What Tao Chi taught me about management

I came across tai chi by serendipity, and I am forever grateful to the people who took the time to introduce me to this flowing way of understanding myself and the world around me.

Tai Chi is the art of awareness in motion, being one with one’s surroundings and yet be entirely apart from them. It is a study in seeming contradictions that actually work together to create perhaps the only martial art where an 80-year-old practitioner can easily defeat a 30-year-old.

Tai chi taught me connectedness and rhythm, the power of a vacuum and wisdom of practicing slowly. It taught me that the strength of my right arm comes from my left leg. That alignment and breathing are the foundation of movement and strength. That a relaxed muscle is stronger than a contracted one.

Yet, I don’t want to spend page after page sharing with you the wonders of tai chi and the impacts that it can bring to your health and wellbeing. I am sure others have done this much better than I ever could already.

What I do want to talk about are implications of tai chi for business.

I find that organizations are a lot like humans who do not practice tai chi — often unaware of their own breathing, their misalignments, and friction that they create.

Time after time, I witness managers initiate more and more initiatives because something is not working.

This is where tai chi is so different from all other forms of physical activity that I have ever encountered.

From early in life, it seems, we learn that if something does not work, that means we are not applying enough effort. So, when thing don’t work, we work longer hours, get more people involved, try harder.

That’s not the tai chi way.

Tai chi teaches us to meet force with emptiness, to sense and listen before we react.

It is a better way to live. It is a better way to manage.

Less stress.

Taking time in the midst of the crisis to find the right place to apply the energy, making sure everything is aligned and in sync with that application, then and only then delivering the right amount of force, usually even that by redirecting the energy that is already involved in the problem.