does this increase my profits?” But that very question may be part of the problem. If we’re so focused only on the short-term, profit-driven mindset, we are missing the bigger picture: how aligning with broader social and environmental goals leads to sustainable, meaningful success.
Next steps
I hope that many of you will use the model to reflect, even for just a moment, on what implications this may have for you, your business, and what you might do differently in the future. If this is you, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments below. And, if you would like to continue the conversation, please keep in mind that I have developed a half-day workshop for leadership teams to explore these questions. There is still funding available for it to be delivered at no cost — just ask.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Relevant Link: Purpose Prototyping Workshop
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Unlocking the Hidden Value in Challenges: Developing Performance and Potential
Are you missing out on half the potential value of tackling your most difficult challenges? Surprisingly, many organizations are! And the reason for this is a performance blindspot; one which conceals untapped opportunities right in front of them.
Business is all about challenges – corporate and personal
Imagine you are facing a major challenge! Perhaps an unexpected deficit, a market issue, a crisis, or a huge new opportunity? But it is important – and it demands a cross-functional team to tackle it effectively. How do you select the team members? What criteria do you use?We all face situations like this, where our choices will impact our future. And with the growing pace of change in today’s business landscape, we encounter such situations increasingly frequently. So, take a moment to reflect on the criteria your organisation tends to employ to choose participants for these key challenges.
Over reliance on top talent – a high-cost strategy
In most cases, organisations tend to select their best mixture of experience, ability, can-do attitude and leadership skills. They gravitate toward people who they are confident can deliver the best possible outcome and maximise the value that can be gained.
But who are these people? Aren’t these “go-to people” the same ones that are already overwhelmed with their current responsibilities? Yes, they are stretched thin, and while cloning them would be ideal, that’s not possible.
Unfortunately, for many organisations, selecting people for their ability means that is, by and large, the way things will stay: Defaulting to those ‘A-List’ employees, until they are no longer available – perhaps due to overload, or stress-related illnesses, or eventually leaving to find bigger challenges.
We get the performance value, but it is at a cost.
Pressure to perform narrows corporate focus
So, what’s the missing piece of the puzzle? What are these organisations failing to see?
The issue lies in how organizations perceive these problems and challenges. They typically view them through a narrow lens, focusing on restoring or improving performance, be it revenue, margin, sales, efficiency, savings, reputation, or customer satisfaction. They see them almost entirely through the lens of the diagram on the right: We have a problem (opportunity); we need a project, a task-force, a meeting; we have to secure our future performance; who do we need to make that happen?The hidden value in challenges – developing potential
What they fail to pay sufficient attention to is that each project and meeting initiated to address these challenges is a treasure trove for development. These environments are teeming with ideas, insights, experiences, energy, and understanding, providing fertile ground to nurture individuals’ experience, ability, can-do attitude, and leadership skills. Unfortunately, this exposure is often wasted on individuals who already possess these qualities.
It’s crucial to understand that these projects and meetings don’t just shape the outcome; they also shape the individuals involved – while the people work on the problem, the problem works on the people. In this way, they contribute to both enhancing performance and nurturing potential. The diagram on the left illustrates this concept.Developing potential through these endeavors holds the key to future performance gains. It achieves this without burdening individuals or exposing the organization to the risk of their departure. In the long run, the growth in potential can prove more valuable than the growth in performance. The question then becomes, how do we harness this value?
Developing potential – more important than performance?
The first step is recognition. By acknowledging the developmental aspect of these challenges, we can reconsider our team selection process. But it is vital that we don’t over-simplify this as an “either… or…” situation. If your organisation’s paradigm has been one of structuring teams solely for maximum performance, you may be tempted to compare a team of experts against a team of novices, highlighting the drawbacks of the latter and dismissing it as an option.
However, a deeper understanding of how to leverage both potential and performance leads us to define developmental goals as clearly as performance goals. As we contemplate how to configure teams to achieve this, we realize that a mixture of expertise and learning is necessary. Experts may not be required on a full-time basis or directly involved in the task at hand. Instead, they can contribute their experience through coaching, mentoring, or consulting, enriching the team and its members. This approach allows novices to develop problem-solving abilities while experts refine their facilitation and empowerment skills. Furthermore, individuals with leadership, facilitation, counselling, design-thinking, analysis, presentation, and administration skills can mentor those taking on these roles.
These challenges, projects and meetings thus represent an opportunity to rapidly advance your people’s growth and development through experiences and roles not readily available in traditional line positions and functional structures.
Balancing performance with developing potential
In essence, every such ‘opportunity’ within your organization possesses the potential to foster growth, engagement, and abilities by:
- Inspiring commitment and aspiration for personal development and reaching one’s potential.
- Providing insight into the logical framework that underpins the organisation’s functioning.
- Modelling a logical and methodical decision-making process that individuals can replicate.
- Building confidence in making practical, constructive, and creative contributions.
- Educating and familiarizing individuals with effective influencing and communication behaviors.
- Challenging individuals with new tasks suited to their current and future development stages.
Moreover, this approach maximizes the utilization of your existing experts, enabling them to contribute to multiple projects while multiplying their skills and experience in those around them.
Building a high-performing, future-ready workforce
The first (and most powerful) step for you to take is simply to enshrine the following question in your process for tackling each new challenge or opportunity: “What are our developmental aspirations for this work?”
Two further steps you might like to look at are: How to best facilitate people’s growth in these situations; and the role of a more balanced approach to development in maintaining mental health.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Share this post on Linkedin … | Follow new Culturistics insights on Linkedin …
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Meeting manifesto: What to expect from a facilitated meeting
If you have been invited to a facilitated meeting which includes a link to this page, this is what you can expect
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Effective Structure
Purpose – The meeting will have a clearly defined goal, communicated in advance, and prominent within the meeting. The goal will be revalidated at the start of the meeting and its fulfilment reviewed at the end. Click here to Read More
Process – There will be a clearly designed process for the meeting to achieve its purpose. Where possible, agendas will be in the form of questions to be addressed in support of that process. Click here to Read More
Design Thinking – Wherever appropriate, the meeting will use design thinking in the form of best-practice tools to engage participants in working together to achieve the goal. Click here to Read More
Meta Perspective – The meeting leader (facilitator) will be responsible for maintaining awareness of the meta processes at play in the meeting, and for initiating changes in them – often subtly but sometimes explicitly. Click here to Read More
Use of Timers – Timers may be used as a means to better support a flow of participation. Where these are used, participants will be expected to seek a balance of perspectives within the allotted time. Click here to Read More
Engaged People
Human Centric – The design and operation of the meeting will support the primacy of people. Process will be used in support of this. Special needs in respect of participation should be raised with the leader beforehand. Click here to Read More
Participation – The attendance will have been carefully considered. Everybody is expected to bring the best version of themselves, and will be enabled and expected to participate fully. There are no passengers. Click here to Read More
Ground Rules – An explicit contract on the expectations of participation will be mutually agreed between participants at the start of the meeting. Everybody is responsible for ensuring that it is honoured. Click here to Read More
Listening – Quality of ‘listening’ will be treated as paramount, both in regard to verbal and written contributions. Everybody is expected to be (explicitly) accountable for this within the meeting. Click here to Read More
Leadership – The meeting leader will have been trained in facilitative leadership skills to help them better understand the dynamics of the meeting and their range of options to maximise success. Click here to Read More
Active Learning
Preparation – The meeting may well require participants to undertake some preparation beforehand to ensure that participants are sufficiently informed to play a full part in the discussions. It is vital this is completed. Click here to Read More
Actions – For reasons of efficiency, the meeting will require participants to diligently deliver outcomes post meeting. These will be clear, agreed, timetabled, practical and with a clearly defined owner. Click here to Read More
Recording – There will be a record of the key decisions, actions, and relevant background and insights that can be easily accessed after the meeting, but this is unlikely to be in the form of written minutes. Click here to Read More
Review – The performance of the meeting will be reviewed, by the meeting, at the end of the meeting. The learning from this will be utilised to improve participation and facilitation in future meetings. Click here to Read More
Relevant Links:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
The Adventurer’s Guide to Unleashing Intuition
Introduction:
In an era defined by rapid change and complex challenges, the ability to blend rational analysis with intuitive insight is more crucial than ever. Yet, many of us find ourselves trapped in the confines of our rational minds, not really trusting the creative and intuitive resources that lie just beneath the surface. However, the same models which enable us to develop and empower new people to safely take on greater responsibilities can also be used to enable our intuitive subconscious to take a more effective role in finding powerful solutions.
Navigating Complexity with a Balanced Mind
All around us, in business, in government, in social media, we’re constantly navigating an increasingly complex world. A world that has moved beyond our individual logical ability to make sense of it. A world where the consequences of relying on argument and opinion can be seen in increasing division, conflict and polarized debate. Where the temptation is to retreat into echo chambers which feed and reinforce a black and white rationale that belongs to a simpler world.
And this can be true of our own professional and personal lives, as much as it can the politics which govern our country. But the truth is, our greatest insights often emerge from the subconscious mind—those ‘Eureka’ moments that seem to come from nowhere. But how do we consistently tap into this well of creativity?
The Situational Leadership Model: A Guide for Personal Growth
The Situational Leadership model, developed by Hersey and Blanchard, which adapts leadership style based on the maturity and competence of the team, can surprisingly guide us in harmonizing our rational and intuitive selves. By viewing our conscious mind as the ‘leader’ and our subconscious mind as the ‘team member,’ we can embark on a transformative journey toward holistic decision-making.
In this way, we can adapt the model as follows.
The Four Phases of Inner Leadership
- Direct (Tell): Start by acknowledging the dominance of your rational mind. It’s your go-to for decision-making, but also the gatekeeper that often blocks the intuitive insights from your subconscious.
- Persuade (Sell): Begin to open up to your subconscious. Let it know that while the rational mind holds the reins, there’s room for the intuitive thoughts to surface. It’s about saying, “Show me what you’ve got,” and being open to the creativity that arises.
- Support (Coach): As your intuitive side starts showing its potential, learn to nurture it. Understand its strengths and how it complements your rational thought processes. This stage is about building a partnership between the two sides of your mind.
- Delegate (Empower): Finally, reach a stage where your rational and intuitive minds coexist in harmony, seamlessly switching roles to leverage each other’s strengths. This is the pinnacle of self-leadership, where you fully harness your inner genius.
Applying Situational Leadership Internally
- Acknowledge Your Growth Potential: Understand that engaging more with your creativity and intuition is a journey that starts with self-awareness and openness to internal dialogue.
- Embrace Challenges as Opportunities: Use everyday challenges as a training ground for your subconscious. Recognize that it’s like a muscle that needs to be exercised and strengthened over time.
- Constructive Collaboration: As your confidence in your intuitive side grows, actively seek ways for both halves of your mind to collaborate on real-world problems.
- Continuous Reflection and Development: Regularly review and refine how your rational and intuitive minds work together. Celebrate the successes and learn from the challenges.
Resources
The adventures in our adventure library are all about taking you to places that your rational mind would typically discount. The provide 50 week by week exercises to develop greater confidence in your intuitive capabilities.
Conclusion
In a professional landscape that values innovation and agility, mastering the art of situational self-leadership can be a game-changer. By fostering a dynamic partnership between our rational and intuitive minds, we unlock new dimensions of problem-solving and creativity. Let’s lead ourselves with the same wisdom and adaptability we strive to lead others, and embark on this journey of self-discovery to unlock the full potential of our inner genius.
More from Culturistics:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
#000 – Welcome to Leading by Adventure – weekly post version
Exercise and develop the more spiritual aspects of what makes you YOU; new self-development challenges every week
Why take these challenges?
To encourage and support you in exercising the more intuitive and spiritual aspects of what makes you YOU. Each challenge is primarily about taking your perspective and your awareness to a new location for a few moments. What you do there and how long you stay is entirely up to you – It is your adventure after all.
+ Green track - taking it in your stride
+ Blue track - a bit of a workout (click to open)
+ Red track - stepping up to bat (click to open)
You may find the following resources helpful in tackling your challenge or in gaining further benefits from the skills and insights you develop
McKinsey paper on the future of work
PWC thought piece on preparing for the future of work
Gartner analysis on how the workplace is changing
Please help us to extend and develop our community by sharing what you are doing. Click on the links below where you are most active, and then like or share the article to your network. Thank you for helping.
- Share the Linkedin version of the challenge
- Share the Facebook version of the challenge
- Tweet the challenge on Twitter
- Share your progress and insights with the Linkedin LbA community
- Share your progress and insights with the Facebook LbA community
- And share your progress and insights with the Twitter LbA community using #leadingbyadventure
Useful links:
Introduction to Leading by Adventure | What we mean by spirituality? | Why Adventure
Adventures to date | I did it, but it didn’t work very well | How do I know if it is working
Bringing this thinking into your meetings | Adventure & Mental Health
Leading by Adventure community | Explore Strategic Support options
Adventures to date | I did it, but it didn’t work very well | How do I know if it is working
Bringing this thinking into your meetings | Adventure & Mental Health
Leading by Adventure community | Explore Strategic Support options
Driving your purpose with metaverse thinking
In metaverse* thinking, the focus is not so much on the ‘what’ as the ‘how’. Once you have the ‘how’ right, you can deliver almost any business goals you desire.
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*Metaverses are ecosystems** of curated data which enable and empower metalevel perspectives for the purposes of insight and agency
What is your purpose?
Purpose Driven Organization, as defined by the BSI in PAS 808:2022, is very clearly about establishing and realising a ‘higher purpose’ for your organization: A purpose that is about optimising your strategic contribution to the sustained wellbeing of all people and planet; achieving this wisely and ethically; while conserving and investing in key resources. It is not just about developing and clarifying a higher purpose, it is very much about redesigning and configuring your organizaton to best achieve that.
Sadly, however, much that has been written about ‘purpose driven organization’ in the business press has been about a more cosmetic approach. About translating an existing purpose into a more inspiring form of words, and then finding ways to share and communicate this to better motivate employees and business partners. And much of the negative press it has achieved has been about this so-called ‘purpose washing’ and the industry that has sprung up to profit from it.
Culturistics exists to help organizations better discover their purpose and to design better ways of delivering it. Whilst we believe in a higher purpose (ours is to help everyone live healthier and more fulfilling working lives through better achieving their individual and collective potential) it is not our role to define higher purpose for our clients – but we do help them to explore what it might be.
How do you make your purpose happen?
Whatever your purpose, goals and ideas, if they are sufficiently ambitious they will need the support of your people to achieve them. Strategy Engagement and metaverse thinking represent the surest and most sustainable means of securing that. So what are the ecosystems** that ensure effective strategy engagement?
The creative passion of your people in working together toward delivering something they believe in- An organisation model that enables everyone to see and pursue their part, in harmony with others
- A culture in which it is easy to do the right things, to be supported in that, and to support others
- Leadership at all levels which inspires and draws out the full potential of the people around them
- Agile working practices which make it easy for people to come together in effective innovative teams
- Partnerships that behave like an extension of your organisation and fully utilise each other’s strengths
- Customer engagement that sees your organisation as a trusted advisor and a key part in their success
- Insightful communications that trigger timely actions that always take account of the wider context
You don’t need to be perfect at all these things. But improving the key ones will have a big impact on your likelihood of success. In other words, it will make securing your business goals far more certain. And it will enable your organisation to take on even more ambitious goals next time around.
Prioritising your focus
But how do you identify the key ones? You may already have a fairly clear idea on which they are. And reading the links in each of the bullets above will further clarify your view.
The thing is that the key things to get right will depend on a number of factors. Factors that are unique to your business, your context, and your goals. But if you would like some expert guidance on what they might be for your specific situation, call us. We love to chat about these things
And once your Strategy Engagement is working well, you can point it at pretty much any business goals you want and deliver on them.
Furthermore, seeking to achieve a challenging business goal may be your impetus to continue to improve your strategy engagement.
**Because the concept of metaverse has been pushed extensively in the digital world, there is an underlying assumption, a paradigm if you will, that its ‘ecosystems of curated data’ will be exclusively digital. However, as our list of ecosystems (above) illustrates, curated data can exist in many forms. It is not restricted to bytes, or even paper, but can exist in shared imagination, tacit skills, relationships, patterns, custom and practice. And it can be curated by dialogue, logic, policy, procedure, learning and indeed digital forms. Digital has a lot to offer the metaverse, but the idea is much greater than that, and we ‘miss out’ if we limit its potential to computing. In fact, one of the most inspiring propositions of a metaverse, published in a CLO article: ‘The future of learning’ was ‘that everyone can create their own adventure in an ecosystem supporting curiosity and experimentation’.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Helpful Resources: Virtual Flipcharts | Timers | Participation Hacks
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Accelerating Change with Neology – The Awesome Power of Biznaptics
Our world, and our work, is ever-increasingly about change. And the expectation for our future, like it or not, is either that we competitively adapt to that change and take advantage of its potential. Or we fall behind, and eventually fall victim to its consequences.
But change is not just about what happens around us, it is about what happens within us. And a really big part of that is about developing our cognitive abilities. Developing our thinking processes and our mental models to better equip us to better engage with with the opportunities of change.
The role of vocabulary in thinking
Our vocabulary plays a really big part in enabling our brains to grasp, handle, communicate and apply the new concepts enabled by that change. This as explained in a really helpful TED talk: ‘How language shapes the way we think‘ by Lera Boroditsky,
That is where biznaptics come in.
You may not have heard of biznaptics. It is a made up word that I have created, purely for this article. It represents the practice of actively generating, or appropriating, sets of new words (also known as neology). But specifically to support the mental engagement with change, and thereby accelerate its impact within a business.
And, all of a sudden, we have a new concept. And we have a new label. A container which can expand or adapt as it needs to in order to embrace our understanding of the concept as it develops. The advantage of this is explained by the list printed at the end the article.
Adopting words as containers of ideas
Dr Boroditsky’s talk connected with something I became aware of very recently. I have been working with a particular client for some months now. I have been introducing new Agile design concepts to them, and helping them weave these into their everyday practice. Last week I discovered that they had labelled this work, its meetings, and its projects ‘culturistics’. And this provides them with a container which evolves to reflect their increased understanding and awareness of this new way of working. As a word, for them, it represents a change in attitude, in practice, in ambition – along particular lines. And it helps them in all the ways described by the list below.
For me, it is simply the name of my company, inspired by Daniel Kahneman’s work. It is the idea of ‘cultural heuristics‘ in better engaging with ever increasing rates of change. In other words, a totally different container. But that doesn’t matter. For this particular client, the word becomes whatever is currently most productive for them in engaging with these new concepts.
To be fair, many changes you encounter already have their own new (or appropriated) vocabulary. Take Agile for example, with its scrums, sprints and ceremonies. But other changes may not have such a vocabulary, or may have insufficient new vocabulary for your people’s needs. In these cases it is helpful to created a limited set of new vocabulary to act as labels and containers for the evolving understanding that will be taking place. In many cases these might be hybrid words, or word combinations, particularly when associated with meaningful and specifically named locations or events. For example the Chatham House Rule.
New words and the risk of jargon
Unfortunately, in doing this, we will inevitably open ourselves up accusations of creating or supporting ‘jargon’. And those accusations will be fair. But they will largely come from those outside the group actively engaging with change. They will come from those for whom the words have no meaning, and who frankly may not need them.
So we need to be considerate that our communication is appropriate and meaningful to our audience. We need to reserve our neologisms for those who embrace their meaning, and those who we wish to bring into that group. After all jargon is only ‘jargon’ when it is used inappropriately. But the fact that it is as prevalent as it is, is a sure sign of its competitive power to those for whom it is appropriate.
If we use ‘biznaptics’* intelligently, we will significantly empower people’s minds to engage with change. We will be providing them with the cardinal points by which to navigate and chart their new adventure. And we will be strategically extending their cognitive and conceptual processing through:
Benefits of new vocabulary
- Expanding Concepts: Introducing new vocabulary allows individuals to articulate and comprehend concepts. Concepts that might have been previously vague or difficult to express. It provides a framework for thinking about abstract or complex ideas, leading to more nuanced understanding and analysis.
- Cognitive Flexibility: Learning and using new vocabulary can enhance cognitive flexibility. Thereby enabling individuals to switch between different ways of thinking and problem-solving. This adaptability can be especially beneficial in diverse and dynamic business environments.
- Perception and Attention: Specific vocabulary can influence what individuals pay attention to and how they categorize and interpret information. For example, having specialized business terms can direct attention to critical aspects of a project or market analysis.
- Decision-Making: New vocabulary may lead to changes in decision-making processes. By having access to precise terms to describe risks, opportunities, and potential outcomes, individuals can make more informed and strategic choices.
- Creativity and Innovation: Language is a tool for creativity, and introducing new vocabulary can spark fresh ideas. This enables more innovative approaches to problem-solving. It allows individuals to think outside their usual linguistic boundaries and consider novel solutions.
Avoiding being constrained by the limitations of language
- Emotional Expression: Different languages and vocabularies often have unique emotional expressions. Adopting new emotional terms can enable individuals to articulate their feelings more accurately, leading to better emotional intelligence and communication.
- Empathy and Understanding: Language can influence our ability to empathize with others. Learning new terms related to diversity and inclusion, for example, can promote understanding and empathy in a multicultural business environment.
- Sense of Identity: Incorporating new elements of vocabulary from various cultures or communities can foster a sense of interconnectedness and openness to different perspectives, creating a more inclusive and cohesive organizational culture.
*I am not seriously proposing that the word ‘biznaptics’ is used for this approach or, indeed, anywhere outside of this article. I have merely been intending it as a vaguely facetious but hopefully practical illustration of the principle, for which I hope it has proven of conceptual benefit. Conversely, neology and neologisms are real words, in fact meta-words, which, now I have discovered them I will be using with enthusiastic abandon.
More from Culturistics:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
What is Facilitation?
Facilitation is a lot simpler than it appears, and a lot more powerful too. Furthermore it is the essential leadership practice in readying people for the new world of work.
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Facilitation is literally the act of making things easier. More commonly, it is about enabling a group of people to arrive at a desired outcome, efficiently and collectively. And to achieve this whilst remaining independent of that outcome.
process and intervention
This is achieved as a result of two things. It is about ensuring an effective process which people can follow, and it is about intervening to enable the people to better follow that process.
Good facilitation looks almost effortless because a well-designed process naturally picks up where the people are, and naturally aligns with where they need to go. As such, it appears to have a light touch, and provides an almost intuitive way forward.
Therefore, the real skill of facilitation lies in the process, and so it is somewhat ironic that many people tend to think of facilitators in terms of the ‘intervention’ side of their role.
Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect process, certainly not when dealing with people. No matter how well we have designed the initial process, it will go off-track if we do not carefully maintain its progress (and this is where the intervention comes in).
The purpose of facilitation
Facilitators are the custodians of ‘how’ things are being done. They are people who maintain their awareness in the meta-level of meeting and collaboration, observing the patterns that develop, comparing these against the process that was intended, and making small adjustments and interventions to keep things on track to a successful and valuable outcome.
four essentials of success
Key within this is maintaining the ‘four essentials of success’ at a functional level. These ‘four essentials’ are basic things that make the difference between success and failure for any group (whether remote or physical). They are reflected in the following questions:- Are people clear and in agreement about what they are trying to achieve in this activity? (Goals)
- Are they supportive of, and working in line with, an agreed and plausible approach to deliver that objective? (Process)
- Does everybody understand their role within that approach, and are they willing and able to effect that role? (Roles)
- Is the communication that is taking place constructive, supportive, and likely to encourage progress? (Interpersonals)
These are the questions that the facilitator needs to hold at the front of their mind at all times. If the answer to all four is ‘yes’ then the facilitator can feel confident that the group is making effective progress toward the desired outcome.
good questions lie at the heart of facilitation
However, if the answer to any of the four is ‘no’, then the facilitator needs to intervene in some way, either by instigating a change of process, or by addressing or highlighting the behaviour or issue that is the source of the problem. We can achieve this by posing a question to the group. A question is a beautiful thing, because it is both intervention and process.
Process
Questions also illustrate that ‘process’ does not need to be heavily structured. A process can be as simple as a single question, or a series of questions. In fact, many of the tools and templates we use in group facilitation are simply a reflection of different questions laid out in a logical pattern. And best practice for writing meeting agenda items is to phrase them as questions.
A key skill in facilitation is finding the right questions. Both in preparing the session beforehand, and in responding to things going ‘off-track’ in the moment.
At one level, the process can be as simple as posing the four bullet point questions above to the group. But it can also be as sophisticated as the whiteboard process for an organisation design sprint illustrated on the right.
the right tool for the right job
In between these two extremes lies a whole raft of proven tools and best practices – both complete processes, and bits of process – which equip the facilitator to shape the flow of the discussion to a meaningful outcome. Some of the tools are largely auditory, such as clean language and appreciative enquiry. And, some are largely visual, such as matrices and templates.As with any master craftsman, the facilitator’s effectiveness is influenced by the range of tools at their disposal, and the skill they develop in using them.
Each of the four essentials of success: Goals, Roles, Interpersonals and Process (or GRIP if you like) is served by a different range of tools or process elements. You can see a sample of some of these by clicking on the links in the previous sentence. All of these elements are free to use from Meeting Toolchest, and most can be used in physical or virtual environments.
Intervention
However, even when we are utilising an optimal process for what the group needs to do, problems can still occur. Progress can be hampered, or derailed, through behaviour, attitude or confusion. In these cases, the facilitator may need to intervene to bring things back on track.
The skill in these interventions lies in picking an option that is sufficiently strong to bring about the necessary correction, but not so strong that it is overly disruptive.
Non verbals
Non verbals are the gentlest form of intervention. They are most useful when a simple reminder that you are ‘present’ is enough for people to self-correct.
Examples may be shifting your posture, changing your location or expression, clearing your throat. Anything that indicates you may be about to intervene. Because, often, that is all that is required for people to think about why you might. And to give pause as to whether it might be because of them. And to momentarily reflect on what they personally are doing, and whether it is helping.
Furthermore, even if the individual misses the cue, someone else in the group may take responsibility for gently adjusting things, or redirecting the group’s attention.
helping people facilitate themselves
Other examples may include gently tapping someone on the shoulder, giving them a ‘look’, or standing behind them. This can help control side-conversations. For those dominating the dialogue, it can include gestures, indicating brevity or toning it down a bit. And gestures to highlight something in the room, for example a ground rule or an objective, can also help.
But please be aware, the effectiveness of non-verbals is very dependent on your relationship with the group. Particularly your consistency, your credibility, and the respect they have for your motivation.
Direct interventions
However, often the issue is beyond the scope of intuitive self-correction by individuals or the group. In this case you may need to explicitly interrupt what is happening.As was stated earlier, this is most effective in the form of a question. And it is likely to be aimed at getting the group to reflect on whichever of the essentials is currently awry. But if the group has got itself engrossed in a bit of an argument, or emotions are beginning to flow, you may need to get them to stop, and pause, or take a time out before you pose the question.
lift their thinking up a level
Sometimes a simple ‘So, what is happening here?’ or ‘So, where might we be going of track?’ is enough to provoke constructive self-reflection by the group. But sometimes it might be up to you to name what is happening, and to suggest how they correct it.
The most common issue that requires direct intervention concerns listening. Feeling listened to is key to achieving consensus in the group. But as the discussion gets more ‘enthusiastic’ people focus on what they want to say. This blocks them listening attentively to others, except to find a gap they can speak into. For help on this you might look at Meaningful Conversation, and Techniques to Advance Listening and Shared Understanding.
Facilitation Skills
The best source of skill development is using the tools and interventions for real. However, as illustrated in our case study, this is unlikely to happen if potential facilitators do not get a good basic grounding in facilitation from the outset. And this basic grounding is best delivered by a training programme. Or, to be more technically accurate, a facilitated learning programme.
Such programmes enable people to learn, practice and develop the confidence they need to lead in this way. In them, they will equip themselves with a range of process elements and interventions. And they will learn to combine them and adapt them to achieve everything they need. These programmes provide surety that people can facilitate adequately. And they provide enough experience, confidence and understanding to make them want to.
the master craftsman
But that is when the real learning, and enjoyment, begins. That is when people develop from an adequate facilitator to a craftsman in the art of facilitation. When they learn to fashion their own tools and style, and enjoy customising them to different situations. This is when they truly begin to enjoy leadership as a means to empower and grow others. And when they take real pride in the processes and practices they use to do this.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Share this on Linkedin – | Follow Culturistics insights on Linkedin –
Relevant Links:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Use practice zone thinking to reduce stress & performance anxiety at work
Use Practice Zones to develop skills and insights in people ahead of when they are needed. This helps build competence and confidence ahead of taking on new roles and challenges and reduces performance anxiety at work. This article is part of our series on stress resilience and mental health at work..
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The challenge of everything having consequences
Performance anxiety at work is perhaps the epitome of workplace stress. It occurs when we need to perform at a particular level and we are not fully confident that we can. Perhaps it is a new challenge. Maybe we talked our capabilities up in securing the opportunity to face that challenge. Or maybe we feel we may be on our ‘third strike’ – metaphorically, or literally.
We feel a bit under the microscope of dispassionate (even unfriendly) eyes. And we cannot drop the ball. Perhaps doing so has real consequences for our career, or our job security, or our reputation and influence.And we feel this high level of stress as a churning inside of us.
our body, our minds, and our skin are telling us they would rather be somewhere else
Some people thrive on this feeling, even at this level of stress. They know it is a precursor to their next amazing victory. And that fires and inspires them to something extraordinary.
But most people don’t, and this can have real consequences for their mental health at work.
The challenge is difficult enough on its own. But as they confront difficult odds, even their own mind seems to be turned against them. It should be giving them experience and ideas and confidence. But instead it talks to them of what will go wrong, threatens awful consequences, and berates them for their temerity.
Coming out of lockdown and sliding into recession makes the stakes even higher. The inflated promises we make to secure a job. The implications of losing it. And here, now, on our very first run, it is make or break. That is real performance anxiety at work.
The power of practice zone thinking
In the film Sully: Miracle on the Hudson, Tom Hanks plays the pilot who landed his plane, full of passengers, on the Hudson river. In a pivotal scene he is facing a board of inquiry that, for various reasons, want to prove him in the wrong. He is forced to watch two simulations where pilots fly from the point his plane is damaged, and safely land it at two nearby airports. So he asks the board how many trial runs those pilots had before the demonstration. The answer was seventeen.we all need practice zones
The point is, we all need space to practice. Nobody can be relied on to perform at their best the first time round. We all need time and space to learn and try things out. To have time in practice zones where we can build our confidence, and experience, and our strategies in a safe environment. And yet, for most of us, our entire working lives are spent in the performance zone, where everything we do has consequences.
The problems of a performance mindset
And the biggest consequence is what Carol Dweck refers to as a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset shies away from challenging situations. It would rather excel at something it already knows than learn something new. And when it encounters problems, those problems are always the fault of someone or something else.
And there are two big problems with this:
- The first is, that when you blame something else, you psychologically throw away to opportunity to find something you can do different. You concede the power to learn and to change.
blame concedes power
- The second is, that the future of work is increasingly all about change. Continuous learning will soon be the key skill that everyone needs to thrive and survive as people and organisations.
As routine becomes more automated, AI will play an increasingly large part of our work. Every day will include new things we haven’t encountered previously. Those who approach this with a fixed mindset will become increasingly irrelevant. And those who operate solely in the Performance Zone will become increasingly stressed. Without practice zone thinking there is a real danger that we will see increasing incidences of both disengagement and issues in mental health at work.
Practice zones – environments that encourage practice
To avoid this, we need to take a good look at how our organisations, and the people within them, respond to change. And then we need to create a practice zone environment in which it is easier and less threatening for people to engage with change:- Foster a more realistic expectation of people. Create a tolerance, even an expectation, of mistakes. Encourage vulnerability between people by having senior people share their own experiences of going wrong. Allow people to be more honest with themselves, and with others, about their limitations. And through this inspire people to value learning over appearance.
value learning over appearance
- Teach people about fixed and growth mindsets, and help them to be more accepting of the reality of themselves. Prepare them with an attitude of lifelong learning, and help them to define and aspire to their own vision of the next stages in their personal development.
- Establish practice and performance zones for people. Use a proportion of your meetings and internal projects to be deliberate Practice Zones. Periods of time where everything is safe, and people can try things out. And where the outcomes can be revisited and adjusted later. Create a culture where people build real confidence to try out the new.
- Run simulations of situations and meetings with more junior people so that they can develop skills and attitudes to equip them for their next career step. In this way, they can make their next promotion with more confidence and less risk. Expose them to aspects of their potential future roles early so that their responses can be coached years ahead of time. (And they can build even more confidence in their current role).
develop curiosity
- Encourage ‘open’ attitudes in all conversations. Teach people to develop curious reactions rather than judgmental ones, and to prefer compassion to cynicism. In this way, we will not only make learning easier and more certain for them, we will also foster communities where people can feel more free and less stressed with their colleagues.
- Create spaces for people to reflect and ready themselves to be the person they have the potential to be. Begin meetings with a time that allows people to centre themselves. To move past any stress from previous encounters. And to make a choice about how they want to be in this one.
reflect the truth that we are ALL learning
Let the environment reflect the truth that we are all learning in these new ways of working. Practice zones can help to remove performance anxiety at work and help people to feel comfortable in their own present. And also comfortable about changing themselves for the future. We can make humility safe, and through that create workplaces in which everyone can thrive and reach their potential, and maintain their mental health at work.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Share this on Linkedin – | Follow Culturistics insights on Linkedin –
Relevant Links:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Wellbeing leadership – facilitate healthy supportive working environments
Wellbeing leadership uses facilitative approaches to nurture supportive relationships. These make success more likely and reduce the stress of conflict and criticism.
This article is part of our series on stress resilience and mental wellbeing..
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Relational Anxiety
They say that, often, people do not so much leave their job, as much as leave their boss. If you speak to anyone about their career, you usually find that they have had times that they found unfulfilling, and unpleasant, even damaging.
And when you explore deeper you usually find that the biggest factor in that is people. It may be an individual, a group, or even an entire work community. You hear stories of indifference, bullying, confrontation, blame, unhelpfulness, secrecy, politics, lies. Situations where everyday is a battle – not so much with the work but with the personalities around it.
The Need for Wellbeing Leadership
being denied the opportunity to ‘belong’ …
And whereas a healthy team can inspire and amplify everyone’s efforts, an unhealthy team can do entirely the opposite. And in doing so, it can create disabling levels of anxiety and depression. We were all built for relationship, and when we are denied the opportunity to ‘belong’ in this way it can have harmful effects on us. It can strip us of enthusiasm, self-belief, confidence, mental wellbeing, even hope.But why do these things occur?
… can strip us of enthusiasm, self-belief, confidence, mental wellbeing … even hope
Oftentimes they are the result of unresolved performance anxiety. As those around us feel stressed and vulnerable, they focus more narrowly on themselves and their own needs. As they feel impotent or see themselves falling short, they can become more demanding of others. In protecting themselves and their own situation, they leave others vulnerable, and even exploit that vulnerability.survival of the fittest leads to suboptimal choices
Such behaviour doesn’t sit well with them – at least not initially – but needs must. And they begin to justify themselves with stories about it being survival of the fittest – a dog eat dog world. Until it becomes true.
But, in an interdependent organisation, this narrowness of focus, and selfishness, leads to suboptimal choices and everybody losing out. And so the performance situation further declines and the pressure builds even greater. Silos form, the blame game starts, politics abound, stress builds and mental wellbeing declines.
Stressful behaviour
The situation described above is a reflection of the left-hand side of the diagram below.
When we feel that our situation and our expectations are being threatened in any way, we tend to close-in. It is psychological. Even small amounts of tension and anxiety – amounts so small we are hardly aware of them – can do it. Our thinking shifts from the subtler higher order functions to older, more direct, functions. If we pay attention to ourselves, we will sense it in an increased alertness, a small tightening in our middles.
the entire balance can shift in a moment
And the shift in our thinking makes it much more likely that we will tend toward the closed dialogue responses on the red side of the diagram above.The thing is, when we do, our inclination toward judgement or cynicism is picked up by others – often subconsciously. They can perceive it is a threat to their ideas and acceptance, and this will influence their own brain chemistry, accessing other thinking centres in them. In turn, their behaviours shift toward the red, and in a moment, you can find that the entire balance of the discussion has shifted.
And that is in healthy environments. In environments like those described in the first section, people arrive at the meeting already closed. People begin defensive. Empathy is hard to come by. Ideas are quickly shot down. Creativity doesn’t really stand a chance. And meetings stop being productive.
For more on this, take a look at our blog item on meaningful conversation.
Facilitate healthy environments
So how do you avoid this? Or how do you fix it when you are descending into this vicious circle? How do you facilitate healthy environments?
The temptation as the leader responsible for the meeting is to become more directive. For some people this may be driven by the red chemistry that is going on in their brains. For others, it may be the only form of leadership they feel confident in delivering.
Either way, it is more likely to close things down further than to open them up. What is required is a more facilitative approach to leadership. A more vulnerable and open approach. One that defuses the tension and which reflects humility and acceptance. Not from a weak and timid position, but from a strong and assertive one. If you are someone who wants to change the culture in your own organisation, we recommend you consider the following to facilitate healthy environments:
8 Steps for Wellbeing Leadership
bringing it back to green
- Temporarily accept the current performance. Lets face it, ‘not-accepting it’ is not going to change it. But accepting it alleviates some of the pressure that has led to self-interest and the current decline.
- Explain what is happening, and in particular your own part in it (this will give others permission to be honest about their own parts too). Give people the insight and the vocabulary to discuss their behaviours and the implications of them without blame or guilt. And then facilitate forums in which such discussions can safely take place, and people can experiment with adopting different approaches.
- Explore with people the damage that stress may have inflicted on diversity and inclusion, Ensure a clear understanding and a vision for both. Provide education if required. And take the opportunity to agree practices which embrace everyone.
build in a vision for diversity and inclusion
- Introduce education about open conversation and train people to be self-aware and able to manage their own internal condition in dialogue. Introduce review points into meetings, so that people can more easily see the meta-process and work with it to ensure healthy and supportive dialogue.
- Equip the leadership with facilitation skills. These skills will provide them with the confidence to achieve their aims using less directive and autocratic approaches. As a result they will be able to more readily see and coach the interpersonal dynamics. In this way, they will better ensure wellbeing leadership themselves through healthy and supportive dialogue.
- Use more design thinking and participative tools in your meetings. These enable people to contribute without having to compete to dominate the discussion. The tools enable people to relax more – and not continuously be on the alert for the micro-breaks in the dialogue that will enable them to make their point.
enable easier contribution
- Build a better sense of the Internal Customer. Use a more holistic and systemic understanding of the organisation to help people understand how it works. How their role works through others to achieve the goals of the organisation. And to create a greater sense of interdependence and the role of mutual service in making progress.
- Remove any divisive incentives that might tempt people to compete at a cost to their colleagues. Reward performance collectively, and attitudes individually. Reward (and celebrate) ‘assists’ more than ‘goals’.
The Benefits of Wellbeing Leadership
The situation won’t change overnight, but it will change. It may need some individual coaching of those who cling to their original behaviours. But as they begin to realise they are no longer benefiting from them, they will either fit in or move on. The result will be a more efficient, more effective and more fulfilling place of work. Creativity will begin to flourish, and performance will grow … and so with the people.
Wellbeing Leadership is all about facilitating healthy environments, and providing an increased sense of belonging and value that will help to minimise the risks to mental health.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Share this on Linkedin – | Follow Culturistics insights on Linkedin –
Relevant Links:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Better meeting design to empower mental health and reduce meeting stress
Well designed meetings are a vital and powerful tool for transforming the negative effects of stress into positive energy and excitement
This article is part of our series on stress resilience and mental health at work..
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Is stress inevitable?
Challenges are always present. They are what provide us opportunities to add value, to pull together, and to shine. It is challenges that provide us with learning and fulfilment and rewards. But they also involve stress.
So how do we prepare our people to work with that stress so that it doesn’t adversely affect mental health at work? In other words, how do we equip them to use it as a motivator, and not be overwhelmed by it? And how do we ensure the stress is a positive influence and not a negative one.
The need for better meeting design
Typically, the biggest factors in how our people approach challenges depends upon:
- Their understanding of the challenge and its context
- Their skills, capabilities and confidence to rise to that challenge
- The level of support they can expect in tacking the most difficult bits
- The sense of purpose and meaning the challenge has for them
- The insight, ideas and creativity that they can bring to the challenge
- Their attitude and beliefs about themselves and their team in relation to the challenge
- The appreciation and acceptance they feel in tackling the challenge
Greater levels of these things help reduce stress. But where the levels are low, stress grows, and has a negative impact on mental health at work.
So how do we deliver these factors to the individuals who are tackling the challenge? The answer to that is most likely the meetings that take place around the challenge. Big meetings, small meetings, one-on-ones. To good effect or bad.
The greater the positive influence of these things, the greater the likelihood of success, and the more the challenge seems like an adventure. But if these things are missing, or badly handled, the challenge can seem overwhelming. As a result, its impact on us and the organisation can be damaging.
Meetings are key. However, this is somewhat of an irony, because many of us don’t see meetings in that light.
Meeting stress
There is overwhelming anecdotal evidence that people see meetings as an obstacle rather than an enabler. All too often, and for too many people, meetings seem (and perhaps have become) a distraction to simply getting on with their work.Instead of meetings being a means to handle and reduce stress through the means defined above, people find that many meetings add further stress. And this meeting stress is totally unnecessary, and the result of lack of meeting design. Such meeting stress is a major cause of issues in mental health at work.
And there is good reason for this. We have somehow lost sight that the value of a meeting is the difference it makes to those who attend it. We couch meeting objectives in terms of inanimate deliverables. But the only thing a meeting CAN change is how people act as a result of it. All that it can do effectively are deliver the bullet points above.
the value of a meeting is the difference it makes to those who attend it
A decision is sterile and impotent without the understanding and commitment of those required to effect it. The fact is, if your people do not need to change, even in a small way, then you don’t need a meeting. And if they do need to change, then that is what the meeting needs to deliver. The content is simply a means to achieve that. In a well-designed meeting, the people do not so much work on the content, as the content works on the people.
We need to begin to see meetings as a means to change people to what they need to proceed. Then we will start to design meetings as journeys in which we address what is missing (from the bulleted list). Our objectives would reflect skills, attitudes and shared understanding. And people would not only see their value, they would eagerly engage with them to play their part in that journey.
The value of your meetings depends not only on the journey, but the extent to which people engage with that journey. Their adoption of what is needed is much more likely if they are actively involved in developing it. For that reason, your meeting (especially if it is virtual) should use participative tools wherever possible.
Steps to better meeting design
So for your meeting design, here are some practical things to think about:
- Do you know what they need in respect of the above bullets? If not, can you talk to them to find out?
- How much of what is required can be delivered through interaction with their colleagues in a well designed meeting?
- What did they feel about the last meeting in this regard, and why? Can you raise the bar for this one?
- How will you use participation to build personal and team ownership and support?
- How can you better engage their insight, ideas and creativity in the plans that you want to build?
- Where can you authentically express your appreciation and acceptance for what they have achieved already?
expectations on people are not getting any easier
The expectations on people are not getting any easier. The challenges to which we refer are increasingly frequent, perhaps even daily, occurrences. Better meeting design is all about systematically rethinking our everyday meetings until they better equip people for those everyday challenges. If people in our organisations do not like meetings, it is a very clear indication that they are poorly designed. And if they are poorly designed, we are handicapping ourselves and our people in a competitive race for the future.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Share this on Linkedin – | Follow Culturistics insights on Linkedin –
Relevant Links:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Encourage creative solutions to stress – creativity and mental wellbeing at work
Creative solutions to stress are more than just ideas – the very exercise of being creative can help resolve tensions and improve mental wellbeing at work. The ideas help too!
This article is part of our series on stress resilience and mental wellbeing at work..
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The relationship between creativity and stress
In Engineering, ‘stress’ is usually caused by something wanting to be in two places at once. ‘Strain’, incidentally, is what results from this – it gets stretched, it suffers ‘fatigue’, it breaks – all very anthropomorphic.In Engineering Design, conceptual stresses are caused by the tension between something having to be two incompatible things at once: big yet light; long yet compact; hot yet comfortable. Handling this tension is often a matter of finding the right compromise. But if we can resolve the tension by breaking through the compromise – then that is creativity: an umbrella; a telescope; insulation. Creative solutions to stress.
creativity is all about resolving stress
Creativity is one resource that most often resolves such stress. Finding a new way to break the tension, to move beyond the compromise, to get more out of less. And not just in Engineering! Creativity is also the best way of resolving stress in social and organisational settings too. Creative solutions can do more with less, save time, fix problems, and energise people.
It is therefore a bit of a cruel irony that being under stress is often the biggest barrier to being creative.For example, stress can narrow our focus. It can cause us to concentrate on the obvious. And it can can close down our higher-order thinking.
Stress can also make the environment more hostile to ideas. It can make people judgmental and critical. It can lead to closed minds, and dismissal of things that are different – both people and ideas.
And sadly, in many workplace situations, that is what seems to be the most prevalent outcome.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Finding time for creative solutions to stress
Creativity doesn’t need a lot of time. It can be one small part of a day. It doesn’t need to be a major distraction from running along our well worn tracks, or bouncing from one issue to another.
But if we can break out of ‘being driven’ for just a short while. Perhaps by planning in some time to be creative within our meetings. To stop for a moment and think about alternative ideas. For example by having a regular point in each day, or even week, to exercise our creative faculties. How might our working lives be different?There are of course issues to overcome. Many people believe they are not good at being creative. Others think that they don’t have the time to be creative. And still more have had experiences where attempts at creativity went nowhere.
everybody can be creative, with a bit of help
Unfortunately, these beliefs often stop people from exploring and testing out the powerful solutions that exist for overcoming these issues.
As a result, many working environments are now alien to creativity as a process. Maybe pet ideas get voiced. And there maybe one or two people who are known for left-field suggestions – some of which are good. But there is little use of creativity tools (except perhaps ‘brainstorming’). Or of other techniques to stimulate collective creative interplay between people.
But one choice can overcome all of these. The choice to mark out some time, to use some tools, to follow the rules, and to reacquaint ourselves with our creative flair. There are now many tools and techniques which help create the right environment, and which enable people to overcome their internal resistance.
Stress reducing benefits of creativity
It won’t happen all at once. Like all of our abilities, creativity takes practice. But if we make the choice, the practice will come, and our creative muscles will develop.And if we do that, we can expect the following benefits:
- Regular breaks away from the stress of our ‘normal’ roles
- Ideas that overcome issues and make our work easier and more effective
- Raised energy levels from the creative process itself
- Better skills at coping with the increasing disruption and challenges we face
- Improved teamwork arising from the exercise
- All of which have a positive impact on our mental wellbeing at work
The thing is, one good idea can be worth thousands of hours of sweat in terms of its impact on the business. And if we do not plan in creativity, then the continued pressure to do more with less will continue. It will remain as an unresolved tension, a blockage to progress, and a source of increasing anxiety and stress.
Creative solutions to stress can start simple.
Just begin with one meeting a week where you will include a creativity session. A session where you pick something that you want to improve. And where you use a tool to enable your people to take different and creative perspectives. Initially, it might be about winning them over to try. Then it might be about helping them manage their internal mindset. And then about accepting that it doesn’t work every time. But after a few weeks things will start to improve. And when they do, and you are getting the benefits, it will be time to consider extending the approach to other meetings.
The role of Design Thinking
And it may also be time to take a deeper look into Design Thinking.
One of the exciting developments of recent years has been the growth in the popularity of Design Thinking. This has begun to make creative design tools more mainstream. True, the focus has been predominantly on products and services. But once the skill set has become established in an organisation, it can be used anywhere.
Another helpful development is the concept of Design Sprints. This is the idea of bringing a group of people together for one week to solve a problem using Design Thinking.
Design thinking, in its wide variety of forms represents the best opportunity within your organisation to:
- Make breakthrough improvements in your operational performance
- Build supportive, energising and inspiring relationships between people
- Develop skill sets that better equip people for the future of work
- Establish practices that enable people to resolve their problems and their differences
And through all this to reduce toxic levels of stress, and the mental wellbeing issues that arise from that.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Share this on Linkedin – | Follow Culturistics insights on Linkedin –
Relevant Links:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Structure complexity – use Design Thinking to improve mental health at work
Design thinking provides tools and solutions to help structure complexity and present it in a way that best utilises the human brain. This article is part of our series on stress resilience and mental health at work..
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Change is the new normal
Trying to get your head around complexity can be very stressful.
The emerging future makes things more complex in a number of ways.
- Technological advance introduces complexity through its ability to incorporate greater capability into smaller spaces
- The exponential growth of information through data generation and the empowerment of self-publication
- The ability to link everybody and everything at all times and in all places, and the tendency to do so
- The increased level of connections and networks as organisations seek to keep ahead of all this and build synergy
- The way strength is built by building things together to use all of its potential to achieve the best result
the brain was not built for this level of complexity
The problem is that our heads were not built to handle all of this stuff in this way. And the more we rely on our heads to do so, the more likely we are to forget important connections, and make mistakes, and find we have to rethink things – which creates further stress. Or worse still, we ignore those mistakes, and create problems for people ‘down the chain’. This creates further stress for them, and is the main cause of silo behaviours.Even within a single organisation, the connection between people, roles, department, strategies, policies, processes, systems, structures, practices, projects, initiatives, culture, values, IP, regulations, customers, suppliers, contracts, training, data, etc., can be overwhelming.
structuring complexity is key to success
And yet, it is the creation and quality of those various connections that determine the organisation’s success. Furthermore, it is the rapid shifting of some of those connections that enables agility. Which increasingly determines our ability to sustain that success.
So how do we reconcile these two things? The organisation’s need to embrace complexity to sustain success. And the neural limitations of the people who are required to be the architects of that. How do we do this without breaking people?
can we engage effectively with complexity without putting people’s mental health at risk?
There is no ‘going back’ to normal
In the past, things were reasonably stable, and strategies could be cascaded down from the top of the organisation. Jobs remained fairly static, and people could pretty much get on with them year on year in the same way. The key connections the organisation required were largely integrated into routines and habit.However, it was still a motivational benefit to know why your job mattered. It gave you a place in the team. A feeling of pride and engagement. It helped you make sense of the corporate communications you received. And, on occasion, it helped you accept the change initiatives that swept through intermittently.
But now, if it is stable, it is going to change.
if it is stable, it is going to change
Much of the routine in people’s roles will be automated with bots and AI. Which is good, because that will give them more time to spend on thinking through the bits that aren’t routine. The increasing level of internal requests, and product/service changes. The technology that is evolving with each update. The special projects where they need someone with your experience. The requests for new ideas. The new agile ways of working. The scrums and self-managed work groups.Change can no longer be controlled from the top
Because now change is happening so fast, they cannot cope with making all of the decisions from the top. There are too many. And it takes too long to cascade them down. People need to see the opportunities for themselves. They need to make their own decisions. They need to respond, and adapt, and fit in to fast changing configurations.And to do that efficiently, without risking mental health at work issues, yes, they need to know how it all fits together. Or perhaps, if we put it another way: The extent to which they know their part in how it all fits together will determine:
- How quickly and economically they can respond to what is needed
- The quality of their relationships and support with those around them
- Their ability to perform effectively in agile work teams to implement change
- The impact of their ideas and creativity on enabling the organisation to perform
- Their confidence and enthusiasm for doing what is required
- Their resilience in coping with what might otherwise be a very stressful situation
but if things are becoming more complex, how do we do that?
What can we take from those who cope well with complex change?
One other group of people who have to do all of the above in highly complex and fast evolving situations are design engineers. Take the design of a frigate, an aircraft, an oilrig, a computer system. There is far too much detail for any one person to hold it all together. It is a challenge to juggle the implications of change in one part across all the others.
So, since the early 1960s, Engineers have been devising design tools to handle all of that complexity for them. To structure complexity, and enable them to then focus on specific subsets within that. In this way, the overall system of connections can be complex. But the application of human thinking and creativity can be simplified. The design tool enables the engineer to work at different levels of abstraction. The structure of the tool breaks down complexity, but maintains the relationships. It keeps all of the connections as context and simplifies (decouples) the problems within it.design tools structure complexity and make complex change brain friendly
In this way, it configures specific challenges such that human brains (particularly working together) can best solve them. And enables people to bring the best of their creativity, insight and experience to bear. Thereby improving their mental wellbeing.
And as business has become more complex and fast moving also, we are now seeing those tools appear in the business space. This began back in the 2000’s (See the Wikipedia timeline on Design thinking; my own contribution to this, Managing by Design, was published in 2002).
but that doesn’t mean everyone is adopting them
However, for the sake of their people, and their survival, now would be a good time to begin to look look more seriously at how to structure complexity.
How to structure complexity and reduce stress
Take a look at applying design thinking to how you effect organisational change. Use the Design Thinking tools to help you structure complexity, and help your people engage with it. Doing so will create a recognisable and communicable logic for change, and enable people to far more quickly see what it means for them and why- Use strategy engagement matrices to map out how all of the parts of your organisation leverage your goals. This will not only allow you to see the opportunities better, and to design more efficient combinations. It will also enable the various parts of your organisation to see their responsibilities, to map out their own matrices, and to recognise the opportunities for synergy and support at their level and below. The strategic engagement matrix is an excellent tool for quickly mapping and understanding the implications of change.
- Use thinking and design tools as integral parts of your meetings both helps establish and reinforce the current logic, and also equips people with skills and resources by which they can more reliably make and cascade resulting decisions at their own level
- Use virtual whiteboards in conjunction with the above. This will enable you to establish persistent project walls of the current logic. And, as a result, you will be able to more easily explained that logic to newcomers. You will also be able to more readily edit and adapt it as the situation changes and new opportunities emerge
The result of adopting these approaches will not only enable you to develop more effective strategies and solutions for your organisation. It will create an environment in which a greater sense of meaning enriches people’s work. A workplace where goal clarity empowers them to move forward and to contribute. And where alignment around those goals helps build good relationships between people. And the alignment and relationships helps break down silo thinking.
goal clarity empowers
The impact of structuring complexity on mental health at work
The result of structuring complexity from the perspective of the individual will be much healthier:
- Workloads will reduce as more of it becomes productive. As a result people will have more time to think and reflect.
- Interactions with others will be more efficient and helpful. And so supportive relationships can more easily form. This is good for mental health at work.
- And the resulting increased trust will enable people to be more open and get help when they need it.
- People will more readily see that what they are doing matters. And so people will feel more confident in themselves through the progress they are making.
- Stress will drop down to productive and creative levels. And as a result people will feel more relaxed.
- Greater efficiency and productivity will provide more opportunity to think and establish control.
- And as a result of all of this, you will improve your people’s mental health at work.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Share this on Linkedin – | Follow Culturistics insights on Linkedin –
Relevant Links:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Using feedback & growth mindset to sustain mental health at work
Learning cultures are key to avoiding an overload of stress as we face greater levels of change. Key to making them work is embracing failure and feedback. This article is part of our series on stress resilience and mental health at work..
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The role of culture in mental health at work
Culture is a massive factor in mental health at work. A challenge that might be seen as exciting in one culture can be the cause of great distress in another. In part this is down to influences that we have covered in previous articles:
- Levels of support
- Clarity of direction and context
- Openness to creativity
- The opportunity to practice
- The nature of meetings
But perhaps the biggest cultural influence on mental health at work is the organisation’s response to ‘failure’. This is also a massive influence on whether the organisation fosters a growth mindset or a fixed one.
Performance culture abhors failure
Organisations have long tended to be performance-obsessed. The financial markets have set a paradigm where profits grow in every cycle. And they expect changes in leadership when they don’t. This is exacerbated by media reporting, which publicly humiliates leaders who fall short in some way.This has created a business culture where failure is seen as something to be avoided at all costs. Where those involved are tarnished and lose credibility, or even benefits. And where, as a consequence, blame, finger-pointing and conflict are rife. The first victim of any conflict is always openness and truth. As a result, learning becomes ‘in short supply’. This can have a huge detrimental impact on mental health at work.
The problem is that these organisations all see ‘failure’ as the antithesis of ‘performance’. Rather than the precursor to it. And this has permeated the culture resulting in behaviours that directly oppose and penalise growth mindsets.
is failure the antithesis of performance?
As a result, for people within those organisations, taking on risk is highly stressful. People do not want to associate themselves with potential failure. Consequentially, support for challenging or ambitious projects is difficult to enlist.
Therefore, people tend to limit themselves to safe projects – ones that build only marginally on what is already known. Furthermore they select the most capable people in the organisation, and this creates resource conflicts and limits the development opportunities for the less experienced.
Real learning, in both the individual and organisational senses of the term, is kept to a minimum. Thus the organisation not only resists a growth mindset in its people, it has a fixed mindset in itself. Even the concept of feedback gets subverted – but more on this below.
Learning culture embraces failure
However, healthy organisations with a learning culture treat failure as valuable. They rightly see it is a reflection of the degree of ambition. A natural consequence of a balanced approach to risk. And an opportunity for learning and encouraging growth mindsets.
In a learning culture, failure is expected. If everything you do is successful, you are clearly not pushing the envelope hard enough. Thriving organisations need creativity and ambition. And these inevitably generate failures.Therefore, in a learning culture, the level of failure is a function of your level of creativity and innovative ambition. Both of which will be necessary for the organisation to thrive. Furthermore, embracing that failure releases new data and insight to the organisation. Creating a culture of openness around failures enables the organisation to get the information that will bring it closer to success. Success that can leap ahead of the performance of organisations with more staid approaches to risk.
failure is a necessary reality in maximising success
But let’s be clear here. A learning culture doesn’t actually prefer failure to success. It just accepts that it is a necessary reality in maximising their success. And they are not willing to limit themselves to ‘safe’ and obvious ways forward which limit and slow their performance potential. Nor do they want their people hiding failure, and thereby denying their colleagues the insights that are available through it.
Which brings us back to feedback.
Feedback as an evaluation
Attitude to feedback is a key indicator of a culture’s underlying attitude to failure.
In a performance culture, ‘success’ forms a key component of individual identity. Its synonyms are regularly, if informally, used to define and categorise people. And those reputations significantly influence the opportunities and benefits of that individual.
As such, ‘feedback’ can prove somewhat of a liability.
we tend to experience feedback either as an endorsement, or as personal criticism
We all understand ‘intellectually’ that feedback is good for our learning and development. But in a culture where failure is ‘a bad thing’ we tend to experience feedback either as an endorsement, or as personal criticism. It is great when it adds to our reputation and our personal confidence in how we are perceived. But if it highlights any shortcomings, our emotional concerns tend to mask any sense of intellectual joy we may have at being presented with new learning opportunities.
As a result, while our head says we look for feedback so we can identify and address those shortcomings, our heart is saying ‘no way’. We find ourselves becoming emotionally tense inside (even if we manage to suppress the appearance of it). Often, we ‘forget’ to ask for it. We become defensive, or rationalise what we are hearing. And we find explanations that justify us in ignoring it. This not only blocks growth mindset, it also adversely affects mental health at work.
Feedback as data and insight
Feedback is an increasingly key component of the ‘future of work’. As more of the routine elements of our roles are automated, more and more of our work will concern change. And more and more of that change will be effected through the relationships we have with colleagues and customers.
Our value will be the value we add to others. And key to finding new ways to add value will be a growth mindset, our creativity and our ability to innovate. Not everything will work first time. In a learning culture feedback is crucial to learning from the impact we are having on those around us.
So how do we separate the emotional from the intellectual?
change your organisation to one that embraces failure
The first way is “work for an organisation that embraces failure”. If you have influence, then change the culture. If you don’t, then move on. The reality is that if you are stuck in a performance culture that you cannot change, then politically and pragmatically you are stuck with playing the game. However, if you can change the culture, even just your bit of it, then do so. Celebrate failure. Explain why. Champion those who over-reach and innovate. Encourage people to take risks. Reward learning over performance. All in balance of course. Basically, embrace and promote the belief that, if you are innovating, you are inevitably having some failures
And give people a better understanding of feedback.
A better understanding of feedback
Feedback is not, and cannot be, any sort of judgement of us. How can it be?
In reality, feedback can only ever be a self-assessment of the person giving the feedback. The only thing they know for sure is how they have been impacted. They are only really equipped to provide feedback on themselves and how they experienced things.
They may, perhaps by tradition or a lack of humility, couch it in terms of judgement and evaluation of you. But how can they know? How can they know all of the factors (including their own attitudes and behaviours) that led up to what they experienced?
They cannot.
Therefore, any attempt at an ‘evaluation of you‘ based on their experience is inappropriate, poorly informed, and probably arrogant.
However, their opinion of what resulted for them is actually vital information for you.
Whatever the reasons that led up to them having that opinion, they will act in accordance with it. And so, if they feel they got no value, they will act as though they got no value. And the harsh reality will be that no value will be transmitted through them.
Now, if that is what you intended, fine. But if you intended that they should get value, and should be able to use that value effectively to benefit the organisation, then the fact that it hasn’t happened is an important piece of information.
You might not be ‘to blame’. But you are in the best position to realise that you still have a gap to close, and that you may want to adjust some of the variables to make it happen. And if you, as a result, can improve those variables, then you have learned something.
It is not about YOU
And that learning is valuable, but not value-laden. It helps you to grow, but it doesn’t mean you were flawed beforehand. This perspective lies at the core of a growth mindset.
This understanding of feedback is key. If we, consciously or subconsciously, see it as an evaluation, that will be a barrier to learning. In such situations it can be difficult for us to accept the insight without accepting the ‘judgement’. And learning is much easier to assimilate when it doesn’t come laden with emotional baggage.
Any education worthy of the name is bound to be dangerous (Louis Néel). Real learning at the edge of our potential comes at the cost of of mistakes. But if we can see these mistakes as the inevitable steps to who we were destined to be. The fastest route to the value we can add. Then we can get the very best learning out of each one.
The best thing an organisation can do is to accept this fact, and imbue it into its people. Give them a love of feedback. Equip them with a humility in providing it. Key to this is an acceptance by all concerned that falling short is an expected and admirable consequence of reaching far.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Share this on Linkedin – | Follow Culturistics insights on Linkedin –
Relevant Links:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Inspiration and spirituality as a means to better stress resilience at work
Mental health issues challenge who we are – they question our identity. If we can help people better access the things that make them fully human, we can better equip them to have the answers they need when those questions get asked. This article is part of our series on mental health and stress resilience at work..
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‘Having spirit’ is our best defence
Stress in business is on the increase, and this is adversely affecting our mental health at work. When such levels of stress exceed our natural ability to handle them, the consequences are most commonly a decline in mental health at work. And this is usually manifest in anxiety, and depression, all too frequently at a level that means we cannot function effectively.
In the previous articles in this series, we have looked at strategies to diminish or avoid unhealthy levels of stress. This included how we organise, use creativity, work together, lead others, prepare ourselves and learn from each other to improve mental health at work. In this article on stress resilience we look at how we handle the stress that still gets through. Stress resilience is our ability to handle these levels of stress without it affecting our mental health at work.
We diminish the impact of stress when we retain a belief in ourselves and our potential – a spirit of hope, perseverance and love – and a faith that we can make a difference. 
These things give us arguments to keep anxiety at bay, and to lift us away from depression. In this way, they give us a resilience to cope with more stressful situations than might be possible without them.
These things give us arguments to keep anxiety at bay, and to lift us away from depression. In this way, they give us a resilience to cope with more stressful situations than might be possible without them.We might term these things our ‘spirtuality‘ – as in to have ‘spirit’, or be ‘spirited’. A sense of inner resolve. A force for good. The determination to pick ourselves up and start again. They are the things we most easily lose during bouts of anxiety and depression. But they are also our best defence against those bouts, and sometimes our best chance of recovering from them.
Spirituality sets us apart
However, over recent decades, our prediliction for: the material in business; the purely rational in science; and polarity in politics and the media has led us to pay 
less attention to those things that cannot be explained in those terms. As a result, we have abandoned the concept of ‘spirituality’ to more superstitious perspectives. And we have lost sight of its true potential to balance materialistic and rational dominance. Sadly it is no longer a term that can easily be used without prejudice or misunderstanding.
less attention to those things that cannot be explained in those terms. As a result, we have abandoned the concept of ‘spirituality’ to more superstitious perspectives. And we have lost sight of its true potential to balance materialistic and rational dominance. Sadly it is no longer a term that can easily be used without prejudice or misunderstanding.we are not machines – so don’t think like one
But as the world grows ever-increasingly more complex and uncertain, materialism, logic, and binary arguments are insufficient to cope with the rate of change we are required to work within. As a result, their has been a realisation of how much we have allowed the balance to slip. And a resurgence of re-embracing our ‘spirit’ in things like mindfulness, diversity, emergence, authenticity, vulnerability and trust.
Business is reawakening to spirituality
All of a sudden things like hope, love, loyalty, character, centredness, integrity, trust are back on the business agenda. And we are just about reaching the point where we can re-appropriate the term ‘spirituality’ to mean something which reflects the impact and potential of all of those things. Which is just as well, because if we were to attempt to tackle what is coming without them, we would all have serious mental health issues. Spirit is key to stress resilience at work.spirituality is key to tackling the challenges we face
So, in terms of mental health at work, how can we use this opportunity to help people to access and develop these things, and to better protect them from mental illness?
- Firstly, talk about it. Gradually rebuild their vocabulary to enable them to gain a better grasp of their spiritual side, and its importance to them in building stress resilience at work. Launch discussions on topics like: authenticity; vulnerability; mindfulness; diversity; creativity; story-telling; personal narrative; trust; spirit … And build their insight, their understanding, and their ability to articulate their feelings in this area. Most of all, bring it back centre stage so they know this is normal. They do not need to suppress it.
creativity is a spiritual act
- Secondly, introduce and build the role of creativity in your meetings. Creativity is a very spiritual act. Whether you express it in influencing images, writing, concepts or patterns of activity. Creativity changes our relationship with the way the world is and might be. It is about moving beyond the confines of our situation and tapping into things we do not fully understand. In doing so, it reshapes the world around us. And the joy that we feel in our spirit when that happens is a spiritual reaction to what we are doing – a connectedness with something bigger and more enduring than our physical selves.
- Thirdly, equip yourself and your people with a mindset of ‘adventure’. Adventure creates stress resilience at work by providing a valid alternative to a victim mindset in response to change.
Develop a mindset of adventure
To clarify a mindset of adventure, I would like to contrast the example of two people working in the same role facing identical circumstances. Their workload is higher than they can reasonably cope with. Things go wrong from time to time. They inevitably get complaints and encounter blame. Head office has blocked further recruitment and introduced a brand new system. And there is new initiative starting to look at changing the process, again.
- As a result, Jeb feels that: he is stuck; and suffering the consequences of bad decisions made elsewhere; the blame is unfair; mistakes are inevitable given the set up; nobody listens; his team-mates let him down; he wants to avoid the initiative; if his performance drops further he will be fired; and he just wants to make it through each day – all of which is totally true!
- While Aja: choses to stay; wants to learn from how she responds to the challenge; is curious to find how bad decisions might be reversed; empathises with the blame and with her team mates; wonders about options for self-help; sees the initiative as a way to fix mistakes; and to learn new skills; believes listening starts with her; knows they won’t fire her – and if they did, that will be a new experience; sees each day as a new opportunity.
it isn’t what happens to you, it is what you make of what happens to you
Even though everything else is equal, Aja’s level of stress resilience is obvious in her perspective. She is clearly getting far more out of her day than Jeb. It also means that she is far less likely to suffer stress and depression. And the only difference is her spirit – her sense of adventure.
As time goes on, and all other things remain equal, Jeb will infuence and attract more Jebs. Aja will influence and attract more Ajas. And hopefully they will make her team leader because then maybe she can help the Jebs develop a sense of adventure and stress resilience too.
the future is an adventure, or a disaster – you choose – you literally choose!
The reality is that Jeb and Aja’s context is going to be a common consequence of the changing future of work. Increasing uncertainty and complexity will generate extra work, confusion, tensions and mistakes. It will also generate opportunity, new experiences and connections, learning, and insight. But if we are to equip our people to not only survive but thrive in this new world, we are going to have to help them engage with a mindset that emphasises the latter.
Leading by adventure
Waiting for someone to experience mental health issues is too late. For those who feel mentally trapped within their circumstances and their minds, the levels of change we will experience will be overwhelming. But it is easier if we develop new strength way ahead of any damage ocurring. We need to take them on a journey into their imagination, their spirit, and the resources that are available to them now. We need to give them time to: appreciate new perspectives; develop new skills; and gain confidence in their spirit way ahead of the time that it is all that stands between them and a deep dark pit.
an adventure into ourselves and our potential
To begin this journey, we ran a 50 session weekly programme called ‘Leading by Adventure’. It is a series of short weekly challenges that tap into exploring and developing different aspects of the mind. Helping people to see it as the untapped resource that it is, and lifting them to an understanding so that they can use it effectively under stress. Feel free to use this as a resource to build stress resilience and mental health at work with your people. LeadingbyAdventure.com
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Share this on Linkedin – | Follow Culturistics insights on Linkedin –
Relevant Links:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Stress resilience and mental wellbeing: Making stress healthy and productive
As the rate of change and complexity grows, mental health at work is in decline. We need to build stress resilience into our working practices. This is the introductory article to our series on stress resilience and mental health at work.
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Accelerating the causes of stress
In the West, workplace stress and problems with mental health at work now accounts for over half of all lost time.Amounting to 12.8 million days annually in the UK alone. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Before people’s mental health drops to a level where they are too ill to work, stress manifests itself in massive inefficiency: An environment of conflict, poor decisions, waste, lack of motivation, and delays. And that is in addition to the massive human cost for those affected.
Furthermore, every time someone goes sick, the effect is to increase workloads, stress, and these negative effects on the people around them. Mental health issues create further mental health issues.
Stress is killing your people and your productivity – but it doesn’t have to
Not only is the general trend getting worse, but the causes of stress and poor mental health at work are also increasing. Faster change, greater competition, more complexity, longer exposure, increased uncertainty.Technology and globalisation are powering ever accelerating disruption, and there is nothing we can do to avoid it.
Building stress resilience
We cannot avoid change. But we can do something about the stress resilience of our people and organisations to engage positively with it.
And to do that we have to do something about our own engagement with change.
Because the fact is, that these stresses and the risk of mental illness is also affecting us. In many ways the impact of change is having its greatest influence on the leadership. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we too are increasingly busy. More and more, we are handling complex and ambiguous situations. Many of us are feeling it a struggle to keep up, and are unable to find time to ourselves.At the very point when our people need us to think ahead and find a long term strategy for best handling these mounting pressures, we find ourselves least able to do so.
Building stress resilience starts with us
But if we don’t, it will only get worse. We may not have the time to do what is needed. But we need to find it or things will start breaking. People will start breaking. We will start breaking. The consequences for our mental health and the mental health of our employees is massive.
We have to bite the bullet. Whether that is reprioritising, or temporary resources, or getting help. We have to make the time to better ready ourselves for what is already upon us. We have to build our own mental health. And then we have to take care of the stress resilience of our organisations. To look more deeply at how stress manifests itself within them. And to find more productive channels to handle it.
Current data on stress
So what are the causes of stress for your organisation?The HSE report into work related stress, anxiety and depression identifies the main precipitating events as follows:
- 42% are down to factors intrinsic to the job and its expectations
- 26% are due to interpersonal relationship issues
- 17% are caused by change and expectations of personal development
These figures are not dissimilar to mental-health figures reported in the US by the American Institute of Stress (46% workload, 28% people Issues).
Stress strikes at the core of who we are
Unsurprisingly, these events are connected with fundamental human needs for security, affection and control. Three things that are echoed in Maslow’s hierachy of needs.This explains why they are so devastating for people.
It also ties in with what we need to be successful as we cope with the demands and opportunities of our work. The things we need to rebuild our mental health:- The opportunity to deliver something of value,
- A support network of people to do the bits we cannot,
- And the learning and insight to do our own bit well.
Mental health and the working environment
Within each of these areas, there are a number of factors which enable these things. And there are cultural influences which connect them together and maintain a sort of equilibrium.
In a healthy environment, stress can energise these things. This creates a situation where each part positively supports and reinforces the parts around it and delivers an efficient outcome. People can experience this virtuous circle as a sense of ‘flow’ which can be deeply fulfilling and reinforces positive mental health.
Optimum stress creates a sense of ‘flow’
However, if stress builds beyond that healthy level, other influences begin to take over. People become more closed in their interactions, and struggle to find the time to do things properly. As a result, they suboptimise, and the culture suffers from toxic behaviours and attitudes. These actually make the job more difficult and unpleasant, increasing the already high levels of stress in a vicious circle. People tend to experience this as frustration and politics. And this can lead to depression, anxiety and other mental health issues.
Excessive stress creates frustration and politics
It should be obvious from the diagrams that these influences are negative not only for the people concerned. They are also negative in terms of business efficiency and effectiveness.
Stress and our inner condition
Stress may be largely introduced by external factors. But our internal mindsets are also a big factor in the stress we ourselves experience. It also affects how our responses to our own stress impact those around us, and the stress they experience.
What happens in this ‘internal space’ holds the key to how people handle stress. It also determines the extent to which that has repercussions for the mental health of their colleagues and the overall system.It is within this space that people win or lose the fight for their own mental health. And, it is also within this space that we do the key work to shift the balance from vicious to virtuous circles. It is from here that we launch our campaign to ensure stress remains healthy and productive. Both for the organisation and for the individuals concerned.
Some basic truths about stress
Before we get into how, I would like to flag up a few observations. I believe these are key to thinking through the next steps.
- The first is that the reality of how stress affects your organisation is not binary as the red and green diagram might indicate. These are just the extremes of a scale wherein most organisations will be reflected somewhere in the middle.
In fact, it is rare to encounter an organisation which is wholly red or wholly green in this. That said, given the relative business and people benefit of the green descriptions over the red ones, there is always merit in actively seeking to become more green.stress mostly begins around meetings
- The factors, behaviours and attitudes identified, both good and bad, are most evidenced and affected by meetings. Meetings large, small and one-to one; physical or virtual; formal or informal. These are the business activities which are most influential in creating positive or negative flows. And for generating good or bad outcomes within these stress maps.
meeting impact is rarely measured
Do people know the extent to which meetings within their organisation have a positive or negative influence on the factors in this stress map? Most executives would not have any data on the proportion of meetings which fell into each category. Or whether there was any meaningful patterns within that. This, in itself, is part of the problem.roles will be inherently about change
All extrapolations of how work will change over the coming decade highlight the extent to which routine will be automated, and people’s roles will be inherently about change. As a result, levels of collaboration will continue to increase. And continuous learning will become the key business skill for those who will thrive in this emerging future of work.
In fact, it is rare to encounter an organisation which is wholly red or wholly green in this. That said, given the relative business and people benefit of the green descriptions over the red ones, there is always merit in actively seeking to become more green.
Do people know the extent to which meetings within their organisation have a positive or negative influence on the factors in this stress map? Most executives would not have any data on the proportion of meetings which fell into each category. Or whether there was any meaningful patterns within that. This, in itself, is part of the problem.
All extrapolations of how work will change over the coming decade highlight the extent to which routine will be automated, and people’s roles will be inherently about change. As a result, levels of collaboration will continue to increase. And continuous learning will become the key business skill for those who will thrive in this emerging future of work.Stress resilience through change will be the key skill
For many people, “who I am” and “how meetings take place” are relatively fixed concepts. We don’t do a lot of analysis of meeting design. Nor do we spend a lot of time questioning how we think. We tend to take both largely for granted, assumed, not really thought about.
And yet, in a world where change is the only constant, these things become the key differentiator between success and failure. Their active, self-directed, development becomes THE key strategy in designing a competitive response to change. And the best levers we have in managing stress, developing stress resilience, and building mental health.
Working with “who I am” and “how meetings take place” will be key to our success. They are the things that will most impact the stress resilience of our people and organisations. Thereby enabling them to cope with the levels of change that the future will bring.
Seven strategies to build mental wellbeing and stress resilience
Over the next few weeks, we will take a look at a number of strategies that organisations can adopt to take greater control of these things:
Structural influences on mental health at work
- Provide clarity of purpose and context. Use structured frameworks to enable people to see what is required, and how it fits in with everything else. These help to resolve complexity to a manageable level. Related Article: Structure complexity – use Design Thinking to improve mental health at work
- Establish practices to identify and utilise creative solutions. These help resolve the tensions and stress that arise as a result of increasing levels of change and competition. Related Article: Encourage creative solutions to stress – creativity and mental health
- Ensure your meetings equip people with the knowledge, skills, attitudes and support they need to tackle the challenges they are facing. Use this to help people feel more calm and confident in their role. Related Article: Better meeting design to empower mental health and reduce meeting stress
Leadership influences on mental health at work
- Adopt facilitative practices that ensure more supportive and fulfilling dialogue between people. Help foster supportive relationships which make success more likely. And reduce the stress of conflict and criticism. Related Article: Wellbeing leadership – facilitate healthy supportive working environments
- Use Practice Zone thinking to develop skills and insights in people ahead of when they are needed. In this way, help build competence and confidence ahead of taking on new roles and challenges. Related Article: Use practice zone thinking to reduce stress and performance anxiety at work
- Build a culture which has a positive attitude to risk and failure. Enable people to learn from, rather than conceal, issues. Through this, build a healthy open approach to feedback that helps people grow. Related Article: Using feedback & growth mindset to sustain mental health at work
- Help people to adopt approaches that better engage more of their ‘spirit’ in engaging with the challenges they face. Help them build their stress resilience to avoid anxiety and depression and better develop their mental health. Related Article: Inspiration and spirituality as a means to better stress resilience at work
Each of these things not only reduces the negative consequences of stress that people experience. Each of them also make the organisation more effective, and dramatically reduce waste and inefficiency of time, effort, ideas and resources. Use Linkedin to follow our thoughts as they develop.
Acknowledgements: The four quadrants which evolved as this platform for understanding stress at work was inspired by the structure of a powerful self-reflective workshop created by Dr Sue Howard
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Share this on Linkedin – | Follow Culturistics insights on Linkedin –
Relevant Links:
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Visioning Workshops – 5 steps to a common purpose
Visioning workshops are the most powerful and sustainable means to pull your people together into a common purpose in support of your future success. They provide the means harness and align the passion and creative energy of all of your people, and build individual commitment toward a shared goal.
Key to their success is understanding where people are ‘coming from’ as they come into the visioning workshop. This is key to designing an efficient visioning workshop journey. One that facilitates people to coming together from their different starting positions, recognising the validity in each others’ perspectives, and seeing the potential for a powerful common purpose which transcends the differences and offers more than people’s initial expectations.
Step 1: Individual and group interviews
Our interviewing approach allows people to feel understood and respected in their current views. But it builds from there in tapping into their imagination to identify what sort of future would inspire them and their commitment.It asks them to imagine a point in the future where they feel justifiably proud of what has been achieved. And it asks them to describe the key factors in generating that sense of pride. It draws them into the possibility of adventure. A description of the future that is ambitious and exciting. Something that makes the investment of the next period of their lives truly worthwhile.
And it asks them to think about how those around them might feel about the same adventure. Along with what might be the challenges, and how they overcome. And it seeks to understand what they might want personally from the experience of the next few years in terms of growth, and experience, and achievement for others.
Finally it asks them, as the customers for the workshop, what they want it to achieve. What would make them leave the workshop feeling that the exercise had been really worthwhile.
Step 2: Analysis and feedback
In this way, the interview process begins to open up people’s thinking at a very personal level, and to get them to think about possibilities and potential beyond their everyday mindset. And it makes them curious, for how their answers compare with those of their colleagues. And also about what might emerge from the visioning workshop itself.Thus when the interviews are analysed and the summary report is shared back to them the begin to see the collective view and how it varies. And this begins to work on them leading up to the workshop, building a sense of hope and expectation for something really significant to emerge, and wanting to be part of that.
Furthermore, they can see their own answers within the flow of a collective picture. And they can see their contribution to what they hope the workshop will achieve. Together, these begin to build their ownership for the feedback document, and the workshop that will address it. It also helps them to see the variety of perspectives, and where their own ideas may be out of kilter with those of their friends and colleagues. And it builds a greater acceptance that their may need to be some compromise to bring it all together.
Step 3: Visioning Workshop design
Moving from individual positions to embrace and support a collective vision of a common purpose, is a journey. It is a journey in which commitment needs to be built and preserved and reconciled as the collective will emerges and flourishes. And key to achieving that it that the process is both transparent and scrupulously fair.In reality, people may only get about 80% of what they thought they wanted originally. Of course they may get another chunk of stuff that they only discovered they wanted as the journey unfolded. And inevitably there will be another chunk of stuff that they are not so sure about. But one thing is almost certain if the process is right: Even if they only individually would select 70% of what emerges, they know it will take them a lot further toward their goals than 100% of what they originally imagined. And they are wholly willing to support the other 30% because of that. That is consensus.
Designing a workshop to provoke, feed and support that journey of consensus is both an art and a science. A science because of the wealth of tools that exist to explore and resolve common purpose. And an art because of the role that experience plays in pulling those tools together. On thing is sure for the designer of the workshop, when its right, you know its right.
Step 4: Facilitating the Visioning Workshop
Ideally, if we design the workshop perfectly, the process of the workshop will flow naturally and intuitively. It will seem to provide the natural next step at precisely the right moment. And people will not even realise they are following a process. Most of the time, a well designed workshop will feel that way. But there will still be little bumps in the road. And some interventions just need to be tuned and timed to what is happening in the moment. That is where facilitation comes in.Facilitation is about being a servant to the process, as the process is the servant to the combined will of the people.
In respect of visioning workshops, one key aspect is about provoking a vision that really is worth of the people’s potential. That really will feel like an adventure which engages their spirit, their enthusiasm and their ideas. The thing about creativity is that you don’t know that you can do something until the creativity has been required, and has delivered. Creativity needs headroom in order to flourish. It needs us to preserve a space between what we already know to be possible, and what we have not yet foreseen. And it needs confidence in our own ability to respond, to grow, to learn, and to imagine. That is the adventure. And it is important that the facilitator keeps the space for adventure alive.
Fortunately, if the interviews are conducted well, there will be plenty of raw material from the people themselves to provide that creative tension.
For more on the design of visioning workshops, take a look at this explanation, and this case study.
Step 5: Future Visioning Workshops
Pursuing an adventurous shared vision is a learning experience. 12 months in, the people who started off on the adventure, are not the same people you now meet. They have grown in ability, confidence and understanding. The perspectives they had 12 months earlier have evolved. New insights, and collaborative experiences have stretched the way that they think and the potential they see around them. And they are coming to discover that what they thought was 70% right was actually only 50% right, but that is okay because they have only had time to cover 30% of the ground.However, there is a lot of new stuff to take into account. New information, new possibilities, new resources, new relationships, new ideas.
For this reason, it is good to revisit the Visioning Workshop each year. Sometimes just to make adjustments. And sometimes to refresh the whole approach. The former can be achieved by simply reworking some of the sessions in the original workshop. But the latter will probably benefit from a new wave of interviews and a repeat of steps two, three and four.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
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Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Adventurous Visions
How do adventurous visions provide a source of hope – engaging your people in a cause bigger than themselves?
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Hope is the most powerful force in existence. It turns losers into winners. It helps defeat impossible odds. Hope keeps people going when they would otherwise give up. It inspires incredible acts of bravery. Hope ignites creativity. And it transforms businesses.
What do we do when Hope is Lost?
But when we see a world around us which is struggling. And we see evil go unchecked and unpunished. The things we value are being lost. And it all seems to be heading in the wrong direction. What then happens to our hope?Typically, it retrenches. We still have hope, but within boundaries. And unfortunately those boundaries are shrinking.
The danger is that we have a misunderstanding of hope. That we see it is a consequence, rather than a cause. That we hold onto it as a comfort, not as something that drives us to bravely, creatively and triumphantly fight back. Perhaps we are consumers of hope, rather than its creators?
Creators of Hope
The thing is, someone has to create hope. If all everybody is doing is either holding on to it, or stealing it away from others, how will it grow? True, most of us are not in a position to create hope for the whole world. But we can create hope where we are.
And for those of us that lead or influence organisations, we have to ask ourselves, what are we doing to increase hope? Where are our people placing their hope? And what is the role of our organisation in inspiring and channeling that hope? How do we and our organisation become creators of hope?Hope in Community
Religious groups have long understood the fact that hope is sustained better in community. But, like many communities, they sometimes lose sight of the need to ensure that the outworking of their hope is worthy of that community. That its ambition and adventure brings hope to those around it, and brings growth to the individuals within it.
The same is true for all organisations. If their sense of ambition and adventure is insufficiently large, they will fail to develop and harness the true potential of their people. And they will fail to realise their own potential to impact the world around them. They will function, they may even survive, but they are unlikely to really inspire.
Adventurous Visions
What is needed is what we call adventurous vision. A creative expansion of the perspective of the organisation and the people within it. A shared picture of a future that matters, and which creates meaning for all involved in it. Something that makes a real difference for the people within the organisation, and the people they interact with outside of it. A pursuit that offers them a sense of pride in the difference they will make – what they truly, confidently, HOPE to achieve.Un-Adventurous Visions
Very few people get inspired by the requirement for incremental steps in their performance. 10% here and there is for many simply an invitation to work harder and longer. Normally for somebody else’s benefit, usually for someone who already has more money than they do. Numbers and increments do not inspire – well not unless they really mean something that is. It is the implications of the numbers that matter – the difference they make in the world.
But if it is the implications that matter. If it is the narrative around the numbers that is the real source of hope. Then wouldn’t it be better to cast the vision in those terms?
Creating Adventurous Visions
The two most important things in creating adventurous visions are conversation, and asking the questions ‘Why?’ and ‘What if …?’.Conversations can help people to understand what is important to ourselves and each other. As a result, they begin to reconcile a narrative around meaning and potential. And they begin to generate deeper and more meaningful relationships.
Key to this is the question ‘Why?’. Understanding the reasons why people do what they do, and think as they think, can build new links between people’s stories. Successive levels of ‘Why?’ can open up new insights, and creative opportunities for doing things differently. Thinking about these opportunities together can generate new sense of hope and optimism. And it can bond people together, and to the organisation, in pursuit of this.
Inspiring Creativity
Asking ‘What if …?’ helps to break down some of the habits and paradigms that hold our perception of the work we do in the routine and mundane. It opens up further possibilities and fires people’s imaginations.
At the organisation level, it can to some extent recast the organisation’s role. It can help the leadership see further than the product or service into the potential impact this is having on their customers, and even their customers’ customers. And the impact it has on society, on the environment, on humanity, and potentially on history.
Dreaming Big
History? Really?Most certainly. The people who change history are no different from you and I, except in one thing. In some way, they have the belief, the hope, that they CAN change history. The people who don’t change history are no different from you and I except, perhaps, in one thing. They think that changing history is the role of others.
But who are these others? What if we all think it is the role of others? Who then will shine as a light in the darkness?
At some level, and in some way, your organisation could be the next really big thing. But you and your people have to see it, and believe it, and make that their hope. Then again, is that not the role of a leader?
Dreaming Small
Much of this article has been aimed at organisations. But organisations are simply patterns of collections of people. And it often takes just one of those people to make the change.
If you have felt motivated in some way by what is written here, you might be the one that makes the difference to your organisation, that makes a difference to the world. Of course, your organisation might not move. Or even if it did move, you still don’t believe in what it is doing. If that is the case, them maybe your first move is to move to an organisation that you can believe in.
On the other hand, if it might move, you might find some further help in the articles below.
Related Articles
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
About Culturistics: Empowering full strategy engagement through: adventurous visions; deployment frameworks; culture management; facilitative leadership; inspirational meetings; insight landscaping; & powerful partnerships
Refining Intuition – Making better, faster decisions in complex contexts
Intuition is increasingly key to making fast effective decisions. But can we rely on it? Only if we refine its accuracy with better heuristics.
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Intuition and heuristics
Intuition is becoming more and more important as the world get more complex. And the time to respond gets ever shorter. It is increasingly difficult for rational decision making to take account of all the variables. Furthermore, those variables often change before the decision is complete.As a result, we are finding more people relying on intuition. Or to be more specific, on heuristics. Basically, heuristics are mental shortcuts which embody the wisdom of our experience and insight. Some are conscious, like estimating the volume of a rubbish tip. But others may be less so – like deciding we have enough time to cross the road before a car reaches us. It is these less conscious heuristics that play a large part in our intuition.
The problem with heuristics
Sadly however, heuristics are not always helpful. As examples, consider unconscious bias, our tendencies to prejudice, our addictions to gambling, and other bad choices. By and large, these are often a result of our heuristics. A list of the ways in which heuristics have been shown to let us down is surprisingly long. The diagram below (courtesy of John Manoogian III and Buster Benson) reflects a lot of potentially flawed thinking (not by them, I hasten to add).
The problem arises when we use particular heuristics in situations, or in a manner, which is not suited to them. And since much of our use of heuristics is largely unconscious, this can become a serious problem. Particularly in business situations where we will be using them more and more.
Refining intuition – the need to improve heuristics
Conscious or unconscious, heuristics are a skill like any other. Poor outcomes are not a reason for abandoning these skills, they are a reason for developing them. And for creating an environment in which we can use them more effectively. So how do we do that? How do we set about refining our intuition?
As businesses face increasing levels of change, and local autonomy increases in order to cope with this, this question will naturally increase in importance. Businesses which find good solutions will aggregate better faster decisions, and will deliver better performance – and not just financially.
A current example of refining intuition
One solution is training. For example, many companies have greatly improved their ability to harness greater benefits from diversity through delivering unconscious bias training. In essence, helping people to take more conscious control of their stereotyping heuristic.
To be clear, stereotyping can be an extremely helpful heuristic. Specifically, it enables us to arrive at very fast and reasonably accurate predictions of how complex systems might respond to changing situations. However, it can be very unhelpful when we apply it unconsciously to people.
Heuristics themselves are not good, or bad, but our application of them can be. However, it is impractical to train people on every single heuristic (there are over 200 listed in Wikipedia). Therefore, businesses will need to find mechanisms by which people can better train themselves.
Collective participative decision making
Key to enabling this is a collective decision making culture. One in which heuristics become clearer, and their application more transparent. This enables people to develop implicit agreement on where and when to apply particular heuristics. Furthermore, it helps them to recalibrate their own use of them. And it is this recalibration that is key to refining our intuition.
To a large extent this is already happening as a result of a growing interest in autonomous teams supported by collaborative tools. As team members share perspectives on situations, their underlying heuristics become exposed. In this way people begin to learn together what works and what doesn’t. Thereby refining intuition together.
This naturally, almost effortlessly, helps to form cultural heuristics. In other words, patterns of thinking which are validated, proven and then collectively adopted and further disseminated.
How thinking tools become, and develop, cultural heuristics
Cultural heuristics can also exist in the processes adopted to provide the context for this learning.Shared decision making tools such as fishbones, SWOT, six thinking hats, business canvas, force-field analysis and many others are themselves a heuristic device. They are a means of collective learning, discovery, and problem-solving in situations where outcomes are necessarily uncertain.
But they have an added advantage of breaking down complex issues into their component parts. Thereby enabling greater clarity over each element of the decision. And thus providing a much more explicit understanding of what personal heuristics are in play, and reconciling their conclusions.
The role of meetings
Change grows ever faster, and our people become increasingly dependent on personal heuristics to make their decisions. Therefore, our need to help them to ensure that these are effective heuristics becomes more pressing. Rethinking our meeting and decision making processes is the best means we have to refining intuition.
Useful links
For more on cultural heuristics, take a look at our main article.
For meeting tools that act as cultural heuristics in their own right. And which also help to recalibrate personal heuristics, take a look at our tool selector.
To explore greater meeting participation as a basis of continuing heuristic readjustment, take a look at our main piece on agile collaboration.
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Securing your business goals with metaverse thinking
In metaverse* thinking, the focus is not so much on the ‘what’ as the ‘how’. Once you have the ‘how’ right, you can deliver almost any business goals you desire.
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*Metaverses are ecosystems** of curated data which enable and empower metalevel perspectives for the purposes of insight and agency
What are your business goals?
What are you seeking to achieve for your business?
- Increases in your market share and entry into new markets?
- Recognition as ‘the go-to business’ in your industry?
- Better returns, efficiencies, satisfaction and profitability?
- Greater impact on customers, stakeholders, society, ecology?
- Exciting visions, ambitious plans, transformation?
- … ?
Or perhaps you are seeking to prepare your business to engage in the opportunities of the future: Sustainability; purpose centricity; value co-creation; agile partnerships; adaptive organisation; digital empowerment; insight engineering; and human cloud.
How do you make them happen?
Whatever your business goals and ideas, if they are sufficiently ambitious, they will need the support of your people to achieve them. Strategy Engagement and metaverse thinking represent the surest and most sustainable means of securing that. So what are the ecosystems** that ensure effective strategy engagement?
- The creative passion of your people in working together toward delivering something they believe in
- An organisation model that enables everyone to see and pursue their part, in harmony with others
- A culture in which it is easy to do the right things, to be supported in that, and to support others
- Leadership at all levels which inspires and draws out the full potential of the people around them
- Agile working practices which make it easy for people to come together in effective innovative teams
- Partnerships that behave like an extension of your organisation and fully utilise each other’s strengths
- Customer engagement that sees your organisation as a trusted advisor and a key part in their success
- Insightful communications that trigger timely actions that always take account of the wider context
You don’t need to be perfect at all these things. But improving the key ones will have a big impact on your likelihood of success. In other words, it will make securing your business goals far more certain. And it will enable your organisation to take on even more ambitious goals next time around.
Prioritising your focus
But how do you identify the key ones? You may already have a fairly clear idea on which they are. And reading the links in each of the bullets above will further clarify your view.
The thing is that the key things to get right will depend on a number of factors. Factors that are unique to your business, your context, and your goals. But if you would like some expert guidance on what they might be for your specific situation, call us. We love to chat about these things
And once your Strategy Engagement is working well, you can point it at pretty much any business goals you want and deliver on them.
Furthermore, seeking to achieve a challenging business goal may be your impetus to continue to improve your strategy engagement.
**Because the concept of metaverse has been pushed extensively in the digital world, there is an underlying assumption, a paradigm if you will, that its ‘ecosystems of curated data’ will be exclusively digital. However, as our list of ecosystems (above) illustrates, curated data can exist in many forms. It is not restricted to bytes, or even paper, but can exist in shared imagination, tacit skills, relationships, patterns, custom and practice. And it can be curated by dialogue, logic, policy, procedure, learning and indeed digital forms. Digital has a lot to offer the metaverse, but the idea is much greater than that, and we ‘miss out’ if we limit its potential to computing. In fact, one of the most inspiring propositions of a metaverse, published in a CLO article: ‘The future of learning’ was ‘that everyone can create their own adventure in an ecosystem supporting curiosity and experimentation’.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
Helpful Resources: Virtual Flipcharts | Timers | Participation Hacks
Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?