It Feels Like Progress

We are all prone to the pull of our frame of reference, our paradigm. I am no different. Truly shifting one’s paradigm is not easy. But the effort is worth it.

Here is what happened to me.

In the years after I wrote The Living Organization®, I evolved a process working with clients that was thorough and rigorous. I introduced the core principles — the organization as a living person, the three energy fields, the new role of leadership.

We would build the Strategic Compass together, work through assessments, map the business model and ecosystem, and develop a detailed roadmap with clear goals, targets, and assigned responsibilities. I would often also train the team on the six key TLO leadership skills.

It looked like TLO. It felt like TLO. In my mind, it was TLO.

Then familiar patterns would emerge. The urgent would crowd out the important, causing initiatives to lose momentum. And it seemed the team didn’t own the work the way they had in the room when we built it together.

This was the very same pattern I saw in organizations TLO was designed to solve.

Clearly something was off. I thought it was in the delivery, so I would modify the process, and still it wasn’t having the intended impact. The answer eluded me, until that aha moment during a conversation with a client.

“Norman, I know your framework is the right way to go and I feel really committed to it, but the results aren’t happening like we thought.”

I started to respond with the usual diagnostic and then something stopped me.

In that moment I realized the problem wasn’t the process we were using, it was the underlying pattern of thinking we brought to it. I was using the TLO process while trapped in old paradigm thinking.

The shift is not in what we do. It is the intention with which we do it.

For example, instead of asking, “who is responsible for this?” we began to ask, “what are you willing to contribute?”

Those two questions might seem very similar, but there is a subtle yet important shift in intention between them. The first assigns ownership from the outside. The second invites ownership from the inside. The first requires compliance. The second invites commitment.

When people choose and want to do what the organization needs done, you increase engagement and the energy to make sure it gets done.

I had built the entire framework around this concept while unconsciously failing to live it.

To correct this, I introduced Contribution Agreements™ — a process where each leader, each team, each person declares what they are willing to contribute to the organization’s success, rather than being handed a set of targets from above. The initial reaction from my clients was very positive. At the leadership level, things changed. But not so throughout the rest of the organization.

As the Contribution Agreement was being implemented more broadly, the process was successfully adopted but the intention wasn’t. Old patterns reemerged and once again the paradigm trap captured the improved way of operating and reduced it to the status quo.

New tools, new process, old mindset. Nothing changed.

This is how the gravitational pull of paradigms works. It pulls new ideas into what is known and comfortable. We use new terms, new language, new processes, but in the end, nothing changes.

Over the last few decades, dozens of new ideas, systems, and processes were introduced to help organizations execute more effectively. Lean, Agile, Balanced Scorecard, EOS, Scaling Up — to name a few. Today we are enamored with AI as the next solution to improving performance. 

And historically, they have all been caught in the paradigm trap. The Living Organization® Framework is equally not immune from its clutches.

Just because we understand a new way of thinking doesn’t mean we are operating from it. The paradigm doesn’t change because you learned something new. It changes when your thinking initiates different behaviors. That is when you will begin to produce different results.

How do you know if you are succeeding? The results flow easier.

That is, after all, the goal of the many approaches to executing more effectively, including The Living Organization Framework. The difference is that TLO has incorporated the importance of shifting the paradigm before implementing the process.

Let me leave you with these questions:

• Have you implemented new tools, new systems, or new processes to improve your organization’s effectiveness?
• Are you seeing sustained change in commitment and ownership?
• Is execution speeding up or slowing down?
• Are you still the major force driving the organization?

If you aren’t happy with your answers, you might be caught in the paradigm trap.

If you’re not sure whether the machine paradigm has you trapped, reach out to me directly. I’ve been in that trap myself — more than once — and I’d be glad to help you sort it out.