Wk#3 — being part of living systems
DDO
In traditional organizations, most of change management consist in aligning people to the strategy. The consequences are disengagement and politics. Then comes the question of developing people.
This week I learnt about Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDO) and Robert Kegan, whom Laloux refers to in Reinventing Organizations. The principle of DDO is the exact opposit of what people who talk about “resistance to change” do to transform organizations. Being a DDO is all about aligning the organization to people. In DDOs, people tow the organization. The only way to develop the organization is having people to get developed.
Decurion
Better than theory, we had the opportunity to interact with Bryan Ungard who has the amazing title of Chief Purpose Officer at Decurion, which is actually a DDO. He told us what it means from his perspective. He are a few, bold ideas I picked from Bryan:
- You can grow a business and in the same time create the conditions for people in the business to grow and become whomever they want to be in their life
- My job is to make sure that there is no trade-off between the company flourishing and the individual within that company
- You cannot flourish somebody else: you only create the conditions that allow them to flourish
- Evolutionary purpose means for me serving something that is much bigger than yourself through the unique contribution that only you can make
- Our company needs to serve a larger whole that fits into the living systems of our planet, our regions, our communities. It’s the only way that we are going te regenerate ourselves, our organizations, the places that we live.
- We need to admit that we are part of living systems
- Life serve life
Uncovering some blind spots
Our assessment this week was a personal exercise to uncover some blind spots that we have. I found the exercise smart and useful. We all have blind spots (things that we ignore about ourselves) but it is not always necessary to have a look at them. The purpose of the exercise if I understand it well was to uncover some of our blind spots in order to unlock capabilities that we have. It is simple and powerful. But you need to accept to look at who you are completely, which is (very) uncomfortable for most of us.
For me, I believe it has been useful. I did the exercise on Wednesday evening. It was an intensive and tough moment. But when I woke up on Tuesday, I felt relieved.
My improvement goal was to be more persistant when looking for new customers. I was procrastinating the tasks I had to do to get more clients. This (procratination) comes from negative beliefs that I have about myself, which in the exercise are called “assumptions”. Examples taken from my assumptions:
- I am not good in launching new businesses
- There is always a better leader than me
- I am not good at sales
Since I know now that these are only assumptions, it means that they are not systematically true. This means that I can think twice before behaving against my goal.
For example instead of calling my contacts to tell them about my new company, I sometime sit at my desk and do other stuff like working on my website. I know that my priority is to look for customers. If I do anything else, I just have to ask myself: “Is this the best thing to do right now to make the company grow?”. It might not be.
Employees from DDO companies do this type of exercise all the time when they look for improvement. They do it with their colleagues. There is no border between personal life and professional life in the meaning that what you learn at work, you can apply it at home to be a better parent, a better friend, or a better whatever.
