“What I’ve noticed with COVID-19 is that people are nicer…”
My local café owner
There’s a story my 5-year-old loves about a doll who has the power to make wishes. Wishing is how she communicates and influences the world.
For some of us, this is an inspiring and exciting prospect. For many of the people I work with, they’re exhausted. The bow-wave of implications from the last 6 weeks have yet to truly manifest and we’ll be untangling the implications for years to come. Creating anything in that space seems too early, overwhelming, or both.
Photo by Geoff Brooks on Unsplash
1. Let Things Emerge
When I was younger, I delivered a coaching program for people who wanted to consciously create their life. We’d create a vision of life at 80 and work backwards. It was a spectacularly successful program and lots of people (me included) got a lot out of it.
As I got older I started to doubt whether it was making the difference I thought it was. The whole approach started to feel ‘off’, a bit like wishful thinking, so I canned it.
The goal is the same but rather than ‘creating’ the future I walk beside people as they look inwards and backwards at their life to learn who they really are, their Leitmotif (the recurring theme – see HERE). This helps people see the values that defined them and that they can craft their life around as they moved forward.
I think that’s what we need to do now: hold a space to see what is actually there and resist the temptation to fill it too quickly.
Otto Scharmer recently wrote a great piece about how important it is for leaders and organisations to hold off ‘creating’ and start looking at what’s really there: what’s going on right now. As he puts it "what’s left in an organisation when the extraneous bit are shorn away?".
The coronavirus crisis is prompting us to improvise new ways of collaborating and coordinating…. governance to help coordinate by letting go and letting come, based on what we are seeing together: letting go of previous plans, and letting come what is about to emerge.
Good for our organisations... and a life lesson for us all :-)
2. We’re in the 2nd Dip
I’ve been doing quite a bit of work with organisations this last few weeks in what it means to recover from an emergency like this. The model I use is modified from the Natural Disaster space and has helped people prepare for the next step.
We are now in the 2nd Dip.
If you want a chat about this, book a time here.
Photo by Arnel Hasanovic on Unsplash
3. Organic vs Mechanistic
The future is pulling for an organic approach to organisation rather than the dominant mechanistic one. It's often driven by women who are pushing against implicit and explicit sexism and really grappling with themselves to do it.
Mechanical: Recovery is a matter of fitting all the right pieces back together of fixing errors and driving improved systems and processes.
Organic: Recovery looks more like healing. Where relationships are rebuilt, social capital renewed and compassion and empathy rule interactions.
4. Bursty Communication
The other day an executive asked:
"How can we balance being compassionate
with the ongoing need for productivity?
In many cases, in the midst of all this change, we've seen a massive burst of both. Why? Can we carry whatever the source of that is forward?
One answer that is starting to show up is a particular quality of communication (see HERE for the study report):
"...teams who communicate in bursts—exchanging messages quickly during periods of high activity—perform much better than remote teams whose conversations involve long lag time between responses and are spread across multiple topic threads."
It's not ability or skill level, it's not incentives, it's not really even diversity (interestingly unless you count the number of women!
We talk over each-other, riff, creative, shift, turn and change – then do. That’s how human beings roll.
These few things are making the biggest difference in my client base. I'm super keen to hear what's working with you and your teams/colleagues.
