A beginning – We have a lot to say

3. April 2025

A trend or a return to the old hierarchical world?

There are already the first posts on social media positioning themselves against »wokeness«. Sometimes with an attack on the »soft« fashions in the people departments and the so-called soft consultancies. There is a noticeable trend towards more top-down and a new »strength« and »decisiveness«. In addition, all programs that support diversity are under considerable pressure. For us, this is an important moment to reflect on our strengths, attitudes and proven skills and knowledge in transformations. In the following text, we confirm what is important and necessary to give the productivity and performance of people in organisations room to develop. How do you reflect on the significance and influence of this new trend from the political arena that is now reaching companies?

A beginning

We have a lot to say. A lot about: New Organisation, New Work, New Mindset. Five years ago, we could have summarised what we have to say in one lecture – we can no longer do that today. It is too multifaced, it is too differentiated. So we pick out the aspects that we are dealing with in our internal discussions and in conversations with customers. We are experiencing upheavals, experiments, outbreaks and new things alongside a great deal of stability – at all levels, in the organisations as new forms of organisation, in groups as new dynamics of social communitisation, individual people with new life plans that do not follow career mainstream.

What is actually driving this?

On the surface, companies are perhaps driven by fear, of losing touch with the Chinese dynamic – perhaps – perhaps – or maybe the loss of confidence in the European success story: the systematic planning, the management of projects, the once so successful waterfall planning, perhaps doubts about the predictive power of strategic departments? Perhaps the confrontation with the doubts of many about the quality of leadership? Perhaps the widespread loss of trust in the »elites«? But perhaps also because it is obvious that we are now more and more confronted with non-linear, dynamically deterministic systems: in the markets, in competition, in society, in the community of our own company, and yet we have worked so hard to make the world linear dynamic deterministic. No matter how often we ask »why«, we will not find the cause – but we will find conditions, contingencies, relations.

For NEW WORK, one condition stands out, a social, a global tendency that has been stable for a very long time: The gain of more and more individual freedom. We see this clearly in the metropolitan regions – where social control is minimised and there is room for many niches, for a lot of otherness, an otherness that can organise itself as a group and group affiliation. It is about self-determination, about one’s own individuality and its social recognition, it is about utilising an old concept, it is about self-realisation. In the current motivation theories, it is labelled with the terms autonomy and learning (growth) and with the idea of self-realisation, that we are purpose-ied. Today, this is an elementary aspect of a corporate culture. With the orientation towards purpose, which replaces the processes of vision or mission, the strenuous, the challenging – how can we balance the individual with the common into a balance that is characterised by a certain consistency. How can our own purpose become a common one and how consistent can this be? In the background is the question of the relationship between solidarity and individual selfhood. Individuality and the quality of communitisation belong together and they make the new forms of work so interesting, so exciting and at the same time so challenging. Because we are in the process of doing without our big, caring brother.

And of course the freedom of the many, the diversity of the many is a driver of complexity, and in allowing this diversity, the idiosyncrasies, we also experience the loss of the one binding moral institution that provides security. This is not only being demanded politically, but also in companies – unfortunately not looking forward, but with a growing longing for the old authority, to use a psychoanalytical image, for the all-judging father. New Work goes the other way – New Work wants to shape freedom so that co-operation and so that collaboration and community are still possible. They allow us to trace aspects that we encounter in our work and for which there are no simple recipes.

The agile organisation – in essence, the search for an organisation that is able to adapt quickly, in which internal orientation is reduced and in which it becomes possible to make an external perspective effective internally in smaller units. Zygmund Bauman called this a fluid organisation decades ago. The blueprints are available – however, the social and psychological dynamics of such organisations still leave many issues unresolved. What can we observe – apart from the trivial issues that not everyone is in favour of such changes, that scepticism is spreading, that the masters of consistency (they are mostly men) fear a loss of power:

Escape into the method
Methods are helpful and necessary – but at best they are only half of the journey. We are somewhat astonished the thoroughness with which the methodological set is increasingly more and more formulated and increasingly resembles the small-scale process landscape that the new organisation was intended to at least reduce. Described methods provide security, they relieve the individual of the burden of personal organisation and are often an escape from freedom. But that’s what it’s all about if you want to achieve flexibility, the richness of polyphony. They are too often an escape from the opportunity of self-efficacy and the responsibility.

The lack of group dynamic competence
What happens when we level out hierarchy and describe the role in such a way that it becomes more of an enabler for personal responsibility. In fact, we lack an understanding of group dynamics and social dynamic processes. The concept of empathy is waved around, but that, difficult in itself, falls short if we want to support people in the informal, i.e. emotionally unrelieving, social leadership processes. It is time to practise group dynamic competence again. Informal leadership opens up a wide field for egomaniacs and narcissists and we know the devastating consequences of bullying in the school context. Group dynamics as experiential learning is needed.

We want your soul, your heart
This becomes all the more important the more we begin to no longer separate our work and private lives. We are merging two previously separate identities. And we are doing it, because we have understood that in the new organisations we need the whole person and not just the time that they make available to us. The old deal was clear: you get money and security (the famous gold watch later) and you give us your agreed limited time, your obedience and your loyalty. If we believe in the motivating power of a purpose, i.e. the fact that a person commits their whole existence to something, because their own deep sense of purpose and that of the work increasingly coincide, then the old deal no longer works. I can’t buy the heart, the soul of a person – the company has to offer more – places, rooms, spaces, relationships, social structures, meaningful concepts that enable people to make a full contribution. And also the freedom to accept what is on offer, for a time, the freedom to leave them again – in the longer term, company boundaries will become fluid. And so the attractiveness as a »place to live« will become increasingly important.

The finite nature of purpose
Purpose often comes across as very gravitational – with such a hint of eternity. But that is a constriction. We do not follow the one purpose in our lives that we must somehow have to discover on this journey through life. Our energy, commitment find many »senses« and they seek out social contexts in which they can be lived. They are guiding for a time, then we leave them for something that is now in this phase of life, in this social context touches us more. This is where we find the second meaning level of Zygmund Bauman’s concept of the fluid organisation – we also flow within our organisation, but also increasingly between organisations and more and more also between different concepts of life. Organisations are faced with the task of repeatedly and to create inviting places and structures that offer meaning and are thus able to attract those seeking meaning. We will have to learn to experience the flowing itself as stable.

The psychological focus
For us, in our working tradition, the psychological focus, i.e. the constitution of people in these changes, is of great importance. How do people learn recognise their roles, their possibilities in the new forms, how do we give them a chance to realise themselves in the new to reinvent themselves in previously closed possibilities? This requires, for example, deep interventions in the rarely thematised normative basic assumptions of coaching or leadership training. If we work laterally and explore more lateral possibilities, then we leave behind the previously dominant vertical aspect that organisations today primarily offer as a career. Career, previously linked to advancement as hope and as pain, is defined differently – more and more as the ability to repeatedly find places of attractiveness, to see oneself as fluid. However, companies quickly come up against the limits of society, which still celebrates the hero of advancement.

How do we learn?
Ultimately, the question arises as to which concepts of life we train people for. More than ever, Gregory Bateson’s distinction between first-order learning and second-order learning. We will make little progress with a PISA-orientated approach, because that which has trains and teaches what has been tried and tested, in an old and stable world. Learning for the new, that which we have not yet practised, that requires an opening to the part of our part of our society that we like to marginalise with the words art and describe as a place of bliss. But it is precisely there that we can learn more about the future than in any strategy or marketing department of large corporations and consultancies. Long before companies could call what they call VUCA today, art has showed us with a performative twist what event means, what ruptures mean and what it means to be able to act fluidly. But our current management elites have become quite art-averse.

The happiness of otherness
For us, the focus is also shifting to what is dealt with under the keyword diversity. This is about more than statistics showing that we have diversity… quotas for women, quotas for Indians, LGBTIQ* quotas and so on. How do we actually learn to respect each other, how do we learn to talk and act about differences in such a way that they mean wealth rather than exclusion. There will be no real agility without addressing diversity. And that starts with the smaller differences that were not talked about in the old world of work (separation of private and work) and which hold back considerable energy in the form of silence or the lack of a platform for expression. In my work in the diverse Asian cultures, I know that we have really achieved something when people say »you have touched my heart« and when they have touched my heart. Then we start to have respect for each other and thus for each other.

The magic word – mindset change
Sounds simple enough. But what is it all about? There are many descriptions. For example, from inside-outside thinking and acting to outside-inside thinking and acting. Or from being trapped in the inbox to opening up to the outbox, or in the word game play on words, your goal is to come forward or to come along. Whatever it’s called, it’s about getting out of the perspective of self-centredness, of the ego. Not really new, but important, because in business and economics the egomaximiser has been at the forefront of business and economics for too long. was at the centre. The egomaximisers in their competition for ever diminishing resources were seen as the guarantor of dynamism – the co-operating members of the community as the somewhat stupid members of the herd. A very truncated Darwinism, in which it was clear early on that the real egoist is not one, but rather someone who co-operates and is successful as a result. In the Christian world, there used to be the saying it is more blessed to give than to receive. Co-operation here is not just another method or, according to Buddhist concepts of self-optimisation a new trick of egoism, but the self-awareness that the joy, fulfilment and happiness of cooperation can be found in a self-enclosed ego. So what cooperation or today often also called collaboration, can reveal the deep structure of our own thinking and feeling in which we encounter the world. And this makes it possible to create common ground across differences, boundaries and affiliations.

Mutuality
I like to remember conversations with Helm Stierlin, one of the founding fathers of systemic therapy, who understood co-operation as mutuality. Not in the sense of a deal, but rather as a gift that establishes a relationship that allows the other person freedom. This seems to contradiction to the thesis of individualism – because in the new forms of work, the collective is the hero. Now we live our individualism in collectives, in groups in which we feel that we are in good hands and which we change depending on the course of our identity. In mutuality of co-operation, I maintain my individuality and at the same time I am part of a collective that is responsible for the whole. This is the point at which the discussion about the mindset, which sounds so abstract and neutral a spiritual note penetrates. It is the idea of all-connectedness, which in turn corresponds to the experience that we live in a non-linear, dynamically deterministic world.

Organisations or finally thinking politically?
And with all that we are already doing today, we are falling short, if we do not intervene more deeply in the way in which the future is negotiated in companies today (the future here means market, product, process, strategy, etc.). If we only anchor the basic idea of agility, the ability to react quickly and flexibly to changes or to act iteratively and with foresight, in the operational units, then we will not be able to realise our full potential, then we will continue to remain slow and do what has been successful in the past. If we continue with the oligarchic structure of companies, where a more or less homogeneous group that has been organized long time in large programmes, and which has been south, west and east to determine the topics of the organisation, then New Work will not find a place in the organisation. This raises the question for organisational development: who is allowed to speak, who is heard, who has places to speak and to be heard? It is about a genuine discourse process in which the many different people participate in the decisions that determine what should happen in the company and what should happen in the markets. Socially, there will be hardly be a participation in the ownership structure, but a genuine participation in shaping the community with dedicated commitment. With our through-route concepts, we have shown easily practicable ways to break up the oligarchic nature of companies oligarchy and thus created space for voices that are much more likely than long-serving managers to understand what the future will mean and where the place can be that place the company can occupy in this future.

And finally, looking a little further ahead – how do we change our inner attitude towards what is coming as new concepts of life? How do we understand them? An excursion into the pop world of a generation that doesn’t yet has no letter.

Demography – how radical are the changes in life plans?

BTS – a Korean boy band (No. 1 in the US Billboard charts as the first Korean band with »Idol«): A fully staged boy group – every piece of information, every utterance, every movement is choreographed or curated. At the same time the only K-pop band that sends political messages – strongly core message strongly related to individualism: Be yourself, whatever you are or want to be. The videos send, in addition to the offer of identification – the groups always consist of a mix of people (would significantly change the recruitment strategies for management boards) an inclusive message – you are part of us – we are diverse and you belong to us. The videos are also described as representing a hyper-inclusive aesthetic. In the performances, there is no longer a difference between the surface (the performance) and the actual identities – the surface is the whole. Thus Beuys has arrived in youth culture.

Our deep thinking – there is the foreground and the background, there is the appearance and behind it the real thing, the deep-seated Platonism is cancelled out here. The question behind it becomes obsolete because the surface is already the real thing. What does this mean for the world of work? Dissolution of the difference of private and work? The end of role-playing and with it a new kind of authenticity? Places of work as places where identity is formed and lived. Places of work as event spaces – which are passed through quicker – the weakening of continuities in favour of fault lines and lines of rupture and leaps in life? These are also aspects of New Work.

A look at recent coaching experiences. On what background of life plans do I formulate my questions? How much is the whole setting characterised by the old expectations of the companies’ expectations? In her autobiography, Michelle Obama writes about her grandfather, in whom she saw the bitterness of shattered dreams. A bitterness that I encounter again and again in middle management of large companies. While this bitterness can be felt in the background of organisations, the young world is moved by the power of dreams.Let us follow hope and not bitterness.

Appendix: Stories about the lecture

I.
The group was silent, silent for more than an hour. It was traumatised. It was such a good start – working without hierarchy, working in small groups with a common interest, being able to do what you always wanted to do. Then came the setbacks – first the cancellation of projects that were still seen as very promising in the group, but now had no longer had a budget for strategic reasons. How to say goodbye? And how to deal with the fact that you were now also redirected yourself and found themselves in projects and groups that they would not have chosen without need. Then the group dynamics took their course – informal leaders emerged who had good social manipulation skills but were not really suited to the task of exercising a steering function and then the organisation’s desire to make it truly hierarchy-free and the introduction of peer evaluation. The last one was definitely too much – so the group fell silent and had lost all the energy and commitment of the beginning.

II.
From a conversation with a works council member. He was really worried. He looked into the room and saw that all the ergonomic achievements of organised labour had been lost. Employees were sitting on wooden pallets, the tables that were occasionally available were completely unsuitable – and he said, what will their backs look like when they have been working for twenty years? The young people have no longer understand that the company and the works council are fighting against each other to find a better solution for them. They are completely at the mercy of the upper echelons.

III.
From a coaching session. I met this very talented person, when he was still a team leader and had learnt from the CEO that he had been appointed across all hierarchical levels to the board of the the most important division for the future. In that first meeting, we talked a lot about theatre and literature in particular – we compared our reading experiences and it was a tender and very energetic conversation. A year later, I spoke to him, who was still fiery and energetic, about his reading experiences over the last few months. And he blanched because he realised that he had only read management guides and in his reflection he understood, that his deepest source for »leadership« did not come from the guidebooks, but from the deep layers of literary experience. He is now reading again.

IV.
A completely clueless manager. In his management area he has a very talented woman who does much more, does it successfully, than she should and what would be appropriate for her position. So he struggled in his care and his sense of justice, he fought for a promotion and could then proudly offer it to the young woman. He expected joy and gratitude, but received a friendly but firm no – she didn’t want it. And he asked why: And she said, what I’m doing now, I’m doing voluntarily and I enjoy it, if I accept your offer, then I have to do it and I don’t want to.

V.
Another conversation with a messenger who brings you the food you have chosen on the Internet from a restaurant. I said, you know you’re being taken advantage of? You get little money, you only get good shifts if you are fully committed to the needs of your company, which has no duty of care towards you, and you even paid for the box on your back yourself, the bike is your own – why are you doing this? But I am free he said and that was all.

VI.
One last one: An expat manager in Thailand. She mocks about the Thais’ belief in magic, laughs at their offerings in the temples and this daily worship of a shrine. shrine. He is enlightened, hypermodern, rational. The evening is long and after the ritual intoxication process has come to an end (it was mainly cocktails) he talked about his great experiences with positive affirmations. He had found a service provider (they used to be called priest) who, for a small fee, would send him a positive affirming sentence every morning and he then to himself. It was very effective, he said, not realising the irony of the situation.

VII.
It is now 30 years ago. I was talking to a Franciscan woman in a hospital, pushing trolleys of books around the rooms and talking to the sick – talking was probably the most important thing. We talked and that’s how I learnt that this woman, who was now in the lowest rung of the Franciscan hierarchy Franciscans, had been in Rome just a year ago and was the abbess of the entire order of women. And there was no bitterness in her. She was happy and cheerful. It has been around for a long time, the other occupation of the hierarchical posts.

Rüdiger Müngersdorff

Deep Patterns: double justifications

9. November 2021

Throughout its long history, the Western world has returned time and again to the same demand: there must be a sense to your life, your existence must have a purpose that goes beyond the measure of life itself. Viktor Frankl has it that this can be something quite individual, but mostly, we are asking for something bigger, something that traverses a whole life. In national movements, for example, it has even gone as far as self-sacrifice. Children are already confronted with the need to declare a purpose in young years: »And what are you going to be one day?« Be useful! Fill your life with a task, a purpose. The message remains the same: What are you doing this for? What is the purpose? What is the sense? Life itself is not enough, it has to relate to something else, something greater.

As purpose concepts are gaining ground, they are pitching that demand right into the heart of businesses. They emphasize their claim: Pick a task, have a purpose! Choose an employer who also has a greater purpose. Be part of a community of sense. The core message is that a successful, fulfilled life must be borne by a purpose. Once you find yourself in your community of purpose, you will be motivated and engaged. That sounds good.

There is a flipside, though, which often leads to disappointment, fatigue, exhaustion, even a sense of failure. The need to have a purpose in life turns into an interior demand, an obligation. In other words: Justify yourself

The need for self-justification is one of our deepest individual and collectively shared beliefs. It calls upon a higher instance: a judge to whom we have to justify ourselves. In our individual lives, that role is often given to our parents. Casting a wider arch, it becomes increasingly unclear who will even pass that judgement.

What is it that we have to justify? First, we need to justify the sense, the purpose that we have given to our life or that has been given to us. Is my purpose a good and valuable purpose against an exterior measure? We ask that question of ourselves, but nowadays also of companies: does the business serve a good purpose, is it borne by a sense that transcends its mere task of being an economic success? This is the first step of justification. It leads to a second justification: Do I, do we fulfil our purpose? Once again, we are facing a judge and a jury. (Add to that the images of our culturally shaped background: it’s about heaven or hell.)

In my coaching work, I often encounter people who despair at this obligation and the expected judgement. They lose their joy in life and in existence against the backdrop of the judge’s ruling that they are foreseeing. When coaching addresses mindsets, it creates an awareness for these demands for a purpose. It also lets us experience which judges we effectively project in order to reinforce this life obligation.

A look at the role of CEOs reveals that the jury is cast so much more widely today. While justification used to be due only to the shareholders, it is now also owed to employees and to society. Those are quite differing scales.

The need to justify our life and our actions is surely an opposition to arbitrary selfishness. However, it can also dampen lively spontaneity, stop us from doing things for the sheer will to do so and obscure our own imagination as part of innovative action. Günther Anders posed a question that provides a fine reason to take a closer look at our own landscape of self-justification.

»Why do you suppose at all that a life might have to contain something else than just being, or even that it is possible for life to have such another thing – the very thing you call a purpose?«
(Günther Anders in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen)

#myndleap #mindset #mindsetarbeit #mindsetcoaching #kollektivesmindset #synnecta #denksinnlich

Rüdiger Müngersdorff
This article was first published at www.myndleap.com
© Artwork: Mitra Art, Mitra Woodall

Collective Leadership

3. November 2021

Shifting the Meaning of Leadership Roles: Thinking Leadership from the Employee Perspective

1. How does the meaning come to be shifted?
The Western world has some specific cultural patterns. One of these calls out to us already from the Story of Creation in the Old Testament: »…replenish the earth, and subdue it!«, and it paints an expectation of pain and suffering. We are called upon to be doers, designers, movers. That is the core of the leadership role: design, do, create. Our modern experience of a global, networked world and its dynamics, as well as the confrontation with other cultural assumptions and values casts doubt on our notion of a confident, designing subject who has been given the world as a creative space. The modern experience appears different: it is not us who subdue the world, but the world that subdues, even overwhelms, us. Instead of scaring us off, though, this insight makes us look for new ways of finding a balance between designed influence and acceptance of the fact that the world shapes us as much as we shape it. It is an experience that also shapes our notion of leadership: the confident role taken on by a designing manager is being challenged by the potential of leadership by collectives.

We have reached a point where we are more likely to describe a manager as someone who enables, sponsors, moderates. We speak of serving managers with the values of humility and caring. It is the path from a strong ego to being part of a greater community.

It appears as if the manager of old had surrendered in the face of complexity, contingency and acceleration. That kind of leadership can no long fulfil the role of the knowledgeable designer and is facing the limits of its own confidence. Hence an answer is sought in the potentially more powerful and more intelligent collective and its multitude of voices. We trust in the wisdom of many views, different discourses and we believe that the collective as a group with a range of perspectives is more likely than the old manager-hero to succeed at the complex tasks of the modern world.

This development goes hand in hand with an insight that the Western dominant model that everything has a reason and can be based on a cause is powerful, but not universally applicable. A complex, accelerating and dynamic world teaches us to look at events in a systemic way: we view events as interactive and interwoven conditions in which we cannot find a single, unmistakeable cause, but instead find networks that might have caused the event we are seeking to explain. Knowing a single cause shows us a single goal-oriented path of action. A network of relationships forces us to follow feedback whatever we do, to become part of the network, to learn to live with the network. (Hence the altered understanding that mistakes, by triggering feedback, are an opportunity to learn.)

2. Has the old leadership role become obsolete with the turn towards the collective?
In order to master the challenges we face, to find an answer that serves the whole, we surely need the many voices of a diverse collective: we need open discourses without fear. For these discourses to be successful and the many voices not to get stuck in unforgiving positions, we also need guides, an orientation and the ties to a common horizon for whatever is needed at that point. It remains the leadership task to provide orientation, carrying the entire risk of having been wrong. Leadership must surely learn to accept that the subject is not the mighty centre but a part of the whole with a very specific role in that whole. It is always a painful task to learn that I am limited and restricted and that the path to overcoming that limitation are the others. There is another old adage that has accompanied the Western people, passed on by an Ancient Greek oracle: Remember, you are a human! Only a human, but also a human. Hannah Arendt attributed to these humans the ability to make a start. That also remains a leadership task.

3. Is the collective ready to assume leadership tasks?
In many years of working in group dynamic settings, I have seen how difficult it is to attain common orientation and goal-oriented cooperation in groups that lack leadership. In addition to the known group effects (finding roles, positions and meanings in a social field – emotionally driven effects), the development of collective, limiting patterns of perception, thinking and decision-taking form the greatest barrier to a multi-perspective and open dialogue. Together with the emotional dynamics of group cohesion, it reduces the opportunities of multiple perspectives, shrinking the group into – usually subconscious – groupthink. Without directed work on these limited patterns, groups stay far below their level and cannot achieve their given task: to better manage complexity. The dynamics of groups keep covering up the factual focus and, as psychoanalysis described for individuals, access to the collective mindset as a subconscious entity is boarded up by many defence mechanisms. This is why working with the collective mindset requires a deep expertise in group dynamics. It is the only way to manage the new balance in leadership: a more productive balance between leading and being led.

#myndleap #mindset #groupdynamic #collectivemindset #newleadership #synnecta #denksinnlich

Rüdiger Müngersdorff
This article was first published at www.myndleap.com
© Artwork: Mitra Art, Mitra Woodall

Collective Mindset & the Dynamics of Social Systems

5. July 2021

Group dynamics are at the root of all work with social systems. There is a myriad of methods to use in trainings and workshops in order to cover these dynamics. They are effective as long as the issues at hand remain in the foreground and in everybody’s joint focus. However, we frequently find what we call relationship topics gaining ground and hindering progress on the so-called factual topics. Nowadays, as positivity is the prevalent group norm, it has become the habit to not only methodically isolate these dynamics, but in fact to expel them from the groups’ communicative dynamic. At the same time, we know that groups are such rich environments only because of the difference, the range of perspective, opinions and attitudes. This wealth is only accessible where emotions are also admitted. Emotions are too frequently considered dangerous and disruptive, even though they are the very thing we need in order to give difference and diversity scope for effect. We are often lacking the required emotional sovereignty. The habit of ignoring and suppressing group dynamics becomes more pointed in the context of virtual, digital work. At first sight, all conflicts, differences and blind spots seemed to have disappeared in that context, but by now it is apparent that they were in fact only hidden – one sign of this is not least the dwindling enthusiasm in virtual conversations. Another indicator for the fact that it is no solution to ignore the emotional side is the growing number of psychological illnesses and burn-out symptoms reported by the health services.

I often see mindset work concentrating on the individual. There is a promise that we can break free of the binds of mindsets we have collected during our life histories and thereby develop greater degrees of freedom in our actions. That does not go far enough. Mindset work also takes place with a person – it happens within a relationship, in a social situation. This social scene is a fundamental aspect of its efficacy. Taking a closer look, coachings in small groups turn out to often be more efficient than one-on-one relationships, because they work in a much more elaborate social space, a richer scene. Group dynamics are so very important precisely because productive work on the collective mindset is work with the social scene. However, those very skills on group dynamics are often lacking: mindset work that relates to collective understanding and cultural factors is still in its infancy.

We live and work in groups – we are always in a social situation. This setting inspires us and opens our own necessarily limited a priori understanding. While it does create openness, however, it also draws boundaries. The boundaries that are typical for groups are often called groupthink. The usually subconsciously effective norms and rules of behaviour within groups define a space or a scene that effectively limits individual impulses and perspectives. The multitude of individual voices is reduced within groups.

Groups have the potential to be enriching, to have many voices, many facets, and therefore to be able to perform better and adapt more easily, to be more agile. It is rare that this potential is productively tapped. Why is that so? Groups very swiftly form a system of norms and assumptions, values and expectations, which effectively reduce the scope for individual perspectives. Social beings have a need, the necessity to belong, to be part of a social system and thereby also a fear of not belonging, of being excluded. There is great pressure to fit in. We often find ourselves succumbing to that pressure subconsciously or under the cover of excuse stories. Without consciously wanting to, we act, speak and engage in a way we believe to be the group norm.

In doing so, we are robbing the group of its greatest potential: the diversity, the differences, the strangeness and otherness, in short: its individual perspectives. Watching groups, we always see that a limiting norm wins out. The simplest methods in use to that extent are to point out a lack of time or, currently very much en vogue, the request to keep displaying a friendly, accepting Yes Set.

The collective mindset, the organizational development or group culture have an effect on individuals in their belonging to groups and organizations: reinforcing, weakening, shifting. The collective is often more persuasive. Whereever we are dealing with a priori assumptions that shift an individual’s tenets, we must work with the social scene in which that human being lives and works. Individual actions are greatly defined by the scene in which we are set or have set ourselves. Groups provide us with a scene as well as a script that tells us how to play that scene. We seek to niche ourselves within that script: to find those roles which we consider most like to to give us a good position within the community of this group or this social organization. In doing so, we frequently abandon our own personal wealth without even noticing it and are by that very act robbing the group of its own greatest potential: the difference, the individual perspective.

We all have an individual a priori understanding with which we encounter the world and which is each our very own. Where we are part of a social system, we also have a collective a priori understanding that we share with others, with our group. The collective mindset (a priori understanding) is often the more dominant one. The desire to belong and at the same time the fear and shame of exclusion lead us to adapt. We are often not aware of the price we pay for that until the evening, when we are alone. (This is why it remains vital to include at least one evening and one night in workshop designs. They provide the spaces where impulses emerge that can trigger movement. The prevalent abbreviation of meetings, trainings and workshops is one contributing factor for the dominance of the collective norm and the exclusion of difference.)

The collective and the individual mindset are connected. They form a dynamic system and tend to balance out in a limiting stability. Effective work on the individual and the collective mindset works at this balance, opens differences and therefore makes movement possible. At the outset, it is important to perceive the scene that is provided by a group; this makes it possible to engage in different versions and therefore facilitates that differences are made visible and can be discussed. The key to change is opening the group’s expressive sphere, perceiving cracks in the group’s evaluations. This is where the potential of the members can enter group communication and have a differentiating effect. For that to happen, the people must be ready to reveal themselves and develop a setting of trust where differences are accepted (psychological & emotional safety). Group dynamics are about trust as much as the readiness for confrontation. Anyone who supports cultural change in organizations knows that sustainability can only be achieved when both poles of the balance, individual and collective, are worked on at the same time.

This is a plea for group dynamics, then. Any effective work with the mindset concept necessarily demands a deep familiarity with group dynamics, the lived roles within the groups and their mutual influence is essential.

Group dynamics go beyond moderated, directed conversation. They open up towards a wealth of individual, diverse, multitudinous perspectives.

At the same time, this path leads to the ability to repeatedly take decisions that are fit for the contingency and complexity of our modern world of life and work. Wolfgang Hegewald has described what we need in order to achieve that: »(…) that art and society base themselves on difference, on a curiosity about the Other and a sympathy for what I am not, a desire for change, for rhythm and distance. That my heart beats for my mind: an erotic experience.«

#myndleap #mindset #mindsetcoaching #organizationaldevelopment #synnecta #denksinnlich #collectivemindset

Rüdiger Müngersdorff
This article was first published at www.myndleap.com
© Artwork: Mitra Art, Mitra Woodall

Simply not good enough: The perpetual message of insufficiency

28. June 2021

When Arnold Gehlen described humans as insufficient creatures, he furnished this label with a positive interpretation. The human ability to design our life world grows out of the physical insufficiency of humankind, essentially establishing a dominance within it and an ability fashion it out of the very needs of that insufficiency. This anthropological approach is juxtaposed by a psychological definition of insufficiency in the ontogenetic development of humans with messages that communicate to the individual: You are not good enough! In this case, the state of insufficiency is often frozen in time, arrested without achieving the turn toward design, domination and overcoming. The messages of lack result in resignation, doubt, giving up or an eternal fight against the power of the early messages.

Messages of insufficiency are part of our societies’ cultural attitudes. They play an important role in families. In biography-based work that addresses the proverbs children and young people remember having often, time and again, heard from important attachment figures, it becomes apparent how these messages evolve into attitudes and tenets. ‚Life‘s no picnic‘, ‚No pain, no gain‘ or the at first sight less threatening ‚No sweet without sweat‘: they all convey the same message, namely that the recipients are not good enough, need to deliver more, pull themselves together. The world is not a place of experience and blissful design, it takes the shape of a permanent practical test. There are indeed also messages of power, fulfilment and an awareness of one’s own potential. While both facets are there, the balance is often not right.

This missing balance that is so frequently encountered is often met with the recommendation to form formulaic positive resolutions. Although this can have a positive and stabilizing effect on individuals, it is clearly not enough.

Mindset work as realized by MyndLeap addresses the phenomenon where culture, collective mindsets and individual mindsets meet and develop particular dynamics. Any work that focuses only on the individual and that individual‘s belief systems will not alter the ties between such normative cultural messages and the individual’s related tenets.

Ideally, these very ties will reveal differences and thereby open up a space where an altered narrative can emerge. This altered narrative sees that mistakes are elements of innovation and can thereby change the perfectionist norm so that individuals can find a space in which to fashion their own designs, interacting between the fields of ‚I can do it‘ and ‚I am not good enough‘. The narrative that mistakes are an integral part of the process of learning and growing is still strongly juxtaposed by the narrative that mistakes are wrong in themselves, must be avoided and constitute a nigh-on moral failure. There is often a mutually reinforcing symmetrical relationship between collective and individual tenets. This relationship can unfold a great reciprocal power where the belief systems communicate safety, the ability to design, courage and the joy of a challenge. The opposite is true, however, when tenets of insufficiency reciprocally reinforce each other.

Looking back at the origin of the mindset concept, it becomes apparent once more that it really addresses specific assumptions towards the world that are inherent to social systems and predate any concrete experience. It began by focussing on social classes and moved on from there to the investigation of whether there are typical national mentalities. The pivotal question for us today is in what way the mentality or the dominant collective mindset have a significant effect on the enthusiasm and the ability to perform among company employees. While individual mindset work can be a relief for each individual and often shows a path out of a situation that stabilizes and reinforces a person‘s own awareness of their insufficiency, organizations must tap into the collective mindset here. This is the lever for change. There are tried and tested methods that permit groups as well as larger organizations to work in such a way that it is immediately apparent how the collective mindset works and which normative messages it sets. The individual beliefs work within those normative messages. As soon as the connections are made apparent, it is possible to begin a process that lets in other messages and eventually makes them effective by sustainable, mindful awareness and integration. Cultural patterns establish themselves by repetition, modelling and imitation. The work on the collective mindset as designed by Myndleap leads from an awareness of insufficiency to an awareness of potential. It can therefore tap into a culture of potential within which each person can take it into their own hands what to make of that potential.

#myndleap #mindset #mindsetcoaching #organizationaldevelopment #synnecta #denksinnlich

This article was first published at www.myndleap.com
© Artwork: Mitra Art, Mitra Woodall