Waiting, Expectantly and Sadly

Artist Credit- The Amazing Scott Erickson Scott Erickson Art

2020 is almost over.

Thank goodness.

In a year like no other, we have all experienced a kind of collective social and emotional trauma that leaves no one untouched. Life in our country has gotten harder for almost everyone. There are millions out of work, food for many is scarce. Those who can work are being stretched to the very limit of their capacity. The fabric of our society is thin, fragile and tearing in many places. Our systems and structures, the things on which we rely for order, are being threatened and dismantled. Some of this is hard and some of it is good, necessary and overdue. Racial and ethnic inequities, long ignored and dismissed by many, are slowly and awkwardly being addressed—may we see this continue. Unhealthy and destructive power structures are being exposed, are slowly and awkwardly being dismantled—may we see this continue too.

For most of us, these issues seem out of our control and ability to impact. And it causes us anxiety, stress and even alarm. There is much to be overwhelmed by in the world around us.

And as I have watched and stay connected to many friends and colleagues around the country, it seems this year has brought many of us great personal pain and heartache as well. I know this is true for me. I have navigated this year with dear friends who tragically lost a daughter to gun violence, a life taken too soon and senselessly. I have experienced my own young adult child wrestle with issues of identity and emotional health. I lost my oldest friend to a 30+ yearlong battle with cancer. Another dear friend is facing a diagnosis of chronic illness. Two of my closest friends have had grandchildren born with illnesses that may take years of interventions and surgeries to heal. Two others lost their adult children to suicide and another is dealing with mental illness in her teenager. The pain and heartache that touches me through these losses. both my own and those I love, feels very overwhelming these days.

How do we stay whole, even marginally sane, in the midst of these challenging times? I think we must really lean into lament, grace and gratitude. For it is here we can find flickering glimpses of hope.

 Lament, an ancient and often forgotten practice, is simply the ability to express grief and sorrow for something lost. Western culture is prone to dismiss or diminish lament. We do this in all kinds of ways.

• We compare our loss to someone else’s and discount that ours really matters.

• We shortcut our grieving in favor of activity and productivity.

• We suppress our painful emotions in an effort to lessen or deaden the pain.

• We resort to numbing activities—drinking, drugs, mindless binge-watching and binge eating.

But a healthy season of lament allows us to freely express our pain and sorrow and grief and then begin to come to a place of acceptance so that we can integrate and assimilate our suffering and move from a new, and stronger, place emotionally. 

In this season, this long Corona Virus winter, we have all lost something. And we must create space to lament. To grieve what we have lost. Not to become a victim of our circumstances, but to freely and righteously give voice to the emotional and often physical pain of our losses.

 Grace is the receiving of unmerited favor. When someone forgives you for an offense that caused them hurt or harm, they have extended grace. Being released from an obligation or debt that weighs heavy is an important form of grace as well. And in this season, I have come to believe that we must learn to give ourselves grace. We burden ourselves with obligations to ourselves and others that become difficult to achieve.

 Yes, you can give yourself grace, in small ways. You can create space in your day to breath, to work more slowly, to allow yourself to process your feelings, and to create space for things that are life-giving and restorative. Grace is also permission to release things—obligations, relationships, burdens we carry that are unhealthy. Grace is as necessary to our wellbeing as breathing.

Gratitude is a close cousin to Grace. It is the ability, even in the midst of terrible pain and hardship, to find that one thing that you can be grateful for—a good cup of coffee, a snuggle with your puppy, a ray of sunshine peeking through the clouds. And we know that when the mind processes gratitude, it actually changes something chemically in our brains, moves us forward with something we thought long lost—hope.

 In the Christian calendar, we are entering the season of Advent. The season of Hope.

We wait with hope and expectation for the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ. He has been promised to us by the ancient prophets and so we wait, anticipating that yet unseen goodness.

 We know how the story turns out, and yet each year we mark these next 4 weeks with expectant hope. Why? Because I think we need the reminder, the remembrance, each year that there are often long seasons of waiting. Of lamenting. And of grace and gratitude. Life is marked by all of these seasons, however much we may want to avoid them. In the Christian tradition, there is no promise of healing or wholeness in the broken world of today. Only that all things will be reconciled to Him, Jesus, in the new heavens and the new earth. And that is our hope, in the now and the not yet of Shalom, Flourishing.

For today, we lament. We freely give and receive grace. And we seek out those things that we can be grateful for, even in the darkest of days.

This piece of art, part of the New Icons collection by Scott Erickson is a picture of this season, of pain and loss and expectant hope. Eve, our spiritual mother tethered to sin and brokenness, yet reaching towards the hope of the savior in the swollen belly of Mary. Sadness and Lament. Grace and Gratitude.

Here are some Advent Resources for you:

Honest Advent by Scott Erickson

Inner Work Webinar Wednesday December 2, 2020 2pm ET Register here

GearShift: Realigning in the Emerging World of Work— Shift 4

2019 Ferrari, Maranella Italy, October 2019

Last fall my husband and I took a wonderful trip to central Italy. After a few days in Bologna, we headed to Florence and Tuscany. on our way, we detoured slightly to stop at the Ferrari and Lamborghini factories. These stops included the opportunity for us to drive a Ferrari on the open road for a brief stint. As we got in, I squeezed into what was barely a back seat as Roger took the wheel and our guide jumped into the passenger seat. He turned to me and asked me if I wanted a spin at the wheel before our allotted time period ended. I eagerly said yes, I’ll take the last 5 minutes. We headed out onto the open road and Roger slowed down and then punched the accelerator over and over again to hit mind boggling speeds.

it was thrilling.

As it came closer to my turn, I realized two things. One- how much fun my husband was having behind the wheel of this $300k dream machine, and two- that there was no way I could figure out how to drive this complex car in just a few minutes. In one of my more generous wifely moves over 40 years of marriage, I gave my husband the last few minutes of driving the Ferrari.

This is where we find ourselves on many fronts as leaders right now. Not enough time to make sense of what is in front of us and the recognition that knowing how to drive a 5 speed Toyota Corolla does not provide sufficient experience to just jump behind the wheel of a highly engineered complex machine and put it in gear.

That is why we must make this 4th shift from Problem Solving to Sense-making- we can’t fix this problem.

Most of the skills we have learned up to this point around decision making and problem solving will not support the kinds of environments we are now navigating. The growth edge for leaders right now is to make sense of what we are seeing and learning in complex environments. Welsh social scientist and leadership guru David Snowden captured this way entering into complexity and navigating it quite differently in a framework he calls “Cynefin”, a Welsh word meaning habitat or haunt.. Snowden proposes that we all have connections, often through things we cannot see or grasp, and our work is to truly explore other ‘habitats’ to learn how to make sense of our own.

In the visual below, there are the obvious or clear kinds of problems, and more complicated problems. This is where modern management and leadership science has spent tons of time creating models and tools to equip their people to lead and problem solve. This requires an analytical and engineering mindset and way of approaching challenges. And it is still helpful and useful for many kinds of organizational needs and challenges.

The chaotic, which we have all experienced over these last months, requires quick, decisive action that stabilizes the environment. But it won’t work over time.

Cynefin Framework, copyright David Snowden

Engaging complexity is not a simple thing to pay attention to as it is counter intuitive to traditional decision-making and problem-solving methods. However, the cost of not moving into this way of leading will severely limit you to the opportunities that begin to emerge and cause you to stumble if you are only relying on what you already know.  In order to make sense of what we are seeing and learning in uncharted territory, we must be able identify patterns as they emerge and then build our experiments and prototypes around those patterns. If problem solving requires categorizing and analyzing what we are seeing and experiencing, then a very different framework and road map is needed to “sense-make”:

• Listening and probing first, not jumping to categorizing and analyzing:

  • In problem solving, our starting point starts from an assumption that we know what the destination is, we just have to ‘engineer’ our way to the solution. The starting point is “we know”. Sense-making starts with curiosity and question asking.
    Assumes that “we don’t know”.

  • Gather qualitative data- ask questions about what people are experiencing around a specific challenge or concern. Capture key words and phrases. Over time you will see some patterns emerge that become actionable.

• Minimum Viable Decision Making (MVD) is learning to move forward when you can see the bigger picture to some degree but you have insufficient data. Often called   Abductive reasoning, it what is needed when inductive or deductive reasoning are not useful

  • In abductive reasoning, the major premise is evident, but the minor premise and therefore the conclusions we can draw are only probable. We must experiment and be willing to move with insufficient information.

  • Thick Data, not just Big Data, that leads to Rich Data. Thick data is the result of we learned in step one- by seeking patterns and making sense of what people are experiencing and marrying it to Big Data. It provides us with new perspective and insight so that we are not defaulting back to what we know when we begin to examine Big Data.

• Emergent Practices, not Best Practices:

  • Best Practices only work on familiar, tried and true systems. Things that are known and repeatable. They tend to be rigid and focused on compliance when constraints are fixed.  Over time, without review and improvement, they will produce mediocrity.

  • Good Practices allow for some flexibility, and offer governing constraint while allowing people to move with some creativity. They function best when the problem is known, and the solution can be identified, but the path to get there is complicated. They are very helpful in engineering environments.

  • Novel Practices occur when the environment is chaotic and there are no effective constraints. People must act and respond with little or no complete information and stress is often high.

  • Emergent Practices offer enabling constraints, but allow for a high degree of flexibility and agility. They can also emerge when we see that something that already exists- either tangible or intangible- can acquire functions for which they were not originally adapted or selected.

To make these shifts will require interventions in all of your existing systems. It may even require you to abandon some of your systems and build new ones. The danger of simply rubber-banding back to pre-pandemic norms is that you will extend the trauma and pain your people are already experiencing, rather than giving them new conditions to realign around that create safety, resilience, possibility and hope. If you are actually relying primarily on what you know and what has worked in the past, you may find yourself and your organization in dangerous territory. 

This work as a leader is not easy or simple. It will require a significant commitment of your time, energy and focus. It might seem like this can wait until things calm down, or you have more certainty about the future. But when things settle down, and you have a better line of site to a new future, you may have lost some of you very best people along the way. Is that a risk you are willing to take?

 Undertaking this work, especially in complex times, seems daunting. But it has never been more important. If we can be helpful as you navigate these shifts, please email here to schedule a 30 minute consultation.  

Next week, I will publish a conclusion to this series that will seek to synthesize and integrate it a bit based on some stories from the field.

GearShift: Realigning in the Emerging World of Work Shift 3

1984 Toyota Corolla

In the fall of 1983 I bought my first new car. It was a red 1984 Toyota Corolla. It was a 5 speed and it was zippy. By now my ability to handle a clutch was pretty good. But this new one still took a bit of time to become accustomed to driving. Much like the next shift, we may assume that what we already have in place and know about the state of our people is sufficient. It is not. And we must prepare to adjust our thinking and practices around how we care for the whole person, not just their productivity and ability to contribute.

Shift 3 is from Employee Engagement to Employee Well-Being.

Engagement is not possible if employees don’t feel safe and there is anxiety in the organization. You may want to start with Engagement, to know where your team stands. Surveys are a powerful way of listening to your people. and knowing what they think and are experiencing right now is vitally important. Mark Murphy, in a recent Forbes article, strongly urges leaders to assess engagement now, while stress is high and the organizational system is anxious. You are much more likely to get better data, and to hear from those people who are even more likely to be silent now, in the disconnected environment many are operating in. To do this kind of deep listening, and then to respond to it in visible and meaningful ways, builds much need trust and resilience into your organization culture.

And building trust just might be the most important thing you focus your attention on in the near term, and here is why.

Over the last 13 years, the internal think tank at the Mars Corp has undertaken research and application for what it calls the Economics of Mutuality. They identified 4 types of capital that must be considered AND measured in order for Capitalism to be healed. The four kinds of capital are:

• Individual Capital

• Social Capital

• Financial Capital

• Natural Resource Capital 

Bruno Roche and Jay Jakub wrote the primer on their research findings in 2016 called Completing Capitalism: Heal Business to Heal the World

Focusing in on Social Capital, which outlines what must be present for well-being, is described through these 3 essentials.

“Just three simple component variables—trust, social cohesion, capacity for collective action—account for enough of what constitutes social capital that all of the other variables need not be considered by business, unless of course one is undertaking a purely academic exercise.”

It is more important than ever to create conditions for these 3 essentials to be created. These three elements are the hallmarks of organizational health and social well-being. And there are real business implications to be drawn from the EoM research on social capital summarized here: 

“Social capital has an impact on economic development. Social capital drives prosperity and economic performance, although it is often ignored and omitted from consideration… Like any form of capital, however, social capital can be used, created, and wasted. It can also be intentionally grown through business interventions.

It is measurable in a stable, scalable way, making it business relevant. Social capital, moreover, is stable across varied geographies, and data collection is scalable.

It is actionable in business operations. Using social capital, we can assess the fertility of the socioeconomic environment where we and others operate. And we can diagnose and track the impact of targeted actions/interventions by the business.”

Ensuring that you are building social capital in your in your team or organization is of primary importance. Questions to consider might be—Are we extending trust to our employees? Are we as leaders demonstrating trust? Here are a few simple ways to build trust:

• Communicate often and clearly.

• Communicate good news fast and bad news faster. This is a time for radical transparency.

• Ensure your leaders are speaking with one voice, and that voice is calm and congruent. This means that your leaders must be connecting and communicating with one another on a daily basis.

• Assume good intent. Your people are doing their best, given the uncertain environment. A few may take advantage of these circumstances: deal with those people individually. Do NOT reset or make policy based one or two bad actors.

• Extend grace. As much of possible. Everywhere.

• Examine your decision making process. Will this decision, strategy or tactic create opportunities for cohesion or tear cohesion apart? Is this decision being made reactively or responsively

It is easy to move with expedience when decisions press in from multiple fronts. And there are decisions that must be made quickly. But most decisions can be paused for at least some period of time to be consider and evaluated. Do this whenever possible. Get input. Listen to those who will be most impacted. I am not suggesting decisions be made by consensus. But the more your people can participate in a decision-making process, the more ownership they will have in the final call.

This is the time for prototyping and experimenting. It is NOT the time for strategic planning. There is too much unknown. Give people permission to try things and learn. Ensure that experiments, especially ones that donet go well, don’t yield punitive action.

Do our teams have the ability to act and make decisions about their work without checking with a member of the leadership team?

Do they have true agency?

Are we removing obstacles that allow them to do so?

If you are truly creating high trust, cohesive environments, then your teams and people will feel empowered to take intelligent risks that will lead to innovation and new pathways forward.

Are we providing ‘psychological safety’ in our work places? Amy Edmondson, in her ground-breaking book The Fearless Organization defines psychological safety as

“the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking. People feel able to speak up when needed — with relevant ideas, questions, or concerns — without being shut down in a gratuitous way. Psychological safety is present when colleagues trust and respect each other and feel able, even obligated, to be candid.”

This season of Covid, massive unemployment, deep unrest around race and equity and tremendous uncertainty has produced a kind of Collective Social Trauma that we are all experiencing, regardless of race or gender.

Finally, do you have resources available for your people who may be facing enormous anxiety and uncertainty in areas of their lives outside of work? This is the time to build up those resources, including counselors, chaplaincy programs, and Employee Assistance Programs and make sure your people access to these people without fear of retribution. The emotional well-being of your people may be very fragile right now. Resourcing them and supporting them in ways that make sense for your business are vital. These are not just ancillary offerings for a few people in the margins. This is a necessary resource that every organization must make available.

Undertaking this work, especially in complex times, seems daunting. But it has never been more important. If we can be helpful as you navigate these shifts, please email here to schedule a 30 minute consultation.

Shift 4: From Problem Solving to Sense-making: complexity requires a new kind of thinking and radically new ways of learning.

GearShift: Realigning in the Emerging World of Work Shift 2

1977 Volkswagen Beetle

I upgraded my driving skills, less grinding and more stability, but stayed with a VW and, for a brief season in the early 1980’s, drove an orange beetle that I loved. That poor car withstood a couple of wild years with me, but sadly succumbed to a bad roll on route 36 between Denver and Boulder. I survived but the car did not. At the risk of overextending a metaphor, this next gear shift from Guiding principles to Grounding principles is similar.

Identifying core values or guiding principles has been a key part of many organizational cultures in recent years. But often values or principles become pithy words or phrases that hang on the wall or are brought out for show and tell, but do not really have true operational meaning for organizational life.

And while in theory core values or guiding principles should also be timeless, they must be reexamined and redefined for the new conditions and environment we are all experiencing. Some of your deeply held assumptions about your business or nonprofit are likely no longer valid and unless you dig deep to excavate them, examine them and then adjust, you will be stuck in past that is no longer viable.

Core values only really become operational when we get clear on what behaviors we will see as people are working them out real time. For example: an organizational value may be “Relationships Matter”. Lovely. How will we know if this being lived out? One business unit I know operationalized it this way:

• We don’t take work home- our family relationships come first.

• We don’t work after 5 o’clock- if one person has to work late to complete a client project, others stay to help without being asked to ensure everyone leave as close to on time as possible.

• We don’t work on weekends- work without rest is disordered and will cost us relationally and financially.

• We don’t gossip- this mandates effective conflict resolution and communication. Interpersonal dynamics get worked through, not worked around.

This is only an example, and might not be viable in your organization, but you must do the work to get as SIMPLE and CLEAR as possible on your grounding principles to keep relational connectivity as healthy as possible.

Well-crafted grounding principles and values need to be operationalized in ways that everyone understands and knows how they impact their daily work. They answer the question ‘What Matters Most” to us as an organization.

In working environments where people are not face to face as often, getting clear on grounding principles is a vital part of organizational health. This includes examining and addressing any of the well known, but unspoken rules that actually drive more of the culture than what has been articulated. If you regularly hear “Well, thats just how we do things here,” then you know that you have a kind of sub-culture at work that is actually driving and building your culture in ways you may not want. If you have not done the hard and sometimes painful work to make grounding principles clear and operational, then they are not useful or valuable for the organization and staff. You may as well roll them off the road and leave them in the ditch, much like my orange Bug.

And if you are the leader, you may be the one in intentionally driving this behavior. The things the leader pays most attention to are good indicators of what ACTUALLY matters most to the organization. For example, if you have a value around people and relationships, but the only thing your people every hear you talking about is budget and revenue, then you are communicating to them that people are not most important at all.

One final note on Grounding Principles for this cultural moment. Do your values inform and guide your hiring and staffing decisions and practices? In a time when every organization must be paying attention to diversity and inclusion with increased intention, you might want to to the painful work of examining how your actual values, the unspoken ones, are informing the process. How many women or people of color are on your team? How many sit in leadership roles or supervisory roles? Do your recruiting or hiring practices invite diverse applicants? The research demonstrates that organizations that value diversity are more productive and perform overall better financially, as well as culturally.

Diversity and inclusion cannot be a one-time campaign or a one-off initiative. Promoting them in the workplace is a constant work-in-progress, and should be maintained and nurtured to guarantee effectiveness. Empathetic leadership is key to this transformation. For real change to happen, every individual leader needs to buy into the value of belonging – both intellectually and emotionally. 

Undertaking this work, especially in complex times, seems daunting. But it has never been more important. If we can be helpful as you navigate these shifts, please email here to schedule a 30 minute consultation.

Shift 3: From Employee Engagement to Employee Well Being next week