Experiential Capacity Building — Mindful transitioning and handling hidden collective debts
Challenges to Capacity Building in Organizations
Businesses today need to constantly reinvent themselves. In a VUCA world, Transition is a continuously experienced reality for businesses and individuals. Hence most organizations invest heavily in Capacity Building, whether it is to create future leaders, or future managers, who can handle this continuous state of flux or transition. From the organization’s perspective, enabling its people to engage with the transition consciously, allows them to build intra-preneurs and leaders who are agile and responsive and are driving innovation and disruption.
Most Hiring & HR Managers today, however, are at receiving end of the pace-of-disruption. Scrum masters, Agile Practitioners, Entrepreneurs/Founders will tell you that building software/products, is much more easier than building teams. Employee retention, avoidance of team-member-churn, up-skilling and helping career progression of their subordinates, are significant challenges for most managers today. As a Business Founder, Marketing Manager, Product Manager, I can vouch, that its all about teams.
Practice of Building Teams — Triple Immersion
As articulated here, from my own personal experience of journeying through transition, it is a journey of exploration with co-travellers. If you cannot sustain a cohort of fellow travelers, really practicing anything and building teams become immensely difficult. Buddha himself hence said “Sangam Sharanam Gaccahmi” meaning, submit to the process of building the Community(Sangha). So, is building teams or building-capacity akin to building products?
Systems Development and software development, in my experience, is handling diverse moving parts like user-experience, middleware, api-ware, cloudware, hardware, design, testing, developing compatibility and finally integrating it as a whole. Building Capacity and Building teams, is a similar affair, but a more complex one. You have the challenge of handling diverse and eclectic group of people, specializing in their own domains, and most importantly coming from different headspaces, heartspaces and gutspaces. Compatibility & Integration of human psychological spaces, is clearly more difficult than the messiness of technical-wares.
Technical-Debt — Collective Headspace Problem
Ask any Scrum manager, he will say the real catch as we know in software sprints, while we are handling technology messiness, are what we now infamously know as Technical Debts. The Technical to-dos that pile on, as transitions happen, but are not attended to, creating collective-headspace problems. Technical debt and non-refactoring can really overwhelm systems. However, from the previous post we have seen that for successful transitions we need to deal with Triple-Immersion in Messiness.
So, similar to the accrued technical-debt, which is nothing but the gap between action & thinking, there are 2 other even bigger and major debts, namely emotional-debt, and psychological-debt.
Emotional-Debt — Collective Heartspace Problem
Emotional Debt is the accrued piling up of negative emotions, the gap between action & feeling. Let me elaborate. Humans are irrational and mostly our decisions are emotional (yes, kahneman won nobel prize for postulating this). So, as inter-personal conflicts between teams and intra-personal conflicts within teams, pile-up, if they are not resolved in a timely-manner, huge emotional-debts in the form of jealousy, grudges, envy etc, pile-up. So, what happens to all the suppressions, repressions, depressions, oppressions? They create collective heart-space problems. Really have we thought about this?
While Emotional-Debt and its resolution or reconciliation seems daunting, there is an even bigger Psychological-Debt.
Psychological-Debt — Collective Gutspace problem
Psychological Debt is really the accrued piling up of negative perceptions, the gap between action and sensing. Again, we humans have huge psychological biases and heuristics. For e.g. we all make imperfect commitments, when we agree to complete tasks without considering how much time and effort it will take to complete them. With biases like overconfidence, procrastination, akrasia, reckless shipments, etc can have huge impacts on the psyche and morale of teams, while creating collective-gutspace problems. And if not fixed, these psychological-debts are not only toxic, but catastrophic.
Google’s research with 3000 of its employees spanning 300 teams has shown that “Psychological Safety” is the most important Team dynamic for success. The top 5 team psychology dynamics for success as per google, is shown below.
So, there are many hidden debts, which Hiring Managers, Community Managers, Team Builders & HR Managers don’t account for. Such leaders within organizations are well advised to keep an eye out for, experiential programs and practices from other partners, providers and vendors in the ecosystem. Urja program from Kavyata is one such offering helping Managers, Leaders and Builders of Teams.
Why Experiential workshops like Urja? What can be done?
True, most organizations invest heavily in Capacity Building. However, all best practices around the phenomena of transition, solutions to hidden debts, and interventions to enable mindful-transitions, may not be found within organization-guided programs which are internally led and delivered.
For e.g. Not many corporate-teams know, that within Google, teams which adopted a new group norm — like kicking off every team meeting by sharing a risk taken in the previous week — improved 6% on psychological safety ratings and 10% on structure and clarity ratings. ‘Stepping outside’ and ‘Experimentation’ and “exploring the edges” applies equally to organizations as it applies to individuals.
Whether it is characteristics of a Transition journey, the process of transition, or the skills and competencies required for successful transitions, Urja community is unique in these experiential explorations. As Urja’s research has found there are several “frameworks” and “models” with varying stages of transitions. A comparison map shows Restlessness, Striving, Disengagement etc, as some feelings associated with just the start of transition and these change as the stages progress.
Urja workshops are safe spaces to engage with many such models, to experientially feel and resolve them through successive stages. What if the employees of your organization, could tap into a cohort of fellow transitionaries — something more than a community — a tribe that your employees can lean on and be themselves, share fears, aspirations and motivations, without worrying about being judged. URJA creates a community of people who are experiencing transition, takes them through experiential learning methods, which allow sharing, discussion and interpretation of a rich set of diverse experiences related to transition.
The organization, in addition to building capacity for handling a VUCA world, benefits from significantly accelerating the process of its human agents (employees), learning to handle transition. This is done by creating human connect. This is why Urja is designed around experiential interventions that increase empathy, relatedness and compassion, which are especially important in increasing emotional intelligence which helps in navigating transition and also has a direct correlation with well-being and happiness.
So organizations benefit both tangibly and intangibly by nominating and sponsoring their employees to Urja programs conducted by Kavyata. What are you waiting for? Visit the website, sponsor your employee and spread the word to your colleagues and managers. Look forward in anticipation to work with each and everyone of you. Good luck and all the very best!
