Читать книгу The Art of Waking People Up - Kenneth Cloke - Страница 17

This book is a wake-up call to transform our working lives. It is an invitation to become conscious of who we are and what we are doing so we can all be more aware, authentic, congruent, and committed in our work. It is a compilation of ideas and experiences, processes and techniques, stories and examples, theoretical analyses and practical advice. It is a challenge to you the readers to overcome the internal barriers to waking up and transform the external hierarchical, bureaucratic, and autocratic organizational practices that put you to sleep.

Over the last thirty-six years, we have designed and conducted thousands of trainings, facilitations, consultancies, coaching conferences, mediations, interventions, feedback sessions, retreats, change projects, organizational redesign efforts, strategic planning sessions, team building workshops, group meetings, and similar practices. In the process, we have worked with multinational corporate giants, family businesses, entrepreneurial start-ups, government departments, neighborhood schools, social service agencies, nonprofits, political advocacy groups, charitable foundations, and community organizations.

Yet we rarely find organizations, even among the most innovative and enlightened, that actively support all their employees in waking up and transforming the conditions under which they work. We rarely find organizations that routinely provide turnaround feedback; that offer collaborative coaching, strategic mentoring, and participatory performance assessment; that actively encourage courageous listening, paradoxical problem solving, supportive confrontation, and risky conflict resolution; and that consciously design their cultures, structures, and systems to deepen personal and organizational learning.

Waking people up, encouraging their self-actualization, and expanding opportunities for participation in decision making are not only important social values, they are ways of increasing motivation, improving productivity, raising quality, and solidifying customer partnerships. To achieve these goals, organizations are ultimately required to jettison their soporific hierarchical, bureaucratic, and autocratic practices, and create collaborative, team-based, democratic practices in their stead.

While hierarchical organizations require a degree of passivity among lower-ranking employees, democratic organizations demand an active, awake citizenry. To generate this level of participation, we need to redesign organizational processes, techniques, structures, systems, and cultures to encourage awareness and authenticity. It is our belief that organizational democracy is not simply an option for enlightened organizations, it is essential to waking up, to the self-actualization of individual employees and to the continued evolution of our political and social democracy.

We wrote this book as a companion volume to our earlier work, The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy, in which we call for organizational structures, systems, cultures, and processes that are participatory, collaborative, self-managing, and democratic. Our purpose in this book is to assist organizations, employees, teams, managers, and leaders in their efforts to break out of the trance created by working for others rather than for themselves; to develop their capacity for awareness and authenticity; and to renew their active sense of responsibility for jobs they perform but do not own.

We wrote this book to challenge everyone to become more conscious, aware, authentic, and responsible for their work environments. We wrote it to help employees design, build, reinforce, and defend the processes, techniques, cultures, structures, and systems that reward vitality, authenticity, and lifelong learning. We wrote it to advocate and promote the idea of organizational democracy as a substitute for hierarchical, bureaucratic, autocratic management-driven organizations. We wrote it to wake ourselves up, and cultivate awareness and authenticity in our own work lives.

It is difficult for anyone to clearly identify, openly discuss, or actively break the hypnotic grip of hierarchically induced apathy, passivity, cynicism, and despair once they have fallen into it. While observing the way we work is the first step in waking people up, it is also necessary to dismantle the aspects of organizations that put people to sleep, and to redesign their cultures, structures, and systems in ways that stimulate personal awareness, collaborative choice, and social responsibility.

We have all sat and watched as the truth was revealed to us—and refused to listen or understand. We have all denied what we implicitly knew was true because it was too painful or difficult to accept. We have all learned the hard way. It is therefore important to recognize at the beginning that no one can wake anyone up unless they are willing to be awakened, and that no one should be judged or censured for being unable to do so. Therefore, while we can assist people in bringing greater awareness and authenticity into their lives, it is important to do so with kindness and empathy rather than harshness and humiliation, and to act as we would like others to act toward us. Beyond this, we can concentrate on waking ourselves up and not merely speaking but being the truth. By being present and awake ourselves, we make it possible for others to do the same.