The Settle

April 18, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

Picture 13My business is change facilitation and my sport is rowing. I’ve learned a lot about both from cox’ns who provide the inspiration for this 4th in a series of four posts about change leadership using social business initiatives as an example.

The first 3 posts were about:

  • Shifting the vantage point through willingness, not willfulness.
  • Releasing the fairy tale and attendant story-lines identified with what’s non-integral and non-sustainable.
  • Creating the conditions in which innovation and productive friction can take place by embracing different perspectives and individual lenses on the new direction.

This post is about execution and action which require one of the most important parts of a race or practice that the cox calls: the settle. A lot of business leaders get this wrong. They launch a new project with a racing start and push everyone to hold that pace indefinitely. But its the settle that results in purposeful attention, high quality and finding the optimal rhythm together. Just like in the racing shell.

Like cox’ns, business leaders facilitate the shift from urgent desire to unity and trust, through giving the right feedback at the right time. Doing so requires a multi-dimensional awareness, what you and your team sense, feel, believe and embody..not just what you know or want.

The settle can’t be confused with settling for less because its a moment by moment refusal to be less, especially when it hurts. It must be understood as the collective action that creates shared responsibility for aligning with the desired results. In social business, those desired results are some form of creating natural influence in your communities and networks and with your audience.

If you lead like a cox’n, that natural influence could show up as gold.

Filed under: Natural influence, alignment, change leadership, inclusion, intention, intuition, multi-dimensional, rowing, self-awareness, shift, social business, trust
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The Lens On It

March 22, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

Picture 11Its important to understand the difference between shift in belief and shift in perspective.

Beliefs shifts are identity, the “We’re the ones who.. (experience the world and our organization’s place in that world from a single present vantage point of power).”

That shared point of power is the one from which future opportunities, capabilities, culture, innovations, networks, relationships and processes are created. An example could be a shift from a push oriented to a pull oriented belief system from which a social business direction is created.

Team, partner, group, community and organizational members’ ability to shift will depend on both their individual desires and whether their individual complex systems of beliefs, assumptions and expectations align with or contradict the change intention.

But people will have vastly different perceptions about what, why and how. They’ll experience those through a personal lens involving their strengths, weaknesses, talent, skills, personality, risk tolerance, experience, maturity, shadow behaviors and many other factors.

A typical management response is to standardize and control in attempt to neutralize the impact of perception differences but the downside is to stifle innovation and productive friction. Trailer Park Boys provides an alternative.

If you’ve never seen or heard of it, Trailer Park Boys is a Canadian mockumentary about the residents of the Sunnyvale Trailer Park who share a Utopian vision of trailer park community including get rich quick schemes, getting high, circumventing the rules and regulations and staying out of jail. The stories center around three main characters who see the means to their desired fulfillment through different lenses.

Julian is tall, dark, handsome and a natural leader. He also has a glass of rum and coke permanently attached to his hand. A career criminal, Julian is the head of the extended Sunnyvale Trailer Park family and he always tries to take care of the people in the park, especially his best friends Ricky and Bubbles.

Ricky is Julian’s best friend and business partner, grows awesome dope, generally lives in his car, doesn’t always make the best decisions though and the boys often get in trouble as a result. However, Ricky’s heart is usually in the right place, especially when it comes to his family and friends.

Bubbles is the heart and soul of Sunnyvale, not to mention the smartest person in the park. If it were up to him Bubbles would lead a quiet life in the park. Unfortunately, he’s constantly getting caught up in Julian and Ricky’s schemes and is afraid they – or even he – will go to jail again.
Trailer Park Boys web site

There’s seven seasons of problem-solving, decision-making, change leadership, capability building, innovation and creative friction metaphor if you’re willing to think outside the trailer park.

Filed under: alignment, counter-direction, culture, direction, innovation, intention, leadership, shift, social business
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The Fairy Tale

March 15, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

Social business is a direction that requires a shifted vantage point, one from which you view the world as it is, not as it was.

Social platforms and technologies are a subset of a bigger evolutionary shift in which economics and ecology are the same and can no longer be at odds with each other. That applies to the ecology of business in exactly the same way as it applies to the ecology of the biosphere. Survival depends, or inter-depends, on it.

The shifted business is holistic, or integral, meaning that everything it does is good for “me, we, you and all”. The shift is easy to grasp when there’s products involved and you’re weighing profits against labor exploited, resources consumed and environmental footprint. In professional, financial, knowledge and creative service businesses many impacts are invisible but infinitely reverberate nonetheless, positively or negatively affecting “me, we, you and all”.

All the knowledge, thought, concepts, ideas, solutions, content and actions (including social direction) initiate at the vantage point, or intention “we are the ones who….”.

How you answer that, and live up to it, and tell your new story, defines your direction and its alignment with evolution, or devolution. Its no longer possible to intend it both ways. It hasn’t been possible for decades but now is the time to let go of the attachment to the old story, which in essence has been a fairy tale. Ending the old story and replacing it with a new one creates uncertainty but doesn’t have to be a dreadful thing. That’s why the tales end with: “And they lived happily ever after.”

Filed under: alignment, direction, integral, intention, shift, social business
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The Vantage Point

March 14, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

Social Zone Awareness For Personal and Organizational Change | RedShift Consulting and Coaching, Boston MA - mary wynne-wynter, change facilitator Established small business owners are conflicted about social business and the shift towards “pull” platforms. They try to move in the new direction but aren’t ready to let go of habitual practices.

They’re trying to grow and develop and at the same time protect and survive. They’ll go to great lengths to “sell” me on the rationalizations and justifications for their interruption-based sales and marketing tactics and their reporting-based internal systems, structures and procedures.

I’ve learned its impossible to convince anyone to shift his or her vantage point if that business owner doesn’t sense, is in denial about, or not not able to live up to, a new direction like social business. They’re just not there and can’t make “sense” of it. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lost causes.

We just have meet them where they are, let them fail and flail without judging them or jumping to unwanted conclusions on their behalf. “If you don’t act now it will be too late” is an example of one of those assumptions (and one that I’m prone to if I’m not vigilant).

Every client has a vantage point: their personal, or cultural, system of beliefs, competencies and desires. Professional service providers have two options:

  • Tell them what’s wrong with where they are and what it costs them.
  • Meet and accept them where they are if they’ll own it, present the corresponding opportunity and facilitate the shift to a new set of beliefs, competencies and desires.

I don’t know the right framework for the second option, but I know its not a plan.

Filed under: alignment, authenticity, direction, intention, self-awareness, shift, social business
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Conscious Defiance

March 12, 2010 by Mary Wynne-Wynter 

I’ve been defiant and it got me into trouble with whoever had the authority over that particular domain at that particular time. It created a contradiction in me because defiance made me feel alive, powerful and real. But the cost was very high so I feared it at the same time.

Its different now that I’m aware of it, and can define it as: Discernment Discipline + Natural Aggression = Conscious Defiance. I still get in trouble and although I don’t like it, I can be present with the resistance I meet.

My favorite conscious defiance metaphor is “Stick it to the man.” from the great movie School of Rock with crazy-defiant Jack Black.

But how do you stick it to the man in the midst of The Big Shift, Great Recession, The Reset, or whatever they call the massive changes we’re in. Pretty much everyone and everything looks like and acts like “the man”?

I think Eckhart Tolle’s Present Moment Reminder helps answer that:

“Change is absolutely necessary in this world, and the dissolution of many of the ego-based structures is necessary for humanity to survive. What’s happening isn’t ‘dreadfully bad.’ It needs to happen; the intelligence behind phenomena is doing it, so it’s a good thing.”

In other words, align with evolution, defy the temptation to do anything less and leave the rest to the field.

Filed under: disruption, emergence, resistance, self-awareness, shift
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