Whether the zucchini did well this year, or the figs never ripened last, the interrelationship of the gardener and the garden, like of the leader and the organization, is by far the most sustainable crop. This mutuality is also the laboratory in which we observe the life cycle — from sprout to bud to blossom to fruit to seed to decay — revealing itself to us in elegant simplicity.

Gardening, like leading, is mostly an act of faith. Though persistent plants we call weeds thrive in remarkably unpromising circumstances — erupting in rock-hard, sun-baked soil through imperceptible concrete cracks — explicitly choosing what we want to grow takes more than dirt or determination. When we root out problems rather than fixate on eliminating symptoms, we cultivate ground for new growth.

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been,
I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there,
and I am prepared to expect wonders.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Supporting the conditions in which the life we choose to nourish will take root — in our yards as well as our work lives and workplaces — might require space, soil, seeds, water, light, imagination, education, research, planning, creativity, resourcefulness, community, tools, commitment, labor, collaboration, trust, and attention.

Hard, rocky dirt, with the addition of mulch and aeration, becomes home to soil-enriching earthworms. Old trees, with proper pruning and compost, once again bear delicious fruit. Perennially wet areas, thoughtfully surrounded by swales, redistribute once standing water across the landscape. A problem recognized as symptomatic of a larger pattern is the key that unlocks greater productivity. An underperforming team, encouraged to try new approaches, turns into an inspiring model for others. An organization stretched for dollars mines rich veins of hidden resources when it taps the collaborative capacity of its employees.

For those who make the effort to pay attention, the most profound harvest of any collaborative enterprise — from growing veggies to nurturing a successful organization — is learning. While in the West we think of learning mostly as the training ground of expertise, in many other parts of the world, learning is at least as much about cultivating humility and not-knowing.            

Right now my life is just one learning experience after another.
By the end of the week I should be a genius.
~ Jeanette Osias

Since learning opportunities are infinite, and geniuses are not, evidently at least some of us aren’t harvesting the vast crops of learning around us much of the time!

Any gardener who lasts beyond a season or two becomes very familiar with the taste of humility and not-knowing, and may be very surprised one day to find that something once avoided has turned into a welcome gift. Even master gardeners, the experts we so admire and may aspire to become, experience certain things producing well one year and not the next. You can carefully amend the soil, measure the hours of sunlight, plant whatever deer don’t eat*, diligently apply tried-and-true principles of a particular gardening system, and find that, however much expertise you have accrued, there is always more to learn.

* Unless, of course, the deer in your neighborhood, like mine, either don’t read these lists or ignore them!

When so rich a harvest is before us, why do we not gather it?
All is in our hands if we will but use it.
~ Elizabeth Ann Seton

Successful gardeners, whether tilling soil in the backyard or the front office, pay attention to what’s happening — to the leaves or the balance sheet, in the soil or one’s soul — and make adjustments accordingly, all the while knowing that:

• it is wiser to work with, rather than against, the laws of nature (garden books and employee handbooks notwithstanding);
• not everything can be anticipated, and even if anticipated, cannot be controlled;
• learning is always a choice.

Is your current harvest nourishing you? Breaking new ground opens up more space and possibility for growth. What would you like to grow now?

Every man has his own patch of earth to cultivate.
What’s important is that he dig deep.
~ José Saramago

1.    The project plan allocates sufficient financial & human resources and sets reasonable deadlines.
2.    The initiative has sponsors who provide leadership, clout, time, and energy to see it through to completion.
3.    Team members and leaders are accountable for agreed-upon priorities.
4.    Team leaders and members speak up candidly as problems arise.
5.    Team members support the project and team leaders are proactive and effective in communicating their concerns.

While everyone “knows” this, there’s clearly a disconnect between understanding and execution! The study concludes that initiatives fail 85% of the time when just one of these conditions isn’t met. Meeting the conditions doesn’t guarantee success, but the survey found a 50-70% reduction in the failure rate — aka improvement — when these crucial conversations take place.

Several years ago I worked with a group of very capable internal service providers who were deployed in various departments throughout their national organization. During my assessment, it became clear that the key to their shared dissatisfaction was allowing their clients to determine their roles, which inevitably limited the degree to which their expertise was put to good use. To show them how they could shift this dynamic (without being seen as contrary, a big concern for many service providers), I developed a simple yet powerful model I still use in my learning programs on Contracting for Results, sometimes known as, “You Want What? By When? Satisfying Customers Without Losing Your Shirt, Your Mind, or Your Job.” This model looks at the three vectors of success — expectations, capacity, and resources — and how they interact with the individual and joint accountabilities of the service provider and the client.

I’ve written before about the energy that’s freed up for productive and fulfilling work when our attention shifts from what’s wrong with others to how I/we can shape my/our contributions in more useful ways. Leaders — whether of organizations, functions, departments, teams, and projects — don’t always know how to make good use of the resources at their disposal, so service providers who know how to take charge of delivering their highest value can strongly influence the success of projects to which they contribute (not to mention their own satisfaction), even without technically being “in charge.”

For some folks, the transition from following orders to offering perspective is pretty easy once they recognize the choice they may never have known had before. Others want to be reassured that this is legitimate and professional option before taking what they perceive as a risk in approaching their clients differently. Most will benefit from some mentoring to help turn this new idea into an embodied reality. In my experience, nearly everyone gets good results with even a little effort turning the ship in a new direction.

Now imagine the rewards, financial and otherwise, of recapturing the losses of human energy, passion, drive, commitment, and potential that result from outdated organizational structures, misfocused leadership, poor planning, inept communications, fierce territoriality, misdirected attention, dysfunctional teams, unshared knowledge, endless and unproductive meetings, and the myriad other challenges to creative, productive, and satisfying worklives.
Improving the human ecology in organizational life fosters sustainability and improves the bottom line at least as much as technological approaches, if not substantially more.

In nearly 30 years as a management and communications consultant, I’ve observed many of the same unhelpful patterns in most organizations, regardless of industry, sector, size, or developmental stage, to wit:

• over-use of a small subset of resources/capacities while many valuable resources/capacities are under-utilized, if not entirely overlooked;
• symptomatic rather than systemic focus, leading to symptom-abatement and problem-solving rather than pattern-recognition and issue-identification;
• unproductive teams and meetings due to unclear planning, focus, communications, agendas, roles, and outcomes;
• orientation towards blame rather than towards learning;
• disconnect between the big picture/strategy/leadership and day-to-day reality/tactics/workers, often leading to customers (internal & external) feeling like adversaries rather than allies;
• greater emphasis on the ‘what’ than the ‘how’;
• urgency for answers without regard for the quality of the questions!

Creating work spaces that respect our shared environment without also reshaping the work patterns that constrain human/organizational potential is like installing “green” components on an industrial drive-train; the wheels are still going to come off!

Of course it’s easier to change the light bulbs than our brains — I’ll dive into that in another post soon — but since the potential of making even small shifts towards “working wise” is so phenomenal, let’s add human/organizational potential to our sustainabilty equation of:

• Reuse (no good ideas or goodwill left behind)
• Reduce (overuse of a narrow spectrum of human/organizational capacity)
• Recycle (compost our “failures” to nourish new growth)

I have just seen a 4:29-minute video that offers as profoundly a different view of our world as may be possible. Like Koyaanisqatsi, the music and images — fuzzy as they are here — tell the whole story. But this story is one of joy and how effortlessly it infects people everywhere.

If this doesn’t make you cry and/or laugh, I urge you to go out in public as soon as possible and do a goofy dance until your smile is so big your face can barely contain it. We create our world everyday with our choices: to be numbed, inspired, or dancing with the paradox. Reconnecting to your body and your humanity cannot help but enliven your worklife and workplace . . . and isn’t that the world you want to live in?

When the CEO expressed interest in how my work might benefit the senior leadership team, the autonomy I’d enjoyed was gone. The VP quickly transformed into the “client from hell,” who tried to control every aspect of my contact with his boss and colleagues. Despite the fact that his boss’s interest was the result of my (virtually unsupervised) work, the VP saw this as the perfect opening through which to push his agenda and position himself as the CEO’s confidante. What had been an inspiring engagement devolved into a nightmare.

As I talked with colleagues about the challenges I was facing, I witnessed a range of responses I had not experienced and heard about a variety of approaches I had not considered. It’s so easy to label such people and situations as “difficult,” but how do we account for the fact that what irks me does not necessarily faze you? If I make myself wrong, how do I account for the circumstances in which I’m steady while you are thrown off-center? It’s definitely more challenging — and infinitely more rewarding — to be curious about the difficulty I experience with a particular person or situation I’ve demonized, without demonizing myself.

A somatic approach is much more useful here than a purely cognitive one, as the felt sense of difficulty in my own body always comes before the distancing tactics of projection and labeling. By becoming more attuned to my own bodily experience and acknowledging the difficulty I am having, I free myself to choose from among a range of responses rather than simply act out my default reaction. In this way I discover, again and again, the power hidden beneath a sense of powerlessness. Viktor Frankl said it best: “Everything can be taken from a man but . . . the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance, to choose one’s own way.”

Some months into my work with the senior leadership team, I told a friend I was forever grateful to the VP because his outrageous behavior had elicited in me deeper compassion with clearer boundaries. A moment passed before I realized that I had now projected my sense of appreciation on to my client, rather than acknowledging that I had grown, not because of my client’s bad behavior, but because of my relentless commitment to working with whatever challenged me.

In our culture, the pattern of blaming others, situations, or ourselves, for our suffering — while deflecting credit for the work we’ve done — is widespread. Through cultivating our capacity to notice the felt sense and bring curiousity to our embodied experiences, we greatly expand our portfolios of possibility.

“Well, that’s just where a new document always pops up,” I replied, awareness beginning to dawn.

“Can you move it to the middle?” she asked.

“Of course, I just never thought to do it before!” I gasped, amazed that something this obvious had eluded me for so long.

“It would be easier on you if you did it that way,” Sonja offered.

Now this could prompt a long discussion about the latest findings in neuroscience, but for now, let’s just reflect on how the brain perceives “easier.” Anything we’ve done often enough to make it habitual doesn’t require a lot of energy, which is why it’s always easier to maintain the status quo, i.e., use the brain the way we’ve already trained it. If I’m willing to live with the consequences — painful inflammation, in this case — or unaware of their connection to my actions — pretty common, in my experience — of course I’ll keep doing things the same old way. However committed I may be to making a change, even one I know will be “easier” on me in the long run, I must repeat the new behavior often enough to form new neural pathways. This requires concerted effort, voluntary action.

We’re thus faced, once again, with the paradox that the path to an easier life may not itself be easy! The rewards of choosing this path, however, are manifold.

In my RSI example, I’m highly motivated to eliminate the inflammation that causes me pain, and so to change the circumstances that inflame the tendons to my thumbs. I’d like to learn how to use myself in ways that support working well, without requiring time-consuming, expensive, and distracting interventions, medical or otherwise. As I get older, this becomes more of a challenge. A little effort to learn something new seems to me a small price to pay to free up my resources for more satisfying activities.

Sonja also noticed that I got “sucked in” by the computer, which moved my neck and head closer to the screen. Her suggestion that I imagine the words reaching out to me from the screen, rather than moving towards them, totally shifted my relationship to myself and my work. The ease I experienced was so dramatic that it now just requires a gentle reminder when I find myself feeling sucked in again to lean back and let the words or images come to me. This reminds me of something I teach in my Heart of Marketing workshops, where participants learn to distinguish (and choose) among dynamic, magnetic, and default postures. As I type, I now choose to embody a magnetic posture. Realizing I can make this choice is very empowering.

Besides the few ergonomic changes I made using pillows and foam, I needed to change my relationship with myself and my computer. As I’ll keep learning, and writing about, HOW we do what we do is at least as important as WHAT we do.

In sharing this story with a client, he experienced an AH-HA! when he realized that his default conflict avoidance pattern was not a passive inevitability, but one he chose so often that it had become invisible. When we recognize that we are always choosing, we can become accountable for maintaining our status quo — a perfectly valid choice — or committing ourselves to the temporary discomfort, and long-term satisfaction, of making change.