21 August 2021
When it comes to my work – I clarify so you can better communicate and execute. As the national collaboration director, everything is an invitation and opportunity to work better together.
I just landed on that this morning when I woke up. Love that level of clarity – it’s so much simpler and clearer than “I’m the precon to your communication.”
I help folks work better together. A huge way I do this is by helping you clarify so everyone is on the right track, making it much easier for you to communicate and execute.
I feel good about that for now.
Can I do the same thing for myself as a practitioner-scholar?
I study the secrets of working better together?
Judi says don’t worry about a label because it could serve to limit my thinking and assumptions about what I do and who I am. Instead, she recommends that I work on an elevator pitch for what I currently pursue.
I think of an elevator pitch following a certain format: I (do this) (to/for a certain population) (do what) so they can (value/benefit). That comes from my entrepreneur days. Does that also make sense for me as a researcher? I can’t help but think back to Beth Campbell’s research statement on her website:
“I study leadership, team dynamics, and hidden consequences of high performers at work.”
There’s a shift from the elevator pitch there, and also a funnel effect happening in her statement, starting with the broad topic and becoming further refined with each addition. Leadership, specifically team dynamics, specifically hidden consequences.
My challenge is to reverse engineer that kind of statement for myself.
Specifically, the lived exteriors and mysterious machinations of internal mid-level transformationists.
This is a specific type of organizational transformationist. There are internal and external ones, change agents, and transformationists (hard for some people to say)/alchemists.
This nests within transformation at large. There is organizational transformation and personal transformation, both of which are at play.
Perhaps what I’m really getting at here is self-actualization and transcendence as my big area. Creativity plays a huge part in that arena.
I study actualization and transcendence. Specifically within organizational settings. Specifically applied to organizational transformation versus change management. Specifically focused on the individuals involved in facilitating this transformation. Specifically the ones internal to an organization. Specifically, those upper mid-level individuals who take/are given the lead on such efforts. Specifically the unicorns – the ones who achieve seemingly magical results because of their uniqueness and their own self-actualization and transcendent practices.
I research this topic because some companies recognize their need to evolve, yet do not know how to effectively support those unicorns leading the evolution effort.
I research this topic because the people leading efforts for organizational transformation or evolution are not doing the same things as people managing change, yet they may be viewed by their company through the same lens. I also believe that these organizational evolutionists are fundamentally different people inside than change managers. Change is the easy path, the thing that gets leaned into when evolution or transformation is needed and wanted. Evolution and transformation call for a different sort of unicorn.
I also research this because I’m not just the president: I’m also a member. I’ve been a member for as long as I can remember – not quite feeling like I fit in where I worked, but discovering and wielding tremendous power and influence as a result of my uniqueness. For me, this topic is personal.
What am I saying, then?
I research the unicorns in companies that midwife organizational evolution. Who are they, what makes them tick, what makes them different from change agents and change managers, and how companies might care and feed their unicorns for better/easier performance and results.
Yeah. Something like that.
Interesting, this pivot from organizational transformation to organizational evolution. What is the difference amongst organizational change, transformation, and evolution?
CHANGE can be small and incremental, or it can be large and complex. But it is something that needs to be constantly monitored and maintained. Think of all of the change management processes and procedures in an IT organization. You do not put them in place and hope for the best. Every one of these processes has an owner and metrics and involves continual improvements. Change is typically a shorter-term response to new external factors, or evolving assumptions.
TRANSFORMATION is almost always large and significant. Transformation is an internal fundamental evolution of your beliefs of why you perform certain actions. Transformation may not require any external influence to maintain, but it does require foundational shifts from within.
https://www.cioinsight.com/news-trends/the-difference-between-change-and-transformation/
The Managing Research Library has an interesting post on organizational evolution. Here’s its closing paragraph:
Contrary to the traditional view of command and control, coupled with strategy by design, the most powerful force to be unleashed to spur the evolution of an organization is the force of self-organization, communicative interaction with conversational processes at the “”edge of chaos.”” This is the only force that makes an organization self-evolving. The potential exists in all organizations as a natural process of complex organization. The “”process”” is the complex responsive process — agents and networks of agents, organization members, interacting with each other in order to express their identities and in doing so, delineating their differences, creating variation, producing novelty, resulting in transformation.
What the organization becomes emerges from the relationships of its members rather than being determined by the choices of the organizational leaders.
https://managingresearchlibrary.org/glossary/organization-evolution
How does the creative spirit show up in organizational evolution and organizational evolutionists, I wonder?
I’m really digging this insight on change versus transformation versus evolution!
Unicorns, I’d wager, are the evolutionists being looked to as change managers or transformationists. Organizational leaders don’t quite recognize the deeper, evolutionary game these unicorns are playing, so they don’t quite know what to do with them. They don’t quite understand them. They just know that they do amazing things. And, as we alchemist evolutionists know:
Magic is just science that we don’t understand yet.
Arthur C. Clarke
