Instead of MORE OF THE SAME
A new article "Von zwei Seiten zum Konfliktkern" by my colleague Karl Hochdorfer and me was published in Training aktuell 05/21. It describes how the combination dealing your own internal conflicts (with the help of Introvision) and clarifying external conflicts can be combined to foster more collaboration and positive dynamic in organizations. As soon as the article is freely available I will post it here. It is available in German only.
Looking back what happened in 2020 some observations appeared again and again in discussions with customers and colleagues. I’m guessing we see in many places the past year typical cases of "Doing more of the same or new things in old ways“. And it’s understandable as we turn to previous solutions of success under stress and uncertainty. Paul Watzlawick described this in the 80’s in his book Ultrasolutions, or, how to fail most successfully.
Examples of this:
scheduling nearly all the time for meetings which leads to endless hours of video conferences (where did all the time travelling go?)
trying to exert more control
showing more activity and busyness
Whatever your organizational or individual patterns of success are it’s like increasing your RPM when you also could switch gears. And of course, you have to wonder how fast you can drive in a low gear. And often you have to switch to a different plane.
Being stressed leads to more effort, a narrowed field of vision and loss of creativity.
So what to do?
One way to interrupt established patterns of stress and taking everything serious is bringing in Playfulness. There are several TED talks on the use of play. I’d recommend watching Stuart Browns „Play is more than just fun“.
So maybe just think of bringing small or bigger elements of play and playfulness to the workplace this year. These can be gamification approaches such as the virtual team development "Futurespective" by Y Unternehmensberatung and Kulturkatalysatoren.
But there are many big and small possibilities of play(-fulness) at work. It’s about doing something that is incompatible with taking things too serious and enables teams and leaders to creatively see different solutions for new situations.
How do you deal with and disrupt the daily #moreofthesame?