From 20th to 21st Century Mental Models
Formulaic to Expansive
A modern, evolutionary, innovation-forward system reimagines itself rigorously and continuously as a way of operating. These systems embrace confronting themselves as a means of strategy, ensuring clarity, discipline, and focus. Learning is at the foundation of a 21st century organisation — systems unafraid to feel failure and always willing to experience the tides of change. Humility and collaboration steer outcome-focused ways of delivering. Knowing that the whole is far greater than any part weaves their vision, purpose, and culture.
- 20th Century | Industrial Newtonian Organisations
- 21st Century | Evolutionary, Emergent, Wisdom, Quantum Organisations
- Plan and Predict — mechanistic, formulaic, output-based, and controls outside of Self are the basis for operating.
- Prepare and Pivot — sensing, fluidity, adaptivity, test & learn, personal authority, and resilience are the basis for operating.
- Change is a threat. We focus on killing off or consuming that which threatens our status quo as a means to growth, increased revenue, development, deriving pleasure and happiness, and creation/innovation.
- Change is the means. Doing and being change become the means of growth, increased revenue, development, deriving pleasure and happiness, and creation/innovation.
- Looking at/observing ourselves, our habits, patterns, and our definitions is a sign of weakness. So, we don't.
- Ongoing consideration/exploration around our habits, patterns, and definitions enables an environment of agility and adaptivity — so we have no choice but to transform.
- Disrupting the status quo — our own and others — disrupts "the plan" so we stuff, ignore, step over, and accumulate baggage, narratives, and storylines validating our inertia.
- Disrupting our status quo is our cultural norm. We are not ever static because we accept and embrace that innovation and creativity come from our ability to review, reimagine, learn, pivot, and anticipate constantly.
- Consciously growing ourselves individually and as a collective consumes precious time, and we are very busy meeting our targets, goals, and staying on task outputting to do that.
- We grow everyday. Growth, becoming, developing, evolving, learning, risking, and trusting without first knowing all the information or exactly how-to informs our targets, goals, outcomes, and which tasks we ought to iteratively drive on.
- Feeling uncomfortable and vulnerable is scary and inconvenient. We don't like to feel uncomfortable or messy. It is a distraction and threatens our own and the company's myopic focus on the bottom line.
- Feeling uncomfortable and vulnerable may be inconvenient or even scary, yet indicates we are learning, questioning, and growing. Sitting with discomfort means we are stretching, testing, risking, trusting, and elevating — and that is an indicator of the adaptivity that dimensionally expands the company's bottom line.
- It is inconvenient to be inconvenienced. We prefer to be in an insanity loop doing the same thing over and over again, repeatedly, while expecting different results. So, we spend a lot of time talking about and intellectualising what we should do or can't possibly do, what we may care about, feel victimised by, yet we won't actually try because we don't like being or feeling inconvenienced.
- Without inconvenience, we understand that we are not participating in innovation. Attachment is a toxin to an open, innovative, resilient, and responsive culture, team, and organisational system. Inconveniencing ourselves to test, learn, and improve continuously is our job.