Leadership StrateGems: Leading in a Natural Hierarchy

The information age heralds an organic style of leadership based upon inspiration, guidance and mentoring. The Leadership StrateGems program helps executives reconstruct their hierarchies naturally, with nested layers of responsibility, and create exciting work environments where collective intelligence emerges from united group efforts.

In this modular program, leaders learn how to increase loyalty and cooperation, improve morale, reduce internal competition and turnover, and transcend common communication issues. Ten modules guide leaders to broader perspectives on creative power and increase the ability to guide and inspire from the heart. Leaders who take this approach are better able to engage staff as real team members working toward a shared vision and purpose.

This dynamic and fast-paced seminar helps leaders define a powerful vision for uniting group efforts that inspires a new level of personal responsibility and collaboration within their companies. Leaders learn how to cultivate direct communication and operate with greater group intelligence, honor the diversity of experience within their organizations, and fully utilize their valuable brain capital. Leaders gain tools for reconstructing their hierarchies as fractal patterns that are expansive and evolutionary. The benefits of reconstructing your hierarchy and organizing for continuous improvement include:

• Increased productivity: Internal politics have no foundation in a natural hierarchy.
• Improved profitability: New perspectives help leaders and staff solve problems faster.
• Reduced turnover: Staff inspiration increases as individuals take on more responsibility.
• Increased morale: Commitment to shared vision and purpose improves quality, increases customer satisfaction, and enables growth from within.
• Improved collaboration: Reducing redundant efforts makes it easier and more cost-effective to achieve goals and go home early once in a while!

“Janna, I do think you are on the right track. Human organizations are stochastically self-similar. You maximize the effectiveness of the organization by pushing out authority and responsibility. And it is extremely difficult to pull off because there are people in every organization who are afraid of losing control, thereby driving the organization in a conservative direction.” —Ed Catmull, President, Disney and Pixar Animation Studios

Module 1   Organic Leadership

Sharing Power and Responsibility for Continuous Improvement

Organic farmers partner with bugs, birds, and bacterial organisms to battle pests that target their crops. This approach requires more concerted effort than simply spraying fields with pesticides. The result is a more valuable and healthy crop. Likewise, organic leaders cultivate relationships with those they lead through guidance, inspiration, and mentoring. Understanding how we came to rely upon command-and-control and the present ramifications of that persisting model is critical for changing age-old belief systems regarding hierarchy.

Cooperating, Naturally

New scientific findings illustrate Nature’s approach to complexity and evolution, including how Nature has evolved by cooperating, not competing. Imitation or emulation, and other symbiotic behaviors, are examples of cooperative patterns naturally spreading throughout an ecosphere, creating beneficial changes for the cooperative species. In this module we cover scientific concepts such as iteration in nature, pattern integrity emerging in chaos, and entangled minds and the observer effect.

Cooperating Internally, Competing Externally

Our cultural perception is that competition drives achievement, and so the vast majority of corporations not only tolerate but actually encourage internal competition (and then wonder why they have information silos and a dearth of collective intelligence). Complexity theory illustrates how, in insect colonies and human societies, internal cooperation enables successful external competition.

Building Trust

Trust builds gradually in all relationships. By being generous with time and wisdom, and showing commitment to the success of individuals as well as the team, organic leaders guide, inspire, and build trust with their teams. Creating a systematic approach to an agreements-based work environment builds an atmosphere of trust and keeps everyone on the same page.

Redefining Leadership Success

Managers trained for control need to shift their perspectives to different ways of gauging their leadership abilities. Enabling your team’s continuous improvement is more valuable and effective than coming up with the ideas yourself. Organic leaders need recognition for the roles they play in these processes that replace previous measurements of success, such as controlling costs and budgets. Allowing teams to create and manage their own budgets (within parameters determined by leaders) encourages greater personal responsibility.

Module 2   Shared Vision

“A shared vision is not an idea. It is not even an important idea such as freedom. It is, rather, a force in people’s hearts, a force of impressive power. It may be inspired by an idea, but once it goes further--if it is compelling enough to acquire the support of more than one person--then it is no longer an abstraction…. Few, if any, forces in human affairs are as powerful as shared vision.” --Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

Engaging Individuals in Shared Vision and Purpose

Many business philosophers have recognized the role of shared vision as a foundation for organizational success, because shared vision is key to integrating personal agendas within collective goals. Shared vision and purpose are gravitational forces that enable a diversity of talent to contribute to the creative, blossoming productivity of any organization.

Unifying Your Quantum Thought Waves

We’re each generating quantum thought waves that, when synchronized with a shared vision, amplify group efforts and foster new growth with positive and continuous self-reinforcement. Leaders can inspire individual commitment by supporting those they lead. The absence of shared vision is not just neutral, it leads to entropy chaos: an uninspiring leader foments disruption when human creative potential is denied or left fallow.

Inspiring the Molecules of Emotion

The fields of immunology, neuroscience, and endocrinology are converging with recent insights into the roles of neurotransmitters and other hormones. When individuals are excited by challenging opportunities, their physical bodies hum with joy in the absence of negative stress. Leaders need to understand how this works in order to accelerate beneficial change through exciting and successful teamwork.

Crafting a Sustainable Vision

Most organizations are not united by shared vision and purpose. This portion of the program guides leaders through a series of steps for laying a foundation of shared purpose and leading group efforts accordingly.

Module 3   Fractal Hierarchy

Encouraging the Impulse to Cooperate

Disruptions in the quantum energy field from negative human relationships are at the foundation of our dilemmas and produce the paradoxes with which we struggle. Hierarchy is a viable organizing model; yet, authoritative, discipline-oriented top-down hierarchies are no longer energetically copacetic in a world of educated humans and thus create dysfunctional relationships.

Fractal Organizations vs. Top-Down Models

The top-down hierarchy was perfected by the military in the world wars. Until the Internet changed everything, top-down was the best system for efficiently controlling processes and communicating orders or intelligence in large and complex labor-intensive operations, such as a war effort or assembly-line manufacturing processes. Its rigid structure, however, hinders the ability of modern organizations to adapt quickly to changing conditions. Fractal organizations are agile and resilient because of distributed creative power in team clusters and unlimited expansion within the parameters of the vision.

Cultivating Exponential Individuals

In fractal organizations, a culture of leadership and shared vision combine to produce “self-squaring” individuals who continually reach for greater personal achievement. Using the analogy of the Julia set fractal formula, where z = z² + c, the variable z represents each individual, while c (the constant in the equation) represents shared purpose. Individuals connected to a shared purpose who are “squared” or multiplied by the guidance and inspiration of leadership unite with coworkers to create inspiring products and services.

Letting Go of (Some) Control

Allowing fractal patterns of emulation to develop in your organization requires relinquishing control, the cornerstone of top-down hierarchies. Organic leaders learn to grant functional-level staff the responsibilities and authority for improving their own work processes within the context of the group’s shared vision. In our information age, where information finds its way through the network in spite of hierarchy, top-down control produces its opposite intended effect: entropy chaos. Disintegration, disunion, and internal competition patterns emerge from chaos instead of pattern integrity, undermining old-school leaders’ intentions, increasing disequilibrium, and further limiting organizational growth and renewal.

Enabling Functional-Level Changes

Post-Darwinian biology indicates that multi-cellular systems emerged through cooperation, not competition. With shared vision as a foundation, team clusters can make functional-level decisions and produce ongoing, effective changes. Roundtable dialogues around topics and issues enable groups to adapt and be more innovative.

Mapping Fractal Organization Charts

Leaders learn how to design fractal organization charts that replace top-down models and create a new picture of their organization. These maps make it easy to see how allowing functional teams to participate in the process eliminates the need for top-down change management!

Facilitating Cross-Functional Cooperation

Because of their flat architecture, fractal organization charts can also illustrate supra-layers of team clusters devoted to cross-functional issues. In some situations these groupings will be temporary, while in others more long-term groups will emerge.

Module 4   Brain Capital

Operating with Group Intelligence

In modern organizations, interaction costs are the greatest drain on brain capital. Since new information always creates new uncertainties, it must be shared quickly and efficiently. Maximizing technology to eliminate bottlenecks in information usage and retrieval is key to freeing minds for adaptation and evolutionary leaps. Insights into information theory, one of the more successful concepts in modern science, show how complex issues are not very complicated to solve -- the same problems will reproduce and proliferate throughout a system. With systems thinking, groups can shift direction as easily as flocking birds.

Buying Value vs. Time

Work efficiencies improve with experience, and the work of individuals paid hourly often expands to fill the time allowed. If situations do not require a “body in a spot,” paying for value (and adjusting how benefits are accrued) is key to full engagement, as most humans desire to benefit from working smarter, not harder. Regarding compensation in general, sharing the wealth actually creates more, whereas greed constricts the flow of abundance. Actions borne of internal competition (greed) illustrate key misunderstandings of how we actually do create wealth, and how greed always sub-optimizes both the journey (situation) and its outcome (results).

Balancing Time for Personal Health and Happiness

As we are all unique and diverse individuals in different stages of our professional growth and development, we have varying capacities for work. Those who have worked hard to gain expertise early in their careers may want to slow the pace later on as their families demand more involvement, reaping the benefits of working smarter and not so hard anymore. We provide guidelines for leaders to follow when making agreements around touchy issues like these, and how to shift perspectives toward value rather than time.

Module 5   Diverse Personalities

Differing Beliefs and Truths

Though it may appear that we are becoming more homogenized, we are in fact diversifying individually and expanding our personal desires for creative participation. Acknowledging the remarkable richness in our differing beliefs allows us to have conversations without fear, the only enemy in open, honest communications and successful emulation.

Enabling Personal and Collective Paradigm Shifts

It is through open dialogue that paradigms shift both personally and collectively. We are living in a time that demands greater self-leadership and responsibility in our professional and personal lives. Organic leaders nurture these seeds of potential, often dormant, within everyone.

Developing a Neutral Viewpoint

Key to allowing open discussion is suspending assumptions with a neutral viewpoint, which is challenging for most humans yet critical for maintaining personal integrity and health. Compassion, which is the ability to see the world from another person’s perspective and thereby understand what motivates their thoughts, feelings, and actions, is an effective tool for developing neutrality.

Choosing Comedy over Drama

Life can be rather dramatic, yet in comedies the characters figure out what’s going on in time to do something about it. Ultimately, choosing comedy over drama enables humans to work through differences in ways that do not compromise personal and organizational health. When challenges arise, we reduce stress by agreeing up-front to avoid high drama or conflict, key to making the workplace a safe haven in an otherwise negatively stressed world.

Raising Hot Topics and Issues

Leaders learn processes for raising and prioritizing topics and issues of importance. When transitioning from top-down to fractal organizations, anonymous surveys are effective tools for rooting out the toxins. Toxic remnants of competition and greed include unshared information, damaged relationships, and disparate views of relative priorities. Gradually, as things improve through iterative group dialogues and processes, individuals will participate more openly.

Module 6   Direct Communication

Building Trust Through Direct Communication

Leadership integrity is absolutely essential to building a fractal organization. Honesty is still the best policy. Yet top-down hierarchies have one-way gates that keep certain information from frontline workers, a parental approach to management that discourages personal responsibility. Nor are staff encouraged to work out their differences without the aid of management, similar to how parents manage sibling relationships. Collegial relationships in the workplace encourage greater personal responsibility.

Speaking Truth to Power vs. Gossip

In the vast majority of organizations, subordinates do not communicate directly with their supervisors regarding their feelings about work processes, procedures, plans, and so on. This fear of “speaking truth to power” suppresses our natural inclination to participate and invariably leads to negative gossip. Individuals who are committed to a shared purpose must feel free to express their feelings and opinions openly, with guidance for how to communicate without damaging workplace relationships.

Agreements vs. Assumptions

Direct communication is possible when we make agreements instead of assumptions. Our diverse backgrounds and compositions lead us all to make assumptions regularly, often disrupting work processes through miscommunication. Neuroscience reveals how our unique perspectives drive our assumptive behavior. We also need to learn how to foster and tolerate amendments to agreements, so that our behavior continually adjusts to seek the best outcome or result. Organic leaders seek truth and optimal results, they do not just seek agreement.

Making, Keeping, and Amending Agreements

We build trust through a process of communicating directly and making agreements instead of assumptions. Leaders learn how to make explicit agreements for everything: the roles of everyone involved, projected timelines and outcomes, contingencies for unpredictable events, and so on. The more details the better, as agreements are the foundation for our ongoing conversations. Agreements, not a fuzzy vision, must be the starting point for efficient execution, improved capabilities, and desired results.

Module 7   Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence is Good for Your Health

Cellular biologists are working diligently to understand how DNA proteins and cell membranes process both chemical and electromagnetic (vibrational) information. Emerging results show that stress and negativity accelerate illness and aging, while positive experiences promote healthy cell processes and overall wellness.

Training Your Powerful Thoughts

Communicating directly in organizations that encourage diverse input and embrace contrast requires not taking things personally and choosing our emotional responses. What we’re thinking affects our feelings and vice versa, and positive thoughts and feelings sustain the optimal chemical and electromagnetic balance in the immune, nervous, and endocrine systems.

Developing Emotional Objectivity

When Clint Eastwood acts in a film he is also directing, he must see the bigger picture in each of his own character’s scenes. Being a director as well as an actor in every scene means choosing emotions and remaining objective. Organic leaders use this skill for making the best decisions.

Guiding Group Intentions

Leaders who master emotional objectivity are capable of turning dramas into comedies. Reaching for the best possible outcome (seeking truth that aligns with the vision) to any situation is crucial for organic, adaptable teams that must react quickly to changes in the environment. Participants learn techniques for focusing on the opportunities inherent in any seeming crisis and going with the flow instead of panicking.

Module 8   Group Collaboration

Increasing Efficiency in Information Flows

In fractal organizations that promote direct communication, group participation is key to increasing the efficiencies in information flows, which enable innovation. Collective intelligence is remarkably efficient in enabling groups to flow in the direction of beneficial change and new opportunities.

Facilitating Roundtable Dialogues

Leaders learn how to allow iteration to drive continuous improvement in roundtable discussions that address group topics and issues. Facilitating these dialogues requires maintaining the focus on shared vision and purpose while directing conversations toward compatible solutions. Team leaders convey their group’s intentions and desires to the leaders of their respective roundtables (i.e. next-level leaders who guide and enable functional team leaders). This feedback process strengthens the internal communication and intelligence network, as leaders become conduits for the flow of information and resources.

Making Group Mind Maps

Techniques for both individuals and groups include mind-mapping, a time-tested and valuable tool for enabling non-linear communication in brainstorming activities. Using words and pictures to convey thoughts and feelings enables individuals to participate from unique perspectives. These maps can be made silently during meetings or evolve over time in common areas where individuals reticent to speak up in groups may contribute their opinions in a quieter setting. Mind maps reveal the ways our brains create connections and can bring big-picture clarity to any decision-making process. Words, images, numbers, and colors are all incorporated to simulate the ways our brains process information.

Encouraging Contradictory Viewpoints

Invariably we’ll have conflicting opinions, or we’d be automatons instead of diverse human beings. Leaders learn how to facilitate dialogues that allow contrasting viewpoints and out-of-box thinking to be considered within the context of group goals, purposes, and objectives.

Module 9   Personal Mastery

Imagining the Best Outcomes

Imagining the best outcome accelerates its realization, as the resulting successes accelerate new successes. Organic leaders understand how thoughts affect not only emotions but also future outcomes. Leaders need to engage, show up, and participate, or they risk an off-target vision and a missed opportunity. Personal mastery is the art of increasing your intuition and awareness of the bigger picture--what the characters in your scenes are learning and how you as leader can support and enable their growth.

Avoiding Information Overload

Excessive and negative information affects human thoughts and energy and diminishes intuitive abilities. It creates a cloud of uncertainty, a fuzziness difficult to penetrate. Awareness of our electromagnetic energy fields and how they intersect is a tremendously powerful tool for maintaining your composure and seeing through the negativity while those around you are engaged in drama.

Using Color and Light for Wellness

Dramas (dark) produce stress hormones, while comedies (light) promote cellular growth and renewal. Participants learn how color and light are increasingly used in emerging healing modalities, including LEDs in surgery and battlefield medicine and light therapy for treating lupus. Research shows how Vitamin D supplements compensate for reduced exposure to sunlight in winter months, boosting immune system health.

Relaxation, Visualization, and Meditation Techniques for Healthier Brains

Recent brainwave studies on the Dalai Lama’s fellow monks illuminate how our “plastic” brains can evolve throughout our lifetimes. Medical researchers have discovered that meditation not only relieves and reverses the adverse effects of stress, but also increases the brain’s plasticity.

Module 10   Transformation Architecture

Getting Leadership Consensus

Going organic requires committed leadership. You must release individuals who are not resonating with your vision and gather only those who have passion for it. Otherwise your organization will be incapable such practices as mentoring, self-leadership, continuous improvement, and group participation.

Conducting an Organization-wide Assessment

Many companies conduct yearly surveys (some more revealing than others) of employee opinions regarding work processes and supervision. Meaty surveys are sometimes difficult for supervisors to read, but they encourage staff to express frustrations in a more productive manner than gossip. They also generate your list of topics and issues. StrateGems Brain Map is a useful tool for this purpose.

Planning the Shift to a Fractal Organization

By all means, do not force a reorganization on your staff without including them in the planning process! Preparing for meetings, providing information describing the direction you wish to take (i.e. amplifying their participation), and giving them enough conversation tools to help you collectively design your Fractal Organization chart will eliminate the need for change management.

Enlisting Individuals in Creating New Agreements

Once your team clusters and leadership communication networks are in place, groups can begin making agreements around topics and issues in need of improvement. Formal agreements and agile change processes are key to shifting and improving communication patterns.

Imagining Realistic Timetables and Measuring Progress

How long this process takes depends upon the size of your organization and the degree to which you already encourage participation. If your organization practices “progressive discipline” and other euphemisms for control, the process may take longer. Incremental progress is nonetheless evolution, and even if your teams make only baby steps at first, your encouragement and appreciation will give them the self-confidence to reach for ever greater continuous improvements.

Pricing does not include auxilliary services, such as leadership consulting and development, as well as venue and complementary team building activities such as ropes courses, star parties, winemaking, and so on. See the Details page for more information and to contact us to discuss your issues and desired outcomes.

See these sections for more information:

Fractal Org Charts, Stress Relief Tools and Techniques, Green Teams, Details

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