Evolving Ways from past to Future
Mirrors and Reflections
Changing systems means confronting. Looking in the mirror to see yourselves reflected back and being motivated to work with what you see, stop doing what isn't working, and feel inspired to grow, expand, and develop beyond your current state. Pain is often a motivator to get going. The pursuit of money can often be a deflection. Being honest with ourselves individually, as teams, and collectives is how we brave the work. We are all here to meet ourselves. The office is quite literally one of the primary forums in modern life where we are intended do the work. The evolutionary organisation is the one that knows this. One of life's incubators for a more accelerated way of being, leading, learning, and becoming.
Following are points of org pain we hear about often. They tend to get addressed in ways that are well-intentioned (alternatively, ignored altogether), but in ways that do not systemically and strategically solve for the origins of the system problem.
Why? Because learning to solve system challenges with change levers that are sustaining and regenerating is modern, but is not yet the current normal.
Remember:
Problems simply expand when problem focusing.
Solutions expand when solutioning strategically,rhythmically, and progressively.
Deep, not shallow levers root regenerative change cultures. You want repetitive actioning on deep solutions. You don’t want heroic actions on shallow levers.
Animating Vision
Our vision + strategy does not live [and sing] in our day-to- day.
Prioritisation muscle and outcome-based strategy are not yet operationalized.
Our growth and evolution as an organisation are stagnating.
Distributing leadership, power, communication, connectivity, and decisioning needs rebooting and norming.
Our origin story has a 100-Ib gorilla standing on her chest needing freeing.
It is likely time to cut away the accumulated dross to get back to your truth, the source of system innovation, courage, and purpose.
Our org changes end up being topical and performative rather than systemic and meaningful.
Admit you are not trained change practitioners, and pull in partners who are.
Awakening Leadership
Legacy management structuring and ethos are a generational divide.
Opening up a modern system means actively and consciously departing from past ways. In practice, not simply in principle or through rhetoric.
We don’t have an authentic, inspired, and distributed Leader Collective.
It is time to build an inspired, distributed system of Modern Leaders. Willing professional activists who understand and embrace the value of showing up in their genuine and authentic truths while concurrently being able to steer, structure, and guide.
I’m too close to the system, people, and default norms to create valuable and dimensional change.
Asking for help is a real Leader learning curve. Thinking you can do it all yourself is the downfall of many systems and rough Leader lessons.
We enable and save too often as our Leader roles.
Learning about and adopting system designs that interrupt your rescuing tendencies trigger deeper practices of self-sufficiency, ownership, and accountability.
Flowing Communication
Our system-wide communication is overly transactional.
A multi-prong system design to transform communication norms from transactional to generative is needed.
Our narratives cage and bind us.
You need to design operating structures and rhythms that disrupt your worst folklore and storytelling habits.
Flow downs rather than distrbuted networds continue to rule.
You need to holistically upend the way you think about your roles in the sharing of information, the structures by which you unintentionally exhaust your importance as a function of information flow and sharing, and confront your need to manage e.g. control flows.
We partner poorly with technology as a strategy, culture, and system partner.
Establishing a healthy, responsible, and ethical technology vision and stack are inherent designs to an evolutionary and responsive organisation culture. Without them, you merely project the limitations of the current state. What you want to do is design conscious and considered interracting and acting with technology as a partner and technology as a product.
Balancing Power
Limiting beliefs run as a default operating frequency.
Your operating structures are likely not making you courageous enough to confront yourselves, your challenges, and your shared bullshit. Limiting beliefs more naturally unmask themselves in individuals and the collective when you system design progressive structures that pull you into shared power and out of shared victimisation.
We blur the line between agressive and assertive.
You need to awaken systemically to live the difference between power and control.
We tend to not start from our shared humanity.
Allowing your shared humanity to be an anchor of your strategic and evolutionary intent is sound vision and strategy.
Agency, humility, sovereignty, and collectivism are not the norm.
Accelerated change, innovations, and scale are outcomes of agency in role and collective, shared vision. Denying your own agency or a system that denies agency are systems built on fear and designed confusion. Forward-facing, natural systems designing arises and nurtures the individual agency within a collective.
Designing Structures
We do not work rhythmically so we don’t product prioritised, generative outcomes.
Disrupting your tasking myopia and linear output fixation is crucial.
Our operating model contradicts and creates headwinds for our vision and purpose.
It is time to structure logistically, horizontally, and systemically — not hierarchically — to net quantum, evolutionary shifts.
Our organisation structure(s) cut off the air supply to our culture aspirations and brand story.
You must calibrate your culture and brand aspirations to your organisation design and operating system principles. They are part and parcel of the same strategy.
We espouse new ways of working, but it’s a layover not a systemic operating model change.
Designing modern, dynamic, and healthy forward-facing systems and structures is a deep, applied learning and doing path that comes with degrees of difficulty, years of build, and culture commitment. New ways of working were never meant as a social media post, a proclamation or a vanity metric.
Knitting Culture
The frequency of fear dominates so we get only about 40% capacity from our people.
Everyone needs to learn to own their sh@*, do their work, and embrace system designs that can more effectively and expeditiously interrupt frequencies of fear. You cannot change a system and remain in the same frequency. The frequency must elevate. The players must change.
We confound moving fast with moving wisely.
You need to design internal system chops and operating mechanics to move wisely fast(er).
Perfectionism (e.g. disguised shame) reigns supreme.
You need to breathe air into your enoughness and busyness additions. Get out of your own way by surrendering to these as outdated, exhausting, and unhealthy norms. Then, commit to doing the hard work of change.
We functionally operate without genuinely connecting while doing it.
When you learn to tether optimised, operational functioning and connecting into one design, you can overwrite this unconscious and highly common disregard.
Messaging Brand
Our internal operating doesn’t match our externalised story.
Having truth tellers in the building to hold you to account on your misalignments and to help wire the internal and external is innovation and acceleration of productive organisation change and evolution.
Our rigor as a brand leader is not as well embraced within our operating culture demand.
External and internal cohesion must be both a brand and operating model strategy so you all own the rigor, discipline, and conscious application.
Our recruiting is strong; our retention weak.
Your talent strategy is brand, culture, and operating model dependent. Wire for it.
Our remote | in-office tunnels have not been dug coherently.
Brand alignment, talent strategy, and operating system health are integrated system designs in an evolutionary moment in time. How your team will work need not be people and proximity dependent, but is dependent on smart, considered, and technologically savvy ways of working installations.