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Founded in 2002, the blog here continues to be a space of daily conversation about the science of mind and its implications and applications
The more people perform in work with mastery, the more they are performing in territories untravelled. They are pioneers and explorers carving out new opportunity landscapes. Much of their learning is not going to happen by consuming courses or searching for mentors or coaches. It's going to happen through expriments and critiques. Learning how to expriment and critique is vital to their growth potentials.
We have become so accustomed to talking about things at work that we take for granted the talking will lead to meaningful new ideas and new action and new outcomes. Talking is often the rehashing of things we already know and therefore have no power to lead to things that are new. New comes from new kinds of direct experience with things like our goodness which includes our strengths, our dreams and alignments.
It is through this kind of direct experience that evokes new possibilities, energizes and inspires us and cultivates our growth together.
It makes logical sense to many of us. If we want people to do better, we have to help them change. One small problem. People do not trust people they think have an agenda of changing them. People who are untrusted have no power to help people change.
We see people grow all the time. In each case, it's when they have engaged their goodness in new ways. If someone has eight abilities and qualities that add to their goodness, there are over 40,000 different ways they can combine these for growth.
Growth is not a matter of "changing" people. It's a matter of giving them the freedom and support to keep creating new combinations for new levels of performance and possibility.
Failure happens. We don't usually fail on purpose. We don't intend disappointments, falling short and setbacks.
Nimble teams dedicated to growth experience more failure than slow teams dedicated to maintaining certainty at all costs. It is their intolerance of failure that keeps slow teams slow.
Nimble teams experiment continously and quickly engage lessons from each iteration. They have developed clarity on how to turn failing into a gift of new insights and accelerated experiments into far more than what slow teams even imagine.
When they make failing a gift to be engaged rather than problem to be prevented, nimble teams find that reflected failing is a rich source of new questions that spark new possibilities in realizing the long view good and near term progress they seek together.
The point of work in nimble teams is progress toward what we together define as good. Every instance of progress is failure to meet the good that most inspires and energizes our growth. As slow teams do everything they can to resist growth (and therefore failure) on their way to even "realistic" goals, nimble teams outperform slow by at least 200%.
Change is often more an event. Growth is often more a process. Change is an intervention. Growth is an iteration.
With a single email or meeting we can change a team's leader, members, goals, standards, structures, resources, performance compensation, assignments and constraints. Change can be completely dictated and imposed.
Growth comes from within. It is the iterative, incremental process of expanding clarity in three ways. It is a function of progress rather than pronouncement.
Growth requires clarity about the good we what to see, clarity about the goodness we have and clarity in how to engage our goodness in realizing the good we seek. It is progress toward good through goodness. The more clarity we have, the more we grow in and through our work.
Getting to new levels of team culture is a function of growth rather than change. Confusion about this leads to weakening culture. Team culture progresses when growth is at the center of the intention and process.
