WELCOME
I enjoy playing golf, although I only started playing recently. It gives me great joy when my swing hits the ball in the right spot. More than that, being on the golf course can be deeply gratifying. Time passes by unnoticed, I am completely absorbed in my swing, and suddenly, with little effort, I start hitting balls that go beyond the 200 meter mark. For myself, it feels like I am thinking with my body. My body “feels” the ball. My shoulders “decide” how to swing.
I also enjoy helping people, teams and organizations that want to develop their potential. Just like with golf, facilitating change can be deeply gratifying. It gives me great joy when an experience that I designed for others, hits the right spot and creates an “aha!” moment. Just like with golf, the best moments are when I am unself-concious but still fully aware of the situation and creating valuable results - aha! moments - in the process. Unlike with golf, here I am not in the position of practitioner but in the position of facilitator (coach, trainer, parent, …).
The dual experience of practitioner and facilitator are deeply intertwined in a virtuous reinforcing cycle. What I feel when I am unself-conciously creating aha! moments with my participants, is also what my (excellent) golf teacher feels when he is able to create my aha! moment before I start hitting balls beyond the 200 meter mark. Just like me, probably my golf teacher is experiencing this powerful combination of effortlessness and effectiveness when teaching me. The resulting powerful aha! moments, in their own turn create noticable change that often allows the participants in the journey to be more effective with less effort (effort-less).
The virtuous reinforcing cycle between effort-less action and aha! moments is both a means and an end. Imagine a team in which people negotiate complex social situations with little internal struggle, and yet perfectly in accord with the situation. Effort-less action might not be the norm in such a team, but it is also not an exception. As are aha! moments. Now take this idea and scale it up, not just to a team, but, to an entire organization; an organization that can negotiate complex, changing market situations with little internal struggle in perfect accord with the situation. Both means and end are desirable. They are characteristic of what is called an agile organization.
The inevitable question that pops up is the question of how to move from our current state of effort-full action into the state of effort-less action. Despite the fact that effort-less action as described above is considered highly desirable, it does not seem to fit in the dominant mechanistic world view of organizations that are all about performing, performing, performing.
If effort-less action is characterized with unself-counciousness, how can it be achieved? Can we make a concious effort to achieve it? Or is it paradoxically, something that can only be learned if in some sense you already know it? Can it be learned at all? In the words of Edward Slingerland who studied effort-less action (wu-wei) in ancient chinese philosophies: how hard can we try not to try? A little bit of brain science turns out to be helpful.
“Give me a firm place to stand on and I will move the earth” said Archimedes as he discovered the (mehcanical) principle behind levers that lift objects that are too heavy to lift. In a left-brain, analytic thinking, dominated world, the focus is on the lever provided by methods that codify new ways of working based on past experience. Not only is the left brain associated with effort-full action (it literally consumes a lot of energy), as brain science teaches us, the left brain is a bad master. It provides levers that are built on loose sand. Left unchecked, the left brain does not take context into account; it idealizes solutions; and does not respond well when faced with its own limitations. Since the left brain has a hard time dealing with change and novelty (a characteristic of its effort-full-ness), this proves to be especially problematic for organizations that want to develop agility through methods.
The agile mindset is better served by the right brain that recognizes the importance of context, looks at the whole (not just the parts) and is better at dealing with novelty. While the right brain is associated with effort-less action and its kind of thinking provides a more solid foundation, making the right brain a better master, this “whole” that “goes beyond the parts” is also notoriously hard to put into words. The right brain is bad at verbalizing its thoughts. A mindset put into words seizes to be a mindset. What is experienced and learned in an aha! moment cannot be easily described in a way that others can experience the same.
There is a need for a “whole-brain” way that covers the gap between left- and right-brain thinking. A way that both recognizes the importance of methods and at the same time challenges it. A way that recognizes that mindset is the crucial element and at the same time, admits that mindset cannot be grasped. A way that embraces paradox more than it polarizes. And now that we are at it, a way that does a serious attempt at helping to deal with the paradox of lifting oneself up by the hairs because that is what is required for organizations to become truly agile.
