Discernment – Its An Honor
October 18, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Discernment: The “D” in DRIVE
One of the 5 requisites of the RedShift DRIVE Self-Awareness and Change Leadership Model, and key to shifting identity in the meta-cognitive dimension, is Discernment.
Question Knowledge
Our default response is to form opinions and make personal, professional and business decisions based upon what we know: what’s worked or failed in the past, what we’ve read, heard, learned and been advised about by experts. What’s still often ignored is a sense response to subtle yet profound shifts and getting at “what we don’t know we don’t know” or “what we know but don’t know we know”.
I recently observed an example in a growing company in crisis due to lack of available financing in the current credit crunch. The management team’s opinion was that securing venture financing was the only way to survive. The founder/CEO wanted to hang on and self-fund in spite of looming insolvency rather than give up control and ownership. Months of endless meetings, opinions and arguments led to deadlock because there was no framework for knowledge awareness. Both sides were totally convinced of and attached to the rightness of their respective knowledge so could not brainstorm any breakthrough short-term, or transformational long-term, ideas.
These kinds of scenarios are played out every day as individuals and organizations try to figure out “where do we, or I, go from here?” The answer doesn’t seem to be more knowledge and advice, but rather a facilitated process to uncover the logic and truth driving every opinion and to examine if those beliefs hold true or need to be changed or replaced. The prerequisite for questioning knowledge is the agreement to suspend judgment and will. Those who refuse to learn and practice these skills will become increasing ineffective in the decision making, problem solving and innovation process.
Trust Intuition
Here’s a new way to think about lead generation: make yourself a funnel for your intuitive leads, pay attention and act on them without hesitation. As metaphysician Florence Scovel Shinn taught “Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way.” To better discern among myriad choices, change responses and scenarios why not just ask for leads from a higher intelligence that’s always available and take it from there?
Honor Creative Power
Although we emphasize it more, we still tend to think about creative in terms of talent and visible output where team stars rise to the top and good managers find, cultivate and retain the stars for competitive advantage. That’s how organizations and teams succeed. But is it the only way to discern success?
I was recently part of a team of 8 women who got together to row in the Head of the Charles in a very competitive event. We had less than a month to organize and practice a few times but it quickly became apparent that there was a special dynamic among us. It was about more than appreciation for each others’ experience, talent, commitment and training. There was no “rah rah” about what we could achieve and there was no resentment about problems that came up or a result that was disappointing. It was bigger than any of that. It was about honoring our power to create an experience that served our greater selves. It seemed to arise naturally out of appreciation and gratitude for each other, the sport, the river, the rowing community and beyond.
Discernment is about what to yes to and what to say no. These decisions are shaped by our expectations about the (usually quantifiable) results we want from ourselves or our team. Self-aware teams will achieve so much more through honoring their creative power and achieving the possibly immeasurable result of natural influence.
Morphing Concepts
July 16, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Concepts emerge, divide, converge and morph. SEO is a good example. At one point there were two distinct camps: the search engine optimization folks and the organic optimization folks. But now the distinction is blurred. Highly technically focused search engine businesses now evangelize organic content.
Content-marketing is another example. The convergence was faster. The concept was based on: make the content interesting, relevant, compelling, appealing and valuable to the reader, and people will find it, share it and want more from the producer. The cream will rise to the top. But now, companies are tightly connecting content with SEO tools, techniques and technologies. Tailor the content to what they know people search for, and sell the system to drive traffic.
Who knows what’s good or bad, right or wrong, or which way to go?
This makes life interesting for professional service firms. How do you differentiate and position your services when the needs, problems, solutions and competitors are shifting and morphing?
Think of it as the ultimate opportunity to be unique.
For example: I became aware at one point that people need help with “what they don’t know they don’t know” and really had a passion for that space. So over time, I developed a model based on that realization that’s helped guide my strategic and creative decisions and that’s resulted in solutions that clients value.
I suggest getting very clear on what’s always been important to you, what you stand for, what you have passion for, and what you’re enthusiastic about. Build your frameworks around those. Who knows, someday the next big concept could be yours.
Why You Need a Knowledge Sharing System
May 2, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
At least once a week when I refer to a web site or a blog or an influential person or business, the person I’m talking to responds – “great, what’s their name, company and url?”
And once again, I explain that I could never remember that level of detail, but it doesn’t matter because I know how to instantaneously find what I want and need in my personal and solo psf knowledge sharing system.
The response I get to my explanation always surprises me – no response. Nobody ever asks what my system is or how it works or why I consider it a critical asset. I’m surprised because its so apparent to me that its the core of my business and should be for every professional services practitioner.
And its free!
Concept Fatigue
April 11, 2009 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
Isn’t it wonderful to have access to a world of knowledge for our consumption and upon which we can build our businesses, differentiate our brands and better direct our personal lives? Or not.
In fact, when we’re overly driven to add more, to learn more, to understand more, to know more.. we can set ourselves up for the suffering that sneaks up when we’re overly attached to more and more of anything. The excitement of discovering new content, and following new threads and people, wears off and we’re left bewildered about why there’s a sudden shift in our mood to one of tension with mind and body in a knot.
We’re all susceptible to concept fatigue although I believe its easier to see in others.
For example, self-awareness is the cornerstone of my business and personal direction. So I’ve been stoked to recently discover new ideas, insights and perspectives at the intersection of consciousness, neuroscience and cognition. This week alone I added several books and videos. I was on a roll, stuffing my mind non-stop with great new stuff and figuring out how it would fit. My ego loved it. But the resulting dissatisfaction and total energy drain helped me recognize, and hopefully be more mindful about, the paradox of concept attachment in the conceptual world. You get stress, not success.
Antidotes include stopping at the first sign of tightness, breathing, relaxing and reading anything by Pema Chondron.
The value of You!
November 24, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Leave a Comment
RedShift: The New ROI-Of You
If everything you read or hear about money and finance contradicts your present experience, what you want and where you’re going, why look or listen? Think about it: do you want the so-called “experts” to determine your worth?
You may protest, saying you have $100 in the bank and owe $20,000, so you know you’re toast. Really? By what criteria? Most of the financial valuation criteria was designed for a world economy that bears little resemblance to the present, and maybe none to the near future.
So perhaps:
You’ve heavily invested in your physical well-being that will likely prolong your life for 20 years. Is that not a high-yield investment?
You’ve created a global micro-branded business that is not generating much revenue. What about the many intangible assets that can be amortized? How much? How long?
You’re beginning your encore career and are concerned with making yourself and the world better. How do you value your present and future impact? On how many lives? For how many generations even after you’re gone?
You’re sticking out, for 8 more years, a job you despise to meet your financial goals. How do you value what you really owe for that 8 years, or beyond?
The probable scenarios are countless. What does yours look like?
Remove your attention from the 100% negative financial reporting and boldly claim and create the value of you. Its not a fantasy. Its creative authority. Perhaps your -$19,900 negative worth is actually +$4 million. Which will you intend?.
VRM and latent buyer intention
September 15, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I gave my Intro. to Social Networks for Small Business presentation over the weekend and like to open the workshop describing how the shift in power from seller to buyer has been the driving force. So I’m happy that I’m now following VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, an emerging buyer centric platform. The ProjectVRM Blog: Developing tools for customer independence and engagement with vendors, provides a good overview. VRM is particularly interesting to me because its tied to the Intention Economy.
The Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or “capturing”) buyers. (Doc Searls)
Most of the VRM work that I’ve scanned is about how relationship, data, identity and transactional tools will support the paradigm shift to truly open markets, where sellers compete to fulfill the buyer’s stated intention. I’m most interested in VRM development with respect to how it will address not just the obvious, but also the latent, buyer intentions:
- Are intentions beliefs that direct thought and action?
- Can intentions direct action that is at cross-purposes to what is wanted?
- When do thought and action become habitual?
- Can negative habitual actions be changed as awareness of intentions increases?
This may be an area where conversations matter most to buyers and where sellers have the ideal opportunity to earn respect and trust. I’ll be closely following this work, thinking about latent intention scenarios, and how some of my existing program frameworks may be useful to the VRM Project.
Knowledge and change
July 28, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Leave a Comment
We hear a lot about the importance of asking the right questions when 
solving problems and making decisions related to change. Unfortunately, the right questions are rarely asked although there’s a lot of lip service paid.
The greater the challenges, the greater the likelihood of default, reactive, political and ego-driven change response, often couched in buzzword expressions like “out of the box”.
Asking the right questions requires consciousness raising about your knowledge zone. The costs of not being aware include: weak competitive strategies, resistance and low morale, being at the mercy of fate or luck or external conditions and forces.
Whether you’re leading your personal, team, divisional or organizational change, you’ll turbo-charge the question-asking process with the courage to examine your individual and collective knowledge beliefs.
Technorati Tags:
alignment, business coaching, empathy, executive coaching, leadership, personal coaching, self-knowledge, meeting facilitation
Not Knowing “How”.
May 1, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off
I’m noticing increasing individual and collective asking of others in private, business and public life that they answer the following: “How…how are you (or am I) going to do that?”
In one of my last jobs as an employee, a contract came in for strategy consulting for a major retail client and was assigned to me. I was pressured by my manager to communicate “how” I was going to do it and my answer, explaining my experiential process, was not the answer my manager wanted to hear. During that time period, another strategy project was requested by a financial services client. The manager and another consultant determined that using a “thought tool”, that someone in the company had read about, was “how” that project would be done. The general consensus was that I would surely sink and the other consultant would succeed.
In the days that followed, I spent a fair amount of time staring at a large blank whiteboard, doodling around with some terms that kept popping into my mind, thinking about experiences and learning that seemed to fit, following my intuition about what to research and who to interview, and playing around with some patterns, inter-relationships and visuals. Strategies began to emerge for potential large-scale client opportunities and the project was deemed a big success. The other project proceeded much more definitively than mine in a step-by-step path to meet the goal; and then it hit a wall because the final recommendations were pretty much common sensical, small, incremental improvements for the client that did not justify their investment. Concessions had to be made to the client.
So now, a decade later, I think: could I have done better answering “how will I do it”? Probably not to the satisfaction of the person asking. What I have learned is to be vigilant (the “V” in D.R.I.V.E.), and to help others be vigilant, about the negative power and creative buzz-kill in insisting upon asking: “how?”.
Technorati Tags:
creative process, leadership, solo professional service firm
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