Because of how reality works, and because of how our mind works with reality – a synthesizer of reality, of matter – what you put your attention on, what you thoughts comprise of, really, really matters. It really does.
Remember it’s like this: thoughts first, matter second: thoughts matter.
People see only that which they desire and they project their desire ~ OSHO
Everything arrives when you are ready for it. You will feel it arrive because you are aligned to it’s arrival, and to its having by you. That means too, that you also can feel when you are not ready for something to arrive. You just feel it. This is a knowing you have.
I remember a few years ago some very resonating training I received from Steve Covey (via a book, CD, DVD or something like that).
It’s all about prioritising your work and revolves around two key concepts: Urgency and Importance.
Importance means alignment to your strategy, your goals, your purpose. “If I do this, good things will come to me”. These are good things to get done.
Urgency means it is time critical. If it is not done quickly, something happens or does not happen, usually not something you want. Not the ideal to have, but for some reason they exist in our lives and must be delt with somehow, and quickly!
By using 4 combinations of these two concepts (with their negatives) you can categorise any task/project/activity you are working on at any point in any moment in your life. It’s pretty cool how it is so. Once you are clear with why you are here and what you are doing, then EVERYTHING can go into one of the 4 boxes.
Covey used a large square (a box) and drew up each combination into the quadrants of the large box. I think you’ll get the idea if I just type them:
The four boxes:
1. Important and NOT Urgent
2. Important and Urgent
3. Not Important and Urgent
4. Not Important and Not Urgent
Make sense?
Points on each one:
1. Do these at a nice and steady pace and life feels good. You’re on track, whatever that means for you. You achieve your goals, what ever they may be. There’s a fun light feeling to everything.
2. OK, must be done so do it, but WHY has it become urgent. What happened to make this urgent. (“Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”). Obviously these must be done, and then work out how to stop them from happening again. They cause stress and are not conducive to having fun. They interrupt healthy living. Delegate, change the rules, change the strategy, simply say NO! Do what ever you can to stop these landing in this box.
3. OK, what happened here. Can you delegate this non important task and get rid of it? Can you not do it and nothing will happen? Try to avoid doing these as much as you can and study a little how they come into your life and take steps to avoid them.
4. Why am I looking at this? This box is really a bin. Bin it. And get good at binning stuff. Most of the fluff that approaches us in life goes here.
Make more sense?
And if it gets confusing about what goes into what box, meditate on it. The answer will come from inside you, very clearly.
How do you improve human group dynamics, and allow people be more productive, business to be more profitable, groups to be more self reliant, whilst at the same time have it be more satisfying, more rewarding and straight out more enjoyable for the individuals involved?
The solution: Develop a self organising, collaborative workplace (also known as “Sociocracy“).
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4vzhweOefs&w=560&h=315]
Many big companies have worked out how to do it: parts of GE, most of BMW, all of Semco (a Brazilian manufacturing company). Many more practicing it can be found here at Worldblu. While Worldblu calls it “democratic workplace”, it’s really more likely to be collaborative one, since when you have a flexible organisation, it is more likely that 100% consent is necessary to achieve anything, and not merely majority rules – what a democracy is. The key word here is consent.
How to achieve great success, with great results, rewards and satisfaction in a manner which is harmonious to the group, to other participants, and to the world in general? It is not through competition. It is through collaboration.
Much of the presently accepted models in many organisations are competition based, and competition is a poor use of human potential. Autocratic leadership methods necessary lead to almost total staff disconnection. Poor performance, and whip-like management mentality becomes the norm. Such a culture is easy to start, and success may be evident and easy to measure, but it soon grows into a dismal forgotten failure as any long term success measures are applied – staff turnover rates soar, production efficiency, product quality, and eventual profits plummet. It’s simply a dismal failure at humanity, at being human even. Even for those directly measured to have “succeeded” they experience high stress, poor health and eventual a short, and ultimately an unsatisfying life.
One of the most successful examples of collaboration has been documented by Ricardo Semler with his company Semco. His two books “Maverick” and “7 Day Weekend” explain everything in succinct terms. How a small family run company grew to an international corporation with its principal, Ricardo ceasing his involvement a long time ago.
“Semco has no official structure. It has no organizational chart. There’s no business plan or company strategy, no two-year or five-year plan, no goal or mission statement, no long-term budget. The company often does not have a fixed CEO. There are no vice presidents or chief officers for information technology or operations. There are no standards or practices. There’s no human resources department. There are no career plans, no job descriptions or employee contracts. No one approves reports or expense accounts. Supervision or monitoring of workers is rare indeed… Most important, success is not measured only in profit and growth.” – Ricardo Semler
Here’s another great summary of Semler’s work here at Christian Sarkars blog
Personally I have applied Semler’s processes (actually they evolved naturally from Semco employees) to great success in my own endeavors. For example I’ve taken totally disconnected and non-performing employees, and turned them into stars, “fought” over within the office for new assignments. One of the very useful Semler tools I used was upward feedback.
However amongst all of this, I’ve been searching for a methodical system to describe Semlers approach, and for a long time I called it “democratic” as he and many others have done. But I’ve never liked that, that word “democracy”. It is essentially a competitive system. Here’s why:
Demo-ns!
Dubbed “the worst form of government” by Winston Churchill, democratic environments automatically and immediately lead to the oppression of the minority. And oppression of any kind is never a good thing.
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Sir Winston Churchill, Hansard, November 11, 1947
Democracy, by it’s very design, is an oppression regime: the oppression of a few by the many. “This is fair. It’s only natural”, I hear you say, but do you really think so? Is any oppression fair? Of anyone? It is quite plain to see that any minority oppression in a social group no matter how large or small, has an ultimately negative consequence. Suppressed negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions harboured by the minority can only grow and manifest in other forms. The costs – both social and financial, short term and long term – to control, pacify, down-right-openly-oppress increases for the majority. Then something curious happens: the majority find themselves the minority, the minority becomes the majority and the cycle is repeated. Back and forth, back and forth. Those once-were-majority of course hang onto their once-granted-power with great enthusiasm and vigor, as long as they are able. The majority learnt what to do while in power. They learnt the rules of the game. The still-ongoing Occupy Wall Street or “99% protests” (yes, still ongoing since 17 September 2011) are a good example of a majority now being controlled by a minority that has a much better understanding of the rules. Still resilience and perseverance can be a good thing.
“Consent” a better thing.
An another example is a recent US election with Obama and McCain running against each other: it was 53%/46%. Is that a “democracy” when almost half of the people have to yield their desires for the other half? This is more like a society close to reorganisation as the majority may soon become the minority. Such a shifting of power will occur either violently (like has been seen in many Arabic countries recently) or passively, as with not-even-newsworthy Iceland recently. In Iceland the people rejected the debt burden of the banks their brethren in government attempted to impose upon them. They arrested a number of bankers and changed their laws so it cannot happen again!
Good posts about Iceland:
Nice YouTube accounts on Iceland:
So, what is it? What is the magic that means a group of people will be inspired to performance, all by themselves, with little external influence, other than maybe “Go!”
This video clearly shows it is not the money. In fact the study shows that for complex, creative projects, monetary incentives actually STOPS performance! It’s not carrot and stick that works best where creative thinking is required.
Much has been done on the subject and reading Semler’s “Maverick” and “7 Day Weekend” you’ll understand that it is an evolutionary process, and it occurs by consent of the individuals of the group.
This is the important word: consent.
Work that recent came to me by the Dutch thinker Gerard Endenburg offers very substantial physical elements to this evolutionary process. A good short summary of this thinking is in “Sociocracy: The Creative Forces of Self-Organization”, by Gerard Endenburg and John A Buck. You can find this on the web in pdf.
These two resources: Semler’s dual mini-tomes and Edenburg’s principles combined results in a very harmonious outcome: the flexibility of the benefits, and the basic parameters on how to get there.
Endenburg defines four basic concepts for a self-organising group:
Four Principles of Sociocracy
1. Consent: The principle of consent governs decision-making. Consent means no argued and paramount objection. In other words, a policy decision can only be made if nobody has a reasoned and paramount objection to it. Day-to-day decisions don’t require consent, but there must be consent about the use of other forms of decision-making, for example, for day-to-day operations.
2. Election of Persons: Election of persons for functions and/or tasks takes place in accordance with the principle of consent and after open argumentation.
3. Circle: The organisation maintains a structure for decision making, consisting of semi-autonomous circles (i.e. groups of individuals). Each circle has it’s own aim and organises the three functions of leading, doing, and measuring/feedback. A circle makes its own policy decisions by consent, maintains it’s own memory system, and develops itself through integral research, teaching and learning. A circle makes consent decisions only in special circle meetings (also called round table meetings).
4. Double-linking: A circle is connection to the next higher circle in the organisation with a double link. This means that at least two persons, one being the functional leader of the circle and at least one delegate from the circle, are full members of the next higher circle.
With these four principles in place, more specific actions can occur. Here’s an example of a Sociocratic Circle Meeting:
Sociocratic Circle Meeting
1. Opening round: a time to tune into the members. Like an orchestra just before a concert.
2. Administrative concerns: such as announcements, time available for the meeting, consent to minutes of last meeting, date of next meeting, acceptance of the agenda.
3. Content: Agenda item, second agenda item, etc
4. Closing Round: a time to measure the meeting process. E.g. use of time, did the facilitator maintain equivalence, how could the decision-making have been more efficient, did everyone arrive prepared. Also this is a time to mention agenda items that should be on the agenda for the next meeting.
During the Circle Meeting there will be times to appoint a leader or a task or role or job to an individual. Here’s how it’s done:
Template for Sociocratic Elections
1. Task: establish the job description and the period of time the person will perform the job.
2. Ballots: Fill our ballots and hand to the election leader
3. “Public Gossip”: each person says why they made their nomination
4. Changes: Election leader asks each person if they want to change their votes based on the arguments they heard.
5. Discussion: Election leader usually proposes a name after step 4. However they may ask for discussion if the arguments are very unclear – i.e. informal consent has not been reached.
6. Consent round: Election leader asks each person if he of she consents to the proposed person, asking the person proposed last. If there is an objection, the election leader takes everyone back to step five before trying another consent round.
For making decisions by consent, a sociocratic organisation will operate in the following manner:
Template for making policy decisions by consent
1. Consent to the issue(s) to be decided. “What’s the concern, problem or challenge?”
2. Generate a proposal. “What’s our opinion?” Often a person or persons may be asked to prepare a proposal and bring it to the next meeting.
3. Consent to the proposal. “What is our decision?”
a. Present proposal – questions and discussion is for clarification only
b. Quick reactions round – quick feedback about the proposal (intended to illicit the “feeling response”, and not the “thinking response”)
c. Amendments – proposer amends proposal, if needed, based on the questions, discussions and quick reactions
d. Consent round – collect and record any objections on a flip chart. No discussion at this time
e. Discussion – improve proposal to deal with the objections if any
f. Consent round – Each person indicates their consent to the proposal, with the proposer speaking last. If there are remaining objections, they are recorded (no discussion), everyone goes back to e. Discussion, before trying another consent round.
Implementing a self-organising group requires consent from the people who exert power over the group. Simply stated this means that senior management and/or organisation owners must support Sociocracy. Full stop. No “ifs” or “buts” or even “veto rights”. Otherwise internal fractures will be created when the a circle’s “assumed power” confronts the more senior “declared power”. If that happens, growth is stymied and a slide back to pseudo-autocratic or totalitarianism will follow.
The great thing about this Sociocratic process as described by Endenburg, is that it’s an excellent way to get self-organisation into an existing organisation without changing or upsetting the existing power structure. The magic then begins to happen and once the system is running well, initiatives and improvements emerge organically and naturally. There is no revolution, only evolution.
All companies and groups that utilise such or similar systems experience better performance, better products, innovation, higher moral, lower turnover, lower loss, lower costs.
Semler advocates this because, after all, he invented the 7 day weekend!
It is simply the human way to operate.
What could be better?
Recent studies into the prehistoric structures in Egypt and Central and Southern Americas reveal vast spread of knowledge far beyond our own: ancient power stations and wireless power. Tesla in the 1890’s may have rediscovered what was known – and in common use – more than 12,000 years ago.
Watch the video: The secrets hidden in the pyramids of Egypt (Harun Yahya)
This was a good read about so-called “piracy” in China (link here). What people do not understand is that this is not pirating. This has been labelled such by business lobbyists, out to protect their future revenue streams.
Being a “Pirate” is taking something from someone else, something that is already owned. A “potential market” no one owns. It’s potential. In the future. Who owns the market is governed by who makes the best product or provides the best service for it – or the market is shared. Entering a market with a copied similar product is simply people doing business. We humans have done this for a very long time. We have always done it. We always will. It’s human.
We have anti monopoly laws and we have patent protection laws: at their core, the two are in direct conflict with each other. No wonder the West is confused.
Patents are only a recent invention in human history, and serve to stymie development and innovation, not stimulate it. No, I do not like my products being copied and stolen, but I like how it makes me think: creative and inventive to keep up development and protect – and share – my assets. It makes me create my revenue in different ways, creative ways.
Google is the good example of being creative. How many patents? And how do they protect new developments? Very few, if any, and very carefully. (Read about it here).
Patents are dangerous and create false economies. Look at what GM did with electric car and battery technology in the early 2000’s. They “bought” the patents to revolutionary battery technology and then shelved it, along with burying (and destroying) all of their existing physical electric car developments.
In the end this was good a good thing. The Tesla car company in California rose up from the GM team that was dis-enfranchised, and they now make great cars. The documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car” was created and a following emerged. Now 10 years later and all major marques are releasing electrics cars or hybrid electrics.
This buy & bury technique has been replicated as long as there has been “product rights”.
And who invented the radio? There were lots of people involved, and junior school history teaches incorrectly that it was the Italian Marconi? How, when he copied 17 patents to do so? Patents created by Nicoli Tesla 10 years earlier?
So, copy, China. Copy, copy, copy. Make things better, more efficient, more sustainable. Please.
What doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.
The best learning is in the field; “on the job”, “through the school of hard knocks”. Getting getting lots and lots of “Nos” is how you work out what is right. The more Nos, the more you learn. This is how nature learns. Go watch it. Watch a vine climbing a fence. It’s kind of funny actually: this is the opposite to how we are taught formally. We are taught to “do it THIS way”, and formally we spend lots and lots of time learning one thing, one skill. If there is one little variation in the reality of our subject, then that learning becomes the WRONG way – it simply will not work. And no skill has been built to see that it IS the wrong way. Even worse, it is wrong to even admit wrong! You have to learn this yourself, the “hard way”, informally. There is only built in you the expectation that it is the right way. What a recipe for disillusionment! Better to start with little knowledge and build a successful path through many, many “Nos”… This is the life.
I changed a tyre today. It wasn’t my tyre. It belonged to an Egyptian vet, well he said he was egyptian and the back of his car was full of needles and drugs for camels so I assumed that was his occupation. He waved me down on the road, 1 hour from the border with Iraq . When I stopped and asked what the problem was the message that got transferred to me in a mix of Arabic and English was that he had a flat tyre and had no jack or tools to change it. No problems. I could help. So I reversed up and proceeded to take my jack and wheel wrench from my car and together we set about to change his tyre. Then I discovered that his wheel nuts where smaller than the wrench I had… problem. I thought to myself: “This is a new car. Why is there no jack and wrench?” So I went around the back and sure enough, in a side panel was the requred tools my friend thought was missing, with of course the correct size wheel lug. In a matter of minutes the tyre was changed and all was good. Driving away I looked at the outside temperature – 42 degrees C – and it occurred to me how valuable a little knowledge was: something that I took for granted could save another man’s life. Assuming that there was no one else on the road, he would have died simple because he didn’t know where to look. And I did. What is that worth? How much does someone know that is given away, without the acknowledgement of that value. It was a valuable lesson.
There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates, and fills the interspaces of the universe.
A thought in this substance produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.
Man can form things in his thought, and, by impressing his thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created.
In order to do this, man must pass from the competitive to the creative mind; otherwise he cannot be in harmony with the Formless Intelligence, which is always creative and never competitive in spirit.
Man may come into full harmony with the Formless Substance by entertaining a lively and sincere gratitude for the blessings it bestows upon him. Gratitude unifies the mind of man with the intelligence of Formless Substance, so that man’s thoughts are received by the Formless. Man can remain upon the creative plan only by uniting himself with the Formless Intelligence through a deep and continuous feeling of gratitude.
Man must form a clear and definite mental image of the things he wishes to have, to do, or to become; and he must hold this mental image in his thoughts, while being deeply grateful to the Supreme that all his desires are granted to him. The man who wishes to get rich must spend his leisure hours in contemplating his Vision, and in earnest thanksgiving that the reality is being given to him. Too much stress cannot be laid on the importance of frequent contemplation of the mental image, coupled with unwavering faith and devout gratitude.
This is the process by which the impression is given to the Formless, and the creative forces set in motion.
The creative energy works through the established channels of natural growth, and of the industrial and social order. All that is included in his mental image will surely be brought to the man who follows the instructions given above, and whose faith does not waver. What he wants will come to him through the ways of established trade and commerce.
In order to receive his own when it shall come to him, man must be active; and this activity can only consist in more than filling his present place. He must keep in mind the Purpose to get rich through the realization of his mental image. And he must do, every day, all that can be done that day, taking care to do each act in a successful manner. He must give to every man a use value in excess of the cash value he receives, so that each transaction makes for more life; and he must so hold the Advancing Thought that the impression of increase will be communicated to all with whom he comes into contact.
The men and women who practice the forgoing instructions will certainly get rich; and the riches they receive will be in exact proportion to the definiteness of their vision, the fixity of their purpose, the steadiness of their faith, and the depth of their gratitude.
Wallace D Wattles, “The Science of Getting Rich” 1910
