How Do We Change Part 2: Learning to Think Differently

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Feb 052012
 

Is Change Possible?

It is my firm conviction that lasting change is a process that begins from the inside out. As I expressed in the last blog, learning to live from the heart is a discovery of who we are and what we are passionate about. This clear sense of our identity is what gives us the mojo to change. Desire and hunger are the rocket fuel that propel us towards change

Another assumption I have about change is that we need outside help to change. As part of the 12 steps towards recovery, Alcoholics Anonymous has discovered that the journey of change requires a person to recognize their need of God or a Higher Power to change.

I agree with this premise: Transformation of the heart is a God initiated transaction. Alongside God’s help to change from the inside out, the chorus from old Beatle’s song that says ‘I get by with a little help from my friends’ so aptly states our need for external help to change.  This is where coaching comes in. All change requires the humility and willingness to ask for help.

Inside Out Change

With these two assumptions as the initial building blocks in the process of change, I want to discuss how change moves from the heart to our head. Once we have the motivation to change, we will need to have a change in some of our thinking.

Faulty or corrosive thinking comes from two sources: Worldviews that are formed over time as we believe and then buy into the  powerful spoken or unspoken voices in our cultures of origin that tell us what is right and what is real, and Wounds that have been inflicted on our core identity. Wounds empower lies that we believe about ourselves, and are the breeding ground for crippling behaviours in our lives. These narrow and negative thought patterns are like shackles that hold us captive, keep us stuck, and keep us from the freedom of change.

The following story illustrates how faulty worldviews and wounds must be confronted to overcome negative thinking and old ways of doing things. Esther and I just watched the movie Moneyball. This is the true story of Billy Beane, a highly touted baseball prospect of the New York Mets who failed to live up to expectations, and quit playing baseball. He also experienced a broken marriage in which he had a daughter. The wounding from a baseball career that went sideways, as well as a failed marriage, fed a lie that Billy Beane was a loser and would never make anything of himself. He became the GM of the lowly small market team, the Oakland A’s (41 million payroll), a team that nearly beat out the New York Yankees (125 million payroll) in the 2002 playoffs.

Challenging Pre-Existing Worldviews

At the end of the season, the Yankees gutted the A’s by offering players such as Johnny Damon lucrative contracts that the A’s couldn’t match. Beane decide to change the paradigm of how to build a successful baseball team by hiring a Yale graduate of economics who had developed a computer generated analysis program for evaluating and drafting players. Instead of trying to compete with teams such as the Yankees in pursuing and paying huge salaries to super star players or highly touted prospects, Beane and his nerdy assistant GM started looking for players undervalued by the market. They employed the use of sabermetrics, the specialized analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence, specifically baseball statistics.

This strategy went against all the conventional wisdom of the baseball culture and scouting in how to form a winning team. Beane set out to challenge the then existing worldviews in baseball and face the wounds from his past failures by thinking outside the box, asking a different set of questions, and challenging the power structures in baseball. Throughout the movie Beane is constantly battling the negative thinking and fear of failure due to his past wounds. He faces those lies and overcomes. After a successful season, the Boston Red Sox organization offers him a contract of $12,500.000 to leave the A’s and apply his method in Boston. He chooses to turn the contract down in order to be closer to his daughter in California and pursue a World Series in Oakland. Two years later, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series through Bill James implementing Beane’s strategy.

Though Beane hasn’t won a World Series title yet, he has changed the worldview and culture of baseball with his courage to think differently. A line (as I remember it) from Moneyball, “The guy who breaks through the wall first gets all bloody.”

Here are some  reflection questions and exercises to help you learn to think differently:

Reflections Questions:

  • Where are you doing the same old thing expending more energy and resources, yet getting the same old result? Where are you stuck?
  • Where do you need to ask a different set of questions to resolve an apparent problem or obstacle you are facing?
  • Where are you swimming against the current of established ways of doing something, and getting some flack for it because it is threatening the ‘sacred cows’ or power structures?
  • What new information is challenging your old way of doing things?

    Do you see an old lady or a beautiful woman?

  • What are the emotional barriers or cultural blinders such as fear of failure or pride that keep you from seeing a new reality?
  • What are the negative beliefs that you believe about yourself because of some wounding to your core identity? For example: “I don’t have what it takes to….” or “I’m a loser and everything I try ends up failing, so I won’t try again.”
  • What are the wounds you have experienced in your past that empower these lies?

 Practical Exercises to help you think differently:

  • Ask God for His power to change you from the inside out.
  • Ask some trusted friends to pray with you for healing from past wounds that empower lies in your life.
  • Practice risking by doing something that you fear or is outside your comfort zone, i.e. public speaking, learning to swim, eating a new type of food, or developing a friendship with someone from another culture.
  • Try making your next decision through a process of filtering it through two or three different worldviews at the same time. For example, an Eastern Worldview makes decisions through the lens of what the community thinks, while a Western Worldview makes decisions through the lens of what is most important for the individual. A gatekeeper is able to think in two or three different worldviews at the same time. These folks are very effective in global business, or as cross cultural communicators.
  • Make sure that in your posse of friends you have some positive people who believe in you.
  • For every negative comment you make, practice saying 3 positive comments.

 

The Journey of An Architect Learning How to Be An Artist

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Sep 302011
 

The Grand Vision of the Architect Ready to Be Executed!

For most of my life, I have operated from a leadership philosophy/paradigm and a set of practices that cascade out of the notion that the role of a visionary leader is to be solely that of an architect. The prevailing thinking that has influenced my leadership training and practices flows from a Newtonian, mechanistic worldview in which predictability, creating plans and programs to produce order, and determining the end outcome are the key objectives. From this perspective, people can be viewed as cogs in the machine which can be manipulated to get the desired result, or seen as replaceable pieces to be discarded when no longer productive. An effective leader’s job is to come up with a big vision, to cast that vision to a group of people, to find the people with the necessary skill sets to execute that vision, and to implement the five year plan to bring that vision to fruition. This approach to leadership does bring about results and seems to work.

Yet we are entering a time when our Newtonian mechanistic worldview is colliding with other realities. Discontinuous or random change happening at an accelerated rate is making it more and more difficult to have long range, rigid plans.  The realization through chaos is that we are not as in control as we think we are – just look at the fluctuations of the stock market in the last month. There is a growing awareness that systems/organizations are not machines, but a network of interconnected relationships where even little decisions can have great impact on the whole – look at the grassroots revolutions in the Middle East in the last year. If you want to reflect more on some of these ideas, I suggest Margaret Wheatley’s book, “Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order In a Chaotic World”.

This collision of worldviews has given me an opportunity to complement the leadership skills of an architect by learning another way of leading. There are some who in reaction to the extremes of present and past forms of leadership are proposing no leadership, or anarchy.

Vision Flows out of the Imagination

Vision Flows Out of the Imagination!

What I’m discovering is that I need to learn to lead like an artist alongside my penchant for being an architect. Now I’m not much of an artist when it comes to painting or drawing. Although, I’m not too bad at sketching stick figures or randomly throwing paint on a canvas! I love art…just come look at my house sometime. I am learning that art is a way for us to get in touch with our longing for beauty, a portal to help us catch glimpses of the eternal, and a conduit for the creativity embedded by God in our imaginations to be unleashed. The art of leadership is not just casting a vision but creating contexts for others to unlock their imaginations, and together put strokes of the vision we see on the canvas. As leaders we are to create the borders to the canvas which are a few values and practices that make it safe for people to explore and express the vision they carry in their imaginations of what a better future would look like.

Creating Together

This means we as leaders have to give up control of what the end picture will look like, which, if we are really honest with ourselves, no person can determine anyhow! The borders or boundaries around the canvas keep us from tipping over into the abyss of rugged individualism – everyone doing their own thing – or the top down power politics where only the few most dominant or gifted get to paint on the canvas of vision.

 

Here are some questions to ponder as you contemplate learning to lead like an artist:

  • What does the desired future that brought us together look like?
  • Who needs to be at the table to put a stroke on the canvas of our painting of a desired future?
  • What are the values or practices that will make it safe for us to explore and paint together?
  • What borders or structures will complement the painting we are creating together?