Contentment — Anxiety’s Alter Ego
Take a moment now to do some sense making. Move your awareness inside your body and see if you can sense whether you are content. If your experience tells you this is not the case, then sense what is there…
Anger — The Rage of Oppression
Ask yourself, “Which emotions are most challenging for you to understand and then to master? If you are like me, you probably answer “anger, hurt and fear.” In many respects this should come as no surprise considering corporal punishment, one form of social oppression, was only outlawed in Canadian schools in 2004. In essence, we have only begun to change oppressive behaviours that support the development of anger, fear and hurt. Even though research has proven that raising children (or animals) without love develops loveless and fearful beings, we are slow to change our behaviours and beliefs.
From Manipulation to Adaptation — a Shifting Paradigm
From the macrocosm of our planet through to the microcosm of our physical bodies, we are experiencing a radical paradigm shift. A paradigm is a thought model or worldview shared by individuals or societies that influences how they think, feel…
5 Tips for Leading Learning in Organizations
In 1990, Peter Senge wrote a seminal article on leadership and what it takes to build an organization capable of continuous learning. Those of us researching for current best practice might bypass this potentially dated information, but have a look…
Self-determination — You Can Heal Yourself
Whether you are parenting infants and teens or managing a team of employees, your ultimate goal is to develop their self-determination — the skills and choices that lead to healthy, happy, humane living. Simply stated but not easily accomplished because…
Organization Design — Say What???
For the purposes of improvement and/or innovation, organizations redesign their strategies, structures, systems and processes. Over the past 25 years of collaborating with organizations to accomplish their redesign efforts, I witnessed their significant performance improvements. However, only recently (see timeframe…
Adaptive Leadership
I can safely say I spent the past 30 years of my consulting career working to disrupt the traditional leadership practices of command and control. The main reason was not to suit my rebellious nature (which it did) but rather…
Continuously Learning or Sadly Surviving?
At a recent evening meal, I was surprised to hear one of the female guests say, “People don’t really change, do they?” Given the current organizational ethos — change is the only constant — along with women being the purveyors…
STS Collaboration Platform — An Emerging Social Ethos
When we picture a collaboration platform, our mind typically moves to such technology software housed on our computers as enterprise and customer/sales resource planning systems — ERPs or CRMs, SharePoint, Google Apps, GoToMeeting, etc. Many organizations implement these software tools…
Collaborative Organization Design — The Anishinaabe Way
Last week I spent two days designing with a First Nations council that represents 28 communities spread across 55,000 square miles. These grassroots representatives came together purposefully to agree on the strategies as well as design the structure, systems and processes…
Leadership’s Shifting Paradigm
No matter what our occupation or where we reside, how we currently live and work is being redefined by global trends such as: • information and communication technological advances • demographic changes in a highly educated workforce • economic shifts…
Resistance — The Path Out
Human perception (how we view the world) is dependent on what we experience in our body. The anatomy of any experience follows this sequence — first sensation, then emotion, then thought. Our personal experiences of sensation-emotion-thought are limited in that…