Complexity

More Evolved Thinking About Organizations

More Evolved Thinking About Organizations

These are exciting and encouraging times, if we can find the courage to allow them to be.

 

Almost since the time I entered the field of organization development I have been driven by the desire to help people bring more of who they are to the work they do. Nothing irks me more than hearing people talk about being one way at work and another way altogether when at home or with friends. Invariably, these people report that they leave some, often significant, part of themselves at the door when they enter the workplace.

How much are we missing out on and how much is lost because we don’t feel like we can be who we really are at work?

Uncertainty, Fear, and Learning

Fear is a signal you might be about to learn something

 

In an earlier post, I wrote about the connection between uncertainty and learning. There I tried to make the point that uncertainty is a condition that is pre-requisite to learning, and that the present moment is the most uncertain place we can inhabit because we never know what is going to happen next.

There is another aspect to uncertainty, one that has to do with our reaction when we find ourselves confronted by it.

Group Awareness and Being in the Moment

What is the opposite of certainty?

 

I’ve started to play around with an idea I’m calling “group awareness”. My working definition is in two parts. A collection of people has group awareness when they have developed 1) the ability to learn about where they are and what they are doing at any given moment, and 2) clarity about what they want to do next.

This seems so simplistic.