What would a 285 Year Old Tree Say to YOU?

I had the wonderful opportunity to work with a group of people a couple of weeks ago in a quaint retreat area about an hour outside of Paris, France. This is an extended development initiative with a version of an action learning design and this was one of the initial sessions. The retreat itself is surrounded by wonderful trees and some of the more majestic ones have small labels on them indicating what type of tree it is and the age. Spreading out next to a large patio where a lot of the group ended up working one day was what seemed like the grandest tree of all. It was just beginning to sprout new leaves as spring had taken hold and it had been sprouting leaves for 285 years!

The first leaf on this tree emerged in the year 1728!

I think when we are in the presence of so very old and still so very alive entities we can’t help but imagine what such entities might have seen in their lifetime, what they have experienced and what they might have learned. And we often wonder what they might say to us given an experience of time we can only fantasize about.

I went back out to that tree later one evening once the hustle and bustle of the day’s session had passed and just put my hands on that big old tree and imagined what she might have to say to me (for some reason this tree felt like a she… to me anyway).

Here are some of the things that came forward:

• Try your best to do really good work with all these people, but don’t take yourself too seriously. I’ve seen a lot of people like you and those that take themselves too seriously usually don’t do good work.

• When you get old like me, don’t worry too much how you look. It’s a losing battle and those that care about you think you look majestic no matter what.

• I’ve spread a few million seeds around over the years. Most just blow away or die but some, like that 205 year old youngster over there don’t. The mystery is, you never know which ones might take hold so all of them are important even if it feels like most of them are just a waste of time.

• Don’t keep score too much. It produces way more losers than winners.

• What’s it feel like to be able to move around? Do you ever wonder what it might be like to be rooted and grounded for 285 years? Most of you don’t seem too grounded to me….

• Your best friends are never too far away. Make sure you take the time to look for them.

• Bugs and birds and vines and other stuff have been hanging around me for all my 285 years. Sometimes they are really irritating but mostly they’re just trying to get by. We get along ok even if we don’t understand each other too well by remembering that.

• I’ll likely be firewood some day and I’m ok with that.

• The worst invention ever is the chainsaw. At least with an axe you had to work harder. The guillotine was pretty nasty too I hear but I never saw one of those.

• Ok, you can take your hands off me now and go get some sleep.

This is not a post about nature being a metaphor for learning or how what we do should be more ‘natural’, more connected, more whatever that nature is trying to teach us. It’s simply a post about standing under a really old tree and imagining what the experience of that age might say, did say, to me.

We’ve all had this type of experience and sometimes we make it more complicated than what it needs to be by trying so hard to learn something. Maybe we just need to experience and see what happens.

Maybe that’s true about our organizations as well…..

So what might a 285 year old tree say to you!

Author – Tom

What Costs More; the TMP or the MBTI?

Sometimes don’t you just get sick and tired of answering a question?  I’m pretty much at that point with the above question.  It’s not so much that the question is a bad one, it just tends to originate from a comparison that isn’t accurate. That comparison typically being the cost of the MBTI Interpretive report to the E-Team Management Profile.  When you compare these two assessments in this way you are not comparing apples with apples and that’s important.

So to try to put some perspective on this question, below is a chart comparing what comes with the E-Team Management Profile and the approximate equivalent (if available) with the MBTI.

E-Team Management Profile	Approximate MBTI Equivalent
Team Management Profile Approx 25 page report with the following sub sections:   Overview   Leadership strengths   Decision making   Interpersonal skills   Team building   Areas for self assessment   Related preference roles   Linking (how others can best interact with you)	Interpretive Report for Organizations 10 page report with a focus on:   Strengths   Leadership style   Preferred work environments   Areas for self assessment Decision Making Style Report 9 page report with a focus on:   Decision making
Personal Discovery Workbook Basic profile information, background and ways to use your profile.  Included.	Introduction to Type in Organizations Workbook Basic profile information, background and ways to use your profile.  Additional cost.
Preference Comparison to Worldwide Medians About 50 different comparisons available such as male, female, organizational level, function etc.  Included and accessed as desired by end user.	Preference Comparison to Worldwide Medians Available in the MBTI Manual.  Additional cost.  Not included and not easily accessible by end user.
Underlying researched high performance team mode lMaterial available to leverage this model as a stand alone concept.  Included.	Does not exist
Online videos explaining the concepts and models of the profile Accessible to the end user as needed.  Included.	Not available Equivalent information would be found in the Introduction to Type booklet.  Additional cost.
On-line exercises to build understanding of the models of the profile Accessible to the end user or facilitator as needed.    Included.	Not available Numerous exercises exist typically requiring facilitation and/or material.  Additional cost.
Interactive ‘Pacing’ application Multiple use application to provide tips on how to better interact with others.  Uses end user preferences to generate tips.  Driven by the end user as needed.  Additional cost.  Activated by facilitator for end user as part of profile set up.	Work Styles Report 14 page static report with steps provided for two people to develop a more effective working relationship.  Additional cost.
Interactive Job Demand Preference Match application Multiple use application compares end user preferences to perspectives on their job requirements as it relates to the Types of Work Model.  Additional cost.  Activated by facilitator for end user as part of profile set up.	Do What You Are Workbook Additional cost
Profile Questionnaire set up and administration Included	Not available, or Possible additional cost

Given that there are geographic pricing differences we haven’t included actual costs.   But even if you don’t add in the MBTI manual or one of the reports the cost of the equivalent MBTI material in our part of the world  would be about 15% more than the TMP.

So the question, ‘What costs more; the TMP or the MBTI?’ is not the right question to ask because you do not get comparable things for that assumed cost.  The better question is ‘What do I need to make this work effective?’  From there all the considerations that are important and real to the work can be applied to your decision.

Both these assessments are good.  They need to be compared appropriately to ensure they are used effectively.

For more information on TMS profiles and our recent developments click here.

Author – Tom

Habit or Innate – Does it Matter?

I just finished reading the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.  During this time I’ve also been paying attention to discussions and exchanges on the topic of innateness.  And being in the work preference assessment business this topic often comes up.

Our position on preference assessments has been made clear in a variety of posts; we lean toward the social construction of preference as measured by these types of assessments, which would put us more onto the side of habit than innate.

But outside of preference assessments does it really matter if important parts of our behavior are learned habits or innate characteristics?

Well, I think it matters a lot!

Especially because the idea of innate seems to get thrown out there so often with very little evidence to support what actually can be proven as such.  And when the term innate is used to describe behavior it tends to be interpreted as something that the individual has very little, if any control over and something that will not change.  At this point all types of troubling things can happen; acceptance without question of behavior that is problematic, loss of accountability to change that behavior, the search for innate traits and characteristics that produce desirable (or non desirable) behavior, a belief that important parts of our identity are created outside of the influence of ourselves and others, and perhaps the most troubling of all; a belief that we have little choice or affect in changing our own behavior.  We are who we are, like it or not.

Duhigg’s book however points out numerous examples of people changing by focusing on behavior as a habit and trying to understand the dynamics of that habit and then actively pursuing changing the dynamic and thus the behavior.

For me the reason this matters and why looking at behavior as primarily a habit is that it keeps alive the possibility of change.  It keeps alive one of the most important things we own, choice.  That possibility, that choice is either severely compromised or dissipates completely when we see behavior as primarily innate.

I don’t see this as a naïve or rose-colored glasses perspective.  That anyone can choose to behave any way they want and if they want it enough it will happen.  Changing habits is not easy, in many cases this type of change may be the biggest challenge of our lives, and it may not work.

Yet if we focus on behavior as a habit we will continue to try to understand the dynamics of the habits of our lives since the possibility of change exists.  If we focus on behavior as innate we either give up on change or try and understand just what is innate.  And for me, the search for that understanding is naïve given our highly connected and interactive experiences as a human being.

So I land on the side of behavior as habit.  If you want to try to change my thinking I would assume you must think the same way

Author – Tom

Balancing the Psychological and the Social

This post was originally published in the TMS Learning Exchange – December 2012.

We seem to live in quite a ‘psychological’ world. A world where everyone understands the words ‘ego’, ‘personality’, ‘psyche’, ‘identity’, ‘self’ and so many other words and phrases that, in some way or other, have a sense of individual creation and then ownership attached to them.

The starting point for a world understood psychologically is internal and individual. The first sentence of the prolog of Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, captures this well:

“My life is a story of self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole.”

One of my sincere hopes for 2013 and ongoing is that we find ways to take the best of this psychological perspective and balance it with a social perspective. A perspective where the words ‘construction’, ‘emergence’, ‘transformation’ and ‘interaction’ are better understood as part of what makes us who we are at any one point in time. And that who we are is seen not so much as an identity we own, but one that is more fluid, contextual, and shared in its construction by the countless day-to-day interactions we have with others.

I think the pendulum has swung too far to the psychological side and has created a place, for the individual that psychology has created, that too often is lonely and full of guilt, shame and blame. Perhaps with a little more balance toward the social we can find more ‘human’ places to ‘be’.

As the psychological perspective has taken precedence the idea of the individual has become paramount. We, as individuals, are seen as both born with and having created the identity we now own. We are alone in its goodness or badness, its rightness or wrongness, its worth or lack thereof. And it is the I, the individual, who is seen as having sole and unfettered domain over this identity.

As the concept of the psychological individual has become dominant, what that individual should ‘be’ has been idealized in almost every walk of life. We are inundated explicitly and implicitly with what we should be like as a leader, a manager, a mother, father, daughter, son, consumer, citizen and on it goes. These idealized identities are virtually impossible to attain, yet we are somehow supposed to measure up, and as sole proprietors of our identities it is up to us alone to attain these mythical standards of personhood. And when we cannot reach these heights on our own, we find ourselves in this place of guilt, shame and blame.

The gifts of the psychological perspective; deep reflection, a search for greater awareness, comfort with the transpersonal experiences we all share as well as the vast differences we do not, get lost as the pendulum swings too far. No perspective, exclusive of others, is healthy, and I hope we can let the pendulum swing back a little, and our health as perfectly normal humans can be reclaimed.

What does a social perspective bring, and how might it help us to find balance?

A social perspective brings context into focus. A perspective that reminds us that who we are is significantly affected by the place, time, and people we find ourselves in and with. A focus on context allows us to be a little more the product of the space we find ourselves in and a little less of the person that should be able to transcend that space.

A social perspective brings relationship into focus. Relationship and interaction as immediate causal factors in the emergence of our very selves. As we have discovered through complexity science, the relationship between things may be more important than the things themselves and this can be another way of seeing ourselves. A focus on relationship allows us to believe that the potential for true personal and social change resides in every interaction and allows us to see ourselves less as the expression of innate, unchanging characteristics.

A social perspective brings a focus to the present. A realization that the future resides in the here-and-now and that history can be reimagined by how we think about it today. An acceptance that nothing is more important or real than what, or who stands before us at this moment. An understanding that, while we are dramatically influenced by the weight of our histories and the lightness of our futures, we are not shackled to them since we have the capacity to choose in the present. We have the capacity to choose to act into an uncertain future.

A social perspective brings acceptance to irresolvable paradox. Where context is important, rightness and wrongness become more relative, truth is no longer absolute. The heroes and heroines of yesterday can be the pariahs of today. What is accepted in one place and time is not in another and this can be understood. We can find space for difference while not losing our sense of belief. Paradox need not be resolved.

The social perspective allows for the natural existence of uncertainty. George Herbert Mead talked of a ‘conversation of gestures’, where meaning is not found in the initial gesture alone. Meaning emerges from the interplay of gesture AND response. The incredible complexity of our past and as well as our hopes for the future come to bear on each interaction we have and the outcomes of those interactions are founded on this complexity. Uncertainty exists in every interaction we have. It is normal and natural. Acceptance of uncertainty allows us to fail or succeed and move on, rather than being racked by the impression we should have been able to somehow manage the uncertainty away.

Finding a little more balance toward a social perspective is a challenge. A broad challenge. The psychological perspective has influence from our first realizations that we are a separate being: from the first time we are scolded and told to ‘think about what you have done!’; from the first time we walk into a school and experience a teacher; from the first time we are told who the heroes and heroines of our society are; from the first time we are measured as an individual. We are taught from childhood that we are individuals, and that we are separate and distinct, and these teachings spread into the makings of our institutions, organizations and societies. It no longer seems to be a choice of which perspective we shall take. It is more like the water in our fishbowl, simply an unrecognized need of our existence.

My hope for more balance is not unfounded. As we struggle with the individual consequences of a pendulum swung too far, there are hints that perhaps a choice of perspective does indeed exist. The challenges of unprecedented levels of depression, stress, bullying, and a resurgence of fundamentalism are not being adequately addressed by a psychological approach. There are hints of change needed, some even from within:

James Hillman and Michael Ventura in their book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy And The World’s Getting Worse say “…Because psychotherapy is only working on that ‘inside’ soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore.” Robert Aziz in his book The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung states, “In great contrast then, to the highest symbol of the Jungian Paradigm, the archetype of the self – which is linear as opposed to nonlinear, concretized and fixed as opposed to dynamic – the highest symbol of the Syndetic Paradigm is that of the Empty Mandala.”

But perhaps more importantly for me are the hints of change I see with the people I work with. Having shifted focus away from many of the dominant perspectives that inform organizational development work, most being psychologically based in the service of certainty, I now focus with people on the day-to-day interactions they have. And how those interactions create patterns that may be sustaining and how we might consider changing those interactions. We talk openly about the uncertainty of our organizational lives, and that even in the midst of this uncertainty we will move on together, because that’s what we do.

The stories and experiences people have in organizations resonate with this perspective. We see ourselves much more fully. In many cases we can position the trappings of organizational process and procedure as simply more formal platforms for the continuing conversations that make up what we call organizations.

It is a more balanced perspective I think, and one that seems to fit, just a little better, with what we experience, what we live in our lives and our organizations.

I hope for a balance since a swing too far to a social perspective may create a focus where context is paramount and individual choice is meaningless, where irresolvable paradox swallows belief, and where uncertainty paralyzes decision. No perspective exclusive of others is healthy.

In 1914, on the brink of the first Great War Natsume Soseki in his book Kokoro wrote “Loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern world, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves.” We have been paying this price for quite some time and my hope is that we now can begin to choose not to pay it quite so much.

I hope that we choose to balance a psychological perspective with a social one and perhaps find ourselves with a different way of understanding where such wars, both internal and external are no longer a price to pay.

Author – Tom

The Burden of Expectations on Experience

‘Don’t burden my experience with your expectations!’

I don’t really know where this phrase came from but I like it!  Often uttered with a bit of a smile or an air of lightness, it is intended to bring to attention that someone is expecting you to be, or do something different.  You happen to be quite fine currently being or doing whatever you are, and you are gently reminding the person to just back off a bit and focus on what THEY are being or doing and let you have this experience as you choose.

If you change one word in this phrase it takes it to a whole different place, one that I think is important to focus on.

‘Don’t burden my experience with my expectations!’

We of course need expectations, they are probably even inevitable as we consider the future and try to imagine what future, big or small, we might want to have.  Expectations help us to plan, to organize and to focus on what we want.  They also serve to significantly constrain what we experience.  Our focus becomes our expectations and our capacity to focus outside of this becomes problematic.  More problematic is that deviation from our expectations is seen as bad, tainting our experience with a cloud of negativity.

A simple example, perhaps recently encountered by many.  You are planning a nice family get together and dinner.  People are coming from various places and you have high expectations of good conversations, laughter, good food and a nice time to be had by all.  Everything and everyone is living up to your expectations until dessert is served and it’s burnt.  For a surprisingly large number of people this mismatch of expectation and experience will have far greater impact than its logical relevance.  It becomes imbued with the silent ‘Oh, how could I?’ or ‘Oh, how could you?’ and any number of other silent catastrophes that begin to cast a shadow of negativity over the entire experience.

While we may see this experience and smile in recognition, what we often do not recognize is that we create expectations for our experiences that we do not even think about.  We build unstated expectations into almost every experience, often idealized expectations, and do not even realize they are there until they do not match our experience.  By then we have uttered sentences that start with, ‘If only…’, or ‘It would have been better if..’, or ‘I wish that…’ all expressions, when completed will hold some hint of negativity.

As this pattern firmly entrenches itself we find no experience lives up to expectations.  It always could have been better.  Also, experience itself gets constrained into a narrower and narrower band of perception.  We cannot be present to what is actually emerging since we are constantly judging the experience as good or bad against unstated expectations.

Basically we don’t experience much and we feel bad about what we do experience…. Yuck!

Yet this is what the burden of expectations can, and does create.  I think we would be better off thinking about the IDEA of expectations rather than the expectations themselves.  The IDEA of expectations allows for the excitement of what we want and what could be to push us forward with energy.  The burden of the detail is not nearly as important.  The IDEA of expectations provides for a much broader range of actual experience to measure up, perhaps very unexpected experiences.

It seems hard to imagine taking this concept of the IDEA of expectations into our organizational lives.  What on earth would a performance objective look like?  What would a strategic plan look like?  Somehow I think they would look more like what we actually do experience rather than what we expect we should experience.

And there would be much less weight to carry around.

Author – Tom

The Scariest Halloween Costumes Your Boss Can Wear!

As Halloween approaches just imagine the scariest costume your boss could show up in if she or he came to your workspace asking for treats.  Perhaps they might be totally scary showing up with no costume at all but here are a few that we think instill shivers of terror into most of us who inhabit the land of the undead sometimes called organizations:

1. The Budget Meeting Costume – Covered with random numbers that don’t quite seem to make sense.  One huge hand asking for more treats while the other hand slaps at it telling it not to be so greedy.  Depending on your boss, their treat bag is either giant or tiny, but either way don’t reach too far in as both sizes are lined with sharp objects waiting to stab you.
2. The Strategy Costume – Primarily a giant cloud with a number of ugly heads in it.  There seems to be no part of the costume that is actually resting on solid ground.  The term trick or treat is also replaced by phrases such as ‘I have a VISION of candy’ or ‘I am so ENGAGED with the INTENT of ACHIEVING a full treat bag.’
3. The Training Costume – A plain beige bag covering the entire body with nothing of interest on it at all.  Covered in a mysterious sticky substance that the candy sticks to.  Unfortunately the sticky substance loses its effect after 10 minutes or so and all the candy is left behind in a sad trail.  No one really notices though.
4. The Motivation Costume – A collection of posters and coffee mugs with cool sayings on them like – Dream It and YOU can Achieve It or There is no I in Team.  This costume also spits out 100 dollar bills at random intervals but only when accompanied by a strong gust of air which makes it almost impossible to catch them.  It is very hard to walk in this costume as it is laden with everyone else’s candy.
5. The Alignment Costume – Usually a large arrow shaped thing with a picture of a flock of geese flying within the arrow.  This costume is often seen in the company of the Strategy Costume and in fact they are best buddies.  If you ask what the geese are all about before giving out the candy they often turn and run.
6. The Performance Management Meeting Costume – Usually the ugliest costume of them all!  One of those costumes that when you first see it you think it’s not all that scary and then it haunts you at night and causes really bad nightmares.  Interestingly the inside of the costume is covered with a horrible scratchy material so no one really wants to wear it.  However your bosses Mom has told him or her they have to wear it.  They usually only get a couple of candies and just give up.

So what might be the scariest costume your boss could show up in?!?!

Happy Halloween everyone!

Author – Tom

Back to School – What Will You Be Learning This Year?

For many of us there is a different energy in the air this time of year as ‘back to school’ activities begin to happen.  Perhaps it’s finding some cool new back to school clothes, wondering if your best friend will be in your class, and as we get older perhaps wondering what life will be like as we go to school away from home.  And there is always the trip to some store to get school supplies.  We look for just the right, blank notebook so we can capture all the new things we will be learning.

That blank notebook seemed to symbolize the anticipation of learning something new.  That we would diligently fill it up with facts, ideas, doodles; all the things that make up new learning.

So what will you be learning this year?

For me, I just filled up a journal, the last pages written on a canoe trip in Algonquin Park in Ontario, Canada.  My new ‘school notebook’ will be a new journal.  It will be fun to find just the right one.

The last one took about 3 years for me to fill up with descriptions, reflections, ideas, musings, discoveries; all the things that make up new learning.  I looked back to when I started that journal and listed a number of things that had transpired for me and those in my life over the course of those 3 years.  I realized that the majority of what had happened was never really planned with much specificity.  What transpired are better described as ‘possibilities’, perhaps even ideas, but a single, random event could have (and did) change things an awful lot.

This realization brought into clear contrast for me that work; that life emerges in mostly unplanned ways.  And yet paradoxically, at each moment we have the power to choose our course of action.  From one perspective we feel in control, from the other we feel adrift in a sea of uncertainty.  And when these two perspectives come together I think it is best to not let one have precedence over the other.

Perhaps working towards that balance of perspectives is the balance so many are looking for.

I think we are far out of balance right now in our organizations and in many ways our lives as well.  We compromise an acceptance and openness to emergence in the service of control, most often a false control.

So this year I will try to learn how to experience that balance and live more comfortably within it.  I will try to learn how to more effectively weave this balance into the work I do in organizations.  And I will try to learn how to feel a little more grounded in my convictions that this balance is a more realistic way of being and understanding our experience of organizational life, perhaps even life in general.

What will you be learning this year?