Evolutionary Provocateur

Competition or Collaboration

Tuesday night I attended a Festive Holiday evening made up of two women's groups. One of the activities, in addition to raffling off a huge number of door prizes, was a reverse count down on 40 bottles of wine. Forty bottles of wine is a lot of wine it seems to me, so I found it interesting when many losers later there were 4 women at the front of the room each of whom could potentially walk away with 40 bottles OR they could opt to cooperate and walk home with 10 each...still a good take.

Interestingly, they chose to compete. Down to two possible winner, the option to split the booty was presented again and this time they went for it so each left with 20 bottles each.

It left me wondering when is enough enough? When does the choice to cooperate over ride the need to win. Women pride themselves on being relationship oriented and certainly no one went home grumpy because things turned out the way they did. Yet subconsciously, it does beg the question: have we become so oriented to competition in the workplace that it now shows up in the social space as well?

When facilitating leadership learning programs in the mid-90s, my colleague inserted a simulation game from Thiagi into the program. It involved cash-real cash. Not a lot of it but enough that it revealed some deep truths.

The results were eye-popping! These were managers and supervisors who were pretty good at espousing values and principles that warmed your heart. But when the cash got short and the scarcity mentality grabbed hold, a whole different animal came out. One that was quite prepared to cheat and out manipulate to get the booty.

The good news, in an odd way, is that everyone in the room knew that the word was not to be trusted. Actions said it all. It is really unlikely that anyone in the room was aware of what drove those actions. It is certain that they knew what it meant in terms of their relationship...subject to change when the money, power (or anything in short supply) is at stake.

Since research shows that 86% of fraud is commited by male managers, perhaps playing cash games is not a bad routine test to see how what really motivates action. 

Label-Label-Label

In the original version of Scrooge, at the end of the story, Scrooge searches frantically for something to label his gift with while mumbling label-label-label. Label in that context, has a wonderful meaning. In organizations it has come to mean something else.

Personal assessment tools were originally intended to provide insight into your character. The idea was that by knowing yourself, your preferences and those of others it would be easier to understand one another and so work in diverse teams with greater success.

In companies where the practise is NOT to run around with your hair on fire reacting to each and every emergency there is a real potential that the information can be used wisely. Unfortunately, the sky is falling-my hair is fire approach to day to day corporate survival creates a situation where cataloging human behaviour and intellectualizing emotions has clouded the purpose and negated the value that this kind of information could bring to understanding dynamics of teams or selt.

Emotional connections are critical to being human. They are also critical to any company culture which hopes to retain talent, particularly in workers born between 1975-1995. These workers have zero tolerance for the  notion to 'suck it up' or for any incongruence of emotion and reality.

In the haste to catalog humanity as a label, we miss out on what it means to be human and different. We also miss out on all the creativity and innovation that comes from recognizing the power of that difference to realizing achievements that know no boundaries.

I am not that sure that collectively we can afford to do that. Are you?

Seeing the Whole and its Parts All At Once

A recent blog over at Leadership Now on integrative thinking caught my eye. First, when 92%of executives feel that the challenges they are facing are more complex than ever before it suggests a different approach is required. Steve Roesler's quote over at All Things Workplace, "Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better." -Sidney Harris, pretty much says it all when it comes to recognizing that to make a move, you have to make a move.

Secondly, integrative thinking, as noted at Leadership Now, is about recognizing that it is possible to see the parts and the whole simultaneously without bursting a brain fuse. For some people this comes naturally; for others it must be developed. The delightful aspect of that reality is that no matter what, it requires an expansion of how many ways there are of thinking about any given situation.

The fact that things are more complex creates a wonderful gateway for understanding just how you do think and when the boundaries are feeling pushed. This is typically the spot where rebound takes place, back to that safe place where everything was separated into its nice neat piles with clear demarcation lines. That road inevitably leads back to the tempation to simplify by falling back into rote and reliable thinking patterns that frankly, are not effective when the going gets more complex.

Seeing the big picture and its component parts simultaneously demands more advanced skills to see into the situation, using intuitive insight residing in everyone, and then working with the ability to visualize, also innate to all. The joke is you can't get there from here, where here means relying on the thought patterns and love to sort and catalog.

The first step is to know where logical analysis has become more dominant over intuitive insight. The second step is to know what you trust. When those two are clear, so are the options and a whole new field of choice.