Читать книгу CONFESSIONS OF A CORPORATE SHAMAN - Harrison Snow - Страница 8

The big idea, like all big ideas, is simple. An organization has its own collective consciousness. That consciousness is the sum of the behaviors, knowledge, beliefs, and values of the individual members, current and past; and it shows up as the organizational culture.

The consciousness of the leadership both influences and is influenced by this collective consciousness, which has an evolutionary impulse to evolve. The forces that push for change inevitably meet internal and external constraints that affect the pace of this evolution. Over time, the culture and its supporting structure will evolve and adapt or be replaced. Motivating staff with a vision of the future and compelling reasons to leave the past behind is helpful but not enough. Change starts with the leaders of change. Leaders need to become the change they want to see in others. By surfacing and addressing their own internal constraints they can identify and address the parallel, and usually hidden, constraints in the collective consciousness of their organizations. This book explores the connection between the personal consciousness of the change leader with the collective consciousness of the organization. Use of self, systems thinking, and the knowing field are the three pillars that form and inform this connection. These pillars don’t replace the usual change practices, however, which still have their place in corporate offices and off-sites. What the pillars offer is an approach that identifies and resolves the hidden blocks that trap an organization and its leaders in their dysfunctions.

Business leaders sometimes ask me, “What’s new in the field of leadership or organizational development?” It’s embarrassing to admit that most of the practices we use today were developed twenty to thirty or more years ago. That right. It’s been that long. One of the first leadership tools, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) questionnaire, was proposed in the 1920s (and is still widely used today).¹ Group change processes like Appreciative Inquiry, popularized by David Cooperrider,² a professor of social entrepreneurship, or Open Space Technology, developed by the organizational development consultant Harrison Owen,³ were introduced in the 1980s. And, as radical as the idea seemed back then, Transcendental Meditation and mindfulness were also offered to the employees of a number of small, forward-thinking companies.⁴ One of the most recent of the big ideas, the concept of emotional intelligence (EQ) promoted by Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and science writer, debuted in 1995—before the general public had heard of the Internet or could log on.⁵

Every year neuroscience is revealing still more about the astounding potential of the human brain to access knowledge, make connections, and generate new insights. For the first time in recorded history, we can measure how our brains are wired socially. The English poet John Donne seems to have got it right when he wrote in 1624: “No man is an island,/Entire of itself.” Theories of change increasingly highlight the role of consciousness and neuroscience to explain human behavior. Isn’t it time for a new approach that makes use of this vast, untapped potential?

One new approach, which we will explore in this book, is a method called organizational constellations. This method, based on the work of the systemic therapist Bert Hellinger, is just beginning to be recognized in North America as a tool for leadership development and organizational change.

You may be thinking, quite understandably, that what is offered here is too far-out for the cautious and skeptical people you work with. Anything truly new will naturally meet with resistance. If you are a baby boomer you might recall how the practices just described were considered beyond the fringe back in the 1980s. When I first started facilitating team-building and leadership programs at that time, some doubters would look at me askance and say, “What do you mean teamwork? The boss is going to make all the decisions! Work styles inventory like MBTI are just readings from an astrologer. Emotions have no place in the workplace. And, how could anyone meet without a detailed agenda using Open Space?” Once people experienced, hands-on, the value of the methodologies listed above, however, the biggest skeptics often morphed into the most ardent fans.

If you are an innovator or an early adaptor who likes to be a few years ahead of the crowd, then this book is written for you. You believe it’s time to update our approaches to leadership and change the same way we have been updating our technology and business structures. Yet, anything that is truly innovative will also seem unfamiliar, unpredictable, edgy, or even slightly weird—at least till you’ve had a few experiences with it. Another decade may pass before organizational constellations becomes a well-known brand for solving challenges, making decisions, enhancing leadership abilities, and managing change. Until then, if you are willing to trade the comfort zone of the known for the discomfort of learning something new, you will enjoy a competitive advantage as a change leader.