“There is an ethic that’s been around since the Industrial Revolution (…), and it’s this: it’s More, Bigger, Faster. That is the ethic we’ve been operating on for an incredibly long time now. (…) But here’s the problem with that. There comes a point when we discover that the resources available to do this, reach a limit.” (Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project at Wisdom 2.0 2011 – the video of the full talk is at the bottom of this post)

How often do you hear that your employees or colleagues will need more time or more resources to complete what you or others demand from them?

While training people or while facilitating groups in change projects, I hear this a lot, not to say all the time.

People are faced with demands that do not take into account their resources. And that is demotivating.

It is not the increase of demand that will show people the way to new strengths and resources or insights.

Increase of demand is simply an occasion which may lead to that outcome only

• if people can start making progress through the use of resources which are readily available to them,
• if people consider the desired outcome to be realistic and in some way achievable,
• if they understand somehow that failing is an option, although not a preferred one.

Ok, just a couple of quotes here to illustrate my point. The first one is from colleague Paolo Terni (ok you’ve seen him mentioned here before). In “Is Leadership as We Know it a Myth?” Paolo questions some hardwired assumptions about leadership (and influence). The whole post is a must-read if you are interested in boosting leadership in your organization. Here is my favorite part:

The “leader” has something called “influence”, a thing; he has that because of his or her character; the leader can transfer that “something” to “followers”. Wrong, wrong, wrong. “Influence” is not a thing. Influence is a dance where all the parties involved co-construct meaning and negotiate agreements. The “follower” has as much of an active role as the “leader”. Influence is mutual*

This brings me to my second quote, one from Mark Earls (yep, the Herdmeister, also a regular here on Superblyhuman.com). This is what Mark wrote in the aftermath of the Obama Presidential Campaign in 2008:

We follow each other all the time: vertically as in authorities and leaders we chose together but always and more importantly, horizontally in terms of the people we see around us. Copying by another name
Followership, though doesn’t sound that cool in business – as if it’s worth $billions in remuneration – so no wonder business schools don’t teach it but prefer “leadership” instead
Followership doesn’t sound as cool as “influence” – what the singular folk are supposed to do to us.
Followership doesn’t sound the thing for addressing the big issues that we face; bring on individual heroics every time.
But remember that dull and uninspiring ‘followership’ is what got us where we are as a species.

Mark Earls, “Lessons from Obama” at herds.typepad.com

Add this talk by marketing professor Jamie Anderson …

… and you probably understand why at Superbly Human and Ilfaro we have rather abandoned the whole leadership-influence thing and instead decided to dedicate our efforts and those of our clients to

“If one is truly to succeed in leading a person to a specific place, one must first and foremost take care to find him where he is and begin there.”
S. Kierkegaard.

Experience the art of followership for yourself through a Destination Change workshop or Destination Change consultancy.

Amy Purdy lost both her legs below the knee at the age of 19. Today she is a snowboard champion.

Is this a textbook example of resilience?

Yes and no.

No because summarizing this story in one simple line (going from bad to great) makes it too easy to think of resilience as a personal heroic act.

You have personal resilience, but a story of resilience always involves outsiders and circumstances you benefit from. Here in Amy’s story it seems clear that she has a great family who supported her during her recovery. She teamed up with her leg maker to design her perfect feet for snowboarding. She does not talk about her coach(es) and trainer(s) but I am quite sure these people have been of considerable importance in this story as well.

Amy has a wonderful talent to be grateful and use and cooperate with the talents and skills of others. In coaching lingo: she was willing and able to see and make use of her resources.

In that way Amy’s story is a wonderful example of resilience. Not because of the personal heroics, but of the fact that even in challenging times people are able to do great things for each other and for themselves.

The two of them inevitably go together.

To be is to leave behind, no matter where you are staying or where you are going.

Even if you stay at home, life will still be about leaving behind.

Leaving behind is what we do. It is what we are good at. Collectively.

As we are also good at moving on. It is what our ancestors did.

It is what brought us here.

What brought you here to read this post.

Maybe this thought can be comforting when facing challenges like the economic crisis, global warming and so on.

Some of us go on a world trip to enjoy the experience that they actually can leave behind and still be able to live a good life.

Some of us develop a deep sense and understanding what it means to ‘be here’, through mindfulness, meditation or other practices. They enjoy the experience that they can accept how leaving behind fixed notions and ideas about what we have to preserve and be can set you free and allow you to stay where you are and in that way live a good life.

Some of us do neither of those and live life.

Most of us are.

A bit of the travelers, a bit of the mindful, a bit of the natural.

Simply superbly human beings, who each in our own way are continuously “walking out to walk on”.

Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now, is a book by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze.

At Cultivate Community Resilience people gather to build and share the belief that we can. This Irish initiative has some wonderful animations explaining what we are facing and how resilience can help.

Have a look.

“Ok, coaching. Then you must be a psychologist.” (Read: you must be able to dig deep into the mind and soul of your client.)

No I am not.

As much as I am interested in the human psyche (not as a general assumption but in its particular manifestations of every single person I meet), ‘digging deep’ in a client’s psyche by the means of all sorts of mental constructs I use to reveal some sort of hidden clue to a magical solution has not worked for me nor the client (so far).

Why? Because that sort of deepness is simply another imaginary layer or construct I add to the conversation obscuring what the client is actually telling me. Trying to be clever simply keeps me from picking up the real clues the client (and his or her system) is offering me.

Colleague Paolo Terni formulates it rather well:

“In Solution-Focus circles we like to travel light in the realm of assumptions and explanations. We like to stay in the conversation, as it happens, without adding anything.”

“Because it is in the Clients’ worldview, expressed in their own words, from their unique perspectives, based on their experiences, where sustainable and long-lasting solutions are found.”

I find myself having these kind of conversations quite a lot lately. And honestly, trying to explain coaching isn’t as easy as I thought it would be.

My colleague Paolo Terni sums it up in one sentence: “Coaching is simply a purposeful conversation designed to help clients improve their performances and move forward with their life/career.”

On his blog he refers to a recent article in The New Yorker where Dr Atul Gawande tries to explain coaching from the client’s side. Here is his take on explaining the purpose and meaning of coaching:

“The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate. Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things: operating inside people’s bodies, teaching eighth graders algebraic concepts that Euclid would have struggled with, building a highway through a mountain, constructing a wireless computer network across a state, running a factory, reducing a city’s crime rate. In the absence of guidance, how many people can do such complex tasks at the level we require? With a diploma, a few will achieve sustained mastery; with a good coach, many could. We treat guidance for professionals as a luxury— you can guess what gets cut first when school-district budgets are slashed. But coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.

There was a moment in sports when employing a coach was unimaginable—and then came a time when not doing so was unimaginable. We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.”

First of all: Thank you Paolo for the reference and the quote from the article!

Second: notice what Dr. Gawande says about ordinary people getting the responsibility for extraordinary things. It is our job as a coach to humanize these responsibilities and this world until it becomes viable again. In other words: allow people to see and act upon what is possible in the realm of the impossible and allow them to discover that what is possible is also valuable, is also meaningful.

Third: intelligence is not in the mind. It happens in between minds. Our way of rewarding smartness enforces the idea that you are smart if you can find that solution within your own mind. Nothing that came from an individual alone has ever changed the world. Everything that ever came about in this world, came out of a relationship, of a connection with other people and other things.

Maybe a coach has only to work on five things:

1. This challenge of yours is real.
2. You are not alone here and you don’t have to deal with this on your own.
3. You have already made a meaningful difference to yourself and to others.
4. You will always be able to make a meaningful difference to yourself and to others.
5. Whatever you are facing we can only start from here. What is here which is useful?

On his blog @herdmeister Mark Earls has an interesting piece about the connected life of networked trees in relation to our connected lives. Much of the story is explained in the video above.

Apparently these trees form large connected networks with their roots. The bigger trees play the role of hubs spreading nutrients through the system to other smaller trees who can enhance their chances for survival by tapping into this network and by adding value themselves.

This video actually tells us a lot about being a successful change-agent, which is: are you able to validate the connections you and others have, and can you add value to your relationships and those of others?

According to herdmeister Mark Earls we tend to leave out one of the most important factor that influences our behavior, namely ‘other people’.

“Much of cognitive psychology (and it’s fair to say, much of the Nudge-gang’s work) remains rooted in understanding the quirks of individuals’ cognitive machinery; much of evolutionary psychology seems to be stuck in explaining the behaviour of individuals devoid of their real context – that is, other people.” (Mark Earls, ‘One Tree Stands Alone in the Forest?‘)

When I work with clients who are trying to influence others through change campaigns, we often start with a very individualistic notion of control. It seems like we have to come up with a solution to make it all happen and to gain control about (at least) a part of the network we are working with.

This is a flawed approach, at least for six reasons.

1. It fails to take into account the ‘real context’ as Earls calls it, namely other people having a continuous impact upon those we are ‘designing’ change campaigns for.
2. It fails to attribute sufficient weight to the role contextual factors in general play in why people act the way they do.
3. It fails to understand the rather oblique nature of complex processes in nature (rephrased by John Kay as ‘our goals are best achieved without intending them’ or the shortest route to a goal is not always a straight line) and our misplaced tendency to think we can plan the whole outcome in advance.
4. It fails to recognize that our maps of reality are not the same as the territory, let alone a comprehensive map of other people’s maps of that same reality.
5. It overemphasizes our individual role we play as ‘change-agents’ in influencing the choices of those we tend to change.
6. It keeps us from understanding how we can really add value and make a difference in other people’s lives, and thus make a difference that makes a difference (dixit Gregory Bateson).

Even in a complex project such as influencing the behavior of large groups you can do a fairly simple thing to change people’s lives. That is not by ‘using’ people to co-construct your image of a future perfect world. It is far more simpler than that.

You can always add value to other people’s lives by genuinely caring about your relationships with them and about theirs with others around them. And with others I mean more than just people.

Being a successful change-agent is not about being some kind of mastermind architect or some supreme Neo-like hacker of Life’s Wonderful Mainframe. It is about being a person who cares enough about others to do what it takes to improve their relationships, their connections with the world.

There is something really wrong with the word change-agent in itself, even with the word leader – which is often associated with it. And that is that it implies that you show the way, that you pave the way and that you drag others along.

Not. Well, not exactly.

In order to add quality to your relationships and to those of others, you have to care first, which means paying attention to what makes our lives worth living.

You are a master-follower.

And through that particular kind of attention, through this kind of genuine care, you actually do pave the way for others, but rather in master-followership than in master-leadership.

If you think about it you understand that great marketing, but also any other great service in any kind of field (education, psychology, health, finance, …) is actually about master-followership resulting in adding some meaningful quality to the relationships people are having, with other people, with their bodies, with the things around them, and so on.

The beauty of all of this is that in order to add something meaningful to your relationship with other people and to theirs with others, you do not need big inventions or huge amounts of money.

Genuine attention is an almost inexhaustible and very inexpensive resource. You can spend it anytime you want almost as often as you like. Yet the difference it makes is immense.

Want a more tangible form of this kind of attention? Ask a question. One like: “How did you manage to do that?”

And really listen to the answer.

Ask another question and watch the other person grow.

Want to train your master-followership skills? Sign-up for ‘Destination Change’. More info on this page.

“‘Oh, but one thing … What do I do?’ And her answer was in the form of a question and that question changed my entire life. It changed everything. It set the stage and it set the template for everything that was to follow in my teaching. She said to me: ‘What do you want to do?’. She didn’t give me a directive, a mandate, a manual to follow. She cleared an empty space and said: ‘What do you think you should do?’.” (John Hunter)

And out of this emptiness came “The World Peace” game, a wonderful role playing game developed by John Hunter. Hunter invites primary school children to ‘rule a country’, having to overcome multiple and complex global challenges, or rather ‘learn to live’ with them since overcoming is actually almost impossible.

To me Hunter is like the teacher whose memory make your eyes sparkle again because he or she brought out the best in you. And to me, that is what this game is truly about, about giving young people the opportunity to bring out the best in them and in others, while also allowing the full scope of human behavior to emerge. A truly superbly human way of building trust, resilience and faith with upcoming generations of world-citizens.

“But yet they’re so afraid they may fail. But we have relationship. And there’s a trust there. And with that trust they feel they can attempt it safely. They are allowed to fail as many times as they wish. Because that’s a part of life.”
(John Hunter)

The rest is up to John Hunter to tell you.

Enjoy.

Who is John Hunter?

“A graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, John Hunter is a gifted and award-winning teacher and educational consultant who has dedicated his life to helping children realize their full potential. He has combined his teaching and artistic talents to develop unique teaching programs using multimedia software in creative writing and film courses. He traveled and studied comparative religions and philosophy throughout Japan, India and China.” (source: www.tedxflanders.be)

Jamie Anderson just nails it.

“We’ve got it wrong on social media. (…) These experts talk about social media like something that you do to people. But as we know of course social media is actually about relationships. Relationships are never something you do to someone. Relationships are things you do with someone or with other people. (…) It’s not about social media, it’s actually about something more profound than that. And the term I like to use is followership.”

Followership according to Jamie Anderson is

- to tell people who you are (know who you are, where you come from, what you stand for and project that image)
- to tell people what we are together (the collective, people want significance and they want to be part of your journey, a sense of belonging)
- to tell people where we are going (an electrifying future, accountability and taking an ownership)

Finally, Jamie concludes with one simple but powerful assignment:

“I want you to ask the person next to you: ‘Why should I follow you?’ (…) Because followership is not just about people like this: Lady Gaga, Mahatma Ghandi, Steve Jobs. It’s about people like us.”

Who is Jamie Anderson?
“Jamie Anderson is Professor of Strategic Management at Antwerp Management School. Recently named as a “management guru” by the Financial Times, he has also been included on a list of the world’s “top 25 management thinkers” by the journal Business Strategy Review. Jamie’s research and teaching focuses on the interconnectedness between leadership, strategy and change, and he has advised a range of Fortune 500 firms on approaches to corporate renewal.” (source: www.tedxflanders.be)

Do you want to improve your art of followership?
Superbly Human now offers you “Destination Change” (link), a unique workshop that gives you hands-on tools and experience to map and nourish the relationships needed to increase your followership on different types of projects (change-campaigns, team-building, platform-building, etc.)

For more information: call Hannes Couvreur +32 472 50 90 76 or send an email to superblyhuman-at-gmail-dot-com.