Stress — The Enemy is Us
We have met the enemy and he is us. As uncertainty, complexity and change continue to be our daily bread, our ability to cope with elevated levels of stress is increasingly challenged. A peek into the near future indicates…
The Complexity of Integration — A Hero’s Journey
Integration is a much sought-after capacity in today’s business world. Interestingly, it is also highly desirable from both an ecological and human development perspective. The integration of symbiotic species, organizational systems as well as fractured personalities empowers ecological, economical and…
4 Coping Tools for Workplace Restructuring
I recently delivered a seminar to a workplace in the throes of restructuring. Three months earlier, this same company hosted almost 500 employees, today 100 remain with 50 more scheduled to leave within the next month. Although the employer offered…
If It’s Not Alright, Then It’s Not The End
Last night I watched a delightful movie titled, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. My attention was captured by the mantra (see quote below) of its young proprietor, Sonny, as he struggled to create his dream accommodations for the “elderly and…
4 Tips for Glimpsing the Future
What do you see as the greatest source of uncertainty in today’s world? Certainly, driving forces such as digitization, globalization and individuation top most thought leaders’ lists as contributing to the planet’s increased volatility and complexity. However, at the root…
Are You a Suppressor or an Expresser?
As most of us are aware, emotional repression — the conscious or unconscious suppression of painful impulses, desires, or fears — leads to, at its least, defensiveness and, at its worst, disease. The list of ailments is a long one…
Design Principles for Relating, Working and Leading
I am freshly home from the Organization Design Forum held in Atlanta, Georgia, where my colleagues and I presented some of our ‘discoveries’ on the changing nature of organizational design in today’s New Normal business environment. As Socio-technical systems (STS)…
Coming Together, Staying Together, Working Together
In today’s rapidly changing iVUCA (interconnected, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world, the art of building relationships in order to co-exist in community is fundamental for both surviving and thriving. Global agreement, in principle, supports “the quantity and quality of…
Leading With Love
This is what I know about love. That it is tested every day, and what is not renewed is lost. One either chooses to care more or to care less. Helen Humphreys, The Lost Garden So what does love have…
Emotional Intelligence = Choosing Love Over Fear
This is my last week for sharing some of the substance from my soon-to-be-published book, Creating Space: The Practice of Transformation, Vol. 1. In the final chapter of this first volume, the focus on emotional awareness completes the circle of…
Coming Together or Coming Apart
Just as our global society appears to be coming together through shifting values and social paradigms so it appears to be coming apart at the seams with crumbling social institutions — government, education, healthcare, etc. Such duality of experience is…
Mind Over Matter
The phrase “mind over matter” reminds me of my first year university English Literature class. My 1972 hip and eccentric professor themed the year’s readings around R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1960). …