The Main Shift

The gradual discovery over the last few years that it's not really about me and my ideas versus rigid unhelpful people in the organisation has been rather seminal for me.

It's not that I don't have all these ideas that I want to put into practice: I obviously do and that's a part of why I'm here. But the way that I understand this entire process, I think, has become a whole lot more evolutionary or organic. I have come to see the organisation as a living community - with its own knowledge, energy, direction, concerns, processes, and so on. In some ways, it is like a dense ecosystem - with different bits fulfilling different roles and functions - each component having reached its own kind of equilibrium in relation to others, for better or worse. This equilibrium is a delicate balance of function, knowledge, power and quality of relationship and the way these properties are distributed across the system.

When I come along with my nice ideas, there is a need to explore the fit between my ideas and the organisation. The introduction of any new idea - or meme - then becomes a subject of inquiry. Taking as a starting point the fact that the people I am interacting with do not see things in the same way as me, it is important first for me to understand how people see things.

My first thought would then be that, by knowing this better, I can ever more carefully position myself and adapt, craft the ideas or whatever it is I want to bring, so that it appears more worthwhile. I think this makes sense up to a point.

My second thought is that, as I begin to know the system better, I would also start to look at things differently and shift my own sense of what really is a priority and why.

This triggers a third thought which tries to reconcile the first two: have I simply fallen into the 'hole' that the people I am trying to work with are in or am I developing a deeper alignment with that system that positions me better to really influence it. The former is the view that many outsiders tend to hold when I talk to them about myself, my work and my relationship with the organisation where I am engaged. To them, I appear to have become lost, failing to really get to grips with the real issues, taking long-winded approaches to solving problems that are actually simple and can be classified neatly with high-power consultants vocabularies or through catch all statements like: "you just need to change the management, you know..". I have never been convinced by such perspectives, though I have had definite quarrels with various leaders and often wondered why I they posed such immense obstacles to ideas that I found so attractive.

Today, however, I find myself standing somewhere else. I have come to understand more clearly the fact that the organisation is like a living system - like a giant forest full of different species all interconnected with each other, interdepending on each other, each with their own particular characteristics, habits, niche and so on. As with a forest, I cannot simply come trudging in and expect to reshape it in any way that I want and have much certainty - if any - that what will emerge or result will be any better than what is already there - particularly if I don't understand the properties of that living system. Even if I do 'understand it', the gap between what I know and what I can do and what the other people know and what they can do still needs to be bridged if any truly systemic change is to be achieved without conducting what is effectively a surgical operation - i.e. cutting chunks out and converting curved lines into straight edges. For some reason, I have a deep seated concern with the idea of overly rectilinear approaches to things. It seems like the antithesis of sustainable, systemic transformation - something which to me must be a kind of organic, slightly chaotic self-organising process - and our entire vision of empowering people/communities to take charge of their own development process by gathering the knowledge, changing the behaviour and developing the relationships required to achieve this.

I suppose the conclusion is that I have come to see myself as a kind of conduit for a whole host of ideas and the organisation as a kind of living system that I must come to understand so deeply that I become able to translate whatever knowledge and ideas are out there into the language and rhythms that are meaningful to the organisation: to give the organisation what it thinks it needs in the way that it wants it! rather than to give the organisation what I think it needs in the way that I want to give it! So simple, yet so amazingly hard to appreciate!