Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.
Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone’s commitment and intelligence.
For example, I was discussing the use of email and how impersonal it can be, how people will now email someone across the room rather than go and talk to them. But I don’t think this is laziness, I think it is a conscious decision people are making to save time.
Aggression is the most common behavior used by many organizations, a nearly invisible medium that influences all decisions and actions.
In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We’ve chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.
When error holds so much power, play disappears. Creativity ceases.
Circles create soothing space...
Surrendering to life offers some wonderful realizations. We learn we’re capable of being in this dance, of working with whatever happens. We learn to trust ourselves and then others and, gradually, we learn that life itself can be trusted.
The future cannot be determined. It can only be experienced as it occurring. Life doesn’t know what it will be until it notices what it has become.
One of the easiest human acts is also the most healing. Listening to someone. Simply listening. Not advising or coaching, but silently and fully listening.
We’ve taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations – soft-spoken, even whispered at first – that we need to encourage.
Life doesn’t move in straight lines, and neither does a good conversation.
Life is creative. It makes it up as it goes along.
As we let go of the machine model of work, we begin to step back and see ourselves in new ways, to appreciate wholeness, and to design organizations that honor and make use of the totality of who we are.
Power is the capacity to generate relationships.
Space is the basic ingredient of the universe; there is more of it than anything else.
It is time to stop waiting for someone to save us. It is time to face the truth of our situation – that we’re all in this together, that we all have a voice – and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our workplaces and communities.
A world based on machine images is a world filled with boundaries. In a machine, every piece knows its place.
To make a system stronger, we need to make stronger relationships.
We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.