A toolbox to learn — and a mountain to unlearn
Normally experience is an asset to build on and profit from. However — as I somehow knew already — the benefits of experience are easily outweighed by the downside of the difficulties of unlearning. Many years of experience as staff and leader in traditional organizations can easily block the view into the world of Self management.
The video explains everything…
So while my learning curve this week have been very steep and lead me down on a road sharply bending away from the highway I have been following for 20 year — its is also painfully clear that I need very different driving skills on this new lane. The surface, gravity and topography are all new on this road and requires a different set of reaction patterns. While theory can be learned — suppressing instinctual behaviour is very difficult.
Meeting quite unexpectedly Doug Kirkpatrick from Morning Star in Copenhagen this week was reassuring in the sense that after 25 year he seemed to think only inside the Self Management paradigm.
So while I do not expect unlearning to be one of the purposes of this Leadwise course I think it will be the greatest challenge I — and all my colleagues — will be facing when we implement a new structure in 2018. Time is a factor in unlearning — so the ‘take away’ is maybe — take time !
….
As regards this weeks work I think it was great to work with the role concept in practice — demystifying them into something very pragmatic. It was also great to get started using software with functionalities suitable for modern workplaces — That will surely have a direct and highly effiency improving effect on my own office very soon. There is however some way before I navigate painlessly between Slack, medium, google doc, MUD, Zoom …..But at least I do not have so much to unlearn in this area.
But this is what we got to
For clarity of presentation our metrics and other stuff was not included in this document so for the very dedicated please also consult our working document.
It was great and instructive to be thrown into a group of complete strangers and asked to collaborate — Surely the normal way forward would involve to designate an overall responsible chief and let this person distribute and plan the operation. As this was clearly not an option given the purpose of our course — Self Management was obviously needed. My reflection on this proces includes
- It was useful to distribute roles to every person, but I think we could have benefitted from spending more time on this part of the process
- It is a personal challenge to lean back and see what happens — but is seems to work.
- What is the balance between planning and letting spontanous ideas blossom.
- Graphic presentation is such a strong tool — I wish I knew more about this and had less angst of trying it myself !!!
On the GVA
I did not go very far into this exercise — perhaps because I have done similar exercises many times and somehow I know my own values — what they give — and what they cost me — pretty well already. So I concluded that this was not som important fo r me personally to spend time on.
Rasmus Kjeldahl
Copenhagen
