“People are smart and able, yet when we aim high,
when we try to innovate, we often fall short.”
Most of us have heard this kind of thing. Most of us have thought it. How do we overcome it? The information needed to rewrite your organization’s story is already there, all around you. Let me show you how to access and act on it.
In many workplaces, if you could read minds, you’d find that people feel their work serves one or more organizational processes that they didn’t create and haven’t owned. To live into their full potential, it has to be the other way around. People must feel their work enlarges their creativity, their sense of personal achievement, and their pleasure in what they do and what it means.
When this feeling is shared, the organization adopts a culture of possibility. A culture of possibility lets organizations shed the stale mechanical and hierarchical paradigms that saddle them with tedious meetings, pointless planning, irrelevant reports, metrics without learning—in short, with mediocrity—and renew themselves.
Creating a culture of possibility means a significant step change, embodying the shift you want to see. People learn how to receive and use a much fuller range of information. They see their work and your collective mission through a cultural lens, spotting blockages and opportunities that weren’t evident before. They know how to bring everyone’s full and best capacities to each problem and challenge. They have much more powerful design tools, imagination plus inspiration. Individual learning aggregates into new organizational culture and new results. And that multiplies the impact your work and transforms your relationships with constituents and consumers.
It’s not a radical message
When I travel around the country talking to organizations about a culture of possibility that releases and increases true potential, everyone gets it. When I say we need to bring our whole selves to work—minds, bodies, emotions and spirits—the room is a sea of bobbing heads.
In my new books—The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future and The Wave—I lay out what Gloria Steinem has called a “future in which creativity, empathy, and social imagination are the primary forces in our daily lives. Everything in it is doable and practical.” I explain that we need all our capacities to excel at creating and trusting new ideas, at reading people and situations, at building relationships, at nurturing emergent leadership, at all we do.
The chief response to my ideas has been, “Great! How do we do it?”
How do we do it?
“We can’t solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them,” Einstein said. I can help you create a culture of possibility for your organization. If you’ve already begun the journey, I can help you even more. Here are some ways we can start:
- Inspiring talks and workshops that engage people at all levels in new and exciting possibilities, connecting purpose and pleasure;
- Hands-on workshops for leaders that align leadership with a new model and teach powerful new skills;
- Art-based planning and design processes, building creative resources into your organization’s future
advice and counsel tailored to your aims and circumstances through one-on-one coaching, dynamic group work, or both.
Please contact me to talk about creating a culture of possibility in your organization or business.
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