Schlagwort-Archive: Concepts

Agilemma – Spirits that I’ve cited, my commands ignore

Even if you fasten your seat belt, close the door and place a group of doorwomen in front of the office, as a manager you cannot hide from the demands of the VUCA world. The speed at which you have to react and the amount of skills required no longer allow us to rely on the rigid frameworks of the past. If even the American military sets up its troops with a new managing style, it should become clear to the last one that the time has come for new leadership styles. Since the solution is different for everyone, we have to design our own approach. At the same time, we run the risk of becoming sorcerer’s apprentices and being overrun by the released forces. – Spirits that I’ve cited, my commands ignore.

There are three aspects that tear you apart as a leader and give rise to the fear that you will lose control forever, once you have opened the floodgates.

  • New concepts
    What does it take to let go and engage in spontaneous improvisations that lead to a convincing result done by the self-organized participants? So far, everyone’s commitment has been crushed by distributing tasks, competence and responsibility on different shoulders. The greatest effect is achieved when everything is in one hand and the group takes responsibility for the result. People do not only spare the unproductive time of detailed planning, the slowing down of colleagues due to excessive control or the relief that is created by assigning blame to others. Those who do not drive these changes forward will be driven by the changes – now, or perhaps not before tomorrow.
  • Different leadership styles
    The troops stand no longer in line and follow orders. They have their own ideas and conceptions which they want to implement. The competition stops taking place between the own team mates but with other groups. In the future the individual destiny will depend on the fate of the whole team. This means for the manager that the organization is no longer developed by designing the positions and regularly control the behavior of the employees. The boss is now a coach, fostering his employees as an available contact person and solving the insolvable issues. The group is promoted as a whole, learns together and shares the joy and sorrow of the outcomes. If you don’t get involved, you lose the loyalty of your employees and thus your purpose as a manager.
  • Value-based governance
    In the past nothing functioned without governance and in groups it will never work without it. The personal commitment is the main reason for the willingness of the employees to get involved. The laws, standards and guidelines are the regulations that you HAVE to follow – otherwise you will receive more or less defined sanctions. In the end, this leads to doing things right – especially in the economic sense. This type of governance is exacerbated by filtered information, whose credo is shaped by “knowledge is power” – it is not entirely wrong to either speak of censorship. The new approach focuses on doing the right thing out of inner conviction. The fuel is not the fear of punishment, but the intrinsic commitment to your task. This requires information distributors, who keep the involved people up to date. Those who cannot apply this value-based management are crushed by the old rules and eventually become obsolete.

This does not mean that doors and ways are opened to anarchy. It is about giving the team, and thus each individual employee, the freedom to achieve more with the existing strengths, instead of exhausting oneself with senseless and futile (self-) limitations.

Bottom line: The master of these magical powers is not the sorcerer’s apprentice, but the master. The loss of control of the trainee comes from the fact that he did not practice enough yet. That is why he formulates a bit early:

Bubble! Bubble!
Some route,
that, for the purpose,
water flows
and with a rich, full flood
to pour to the bath.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

without having the capability to reverse the command. One or the other can certainly imagine the helplessness of the sorcerer’s apprentice. All concerned people are still integrated into the old structures. At the same time, many recognize the opportunities, but do not want to get into the situation of the sorcerer’s apprentice. For this reason, you should pro-actively take care of the new approaches of agility. In delimited special operation zones, which are exempt from the old rules, these new concepts, different management styles and value-based governance can be practiced by everybody. The Agilemma will slowly dissolve that way and the spirits that one has cited, you no longer want to get rid of, but to use it in growing circles.

Additional meaning is between the lines

Not only since the Internet there is the tendency to ever shorter texts. Blog posts provide facts, opinions and gossip with less than 1000 words. In extreme cases a Tweet compresses expressions into 140 characters. Thus, it will be more and more important to be aware that a text contains only a part of the meaning. Additional meaning is between the lines.

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The steps to this additional sense go over questions concerning the following aspects.

  • Intentions
    Each text is written with a certain intention that does not necessarily reveal itself in the text. If somebody describes drawbacks, like for example the U.S. in the course of the Volkswagen crisis, then the text conveys noble reasons, like the protection of the environment or the consumers. If one could see behind the scenes, then perhaps the true intentions would become visible – influencing the automobile market or damaging the European economy in favor of the U.S.
    The question that arises is: What are the true intentions of the writer?
  • Concepts and terms
    The words that are used in a text, are coming out of the mind of the author, which he learned through concepts and terminologies. In German, new terms can be quickly created by simply combining two nouns, like e.g. joy and hunger to joy hunger. But the resulting word will be incomprehensible to some and understandable to others. If the word is used in the context of psychology, another association emerges, as if one finds it in a cook book. Eventually one cannot know, what the writer originally meant. The appropriate questions are:
    In which context are the words used? What do the words mean?
  • Standards
    All texts evolve in a cultural context with certain standards. If an American writes a text, then the individual is always in the limelight – the American dream stimulates for special performance. In Asian countries the text is created in the context of social relationships – the stimulus results from the obligations for the community.
    The suitable question is: Which standards push the meaning into which direction?
  • Way of writing texts
    The production of texts can be very different. Hand written words from the ivory tower have another character, than sentences written by hand in a coffee shop, or typed with a typewriter, or entered into a computer or spoken into a tape recorder. The same is also valid with the text interpretation – read or listened. According to the procedure, texts have a more or less well structured story line as well as a respective consistency of the thoughts.
    The questions are: Where and how was the text created?
  • Feelings
    “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Ludwig Wittgenstein finished with this sentence his Tractatus Philosophicus. And this is where we find the limits of expression. Feelings that move us and that we do not have a word for, cannot be expressed accordingly with words. Nevertheless they affect the flow and the conclusions that are written or are omitted in the text.
    The associated question is: What was the mood of the author?

Bottom line: In summary, a text is much more than the sum of its words. In most of the cases it will be difficult to determine those additional backgrounds. Perhaps at least a part might be discovered, by imagining additional meaning between the lines.