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Lots of people have told me how they hate meetings, interruptions and administrative overhead at work. And on the internet you don’t really have to search long to find excellent blog articles like meetings and why I hate them. Not only the time and energy spent in meetings that do not seem to produce value, the time required for all the context switches is often not taken into account as “work time”. We will only get paid for spending time on actually producing value as “agreed upon with our managers”.

And the better we are at doing “multiple things at the same time”, the more that loss of time and energy is considered a part of the “free economy”. We may actually be asked to spend 50% of our time on a “trouble shooting or problem solving” for that yearly goal setting form, but without taking into account the necessary “context switches”. Encapsulation attempts?

Goal setting form??? Yes, that form that assumes a stable year, and has just stolen a weekend of our time because we know it will come back to haunt us during a performance review. Filling in that form is also not considered “work time” …

The stolen time and energy in filling in forms, meetings, and loss of time and energy due to “context switches” and “power plays” is one of the things most organisations have “tacitly agreed not to talk about”.

Focused on actual response-ability and excellent product manifestation as we creative problem solvers can be, we do not want to loose even more time and energy on fighting the legacy system, and we kinda leave it at that. Kinda, because it makes us hate those meetings, forms, and procedures, and eventually our work.

Trouble shooters’ and problem solvers’ time and energy are taken for granted, become hidden factors, simply because an organisation and management process in general does not desire to find “trouble”, “problems” and “mistakes”. Especially executives do not want to know. We must all just be more positive, n’est ce pas, and success will manifest itself, so “the illusionary top” can get those fat bonuses, and “give” us a “free” lunch?

The Love

Focused on maturity of excellence, we can land ourselves in a position where we get encapsulated by the system because we keep solving the “wrong problem”. The real problem here is the above multiple bind the most creative problem solvers can be in. Solving these system problems requires courage of the problem solver/change artist/foreign element to

• raise awareness on these issues.
• gather multiple viewing points even when “everybody knows that …”
• use excellent communication.
• break any co-dependency dance and attachment with named system so encapsulation can’t work.
• anticipate aggression from the system, even when we would like to believe we are already working in a more fully humane context.

Balancing Our Act

From the Satir Change Model (our experiences as change artists):

In an organizational context, a foreign element can be generated internally, inspired by the desire to improve. This desire can come from management or from participants on the operational level; the change can be mandated or voluntary. How such desires are substantiated by which stakeholder will greatly affect the reaction to the foreign element. In both cases they are reactions. In the case of an unwanted, unexpected or mandated change the people within the organisation (system) may try a number of strategies to neutralize the impact of the alien element. The system may reject and expel the foreign element; people may ignore it, use delaying tactics, or may try to encapsulate the foreign element within the “normal” ways of handling things, or they may try to find a scapegoat to attack and blame.

When mandated sequences of events are experienced a couple of times on the operational level, trust levels of operational people in management being able to lead, goes down quickly. People will anticipate more on potential future management blaming than by management desired changes. Whatever happens, people do learn to anticipate effectively!

And a healthy balanced system accepts and investigates the foreign element mirrors received with care in mind, and integrates what is (re)useful.

People going incongruent in meetings, thereby making the meetings “unfocused” and “unproductive” are a sure signal there is something “hidden” or “blind” in an organisation that needs attention. We can’t simply fill in that “it’s for attention” and ignore the signal. We can ignore it after investigating if and when we so choose. When people want our attention it may be for a reason. Maybe there is some information that may shatter our belief the system is in excellent condition, but if that is the case and if we haven’t chased away all our creative problem solvers yet, the gains are just around the corner and can outweigh the loss of our personal shattered belief by a tenfold, minimally. How interactions and stances can affect a system?

The Challenge

It is what it is. And if people have no desire for “excellence”, for whatever “reason”, so be it.

Any effort to control the nature of things is ultimately useless. One who knows this, however, is free to continue to insist on trying.

Are we actually on the lookout for such signals too, and investigating the system if and when we hear people complain about “unproductive meetings”? Besides meaningful measurables on that beautiful porsche type dashboard, do we also track significant observables? Are we seeing, guiding and steering towards a more fully humane system or routinely looking at an illusionary black box?

Do we really wish for maturity of excellence in our organisations?

Inspiration is not born in a vacuum; excellent ideas are seeded by other excellent ideas and fertilized by still more excellent ideas.

Controlled folly was originally re-designed from the balancing act, to support consultants coaching executive teams and managers. The demand was taken from the AIM UAW alliance executive coaching webpage, and from exchanges with Peter Schoonens, a local consultant.

Inspiration for the Ship of Fools sculpt idea came when listening to Reinhard Mey – Das Narrenschiff (live) — the lyrics in German and English are included below as pdf’s. Thank you Reinhard.

The concepts used are Satir organisational sculpting (pdf) concepts, and a run up for being able to take in such critical feedback as a sculpt delivers, also uses Satir concepts: coping stances (pdf), ingredients of an interaction (pdf), and temperature reading (pdf).

A team keeps having seemingly endless discussions, or the team appears to be in chaos and does not seem to get out.
As a meeting moderator or facilitator, how can I discover what is going on?
And what can I do?

Lots of things may be causing it, so don’t judge too quickly! The field may hold things like one or more team members being driven by some (hidden) want. Fear may even come into play. Or our facilitation. And before we believe that (and start co-avoiding or co-spiralling), we can consider a simple lack of awareness of team members of the state the team is in and/or what is causing it. People have different ways of approaching and working with information and/or have different problem solving strategies; this sometimes looks like -or if ignored can lead to- incongruence.

In simple cases where a lack of awareness is at play, translating between “intelligences” may work. And if our intuition keeps nagging us on “something else”, we can always choose to fearlessly observe and gather information.

If our production doesn’t go according to our design, we would do wise to, besides considering improvements for our operational functioning, also consider the possibility there may be “faults” in our design (the way we currently do things).

Check for clues like listed below for indications of ’something else’:

• Face, manner, and way of talking and moving, seem to project frustration or anger.
• There appears no felt quality of ease and spontaneity in people
• There seems no harmony between what is being said and done and how people look, sound and move.
• People seem to display no openness to and curiosity about new ideas, new experiences, and new possibilities life offers.
• Some or all people appear to be intimidated or overwhelmed by fears of anxiety or insecurity.
• No sense of humor
• Quality of harmony and dignity seem not preserved under stress.

Body language can also give clues to that ’something else’ is on a person’s agenda (or that people have a physical problem)

• Eyes seem not alert, bright and lively.
• Face and jaw not relaxed.
• Head appears to not be held erect and in alignment with the body.
• Shoulders not relaxed.
• Arms not hanging in a natural and easy manner.
• Posture neither erect, nor well balanced, but rather strained.
• Walk or posture is aggressive or overbearing.

We can also observe the way interactions are done:

• People seem not at ease talking about (their own) accomplishments and shortcomings.
• Compliments, expressions of affections, familiarity, or appreciation are hardly given.
• People seem not open to criticism and appear not comfortable about acknowledging mistakes.
• People do not seem to show flexibility and trust in their own mind and skills in response to changing situations and challenges.
• The world out there appears a doom and defeat place, and gets mentioned only in terms of win(ners) or lose(rs).

And we can smell it, and feel the reflections of it in our own internal messages.

When receiving one or more indicators of a foreign element, and potential downshifting was a part of the engagement agreement, a proper action would be to shift attention to the individual team members, and informing people of our observations in a congruent way, asking for help with making meaning and assigning significance to our observations. Of course, this action usually throws the group in chaos.

We don’t have to be liked. We get that at home. We do need enough healthy and professional detachment. And a part of that is not caring. Another thing we need is to allow our selves to feel love for life and all beings. And believing in the five freedoms. Dimensions possibly playing a role in team incongruence can lie within the group itself, can be found to lie within a more historical or individual context, and can also be caused by spells we have inadvertently cast (on) ourselves as facilitator and that need detecting and undoing a.s.a.p.

Serving (hidden) needs/agenda this way is likely to enable the team a congruent focus on the original issues, even if there are different perspectives. Only after all of the members’ (hidden) needs are either “in the open” and have been acknowledged as being important issues and/or have been met, the original problem can be addressed and the team can move to integration of and practice with ideas phase so that original issues may find a solution.

Let’s celebrate our successes and party some!

Communication and stances

The more we learn to (re)cognize stances and their finer shades, the better and faster we can level out our responses when, as we humans tend to have happen to us, we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of incongruence (again). Quite a balancing act and lots of practice, practice, practice ….

Rules

With a lack of esteemed communication in our system, our rules become hidden, outdated, inhumane, written in stone. A likely effect is that people change their needs to conform to established rules. Some may believe that a good idea. In the long run, it leads to Only Might being Right. With open communication, the rules are clear to all, up to date, change as the need arises, and people noticeably practice the five freedoms and will comment on anything that attracts and repels them, in congruent ways.

Results

With hidden rules written in stone, results will be accidental, chaotic, destructive and unfitting. In a congruent system, with open communication on rules, agreements and contracts, and with transparent strategies, the results will be in the flow – we can easily surf chaos.