I help organizations fulfill their purpose by discovering their shared story.
I advocate on behalf of unseen narratives that inspire collaborative work. This is my secret. My real clients are unresolved stories.
When I hear mission statements, I hear disembodied executive marketing declarations that fail to answer the question “Why should I care?” They fail to bind operational intent with human desire. However, our shared stories answer the critical questions “What are we doing?” and “Why would I want to do that?”
Natural hierarchies evolve to manage complexity. Though organizational hierarchies require authority, the purpose of healthy authority is to honor, update, and reinforce the integrity of our organizing narratives. So how do I advocate to resolve these organizing narratives?
I start by inviting clients to have what I call a Slow Meeting. I meet one-on-one with ten to fifty selected participants, participants believed to carry important pieces of the context. With each interview I add to, and augment, the accumulating narrative using words and sketches. I include their desires, their expert understandings, and their insights.
To appreciate the power of a Slow Meeting, let me describe our familiar Standard Meetings with new detail. With limited preparation we gather the participants. Look around the room and notice: when ten people meet, 45 pairs of relationships are in the room; when twenty people meet, 190 pairs of relationships are in the room. With twenty people in our two hour meeting, each person has only six minutes to speak if no one asks a question. Do you feel the strained and diverse power roles, the self-protection, competition, and the need to look good or to be right? When we are most vulnerable we reach for standard meetings that will bring, at most, acquiescence. Let’s return to our progressing story resolution.
After our Slow Meeting, I invite all participants to gather in Group Resolution Sessions. Notice how this differs from our Standard Meeting. Unique elements are present in the room, including: A person who has deeply heard each participant’s input – me – and a collected context from which to work. There is also an absence in the room, our anxious high temperature has cooled. Now participants can concentrate on what can only be done together. I begin by presenting our co-created shared narrative for mutual vetting and refinement. Then, we concentrate into sub-groups to discover strategies to work with our obstacles and constraints.
When we mutually recognize that the time has come, I capture our work in a coherent report. I create a touch stone that will reinforce the shared story and guide future implementation.
I bring complex systems modeling skills, physical metaphors, and focused communication skills to synthesize previously inaccessible narratives. This is how my career has grown from Chaos Theory and complex system modeling to nurturing our shared story relationships.
I help organizations fulfill their purpose by discovering their shared story.