AN INSIGHT
We are so often inspired by the great thinkers and writers of our world today to access a better future, but our ability to implement change can be diminished and even completely crushed when faced with the ever present reality of ‘how things work’ in the everyday.
Interestingly, there are patterns in ‘how things work’ across our organisations. And if there are patterns in this, there must be underlying principles governing them.
I have studied these patterns for 8 years and this is my conviction: Even though we are rapidly evolving our personal value sets in our work, there is a specific set of values embedded in our organisations which we’re not evolving at the same pace, mostly because we don’t realise it exists as a value set. These values are not the spoken organisational values, but a deeper set of systemic values which have a marked impact on our individual choices and actions in our work. (Think for example how difficult it is to implement a well-functioning mentorship programme in an organisation – we know it’s important, we want to do it, but we never quite seem able to make it happen properly. Or any other good intention that may be relevant to you.)
So what we often end up with, is a misalignment between what is influencing our thinking and what is channelling our doing.
The effects of this misalignment frustrates us greatly and is in fact what is holding us back in our organisational change and impact.
Interestingly, there are patterns in ‘how things work’ across our organisations. And if there are patterns in this, there must be underlying principles governing them.
I have studied these patterns for 8 years and this is my conviction: Even though we are rapidly evolving our personal value sets in our work, there is a specific set of values embedded in our organisations which we’re not evolving at the same pace, mostly because we don’t realise it exists as a value set. These values are not the spoken organisational values, but a deeper set of systemic values which have a marked impact on our individual choices and actions in our work. (Think for example how difficult it is to implement a well-functioning mentorship programme in an organisation – we know it’s important, we want to do it, but we never quite seem able to make it happen properly. Or any other good intention that may be relevant to you.)
So what we often end up with, is a misalignment between what is influencing our thinking and what is channelling our doing.
The effects of this misalignment frustrates us greatly and is in fact what is holding us back in our organisational change and impact.