Tag Archives: re-thinking

Taking Personal Responsibility – Creating the Line of Choice

Taking Personal Responsibility - Creating the Line of Choice

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our last blog, we described how people’s personal power is diminished when they don’t take personal responsibility for the impact of their behaviors and actions and the results they cause. Where many people are feeling minimized and marginalized, anxious as a result of being isolated and lonely, worrying about losing their security and freedom, and dealing with the instability in their working environments.  Resulting in many people disengaging from the important conversations, job functions, key relationships, workplaces, and in some instances, even from society. Where managers and leaders lack the basic self-awareness and self-regulation skills to control the only controllable in uncertain and unstable times, is to choose how to respond, rather than react to it.

We have a unique moment in time to shift their defensiveness through being compassionate, creative, and courageous towards helping managers and leaders unfreeze and mobilize to exit our comfort zones.  To take intelligent actions catalyze and cause positive outcomes, that deliver real solutions to crises, complex situations, and difficult business problems.

Why do people avoid taking personal responsibility?

People typically avoid taking personal responsibility for reasons ranging from simple laziness, risk adversity, or a fear of failure, to feeling change fatigued, overwhelmed, or even victimized by the scale of a problem or a situation.

Resulting in a range of different automatic defensive, and a range of non-productive reactive responses including:

  • Avoidant behavior, where feel victimized and targeted, people passively “wriggle” and the buck gets passed onto others, and the real problem or issue does not get addressed or resolved.
  • Controlling behavior, where people ignore their role in causing or resolving the real problem or issue, and aggressively push others towards their mandate or solution, denying others any agency.
  • Argumentative behavior, where people play the binary “right-wrong” game, and self-righteously, triggered by their own values, oppose other people’s perspectives in order to be right and make the other person wrong.

Creating the line of choice

At Corporate Vision, we added a thick line of “choice” between “personal responsibility” and “blame, justification and denial” to intentionally create space for people to consider taking more emotionally hygienic options rather than:

  • Dumping their “emotional boats” inappropriately onto others, even those they may deeply care about,
  • Sinking into their habitual, and largely unconscious default patterns when facing complex problems, which results in the delivery of the same results they always have.
  • Not regulating their automatic reactive responses to challenging situations, and not creating the vital space to pause and reflect to think about what to do next.

To enable them to shift towards taking response-ability (an ability to respond) and introducing more useful options for responding in emotionally agile, considered, constructive, inclusive, and creative ways to the problem or the challenge.

Noticing that when we, or others we interact with, do slip below the line to notice whether to “camp” there for the long term or to simply choose to make the “visit” a short one!

Doing this demonstrates the self-awareness and self-regulation skills enabling people to take personal responsibility. Which initiates ownership and a willingness to be proactive, solutions, and achievement orientated – all of which are essential qualities for 21st century conscious leadership that result in innovative outcomes that result in success, growth, and sustainability.

Shifting your location – from “you, they and them” to “I, we and us”

Developing the foundations for transformational and conscious leadership involves:

  • Supporting people to acknowledge and accept that the problem or challenge is not “out there” and is within their locus of control or influence.
  • Shifting the “Maturity Continuum” to enable leaders and managers to be both independent and interdependent.
  • Creating a line of choice to think, act and do things differently.
  • Calling out people when they slip below the line.

It involves supporting people to let go of their expectation that “they” or someone else, from the outside, will fix it, and supporting them to adopt a stance where:

  • “I” or “we” can and are empowered to do it,
  • “I” or “we” are responsible for getting above the line,
  • “I” or “we” can choose a different way of being, thinking, and acting intelligently in this situation.

Developing conscious leadership

At any time, everyone is either above or below the line because it is elemental to the type of conscious leadership we all need to survive and thrive, in a world where people are seeking leaders, managers, and working environments that require interdependence.

To operate in the paradigm of “we” – we can do it; we can cooperate; we can combine our talents and abilities and create something greater together.

We cooperate together by creating the line of choice where we call out to ourselves and others when we slip below it, to get above the line as quickly as possible.

Where interdependent people and communities combine their efforts, and their self-awareness and self-regulation skills with the efforts of others to achieve their growth and greatest success by increasing:

  • Transparency and trust,
  • Achievement and accountability,
  • Diversity and inclusion,
  • Experimentation and collaboration.

All of these are founded on the core principle of taking personal responsibility, which is an especially crucial capability to develop self-awareness and self-regulation skills in the decade of both disruption and transformation.

Bravely calling out self and others

When we take responsibility for managing our own, “below the line” reactive responses, by habitually creating the line of choice, we can bravely call out ourselves and others when we slip below it.

Because when we don’t call ourselves and others we interact with, we are unconsciously colluding with their emotional boats, default patterns, and automatic reactive responses, which inhibit their ability to effect positive change.

When we safely awaken ourselves and others, we can get back above the line quickly and choose different ways of being, thinking, and acting intelligently in the situation.

Alternately, people aren’t taking personal responsibility, they cannot be accountable, they will fail in their jobs, and their teams, and fail to grow as individuals and as leaders.

In fact, developing a habitual practice of emotionally intelligent and conscious leadership by safely and bravely disrupting ourselves and our people, in the face of ongoing uncertainty, accelerating change, and continuous disruption.

This is the second in a series of three blogs on the theme of taking responsibility – going back to leadership basics.

Find out about our learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, starting Tuesday, October 18, 2022. It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem focus,  human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique context.

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Re-Thinking for a New Era

Re-Thinking for a New Era

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our last blog, we proposed, rather than living in a world where everyone hates to fail, why not adopt a rethink, respond, regroup, thrive pattern, and experience failure as an opportunity for change, unlearning, and re-thinking? Adopting this approach supports your human-centricity and enables you to become future-fit through developing your set of 21st-century superpowers in the face of the acute disruption of COVID-19. This is reinforced by Adam Grant, in his book “Think Again” (the power of not knowing what you don’t know) where he states that we are living in a time vital for re-thinking to help us become adaptive and agile and develop our future fitness to thrive in a disruptive, uncertain world.

Critical Art of Re-Thinking

The critical art of re-thinking involves being actively open-minded, hearted, and willed:

  • To learning, and possibly re-learning how to effectively question your own beliefs, mindsets, assumptions, opinions, and habits;
  • Through connection, association, detachment, and discernment to these qualities in other people’s minds and hearts;
  • And to then put our “mental pliability” and “emotional agility” to the test by creating the time and space for re-thinking with a new “set of goggles” and revising our views based on what we learn.

This potentially benefits everyone because it allows us to upgrade and update our points of view and expand our understanding of the world, we are all living in today and build our future fitness.

It also positions us for change innovation and excellence in the way we transform our approach to work and share our wisdom in life.

Making time and space for re-thinking

  • The vital role of unlearning

Embracing human-centricity and a future-fit focus involves unlearning and letting go of many of our old beliefs, mindsets, assumptions, opinions, and habits embedded in our habitual feeling and thinking systems.

Being able to discern which of these are now incomplete, ineffective, and irrelevant as we adapt, and serve people, teams, and organisations to survive, grow, and develop future fitness to thrive in the post-Covid-19 world.

Unlearning is not about forgetting, it’s about paying deep attention and developing the awareness to see, and safely and courageously step outside of our old thinking systems, mental models, biases, and paradigms.

  • Being intellectually humble

Being intellectually humble involves “knowing what we don’t know” and being inquisitive and curious enough to explore new discoveries, and pay deep attention, and be consciously aware of the rich and valuable rewards to be found in the “unknown”.

Most of us are unconsciously motivated to move away from change and learning as a result of “blindness” to our learning or survival anxieties (Schein), and the need to cover up our “learning incompetence” (when people pretend to know things they don’t).

The willingness to be actively open-minded, hearted, and willed and embrace intellectual humility helps us see things clearly and moves us towards overcoming our blind spots and weaknesses.

Re-Thinking in a Disconnected and Disruptive Era

  • Thinking, fast and slow

Daniel Kahneman, in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” describes the “machinery of … thought,” dividing the brain into two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which “respectively produce fast and slow thinking.”

For our purposes, at ImagineNation™, in our group, leadership, and team coaching programs, these can also be thought of as intuitive and deliberate thought.

  • Introducing System 3 thinking

My colleague, Peter Webb (www.peterjwebb.com), has added to this work by researching and validating a System 3 which he describes as considerative, which is complementary to our approach to thinking differently at ImagineNation™.

  • System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. it is intuitive, quick, and emotional.
  • System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration. It is deliberative in that is rational and calculated.
  • System 3 thinking is more considerative, thoughtful, and consequential in that it enables you to focus on what really matters, discern what makes common sense, make small decisions and take small actions to find out what works best, be compassionate, regulate your emotions and develop a tolerance for divergent values.

You can explore more these three thinking systems, and initiate your own re-thinking process by contacting Peter at https://www.peterjwebb.com/

Initiating Your Re-Thinking Strategy

  • Developing a habit of reflective practices

Our innovation coaching, leading, and teaming learning programs involve developing a regular reflective practice –which according to Turner, Lucas & Whitaker, in the learning and coaching context is:

“the ability to step away from your work and identity patterns, habits, strengths, and limitations in your work, and/within the system you work in.”

  • Pause-retreat-reflect cycle to catalyse re-thinking

At ImagineNation™ to initiate the re-thinking process, through partnering with clients to be actively open-minded, hearted, and willed through our “pause-retreat-reflect-reboot” cycle.

To support the development of the new habit, we include:

  • A personal reflection practice involves initiating or continuing a mindfulness activity.
  • A set of regular reflection activities which include different sets of reflective and generative questions.
  • Journaling processes, incorporating the CCS Cards for play and critical reflection for our clients to experiment with.

This involves practicing a set of regular retreat and reflection activities involving safely and intentionally enabling people to deeply listen and question and paradoxically dance across the 3 thinking systems simultaneously.

Enhancing your own and your team’s capability to do this will transform your approach to work, harness people’s collective intelligence to share their wisdom in life with the world, and develop future fitness to master challenges and solve problems as they arise.

  • Shifting to re-thinking
  1. Interrupt their habitual “do-feel-think” cycles (doing stuff that may not deliver the results you want, feeling the awful emotions that result from mistakes, imperfection, and failure, then thinking what to do about it).
  2. Create “stop signals” to affect a pause, long enough to stop doing stuff and become present to the range of emotions to calm down their nervous system.
  3. Connect, associate with and acknowledge how they might be feeling at this unique and specific moment in time.
  4. Pay deep attention to observing their operating thought patterns, with detachment and discernment.
  5. Intentionally choose a desired future state or outcome.
  6. Consider the impact of their feelings and thoughts on the results they are getting.
  7. Deliberate, consider and quickly choose more resourceful visceral and feeling states that compels (pulls) and mobilise them to achieve the desired future state or outcome.
  8. Finally, deliberate, consider and quickly choose more resourceful thought and feeling patterns to choose the most intelligent actions to take to achieve the desired future state or outcome.

The result is usually the development of a re-thinking process that has evolved from “do-think-feel” to “feel-think-do” (connecting to a desirable outcome, feeling present, thinking about the most intelligent thoughts and actions to embody and enact to get there, saving both time and money on wasted activities, avoiding mistakes and failures, to get to their desired future state.)

A Final Word on the Benefits of Re-Thinking

Taking just a moment to pause-retreat-reflect catalyses our rethink, respond, regroup, thrive pattern and creates opportunities for change, unlearning, and re-thinking. It is also a vital ingredient towards developing peoples’ future fitness.

Enabling us to appreciate the value of tuning into ourselves and into others, to leverage our emotional and mental muscles, towards actively creating the space for evoking and provoking different options and creative choices.  Which better enable and empower us to re-think about being, thinking, and acting differently in a new age, impacted by the technologies created by accelerated digitization.

We can then perform at higher levels, achieve our desired outcomes and goals, interact, lead and team more effectively and develop functional and highly valued collaborative relationships with others, as well as with stakeholders and customers.

To leverage the current turning point, and develop our 21st-century superpowers, to co-create a more equitable, resilient, sustainable, human-centric, and future-fit environment, within an ever-changing landscape.

Join Our Next Free “Making Innovation a Habit” Masterclass to Re-Engage 2022!

Our 90-minute masterclass and creative conversation will help you develop your post-Covid-19 re-engagement strategy.  It’s on Thursday, 10th February at 6.30 pm Sydney and Melbourne, 8.30 pm Auckland, 3.30 pm Singapore, 11.30 am Abu Dhabi and 8.30 am Berlin. Find out more.

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