End of a podcast season, but that’s not the end
So we just ended our first podcast season. Some 20+ episodes with thought leaders and practitioners in the space of leadership and leadership development. We explored a number of topics and if you want to hear our take aways from these conversations listen to the episode, perhaps here:
I would like you touch upon three concepts that stood out throughout the season:
Connection at the centre
Connection is one of those topics that seem to be incredibly central, more or less on every level:
On the company level we can speak of connection to what is going on in the legislative environment and ones customers to be able to navigate the highly uncertain times we live in.
On the team level we can speak of connection to one another to be able to deliver on goals in an agile way and to adapt as conditions and contexts change.
On the individual level we can speak of it in terms of trauma, e.g. not to be stuck or caught in singular identities or connect to ones deeper desires and longing so that we find life and work meaningful and avoid burning out or languishing. Brene Brown says: “Authenticity is belonging to yourself” (belonging as being connected for the purpose of this article).
We see it yet again in more resent research that it pays off to be connected. The oxford wellness study shows across a number of metrics that happy workers deliver better. Happiness in our thinking would be a result of feeling connection with the work one does, the company or ones team. In other words, investing in connection is not something soft or nice to have, the study shows statistically significant improvement in ROA, Tobin’s q and reduced volatility across a number of metrics.
Want to dive deeper? Connection came up in a number of episodes:
Krisin Grimsdottir on belonging
Ricky Goodall on authentic relating
Self organisation as a fact of life
There is a trend right now to talk about self-organisation as this mysterious thing that happens at the fringes of society. Some of our podcast guests argue that it’s not. In fact, as long as we are dealing with living beings these will self-organise. The question is whether we can successfully use structure to liberate instead of limit the potential of our organisation.
What does it mean? Well if we have a strict structure with lots of formal controls, what tends to happen? Well usually you will figure out how to get things done anyways. Like, don’t talk to the IT guy on mondays but do talk to him after the coffee break on tuesdays and see if he cannot get you the thing he needs without the formal request. And if I bring some chocolate while I ask, then it’ll be a higher probability that I get things done. That’s also self-organisation. Or if I know that my friend has the bosses ear, why not let her ask on my behalf?
So does that mean that we should have no structure? Well probably not. That’s risky too. It gives room for people to just do whatever they are used to doing, i.e. a tyranny of structure-lessness where our biases can come into full, unregulated play.
We had a couple of discussion on this theme. And it’s not intuitive always how to get it done but some take aways that stuck with me related to the topic:
Do your thing and get out of the way. Do what you think will be best for your organisation or team and then let people respond as they need to. Don’t close the door. Don’t turn off your phone. Stay available and respond when needed. But watch curiously for how your ‘change’ propagates thought the organisation and see if you need to adjust for unintended consequences.
See if you can find out how things are and modulate them towards a desired outcome. That is very different from working from how things ‘should have been’ if everyone did what it said in their work description.
Quit your goals, start working with horizons. It means let’s get together to navigate towards a common horizon and liberate our teams and colleagues to get us there instead of staying addicted to hitting specific mountaintops on the way. Moving towards a horizon is nice too since you never get there - it means that we have continuous incentive to keep adapting to the changing conditions. Contrast that approach to goal setting as first taking specific mountain tops - and when you get there, then what? Down again?
If you feel like digging deeper in this track check out:
Eugenio Molina on self-organisation and doing your thing and getting out of the way
Getur Palmason on tools for organisational analysis
Ted Rau on sociocracy and self-management
Giles Hutchins on regenerative leadership
Niklas Huss on the transformation of large public organisations
Johan Thiel on entrepreneurship as navigation
Why we play might become central in what comes next
Finally I’ll add a perspective on this worldview shift that some we’re talking about. It relates to play.
I enjoy reading and thinking through what seems to be coming next and stumbled on an excellent book called “The structure of world history” (Karatani, 2014). The author proposes that we have spent too much time and energy worrying about the means of production and should have instead looked at our means of exchange as the driver for how our society is structured.
Initially we were exchanging reciprocally (gifting). This was efficient in that particular context. Yet society started changed and this increased shifted the dominant mode of exchange toward coercion. The second paradigm was relating to domination or violence. There was a long period where strength and kinetic power was the main driver for material success. Then there was a third shift. We moved increasingly into trade as the dominant mode of exchange. The increasingly interconnected world rewarded this mode of exchange. Capitalism, communism and other economically driven -isms during the past few hundred years qualify into this paradigm. And right now he argues, as do we at Innerworks, we are at the cusp of something else. Another shift. What mode of exchange will take over when trade seizes to be the dominant system? What mode of exchange hold the potential to rebalance our current time?
An argument made by the Nordic meta modern school is that that thing we are moving towards is play. They define 4 different human interactions: cooperation, competition, trade and play. These are very similar to what Karatani proposed. Their argument is that we have cooperated, competed and traded and now we’ll need to do all of that but playfully. We cooperate to increase our leverage in the game, we compete not to kill the other but to get to keep playing, and we trade to be able to acquire things to play at a higher level. A similar idea lives in James Carse’s Infinite games. I.e. we will have to gift, coerce and trade but with the ultimate goal is to get to keep playing.
If play is the dominant mode of exchange that moves us away from the maximisation and it will allow us to also take in contexts. Play can mean that we actually perform the other modes of exchange but with a different end in mind. Play does not mean that we don’t do things well, a kid playing can be incredibly serious yet only keep doing it if it’s enjoyable. It is a fundamental shift of worldview from getting to an end to actually engrossing ourselves in the process itself - making sure we get to do as much of it as possible.
What would it mean for your business to stop trying to ‘out-compete’ your competitors and instead seeing them as partners in raising the overall level of the game you’re playing? What would it mean to put relationships at the centre rather than winning? What is the first thing you or your team would stop doing if you took this blog post seriously?