As Culture Eats Strategy, Action Eats Fear!

So we are most all familiar with the famous Peter Drucker quote "Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”. He posits that much good strategy is thwarted by organizational cultures which fights and kills strategies they are uncomfortable with. We know it takes great skill and persistence to shepard innovative strategies through the organization's cultural gauntlets. 

Lately I have been experimenting with a variation on this theme, "Action Eats Fear for (you insert the meal)". :-) In this context, action is the proxy of strategy and fear, of culture.  

Being on sabbatical, I have more time than usual to be plagued and paralyzed by fearful feelings and thoughts. I have found though that when tempted to bog down in this paralysis, “skillful" action is a reliable antidote. As with myself, so with organizations where we often see that in the face of uncertainty, organizations succumb to a "sickness of fear”, a topic my good colleague Bill Drummy recently called to our attention in a TEDMED recap blog post. 

In situations where we are experiencing a sickness of fear, we are not so much at fault for being inactive as for being unskillful in the actions we take. This is a conundrum as skillful action is often the child of unskillful action that we learn from. This pondered, a good addition to my original premise is that while Action may eat Fear in the short term, Educated Action breeds Success over the longer term. :-D

David Allen’s (of Getting Things Done fame) Next Action is a good practice to execute this Action Eats Fear strategy. Forgetting about the fear of what could go wrong and what resource is lacking, I find that taking the Next Action is like a lit candle which pushes back the darkness of fear. In each Next Action, one more step toward a goal is accomplished, and hopefully learned from. 

I am also finding that sometimes the best Next Action is one of (relative) non-action, taking a nap, sitting in meditation, going for a walk or writing an encouraging note to a colleague who inadvertently crossed my mind. This non-acting action often unblocks the flow of creativity and courage that fear blocks. 

So as Culture Eats Strategy, let’s also remember that Action Eats Fear and be skillful in how we confront to get the change we are working on in the world, however we define it.

Bon appétit! 

Translating Fear of Wrong Decisions to Learning From Wrong Decisions

Yesterday during my morning walk, I was reading, yes on my iPhone, a Daily Om newsletter on Self-Determination. In reading, I came across a sentence that alluded to how we are stopped by the fear of wrong decisions. I know this is a common barrier for me, having been raised on the sanctity of right decisions, and the utter sinfulness of wrong ones. This is also a habit I witness overwhelmingly in my coachees. This fear of wrong decisions is a problem when taken too far, and especially when it robs us of learning and the opportunities that learning takes advantage of.

With adequate time to reflect, I think you would agree that there has been a rare decisions made which did not have a risk of being wrong, yet, we generally have made the decision, reaped the benefits of its rightness, and the learnings of its wrongness without the world or our lives coming to an end. In situations where we procrastinated endlessly, we neither benefited or learned from our procrastination. I acknowledge here that sometimes the best decision is to sit tight but even in those cases, we should decide deliberately, and without fear, thus reserving our energy to better adapt to and learn from whatever happens, right or wrong.

As I have more and more decisions behind me in life, I have have developed confidence in this method of investing my energy more in learning from, and adapting to, wrong decisions than in fearing them, as they are inevitable. I am not perfect at it but I improve with every mindful decision. I encourage this perspective in you also.

Remember, every decision has a risk of right and wrong in it. Celebrate the right and learn from the wrong, but do not be paralyzed by fear of the latter.

Failing To(ward) Success

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The Transformation of Accepting Change

Change is constant.

Change involves loss even as it involves gain.

Loss is pain. Loss is a form of death. Because we fear death, we fear loss, we fear change.

If we can learn to accept the pain of loss, the fear of death and the constancy of change, we can be profoundly transformed in our thinking, our being and our doing. With this transformation of ourselves, comes a transformation of our teams (families included), our organizations, our networks, our businesses and our careers.

So much of the hesitance, hedging, capriciousness, deception, fretting, anger, fear, blame-shifting, etc., that hangs us up at work is a result of this fear of change, of loss, of death.

How is our fear of loss and our lack of acceptance hindering our teams, our organizations, our selves, our careers, our work and service in the world? However they are, let’s commit, and continually recommit, to practicing acceptance versus fear, so that we become not victims, but shapers of inevitable change.

One might say that, “If you can’t beat it (and ultimately we cannot), shape it!”

Replies and rebuttals welcome.