Sat Nav for your life

Posted on March 10, 2020March 10, 2020 by Jeremy Lewis

Do you sometimes feel downhearted, overwhelmed or disenfranchised with modern life in a fast-paced city? Are you losing your sense of yourself, your place and community?

“Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize.” Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Activist.

We rely on Sat Nav to get us places we want to go in our lives. What if there were a Sat Nav for your life: a simple wellbeing solution to help you become more open-hearted and open-minded and to find the wonder in the everyday, every day?

Take a walk

“Go for a walk – you could discover the meaning of life.” The Guardian.

I’m currently reading Wanderful, by David Pearl. He is the founder of Street Wisdom, a global not-for-profit with a mission to bring inspiration to every street on earth. Several years ago, I experienced my very first Walkshop, and I’ve been running them ever since for groups of people who are looking for fresh answers to their challenges.

It’s a simple technique that anybody can do for themselves, once they’ve been introduced to it.

As part of Leeds Wellbeing Week (March 30^th – April 5^th, 2020), I am running two such Walkshops:

A full, immersive, three-hour version on Tuesday March 30, 13:00 – 16:00, meet at on Leeds Art Gallery steps. Get tickets
A shorter introductory Walkshop on Wednesday April 1, 12:30 – 13:30, meet in the Leeds City Art Gallery foyer. This one even fits into your lunchtime! Get tickets

Tune in, slow down, wander

“Find all the answers you need on your doorstep.” The Telegraph.

Both Walkshops involve tuning our senses in to the city streets. Answers are everywhere, you only have to look. In fact, you’ll learn how to look and so you can repeat the technique as a self-coaching exercise in the future.

You will experience heightened awareness emotionally and cognitively, in how you choose to move and of your creativity. That is, we tune up you heart, mind, body and soul to be more aware of the messages the city streets are sending you.

Answers are everywhere… you just have to look

“[People] must necessarily be the active agents of their own well-being and well-doing… they themselves must in the very nature of things be their own best helpers.” Samuel Smiles, author of Self Help , 1859.

If you are seeking inspiration and fresh direction: in work, in life, as you’ll discover, the answers to our questions are right in front of our eyes. We walk past them every day.

Learn how to be your own best helper.

Discover the wisdom of the streets.

Turn on the Sat Nav for your life.

Get tickets: 3-hour Walkshop 1-hour Walkshop

The A to Z of OD: R is for Reflective Practitioner

Posted on June 18, 2019June 18, 2019 by Jeremy Lewis

In which I outline three steps to become a reflective practitioner.

In his seminal work The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Dr Stephen R. Covey uses an example of a woodcutter felling trees with a blunt saw. The workman believes he is far too busy felling trees to take time out to sharpen the saw.

There are three levels of reflection: (1) taking time out to reflect, (2) reflection-in-action and (3) becoming a reflective practitioner. Each represents a more evolved application of reflection and each level of evolution aids organisational development to a greater and greater extent.

1. Taking time out to reflect

You are a busy professional – just like the woodcutter. You have been trained in the rigour required for your own profession, whatever your profession may be. How do you go about a task? Well, you probably draw of your professional training, expertise in your subject matter and experience in the real world. You may well have particular preferences in how you go about your work; you have become a great problem solver, and yet you may become stuck in your ways; you may also find there is tension between the professional rigour you seek to apply and the relevance of your specialist knowledge in the real world.

When I run facilitated learning sessions, individual coaching and group coaching sessions, the most significant benefit managers and leaders tell me they feel is finding space and time to think; to talk and listen to others with similar challenges. They are pining for more time out to reflect so they can become more effective when they are back at work.

2. Reflection-in-action

Taking time out to reflect, think and plan is great; it can really help you get perspective. However, a lot can happen during the time you are taking out, meaning you go back to work with even more to do – even more trees to fell, if you will. You have taken time out to sharpen your saw, however it can blunt again very quickly when there is so much to do.

Reflection-in-action represents the next level. This is reflecting on your actions in-the-moment. It is like being a fly on the wall, watching you at work. You are doing and reflecting simultaneously. This takes practice. That said, it is the route to mastery of applying your professional discipline in the workplace because it helps you become aware of your implicit knowledge and to learn from your experience as it happens. It resolves the rigour versus relevance paradox.

3. The reflective practitioner

Professional mastery goes beyond rigorous problem solving using the science of your discipline. It requires what Donald Schon (author of The Reflective Practitioner) calls a “reflective conversation with the situation”. It enables thinking and doing to feed each other so that every action gives pause for reflection. Doing this requires practice and the benefits are enormous. For the professional in business, it equates to wisdom and influence and calmness. You not only act with discipline, mindfulness and mastery, you are also aware at every moment why you have acted that way and are more likely to get the outcomes you intend.

Mastery of OD practice, where you are intervening in organisational systems to effect change, requires this level of reflection.

Summary

You do not need to do leave the office for a day’s workshop to reflect; you can build time into your daily or weekly routine to do it, right at your desk, in a break-out area, over lunch, going for a walk, whatever suits you; you are not too busy to look after yourself.

Practise reflection-in-action; be the fly on the wall observing you in action, sense the dynamic between you and others. When you can do this, you are on your way to becoming a reflective practitioner.

OD thought leader: George Ritzer (b. 1940)

Not strictly an OD thought leader, American social theorist George Ritzer examined the rationalization of society and coined the term McDonaldization. His thinking has profound implications for organisational development.

Following Henry Ford and McDonalds Restaurants lead, many organisations have reengineered their processes for efficiency. McDonaldization is rationalisation taken to its logical conclusion. Efficient, logical sequences of business processes produce results that are predictable in quality, calculable in quantity and controlled. These are the hallmarks of McDonaldization: efficiency, predictability, calculability and control.

However, over-rationalizing processes has unintended consequences: in McDonalds, the term fast food is literally a misnomer: the over-rationalized process requires customers to order via self-serve terminals and wait in long queues to be served relatively unhealthy, unappetizing food.

In our desire for the components of rational organisational systems, we have allowed unintended consequences that do not serve our human interests:

Efficiency does not allow for individuality and sneakily turns customers into workers. This has now happened in supermarkets too, where we are expected to self-check out
Predictability means uniformity. You only need look at the typical high street to see the same rows of brand names, limiting both our choice and the expression of creativity
Calculability favours quantity over quality. Two-for the price of one on all-but-rotting fruit, anyone?
Control means deskilling the workforce, automation and loss of jobs.

We have inadvertently dehumanised our workplaces and our society.

Back in 1993, Ritzer saw the move to over-rationalized systems as inexorable. We have somehow found a way to cope with all this rationalization – nay crave it – as it reduces risk to us as individuals in society. Why risk an independent coffee shop when you can guarantee a certain quality from Starbucks?

Some 25 years later and the robots are coming. Is this simply the next step in over-rationalizing our organisations and society? Or perhaps we might find a way deploy digital solutions to deal with the rationalized elements of organisational life without dehumanising our workplaces and free human potential by inviting creativity and innovation into our working lives?

In the digital age, I believe OD can help systematically create workplaces that are more human. Stop tinkering with processes for efficiency and control and start working on the whole system; put customers at heart of what we do and enable and empower staff to be creative.

Next time: S is for Supervision

The A to Z of OD (Part I)

Posted on May 14, 2018May 14, 2018 by Jeremy Lewis

This is the first part in a series of articles that will set out the A to Z of organisation development. The series will consider the principles and practices, the tools and techniques and the past and present thought leaders that have shaped the field. I don’t know exactly what will be included under each letter of the alphabet. That will emerge. If you have any thoughts on what you think should be included, get in touch and we’ll discover together where this goes!

But first, we must discover what is OD. And to do that, we must first decide what is an organisation.

What is an organisation?

An organisation is a group of people who come together to achieve a common purpose. They establish a collection of systems and processes that produces more together than the sum of their parts. These components continually impact on each other, depend on each other to thrive and collectively contribute as a ‘whole system’ towards achieving the organisation’s purpose.

Different parts of any organisation perform different functions and can become highly specialised. This specialisation creates a need for coordination at a ‘whole system’ level, i.e. the need for more and more sophisticated leadership and organisation.

What is organisation development?

Organisation development is an ongoing, systematic process of implementing sustainable change that recognises and draws on this ‘whole system’ thinking. It also uses applied behavioural science to understand organisational and team dynamics. After all, organisations are human systems – they only exist as a collection of people coming together to achieve a common purpose.

The goal of organisation development is to maximise the organisation’s effectiveness at serving its purpose.

A is for Action Learning

Action learning is a process whereby participants study their own actions and experiences to improve their performance. You do it in conjunction with others in small groups called action learning sets, typically using the services of a facilitator.

Action learning propels your personal development further and faster in the real world. This is because your peers are helping you reflect on your interactions with other people and the learning points arising. This guides future action and develops real-world wisdom rather than traditional educational processes that focus purely on knowledge. It is particularly suited to leadership development in organisations, where participants are working on real problems in the real world that affect real people.

OD thought leader: Chris Argyris

Chris Argyris (1923-2013) was a founding father of organisation development. He is known for seminal work on developing learning organisations. He pioneered Action Science – the study of how people choose their actions in difficult situations.

Action Learning and Action Science are related. There is a risk the former may inadvertently encourage ‘single-loop’ learning: you act, you reflect on the outcome of that action and then make practical adjustments so that you revise the action you take next time.

Argyris argued that humans are overwhelmingly programmed to act based of defensive thinking. Organisations reinforce this defensive behaviour through institutionalised routines. Such routines prevent individuals expressing concerns, encourage avoiding behaviour and promote a lack of authenticity. It is hard to break this vicious cycle.

Argyris proposed a double-loop of learning. Double-loop learning means to be reflective in-the-moment, to continuously pay attention to the present to make your positive future intention a reality. We must continue to learn, and we must continually relearn how to learn. For me, reflective double-loop learning is one of the cornerstones of organisation development.

Next time: B is for Behaviours

When did this journey truly begin?

Posted on January 12, 2017January 20, 2017 by rgt88

First posted on LinkedIn March 2, 2016

There’s an old folk tale of a tourist visiting a monastery, where he was greeted by an ageing monk and invited in for tea. While the old man prepared the tea, the tourist asked about the monk’s humble lifestyle – a simple bed, chairs and a table, a few books and a prayer mat, a basic cooker and no fridge. “How do you manage to live like this?” asked the visitor. “No telephone, only a few clothes and no radio, let alone a TV or computer?”

The old man replied with a question of his own. “Where are your possessions?”

“Oh, I’m travelling”, the man responded. “I’m just passing through.”

“We are all just passing through,” replied the monk.

I chose to spend much of the day today walking and reflecting. With my partner by my side, I trekked through the moorland near my home, setting down some fresh tracks in the snow. We had an idea of where we were heading, but the snow obscured the footpaths and we took several wrong turns as we passed through the glorious Yorkshire countryside. We eventually descended the moor, found a pub for some lunch and later took a train back home again.

I feel blessed to be able to take a day out every now and again and just be. Pause. Reflect. Are we following our own path or someone else’s? When did this journey truly begin?

And so it seems there are no such things as wrong turns, only paths we never thought we’d take. And in the end, we’re all just passing through.

Jeremy J Lewis

@growthepig