Читать книгу CONFESSIONS OF A CORPORATE SHAMAN - Harrison Snow - Страница 9

Change leaders typically seek to build a culture in which people are aligned around a shared vision, values, and strategy. As part of that alignment, leadership and team skills are developed. Measures, processes, and norms that foster the flow of communication are introduced. Critical problem-solving and decision-making are team based. Risk-taking and innovation are rewarded. Bookcases and websites are crammed with techniques and models that develop the levers of performance listed above. Still, given all we know about building healthy organizations using these standard practices, HR surveys consistently show high levels of dysfunction and discontent in the public and private sectors. The cost of dysfunction in terms of turnover, employee engagement, morale, innovation, and productivity are significant. As these troubles distract our time and attention, globalization continues to scale up competition. The winners are those who are able to contain the office bushfires while, at the same time, learning and innovating faster than the world is changing.

Dysfunction and denial mark the place where learning and adapting are not keeping pace. When a person, team, or organization is afflicted by a learning disability, small issues inevitably grow up to become big, “wicked” ones. People come and go but the dysfunction stays and becomes embedded in the shadows of cultural DNA. Change is difficult because the dysfunction is not in the individual. It is in the collective space between individuals and groups. Standard leadership practices are unaware of these hidden dimensions. Instead of blaming the toxic worker or the ineffective leader, a radically more insightful approach is called for.

The wise change leader faces the global challenges of a flat world with a new mindset, one that inspires access to the subconscious through the emotions, the spirit, and physical sensations. But such a multilateral, systemic approach has disruptive implications. Why? Most corporate professionals are highly educated, and they mastered a rigorous academic curriculum through the mental powers of analysis and conceptualization. Naturally, when solving problems and making decisions, they rely on the same mental domain. Even popular concepts like emotional intelligence (EQ) are presented in a conceptual way that does little to actually develop a leader’s emotional skills.¹ Thinking about emotions is easy, yet learning how to manage them, especially in a group setting, demands a skill set outside the conceptual realm. Not surprisingly, many leadership teams regularly fall into “analysis paralysis” or bog down in emotional gridlock. As long as they rely solely on the analytical mind, they access just a portion of their human potential. If we want our organizations to be more functional we have to find a way to go beyond the limitations of the verbal mind. As Einstein said, “The mind is a good servant but a terrible master.”

Change is driven by insight. These insights emerge when we broaden our spectrum of information. Our visible light spectrum is only a small fraction, “ . . . less than one-tenth of one percent of what is really there.”² As we’ve learned to take advantage of even small parts of that vast, invisible spectrum, our world has been transformed by such innovations as radio, television, and cell phones.

Like this limited spectrum of light, conceptualization that takes place solely within the limits of the analytical mind excludes a vast range of potential insights. Here is the “gist” of the approach of a corporate shaman. Access more information. Include and transcend the limitations of the mind by making more use of the full spectrum of physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual intelligences. The shaman in some traditions is the “one who sees.” In the corporate world, the aware observer can perceive patterns and implications that others don’t. Although I never called myself, or any of my colleagues, a “shaman,” facilitators of change have a lot in common whether they work in a conference room or a jungle clearing.

One of these commonalities is the skillful use of your conscious mind in a way that enables you to access the information and insights hidden below the threshold of awareness. Tacit knowledge—what we don’t know we know—turns out to be more than we could imagine. If your schooling, like mine, was “mental-centric” then knowledge was exclusively pursued by the intellect. Nonconceptual approaches to understanding were dismissed as “touchy-feely” or “psychobabble.” This denigration of the other intelligences is shortsighted. All modalities, subjective and objective, are necessary to fully embrace the challenges and opportunities life offers.

The nonverbal thinking approach is easy to call for but may seem difficult to do at first. I am sometimes amazed at the white-knuckle grip the verbal intellect has on my colleagues. It feels comfortable and safe to intellectualize and analyze the problems they face. I point out that they can’t conceptualize their way to a place of insight and innovation. They have to risk a dip into the “felt-sense” part of their psyches where feelings and sensations lurk just below the surface of awareness. This unarticulated, yet felt within the body, sense of knowing could be a part of ourselves that wants to be heard. Energy from our past is stuck there waiting to be released. Maybe somewhere in our unresolved past there is a small kid who is sad, afraid, or angry. Many expend a lot of energy avoiding or denying those disowned or forgotten feelings, not realizing that this is the path forward for becoming a fully aware person who has the power to lead and innovate.

There are many examples of organizational, social, or even mundane issues where the solutions seem obvious and should work if implemented. Almost all scientists agree that climate change is man-made and will result in serious if not devastating consequences.³ Likewise, we know that about a third of the population in the United States is obese.⁴ The costs of these and other problems are clear. Viable solutions exist. Yet, our unwillingness to act is constrained by factors that can’t be grasped by the inner dialogue of the rational, verbal thinking mind.

The Freudian framework offers one explanation for our lack of logical action by assigning the self three parts: ego, superego, and id. The personal ego sets goals. The superego scolds like a parent when those goals are neglected. But the id, the subconscious, ignores them both and imposes what it wants even though the other parts believe they know better. Most people realize from personal experience that our conscious mind can make any number of resolutions. It’s our subconscious that determines whether or not our resolutions produce results. In making a decision, the conscious mind has 10 percent of the votes; the subconscious has the other 90 percent.⁵ The subconscious is the abode of what we don’t know we know; the home of our tacit knowledge. Unless the subconscious considerations are surfaced and addressed, positive change will be a fraction of what is needed.

What is true in one’s personal life is also true in the life of an organization. Accessing that reservoir of intelligence enables you or your group to make better decisions and to effectively implement them. This level of intelligence, the knowing field, is accessible to us when our subconscious and conscious minds work together. The roots of our perennial problems, along with their solutions, are hidden in the nonverbal subconscious. If we want deep change, that is where our conscious minds have to look. Currently in the corporate world, the tools used to foster individual or organizational change remain on the level of the conscious, verbal mind. Like the old joke about the drunk doggedly searching for his car keys under the streetlamp, we keep looking there for solutions because that’s where the light is. Yet, the essential insights that would rewire the brain for new actions reside in the shadow of the subconscious, beyond the chatter of the inner dialogue.

Accessing these insights requires giving the verbal thinking mind a timeout and focusing attention on the felt-sense of the emotions, the spirit, and physical sensations. Quantum mechanics and neuroscience are often used to explain how vast realms of knowledge can be accessed in a nonlinear fashion that transcends the cause and effect laws of classical physics. The list of relevant articles, books, and blogs about the latest parallels between science and metaphysics grows longer every day. While understanding how nonlinear processes work is important, it’s not as crucial as benefiting from them. Few people can explain how a cell phone works, but that does not stop anyone from making a call.

Simplifying complexity and uncovering insights will appeal to those who are divergent, nonlinear thinkers. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung famously said that the sign of maturity is the ability to hold seemingly opposed ideas together in the mind at the same time. Has your executive team tried the usual approaches yet is still in need of a breakthrough? If so, then utilizing the practices in this book will be worth the perceived risk of doing something unfamiliar.

Change leadership is not an either/or between the objective and the subjective approach. The advanced analytic methods of “big data” highlighted in books such as Money-ball,⁶ offer effective tools for operational decision-making, especially when the relevant criteria can be measured and expressed numerically. Leadership, however, focuses on the people and the ambiguities that drive individual and group behavior. Because of their inherent ambiguity the most pressing leadership questions cannot be answered numerically. M. Scott Peck understood the dilemma managers increasingly face: “The more ambiguous our choices the more likely they are to be painful. Inherently, there are no rules for dealing with such ambiguity.”⁷

Collecting and making sense of large datasets take analytical skills. Acting on those data in a meaningful and innovative way, especially when people are involved, demands nonlinear insights. Change leaders who develop their abilities in both domains have an edge over those who discount one over the other.⁸

As the futurist Alvin Toffler predicted, the more hightech a society becomes the more critical it will be to integrate the hard sciences with high-touch, soft skills.⁹ This book explores how to access and use that nonnumerical knowledge to make decisions and solve problems that are people related and systemic. As a leader or consultant, you can draw upon these systemic principles and exercises to breathe new life into how you inspire and conduct change, strategic planning, coaching, leadership development, team-building, and innovation. This mother lode offers a new world of possibilities for those who are willing to use it. To quote Internet marketing guru Seth Godin, “Our future is created by those who replace the status quo, not those who defend it.”