Best Practice 2 – Creator of Collaboration and Innovation™
Three essays are associated with this best practice, one focusing on the best practice itself and the other two providing concepts that complement this best practice, but also offer a somewhat different perspective.
Best Practice 2: Creator of Collaboration and Innovation™ (Being: Creator)
In this essay, the critical success skills associated with this best practice are identified, as are the BE attitudes that aligns with this practice. This essay concerns the ability to be creative and foster trusting environments, to masterfully listen and facilitate, acknowledge the unknown and think beyond what is, gather perspectives and ask tough questions and discern need for change and project the innovative impact.
Fire and Pendulum
The mechanistic organization of the Twentieth Century ran like a pendulum. A pendulum epitomizes elegance and simplicity in motion. The pendulum, in modern systems theory terms, will always return to a homeostatic balance, retaining its basic form or pathway. Systems theorists would suggest that organizations tend to return to their previous form and function even with disruptions and interference. Is this mechanistic analogy to the pendulum still accurate for Twenty First Century organizations? Rather, many processes of the world are likely to resemble the phenomenon that we call fire. Fire is a perplexing problem in the history of science. Scientists have tended to ignore the complex, transformative processes of fire—as have many organizational theorists.
Dialogical Fitness
Dialogue is “the art of thinking together”. Thinking together involves more than just kicking ideas around. We do that all the time. We hear what others have to say, listening only for things we can agree or disagree with. Dialogue, on the other hand, is the quest for mutual understanding. It is the respectful exchange of personal viewpoints. Dialogue results in shared ownership of solutions and social cohesion. Whilst dialogue is rare these days, we believe dialogue is key to effective coaching and something to be aspired to. But dialogue is effortful, and we need to prepare ourselves if we are to be able to engage in dialogue when needed. We need to cultivate within ourselves high levels of ‘dialogical fitness’.
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