Evolutionary Provocateur

The International Association of Facilitators Conference

TheIAF is over. What great fun it was to be in the company of so many progressive thinkers. I want to thank all the participants who came to Life as a Mirror: Using Collisions to Advance Personal Mastery and to the half day: So They Cooked and Ate the Facilitator. Your response to the material was wonderfully affirming. I particularly appreciated the range of participants in the room covering organizational development, community development, corporate line functions, science and consulting. If I missed anyone please forgive me.

While there I received an email from colleagues of mine about a certification program in Social Action Research Program offered through Williamnette University. Through KINSOL (KNowledge and Innovation Network of Society of Organizational Learning) I have had the pleasure of being in the room with the three faculty members and know you are in for a great program. The social networks of performance related research supports what we know intuitively but don't always follow corporately. Networks drive performance; not hierarchy. Through the trio of Anne Murray Allen, Nick Zeniuk, and Dennis Sandow you will learn a lot about how to listen (naturally increasing performance) and how to get yourself out of the way when learning how value is created in your organization. And it is at the Rex Ranch, a beautiful space and place.

Can Millennials Really Change the Workplace?

Tom Davenport's blog over at Harvard raises this question. From what I have learned and can see, there is no doubt about it. The second part of the interview with GenY leaders Gavin Hollett and Duncan Penn is now posted on Management-Issues.com By the time I had finished the two interviews I confirmed that:

Gen Y love to work in teams. Social action research tells us that performance runs through goal oriented social networks. Totally on track there. Cultural Obstacle: command and control management styles and the assumption that infomation is power not a useful tool.

Gen Y are wired globally to what is going on. Totally on track there. Being unable to deny the magnitude or imperative of social, global and environmental change means you can access the innovation required to address these more complex issues. Peter Senge is doing so via his work on sustainability.

Gen Y are committed to doing what they love to do. Compromise and repressing their desire to make meaningful change is simply not on. While companies might hire Gen Y successfully,unless they are completely congruent in walk and talk and offer opporunities to develop and expand an employes talent, the capacity to retain that Gen Y empoyee might well be limited. Those who need security will stay. If they repress their talent to fit the culture, stress-related illness is the result.

Can the Millennials change the workplace? I hope so. There is much untapped talent in every company that relies on old strategies and antiquated beliefs about how the world works waiting to be released into the social network.

Follow the Joy

This week on www.management-issues.com on the Evolutionary Provocateur podcast is an interview with Nick Zeniuk called Follow the Joy. The conversation is part of a larger dialogue through the recent Knowledge and Innovation Network meeting in Tucson which really points to the imperative to turn the hierarchical organization structures on its side, literally, in order to see the horizontal nature of accomplishment. Dennis Sandow, Anne Murray Allen and Nick Zeniuk have all done or are doing work in this area and are the Inspirators for a different model of supporting and enabling accomplishment or performance.

The implications for executives and managers are pretty clear. It means arriving at a much higher comfort with not knowing. In other words, embracing the notion that you don't know what you don't know. In the gap between knowing and not knowing thrives curiousity which creates a climate where discovery replaces convention or habitual patterns.

This is as applicable to personal lives as it is to organizational dynamics. What drives curiousity in your experience? What is the value of curiousity to eliciting joy?

Your comments are welcome!