Ditch the Reasons

June 26, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

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I’m observing that people focus on reasons when they resist change.

It can be a considerable obstacle to my helping people and businesses take a new direction. Reasons run the gamut and include, for example:

  • why they spent instead of saved
  • why they responded late instead of on time
  • why they resisted instead of accepted
  • why they spoke instead of listened
  • why they did nothing instead of acting

The time I spend listening to reasons is mostly wasted because it doesn’t help me help clients with change. This is particularly true post crisis because the reasons are mostly about responding to a world that now no longer exists anyway. Reasons repeated over and over bind people to that world. Reasons aren’t learning, aren’t beliefs and aren’t feelings. They’re obstacles to those and that’s why its important to be vigilant about what triggers reasons.

It makes perfect sense to me that clients made choices and decisions based on what they believed to be true for themselves at the time. What matters most to me is, does that truth serve them now, and if not, what are the beliefs to examine, change and replace?

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Filed under: Belief, Consciousness, In Transition, Metaphysics, Organizations
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Friction Free

June 9, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

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An underlying technology of the machine tool industry I was involved with was tribology, concerned with friction, lubrication and wear. Round and cylindrical parts last longer when the hardness and smoothness is improved and continually lubricated. The need for tribology grew when tolerance for friction decreased as engines became smaller (example: compact cars) and applications became more critical (example: artificial hip joints).

Without tribology applications, anything from grit to human antibodies will abrade, erode and eventually destroy surface finish.

Its a good metaphor for how to respond to the changes and uncertainty resulting from an increasingly smaller and connected globe, lack of tolerance for bad systems and replacement of worn-out structures.

Worry, doubt, ego, hubris and what Julia Cameron beautifully describes as giving in to “the temptation of despair” will just as quickly erode individual and collective human potential as a speck of dirt will destroy a bearing. Self-aware people and organizations are vigilant about thinking, assumptions and expectations. The result is a mirror-finish belief system or culture that deflects what’s not wanted and functions smoothly, regardless of circumstances.

Relationships, networks and social capital provide the lubricant.

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Filed under: Creativity, Generations, Machine Tool, disruption, longevity, metaphor, resilience, self-awareness, social capital, social networks, strength, stress relief
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Compared to What?

June 3, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

Someone I’m close to who’d been upset about her 401k losses, said she’s now feeling a lot better about it. The reason: everyone else has lost the same percentage, so its relative.

Its an interesting exercise to notice how much of our thinking is relative. By relative I mean judging and responding to the events in our personal and business lives in comparison to others’ lives, or in comparison to our own lives, as we remember or anticipate them. This occurs so frequently that its considered natural. But when you challenge it in yourself, and in your organization and culture, you become aware of the negative results that follow:

  • scarcity - more for you means less for me
  • exclusiveness - keeping you / them out
  • superiority / inferiority
  • withholding / protectiveness

Transformational change takes place at least partially in the absolute, where no boundaries exist between or among us. Social business models and tools provide a great staging area for personal and organizational transformation but only if there’s willingness to be conscious of, and to act upon what’s true for and in us all.

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Filed under: Consciousness, change leadership, expansion, inclusion, integral, shift
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Is Critical Reasoning Dead?

May 22, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

I’m not surprised that the most inspiring essay I’ve read in years is written by a motorcycle repairman, who also happens to be a great writer and who has a Ph.D. in political philosophy. His essay contrasts the levels of critical reasoning, intuition, judgment, experience and metacognition in both the bike shop and in the think tank. The former wins hands down.

Although I’ve never been a mechanic I did work for a decade in the machine-tool industry, both as corporate controller and entrepreneur/start-up partner. But the industry was in decline so I got an MBA and a year later started my career as a knowledge professional, specifically a Web 1.0 strategy consultant. It didn’t take long for my elation to turn to disillusion.

I remember a conversation I’d had with one of our solution architects, which in Web 1.0 meant he could write a paragraph and include a diagram. I showed him a brochure from my former company that I’d co-founded, highlighting one of our portable, lathe-mounted superfinishing machines that we designed and manufactured. He smirked and remarked “boy, you’ve come a long way”. The web consulting company merged several times and was eventually absorbed by a larger Web 1.0 company which then went away several years later. I think my co-worker ended up in financial services. After a another short interactive strategy consulting position I became self-employed. The machine-tool company I’d co-founded was under-capitalized and it folded. I lost touch with my former partners but occasionally drive through the industrial park where we were once located.

Its been 10 years but reading the essay reminded me exactly how I felt when the people who made concepts disparaged the people who made capital equipment. I’m grateful that I still have the traces of grease and oil in my blood to be able to appreciate one of the writer’s examples of the kinds of crises that industrial workers and mechanical engineers experienced on an daily basis.

I once accidentally dropped a feeler gauge down into the crankcase of a Kawasaki Ninja that was practically brand new, while performing its first scheduled valve adjustment. I escaped a complete tear-down of the motor only through an operation that involved the use of a stethoscope, another pair of trusted hands and the sort of concentration we associate with a bomb squad. When finally I laid my fingers on that feeler gauge, I felt as if I had cheated death. I don’t remember ever feeling so alive as in the hours that followed.

But what I most identified with in this essay, is author’s description of the “feel” of the knowledge work jobs he’d had and how most everything about management and process contradicted anyone’s ability to produce great, creative work in order to churn out banal, yet profit-maximizing, output. Perhaps I’m over-idealizing my former life, but I don’t remember that kind of creativity stultification in my machine-tool days. But I still cringe to remember how as Web 1.0 consolidated, management continually tightened the throttle on critical reasoning and creative ideas that didn’t fit with their formula. They hated it and I couldn’t live without it. So, like the writer, I got out, not by opening a motorcycle repair shop but by starting my own solo professional service firm. I’d had enough of a taste of “process management” as a Web 1.0 knowledge worker to realize that if I wanted to create and produce at and beyond the level of which I knew I was capable, I’d have to do it as an independent.

Yet like him, I can imagine the possibilities of a more entrepreneurial, post-crisis economy and some resurgence of industry, the trades and the artisans. And I have faith that there’s even a chance for new and better knowledge work as hierarchies flatten and social business models and technologies replace conformity, formula, centralization and control with collaboration, networks, sharing, ideas and critical reasoning. He eloquently describes how our quality of life depends on it.

Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

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Filed under: Cognition, Creativity, innovation, intuition, multi-dimensional, self-awareness, shift, social networks
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Space

May 20, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

Creativity and Natural Influence

We’re made up of more space (dark energy and dark matter) than visible form and matter, but we spend most of our lives totally identified with the latter. Its one thing to think about the concept of spaciousness but yet another to experience it, for even a short period of time. Anyway, why would we want to and how do we do that?

We want to because we now know that the physical and conceptual structures that we’re identified with are unstable and will be replaced with new ones that are yet to be created. We want to be part of that. But fear and worry about that instability, and how it will affect our lives and businesses, lead to more attachment and rigidity that then shows up in how we respond to change: protection, judgment, guilt, resentment, complaining, blame, etc.

So instead of a desired growth direction we get stuck on the survival path. Life and business experience becomes relentless reactivity to an endless series of crises and lack . We know that the way towards new and better experience is through creativity and innovation, but forget that creativity comes through us. Its not something we can reach out and attain. Rather, we have to make space for it and knock down the walls that block it.

Making space for creativity in challenging times requires vigilance over individual and collective thought and action. Space is created by ceasing thinking and constant doing, and by softening the physical and conceptual boundaries constructed in attempt to keep out everything not wanted, like vulnerability. It can be as simple as taking deep breaths and setting time aside for short periods of stillness. It can also be more challenging and require a lot of courage, putting oneself on the line without a safety net for one’s convictions, so to speak.

The challenges we’re dealing with now are opportunities for dropping resistance and defenses to receive the wave of creative energy that is always available. It comes through us when we let it. It takes faith. The biblical metaphor for our self-constructed creativity barrier is the Wall of Jericho. When we blast ours down, we’re then freed to enter our Promise Land. That’s the metaphor for the place and point of power from where we can expand our natural influence, and contribute the best of who we are to what is yet to be created.

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Filed under: Cognition, Consciousness, Creativity, Metaphysics, Natural influence, creative habit, direction, expansion, innovation, intention, metaphor, mind mapping, presence, shift, wave
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