Resistance in Organizations
How do people understand and work with resistance in organizational settings?
Articles informed by this research:
Resistance is generally viewed as a source of friction that must be overcome through effort, influence, asking good questions, and making friends across departments.
What would it be like to welcome resistance? To see it as a healthy and life affirming quality of a functioning system? The energy of resistance is necessary for maintaining balance and integrity, especially when the system contains power imbalances. I am interested in what happens when resistance is seen in this light; not as something to overcome but as a configuration of multi-polar energies that can be worked with to evolve a system in a beneficial and sustainable direction.
Working with Paradox
How do impactful leaders work with and manage complexity?
Leaders are taught to approach messy situations as problems to be solved. But what happens if the problem is inherently unsolvable?
Paradox management is an essential leadership skill for working with and leading through complexity. This approach to understanding competing forces helps leaders embrace a both/and mindset in order to harness the upsides of both while minimizing the downsides. Common paradoxes include centralized/decentralized, strategic/relational, work/rest, and individual/team.
Notes to Self
Frequent, incomplete, and early sensemaking artifacts from the desk of yours truly.
There is a lot that holds my interest, different threads that make up the warp and weft of what I am slowly weaving together into a coherent tapestry of work. Coaching, teaching, writing, design, technology, consciousness, business, leadership, spirituality, mindfulness - the individual paths I have walked across the course of my life have combined to illuminate the singular question that is always with me: what does it mean to be human? It is my hope, for those who encounter artifacts born of this exploration, that they offer a moment of solace, a pause for reflection, a glimmer of possibility.
The longer, looser threads don’t often see the light of day, but who knows what hearts they might connect with, what small doors start to creak open. I have held back from putting things in public because it felt too academic or irrelevant or weird, but I’ve come to the realization that 1) these are very limiting beliefs to hold and have prevented me from really pushing this work further and 2) there are others who may find this work interesting or useful and I would love to find them! And I certainly am not going to do it by keeping quiet about what matters most to me.