Blog Article — Page 3

posted on August 11, 2014 by Fail Keith

External and Internal Monitoring in Engineering Leadership

As engineers, scientists, and technical people, we tend to think in terms of things and processes, rather than in terms of people. That is what first interested me in the technical professions. How about you?

Yet to make the move into leadership, along the way each of us has to learn to recognize additional “people” distinctions and algorithms. Leadership is about managing events and internal expectations as well as internal reactions.

Engineers understand control systems. We know that to stabilize output, the subsystem in charge of making adjustments must have a larger range and a faster cycle time than the processes it is controlling. If we are going to lead, this means that we have to increase our flexibility and learn appropriate methods for monitoring and providing corrective feedback to the systems and teams for which we are responsible. All leadership starts with keen observation.

Observation means monitoring the channels of feedback in the environment. Self observation means even recognizing the patterns going on within our own mind so that we can compare our expectations to others on the project.

Inside every human there is an observation system and a self observation system. Being able to assess the internal self-observation system of both yourself and of other key people on a team is a requirement for effective leadership.

New Insights

In 20 years of managing and coaching the technical professions, I have found that most engineers have never thought of this before. It is obvious that projects are comprised of a large number of events that are external and useful to observe. Less obvious is that they are also comprised of an even larger number of “internal reactions” that are more difficult to recognize.

For example, can you read the reaction, positive or negative, on the faces of your team members? Do you really know when people on your team are aligned with you or not? How would you know?

Have you ever seen people blow up in frustration or blow off their duties before you recognize that something is not going well on their “insides?”

Do know the differences between your expectations and your customers’ expectations of the next few days worth of deliverables? Or will you only find those out upon delivery and review?

What about your own internal state of mind— Do you respond automatically to frustrating information, or do you differentiate between external events and internal reactions so that you can maintain a semblance of sanity on your project?

It really is possible to hone your skills of observation and learn to recognize when other team members do not share your expectations, motivations, or capabilities. There are specific exercises to develop the ability to handle difficult situations, difficult clients, difficult bosses, and difficult people on your team.

Challenge For Today

Just for today, ask yourself about the people on your team you are working with— “How can I know for sure whether the images they are making in their mind matches the expectations I have in mine?” Become sensitive to whether they really see things exactly the way that you do. And consider, how do you know whether these differences will matter?

You can learn the patterns and distinctions of “people engineering,” Your project, your people, and your organization depends upon it. Just like you learned the technical skills that have made you a successful individual contributor, with a slight shift in attention, you will discover new signals that you were previously unaware of.

What aspects of leading technical, scientist, and engineers do you find most challenging. I love to hear what is going on in your projects. Tell me about your challenges in the comments below.

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Control Systems, Feedback, Leadership, Skills

posted on March 30, 2014 by Fail Keith

Leave a Comment

Happiness Doesn’t Come From Getting What You Want

Most of you know that I am an expert on motivation and leadership, and the communication skills that leaders use in leading teams and helping gain alignment, commitment, and motivation in team situations. With this background my friend Russ Taylor asked me to comment on Dan Gilbert’s work and its relation to the NLP idea of “Well Formed Desired Outcomes.” He asks,

“What would you say is the significance of this data for outcome-based change processes, or even on the ultimate value of change as a goal?”

And points to Gilbert’s TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy

Hey Russ,

Thanks for the note. Great TED talk. I have been thinking a lot about happiness and NLP’s concepts of “Well Formed Desired Outcomes” recently in relation to the “well lived life.” Here is a summary of my thoughts:

First of all, the word “happiness” is a bit confusing because we have only one word for three different underlying concepts.

The first is immediate pleasure, which we call happiness. For example, “Yum, that is a good ice-cream cone.”

The second is the experience of being fully engaged in a challenging and interesting experience that we feel is meaningful. As Csikszentmihalyi‘s research shows, we experience these as “flow” states where we get so involved that time seems to fly by and our sense of self seems to merge with the activity we are involved in. These states are very rewarding, and we think of them as happiness or sometimes bliss, but when we are in them, we are too busy to think about the pleasure we are deriving.

The third experience we call happiness is the pleasure we derive when we look back on some experience or period of our lives and consider how we were living according to our personal values. This “narrative happiness” describes past experiences in terms of a coherent story. If we feel we met our values, we feel we were happy.

It is this third type of happiness that is the subject of narrative rewriting, reevaluation, and the “synthesis of happiness” that Dan Gilbert is talking about.

Gilbert and Wilson’s research is important and sheds light on the exaggeration of choice and the illusion that if you get what you want you are going to feel happy. I don’t think it is surprising anymore that this is not the case. In fact, setting desired outcomes, like any other expectations, is a surefire way to create suffering. Think of what the Buddha said. If you could live totally in the now with acceptance for all that is as it is, then you cease suffering.

This does not mean that all choices are equal, or that freedom of choices is of itself, bad. Only that if you think that happiness comes from what you get, you are likely to be disappointed. Some quote I once read seems right to me, “In the end we are about as happy as we set our minds to be.” (Abraham Lincoln?)

Nevertheless, we are still outcome driven creatures at all levels of experience, from the micro, “I think I will adjust the temperature by opening the window,” to the macro, “I want to be a doctor when I finish school.” Achieving goals has little to do with happiness, and lots to do with effectiveness, which has something to do with the first two types of happiness but little to do with the third.

The couch potato might not be happy, but that is not because he or she doesn’t produce results, but because when he looks back on his life, he has neither a narrative that satisfies his values, nor the experience of flow states that come when we are fully engaged in an activity that we find interesting. Doing nothing, and having no goals, however, may lead to the immediate satisfaction when we feel the relief of stress that comes from relaxing, and the immediate pleasure that comes from programmed entertainment, but it doesn’t lead to feelings of long-term fulfillment.

Now if your choices are constrained by circumstances, you may later synthesize happiness by coming to the conclusion that you did what you could with what you had, and in that sense you did your best and lived the best life you could.

But if you perceive that you have choice and don’t make use of it, that is a prescription for regret and lack of happiness. Though sometimes this regret and happiness is ameliorated by addiction to mind-numbing alternatives like TV or drugs. Many people have given up hope for any good life. They try to “get by” with diversions, distractions, and dissociation from life. But surly this “coping” does not constitute the good life.

On the other hand, setting goals and going after them doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness either.

Perhaps a better approach is to set goals for effectiveness sake, rather than with some expectation that we are somehow going to be happy when we achieve them. For example, “well-formed desired outcomes” are more useful as communication tools for coming to a shared understanding and a consensual set of agreements between people than they are for generating happiness.

On the other hand, recent research about goal setting has suggested that if you want to be happy AND effective, concentrate your immediate attention on the process rather than the end goal. (This idea is not new to Buddhists however) The attitude that comes from taking up the challenge to continually improve your performance at the tasks we are doing leads not only to Flow States (Intermediate happiness) but to long-term happiness based upon narrative review.

When I teach about goals these days, I still teach the Well Formed Desired Outcome Frame questions as a way to build a shared goal between two or more people. I think it is important, for example, to be able to think in sensory grounded terms about how you will know if you achieve a goal. And stating goals in the positive so that you are moving toward some target rather than away from some fear is still a useful distinction. As are ecology and timeframes and all the rest of the well-formed outcome criteria.

But I also teach about the difference between “Ends Goals” and “Means Goals.” Well-formed Means Goals provide the distinctions for determining whether your performance is improving or not. When you pay attention and challenge yourself to improve, and when you have a sensory-based measurement that provides feedback about whether you are or are not improving, you are very likely to go into one of those blissful “Flow States.”

By concentrating on the process you are doing and its improvement, rather than the end goal, you find yourself enjoying your task, and you are likely to improve in ways that are meaningful to you and meet your personal values, and so you feel the bliss of being “in the flow.” Later when you look back on your improvements, you feel that you were meeting your values and so you experience long-term narrative happiness.

Oh, by the way, this is also the path toward excellence of performance and expertise. Do it for 10,000 hours and you will become one of the more skilled in your field. But that can’t really be your motivation if you also want to be happy. But by focusing on the path, the happiness takes care of itself.

That is what I am thinking. What are you thinking about goals, happiness, and effectiveness?

÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷

If you would like to learn more about using Goals to structure success and effectiveness or Mindfulness practices to connect with deep happiness check out my Course Offerings Page or consider the possibility of treating yourself to one-on-one Coaching.

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Shamanic World View, Standards, Values

posted on January 10, 2014 by Fail Keith

Leave a Comment

What It Really Takes to Be a Leader

As a leadership coach, trainer, and specialists I am always surprised at how easy it can be to improve performance in most teams. That is perhaps because so many people in business are not engaged. Industry consensus is that the main reason for that is poor leadership. Managers do not really understand leadership. I guess that this is even more true among the technical and engineering teams that I work with, since so many of their managers rose from engineering ranks and probably didn’t set out to be people leaders.

Leadership always starts with followership. As the song says, “We all gotta serve somebody.” So there is always a tradeoff between serving yourself and serving others. To do this well requires a host of skills.

First of all knowing your own values. Then connecting with a vision you feel contributes in the world so that you can align your personal values with that vision.

This means you need the communication and questioning skills to elicit and understand exactly what those you serve want so that you can use that as guidance to align your own goals with theirs. This is one of the top areas where most people fail. Can you define what those you serve want to see, hear, and even feel that will let them know you are successfully helping them? For that matter have they even defined it?

Many bosses treat your services much like art, they know it when they see it, but they couldn’t tell you exactly what makes it it is bad or good.

To be a leader you have to know how you and those you serve will define success.

Another key skill of leadership is the ability to negotiate commitments. To be successful with those you serve you need detailed specifications for your agreements. Otherwise you will get to the end and find you have built the wrong widget or delivered the wrong service.

You also need to be able to create a vision for the delivery of some products or services that your boss or customer wants and is willing to pay for. This means that you must always define what you want in relationship and reciprocity to others.

Then you have to generate and communicate a meaningful sounding vision to those people you enroll to help you deliver on your commitments. You have to help them understand what is required and sometimes even how they must go about providing it to you. You negotiate agreements and commitment from the people you enroll so that you can assess whether they can and will deliver and to make sure that they do so in a timely manner and with an acceptable level of quality.

These negotiation and assessment skills will make or break you your success.

Leadership comes down to a set of learnable personal and interpersonal skills.

Relationship skills to get to know people, establish rapport and trust, and build alliances with others so that you can communicate accurately and work together smoothly
Questioning skills to discover and specify reciprocal needs and desires
Alignment skills to bring your work in line with what is desired
Visioning skills so that your work is useful, makes a difference, and feels worthwhile to you and your bosses. and enroll others to help you deliver on your vision
Negotiation skills to establish measurable commitments
Management skills to keep the work on track while your people make it a reality
Assessment and communication skills to provide appropriate feedback to steer the work and make sure that your people deliver on their commitments so that you can deliver on your own.
You encourage your people and reinforce desirable results to strengthen relationships and increase engagement among your team members.

To do this well you organize, plan, and execute a series of personal habits that support achieving those goals you have negotiated. In this way you deliver on the commitments you make and therefore build trust with those that you serve. It is a whole lot more than simply being able to articulate a worthwhile vision and enroll others in that vision.

You can learn about these key success habits but to make them your own you need to practice and drill these skills until they become automatic.

That is what I am thinking about today. I would like to know more about what you think of these ideas. Drop me a note or leave me a comment.

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Leadership, Rituals, Skills, Values

posted on December 2, 2013 by Fail Keith

Leave a Comment

What Makes Work Worthwhile to You?

What makes work worthwhile? What about life?

Those moments where everything seems to be fulfilling your life purpose are some times called “Flow States.” You may have notice how sometimes everything seems to be going your way. At those moments “you” are dead. The ego “I” ceases to exist when totally absorbed in the flow of now, with enough challenge that it is not worrying about anything else. If this focus also happens to move us toward fulfilling our life’s values then something special happens.

To live on the edge of the wave, that razor-thin line where everything you do matters, and everything you think is in service to what you do, and your heart is completely open so that your feelings are as sensitive as possible to what you are trying to accomplish. This is where the ego I disappears. Death while physically alive.

I find this a worthy practice. My clients have been having a discussion about ways to support that fine line and live there more of the time.

It takes more than conscious awareness, though this is necessary. It takes love and groundedness as well.

Think what could it mean to be in the middle of a technical project fully alive and living with the conscious question, “How can I be in the living cycle of love at this very moment?” This is a high human aspiration indeed. What could it possible have to do with solving technical or team or project problems? This is the sort of question that makes us more than just an animal or an automaton machine. The living cycle of love requires that we know where that longing is in our body and to tend to it consciously.

It probably doesn’t require that we work in any particular profession. Could be computers, or training, or projects, or coaching, construction, accounting, whatever.

When we live our work lives It seems that it is all meaningless and empty, and perhaps it is. But all that we do can be of consequence. That is why if work is to have meaning it is important that we learn to create the meaning for ourselves.

Being the senior consciousness is only half of the equation, the masculine or active half. The other half is the reciprocity of ever-changing feedback cycle of love. The sacred witness is one side, the cycle of loving compassion is the other. Both are required to live a meaningful life, to make work really worthwhile.

We need rituals. Little practices of the mind and body that serve our success. We need rituals for grounding, rituals for evoking the cycle of love, and rituals for evoking consciousness.

Grounding is coming back to self connected to reality and to highest and best spirit and has to do with finding the stable place within the moving center of the body.

Consciousness is of the mind and the willingness to be at the witness awareness on the cutting edge of the now with presence.

Loving compassion and the cycle of love is holding each other, and one’s self, as sacred manifestations of the life force and tending to us with high expectations and positivity so as to encourage expansion.

What does all of this have to do with leading? With technical projects? What does all of this have to do with making meaning from your work or work from your life’s purpose? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Leadership, Rituals, Values

posted on November 2, 2013 by Fail Keith

3 Comments

Successful Engineers Need More Than Technical Skills

I was walking with a colleague that runs a successful technical firm this morning, and we were talking about breakdowns that come from people who are too smart for their own good. In years of consulting and managing engineering projects I have noticed that engineers and technicians often damage their careers in this way.

As smart problem solvers, we want to design and build the best solution we can. But a product or solution is only really good when its users find it valuable in their particular context and market.

My friend has been asked to take over the development of a complex system because the previous engineering firm decided to build what they “knew” the customer needed rather than what the customer had told them they wanted and needed at the current time.

But why would giving more functionality than was required be a problem?

Design is only one of the factors that Engineers have to track. Others include political contexts, budgets, and customer’s egos.

Well, what the ousted engineering firm didn’t realize is that requirements are not just about the product, or in this case, the system. Customers may define requirements about the product or technical details, yet they always do so in the context of their political circumstances and personal egos. But most engineers were never trained to be capable of seeing beyond the concrete details of the tangible project.

That is why Scientists, Engineers, Technical Specialists, and Technical Project Managers eventually need people skills training as well. It doesn’t matter how great the better mousetrap is, if the customer decides not to deploy it on the right mouse trail, the project can’t really be a success.

To create a successful new product or solution and avoid communication breakdowns you have to track not only your customer’s technical requirements but also their political environment, their product and budget cycles, their ego needs, and the forms of deletions and distortions that they habitually make in their own thinking and communications. That way you can begin to predict the types of problems that will likely arise on a particular project, with the particular people, and in that particular environment. Recognizing these “soft” factors is not only important for your customers but their customers as well. How many scientists, engineers, or technicians really know how to do this proficiently?

It is possible to learn to ferret out these hidden issues from customer’s implicit assumptions.

Political skills and peoples ego structures are learnable just like engineering, analysis and design skills. It takes a special sort of questioning, and you have to understand the range of possible ego and political dynamics, but these so called “emotional intelligences” are not nearly as difficult as science and engineering. It is just that most engineers have never had an interest or been exposed methods to go about gathering this sort of information.

Perhaps that is why so few engineers make great business managers; they find focusing on the hard tech details fun, but they miss the easier soft skills details that create the context in which the technical project or product will be deployed. To be business successful you need both skill sets.

If you are interested in learning more about how to go about gathering this sort of contextual and emotional intelligence and how to use it to improve the quality of your projects, I would recommend a book by David Moulden, NLP Business Masterclass: Driving peak performance with NLP. Check it out from Amazon. Engineering leadership has always required more than just engineering. It requires human systems skills as well. This book will help you learn to make the distinctions that solve project breakdowns before they happen.

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Leadership, Skills

posted on September 21, 2013 by Fail Keith

2 Comments

Pragmatic Tools, Techniques, and Rituals of Cultural Shamans

Last time we looked at the definition and purpose of Cultural Shamans. This time we list some of the tools, techniques, rituals, and ceremonies that comprise the Cultural Shaman toolkit.

Evoking Sacred Space / Sacred Relationship
Invoking Archetypal Energies
Ritual, Ceremony, Celebration, Habit, and Racket
Motivation
Breathwork
Transmuting Heavy Energy to Light
Transporting Energy from another Time
Rebalancing Energetic Form
Fierce Intention, Tender Love, and Playful Attention to rebalance the phenomenal reality
Utilizing Symbols for Empowerment
Invoking the Masculine Archetype (power focus broad and wide. witness awareness, taking it all in, unity, stillness, empty)
Invoking the Feminine Archetype (love, flow, unfolding, opening, dancing, chanting, expression, responding, surrender, full completeness,
Sponsoring Archetypal Energies – earth, air, fire, water, North, South, East, West, Above, Below, Inside, 7 chakra, ancestors, heros, medicine wheel, arrow,
Sponsoring Archetypal Processes
Rhythm and sound to synchronize frequencies
Narrative and metaphor to invoke patterns
Dancing to invoke changes
Drawing down the Moon, the Sun, and the Planetary forces
Unfolding the heart
Transcluding the mind
Setting up resonances, radiances, and rhythms
Witness, Acceptance, Releasing, Transcending
Visioning

If you are interested in using these tools in your own healing work, please join our study group and join us at our next Meetup.

To join our group and get notified of practice sessions, study group sessions, and fun events: http://www.meetup.com/Culture-Shamans-of-Austin/

Previous In Series ◄ ► Next in the Series

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Shamanic World View

posted on September 17, 2013 by Fail Keith

3 Comments

Why the Cultural Shaman Study Group

It seems that most of us commonly think that cultures other than our own are somehow backward or primitive. However, social scientists recently have been coming to the conclusion that alternative cultures constitute a rich store of useful cultural resources in the form of ideas and behaviors that may help us solve real world problems.

The National Geographic’s explorer in residence, Wade Davis, points out that much in the same way that new medicines are being discovered in the exploration of the Amazon, new answers to how to create a balanced and meaningful life have been preserved in the intact indigenous cultures of the world. It is a shame that we are so quickly losing both, even before we have the chance to catalog and learn to utilize these beneficial resources.

My teacher of 17 years, Tom Best, came from a cultural anthropology background and used his interest in traditional cultures, along with his extremely proficient skills at modeling cognitive-behavioral patterns, to detail and share many fascinating and useful cultural-based patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.

His immersion into and study of indigenous cultures that are still in touch with their coherent roots convinced him that we in the modern Western culture are missing important opportunities to improve our world because, like water to the fish, we are completely ensconced in our own cultural norms. These Western norms include prolific efforts to export so called, “Western economic success” worldwide. This cultural hegemony is so superabundant that we are scarcely aware or concerned that so many fascinating and valuable cultures are now on the edge of extinction.

From Tom, I began to truly appreciate that cultural patterns are much like their cognitive cousins. They tend to provide really rich value when you recognize them as “meta-patterns.” By this I mean patterns that are common across a variety of contexts. Each culture’s meta-patterns underlie particular skills and behaviors unique to that culture. But when they are coherently abstracted from their original context, we can incorporate them as new skills and behaviors within our own culture to produce useful new results. Of course this sort of modeling is more art than science and requires that we make the transfer with great respect and sensitivity to the differences between the host culture and the incorporating one. Otherwise the pattern may not even make sense, much less be useful in the new context.

Cultural Modeling, Not Cultural Appropriation

It is also important that we recognize that cultural appropriation can, and often has been performed in a disrespectful way. Many times for example, Westerners have been called “plastic shamans” when they plagiarized patterns like the sweat lodge and peacepipe ceremonies from Native Americans without full respect and understanding for the rich complexity of the original cultural context. This egoic “playing shaman” is the antithesis of Cultural Shamans.

Many of the dis-integrated patterns of the Western socio-political-economic system we live in seem to be the very root causes of the lack of balance we are experiencing so often in the world today. We have disconnected from the respect for natural system that Native Peoples with their animist models of the world managed to stay in balance with for thousands of years.

Modern Western culture’s lack of connected reciprocity with ourselves, with one another, and with Nature may in fact be responsible for such risky results as rising CO2 levels, global warming, over population of the planet, the greedy depersonalization of individual humans in the name of granting human legal status to corporations, and many many more global systemic issues.

The great systems thinker and biologist, Gregory Bateson believed that wisdom only manifests when we are willing to hold different models up against one another, without insisting that one is supreme over the others. In this way we may respectfully discover the value and benefits inherent in each. Perhaps from the emergence of this wiser perspective, we may then explore and discover ways to gain the advantages of the variety of systems of thought while minimizing the losses. But that synergy is difficult to garner until each pattern is first understood from its own perspective.

I believe that the world needs this sort of respectful wisdom at this time.

No matter what boats our ancestors may have voyaged and explored from in the past, today we are all in a bigger ship together, and Mother Earth is her name. The problems of living a good life can no longer be considered in the name of the single individual; we must recognize our inter-relationships with one another. And it is time we recognize the impact we create upon the long-term environment, the context upon which we and our progeny must all mutually depend.

Our reciprocal interchanges of energy, materials, and ideas bind our fates together on this planet in ways that used to be reserved for independent cultures. But now, like it or not, the tribes are coming back together, each bringing its own special expertise based upon their cultural solutions to the problem of how we humans should best live our lives.

If we wish to maximize happiness and minimize suffering for the largest number of individuals on this planet, Tom believed that we must recognize the reciprocity debt we owe one another and work together to minimize the differences of our being. But at the same time we must honor the differences of our behaviors, values, and beliefs that provide the unique solutions each culture has created.

Essential differences are few. This awareness helps us to Love one another other, even when the other is from another tribe. At the same time we recognize the practically infinite variety of mental models that represent our species’ worldviews, values, and beliefs, that lead to our individual behaviors and ultimately produce the results we experience — for better or worse.

Cultural Shaman

In this spirit, I offer the idea of a “Culture Shaman.” A person who uses his or her awareness and skill with metacognition to choose personal responsibility for being as conscious and aware as possible. From this state of our body-mind we can make the best decisions consciously available to us. But culture shamans further develop their ability to penetrate into non-ordinary states of consciousness to facilitate creative solutions and deep systemic connection for the purpose of gaining the advantages of the rich resources of the unconscious mind.

This is not meant as a cultural appropriation of the concept of the Shaman originally found in the Tungusic culture of Siberia or any of the other “medicine men, indigenous healers, or priests from other cultures of the world that are so often called Shaman. Rather it is meant only as a descriptive label to evoke the sense of a caretaker and culture healer who is concerned with ethically applying thoughts and actions to benefit individual humans in the modern world by utilizing cultural meta representations to evoke beneficial patterns of behavior that generate more connected choice and happiness and less suffering in the world.

Cleansing the Instrument of the Body-Mind

I recognize the non-dualist perspective that suggests that with Absolute consciousness happiness and suffering are no longer issues of necessary consideration. However in the more grounded and embodied tradition of practical healers, Culture Shamans hold that until such Absolute consciousness can constitute a substantial portion of a person’s waking awareness, we have no choice but to live in the practical body-mind of associational models with its psychological phenomena. From this pragmatic position we seek to cleanse the instrument that is the body-mind and release false ideation. This frees up the individual system for more flexible choices, thinking, and behaviors.

Below are some of the key organizing principles utilized by Cultural Shamans to affect productive changes in the world. Over the next few posts we will also look through the lenses of their pragmatic tools, techniques, and rituals, and the detailed personal skills that seem to form the foundation for Cultural Shamans.

If you find resonance with these ideas, I hope you will join this exploration and begin to make these tools your own, applying them in your life in ways that make the world a better place to live.

Principles of Cultural Shamans

All things are connected and participate in the energy of life.
There is no one in phenomena, and there’s not two in the noumena
Reality is a construction. Phenomenal things are only illusion, yet everything is connected
Energy flows where attention goes as directed by intention
The Phenomena are organized into levels according to energy frequency — spiritual, mental, emotional, feasible, physical, possession
It is not you unless you say it is you.
No matter what you think you are, you are always more than that.
Limits are illusory. Fear is simply Love returning.
What you think of me is none of my business
Perfect is not the way you want it to be; Perfect is the way it is.
Inattentiveness is simply mindfulness returning
Connections are often forgotten and may need support to be brought back into reciprocity
Shamans transcend the ordinary consciousness to enter alternate realities in order to bring back healing resources
All of your power is in the now where acceptance abides
Shamans recognize the natural sense of Self Healing and the Sense of Self Destruction
The point of penetration into the other than normal conscious is to stabilize new healing patterns from the Death world and the Higher world so that they may be revealed to the everyday world.
People have a Long Body and a Short Body and it is useful to recognize both
Failure activates intentional learning. Fail fast and often, recover in no time – Every life action is a mistake; the art to life is to make one’s life a work of art from those missed takes — the right frequency of correction is the genesis of all Art.
Self remembering as a traverseless path to growth
Releasing good and bad and recognizing heavy and light energy
Illusory Narrative serves to create functional phenomena and must ultimately lead to the ultimate abandonment of narrative
Acceptance, not esteem. To Love is to be happy with. Everything happens for a purpose, even if we don’t recognize it yet.
Intention and intent describe two different orders of phenomena — manifesting and extant
Effectiveness is the measure of Truth — paradox is inevitable and to be cherished as wisdom comes only from holding diverse models simultaneously in equanimity — news of difference.

If you are interested in applying these principles for your own healing work, please join our study group and join us at our next Meetup.

To join our group and get notified of practice sessions, study group sessions, and fun events: http://www.meetup.com/Culture-Shamans-of-Austin/

► Next in the Series

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Shamanic World View

posted on September 10, 2013 by Fail Keith

Leave a Comment

The 5 most common misunderstandings (Part 5 of 5)

In a survey of communication problems across 34 Engineering and IT projects the following five categories accounted for practically all of the communication breakdowns and confusions that affected project delivery schedules or costs. Do any of these sound familiar from your experience?

Assurances Problems
Meanings of Goals Poorly Defined
Hidden Information
Micro Management / Under Feedback
Why don’t they care like I do?

In the last post we addressed internal miscommunications that lead to over zealous, “control-freak” management, and overly-loose management strategies that prevent people from getting the information that they need to become really good their work quality.

Now we turn to the number one most common, avoidable communication error that causes projects to derail, creates costly rework, and negatively impacts careers. That is…

Number 1: Discounting Diversity

By this we don’t mean whether a person is of a particular race, or nationality, or gender. While that type of diversity may be important, the variety of ways of thinking and behaving that causes the most trouble for engineering projects comes from much simpler differences than culture or gender.

Practically every new leader makes the mistaken assumption that others are like them and therefore should think the way they do (or at least should value the same things they value). We call this the “most common error.”

Because of this assumption, we mistakenly believe communications have been clear, and we believe we have consensus on requirements, quality standards, timing, or costs, when in reality we do not. Our assumptions are usually founded upon ungrounded abstractions of language so each party thinks the other understands things their way, but invariably we don’t.

Unfortunately, this is typically not discovered until “declaration of completion” and “review for acceptance” when it can be quite costly and painful to fix.

Recommended Solutions: Team members, and leaders in particular, need to track what parts of understanding are fuzzy and still undefined, both for themselves, as well as for team members, customers, and stakeholders.

At the beginning of a project, it will often be the case that things will be poorly defined, but it’s necessary that a common understanding based in details that could be seen, heard, and felt (as if they were already tangible) unfold before stakeholder expectations become set. Checking for shared understanding by asking other people to explain what they understand is one useful skill team leaders can learn to facilitate tracking of ambiguity. But first you must develop the habit of monitoring how fuzzy your understanding currently is.

Think for a moment about some goal, project requirement, or target that your team is responsible for. If you had to describe it so that another person could paint an accurate picture of that goal from your description, could you do it? If not, is their someone on your team who could describe the desired outcome at that level of detail? Are you sure that that is the same image that your customer, client, or the downstream team that will receive your work products, has in mind? If not, then it is very likely you will generate a result which others will disagree with later.

As a project progresses new information typically is generated that refines your understandings. The art of human engineering management is to keep tabs on all of the committed objectives along with the level of fidelity of their definitions as well as the customer’s understanding and expectation of those “requirements.”

The Meta-Model Challenge Questions are another tool that can help leaders to specify the details of any communication, refine the fidelity of requirements representations, and remove the confusions while ferreting out details that are distorted or missing.

This is a set of 5 distinctions you can learn to listen for in your own, or in other people’s, communications that indicate what data is missing, deleted, distorted, or overly generalized. Each trigger distinction is paired with a specific question that, when asked, recovers the missing or distorted particulars so you can fill in the details and build a rich enough shared representation of what is being communicated to be successful.

If you are committed to growing your leadership skills and avoiding these sorts of communication breakdowns, we can help. We teach the details of the Meta-Model Challenge Questions procedure as part of our Authentic Leadership Transition course. Like any new behavioral skill, you have to practice to make it a fluid part of your repertoire of interpersonal strategies, but through exercises these interpersonal techniques will come as naturally to you as the engineering skills you learned in school and in your technical career.

We specialize in working with new leaders and project managers who have risen from the role of individual contributor in technical, science, or engineering careers to become a leader in your organization. Because we also rose from an engineering background, we can show you the tools that make great engineers and scientists into great leaders. Why should you have to reinvent the wheel?

These are skills like intentionally building rapport, negotiation for commitments, appropriate assessment, grounded interactions, and communication that guides other’s experience. Skills like these were less important when you an individual contributor, but they become paramount when you want to become the best leader that you can be.

If you are serious about mastering the skills of leadership, let us show you the way. Give us a call at +1-512-507-5464. We provide trainings, individual coaching, and facilitate customized team workshops that will make you successful in your new role. But we would love to have a conversation with you about your specific needs and organize or suggest a program of learning to meet your particular requirements.

Previous In Series ◄

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Leadership, Skills

posted on September 3, 2013 by Fail Keith

Leave a Comment

The 5 most common misunderstandings (Part 4)

Assurances Problems
Meanings of Goals Poorly Defined
Hidden Information
Micro Management / Under Feedback
Why don’t they care like I do?

In the previous post in this series we learned a couple of questions that help you explore and possibly challenge rules and standards that may keep your work from being a productive as it should be. Of course, there are often good reasons for rules. And standards are the heart and foundation for great leadership. But you must understand them with perfect clarity to make sure your team is really doing the right thing for the right reasons.

In this post, we tackle another of the most common leadership problems that people making the transition from individual contributor to leader so often make — over-management and under-management. It is important to use the right approach at the right time.

The quality of the results your team will produce depends upon the quality of your communication, both your communications with others and your communication within yourself. If you miscommunicate with others it will obviously create problems. But if you miscommunicate with yourself these mistakes can be even harder to recognize.

The most common form of miscommunication with yourself occurs when you confuse the “what” of a project with the “how.”

Let me explain. To accomplish any goal, a team needs to understand both what they are trying to achieve and how to perform the activities that will create those results. Taking various resources from some “current state” at the beginning of the process to the “desired goal state” at the end of the process constitutes a set of procedures for transforming resources into a finished work-product.

Engineering leaders often assume that it is obvious to their junior team members how to best accomplish this transformation. But it may not be obvious to the rookie team member.

The opposite assumption is is perhaps even more dangerous.

New leaders commonly make the mistake of assuming that their team members do not know how to create the appropriate transformation in the most efficient manner. The manager may think, “I know how to do this, it would be easier if I just did the work myself.” But that would be a mistake because a leader is no longer being paid for his or her individual performance, rather his leadership role calls for him to coordinate other people’s efforts. If a manager did all the work herself, she could never accomplish everything her team should be able to accomplish.

But presuming to tell your people how to do their work is insulting, disempowering, and demotivating if they already know how to accomplish those tasks in a way that produces at at least the minimally acceptable level of quality in a reasonable amount of time, with an acceptable level of materials and at an acceptable level of waste. So managers must walk a fine balance between telling a subordinate too much about how to do their work and not explaining to them in enough detail exactly what will constitute acceptable accomplishment of work-product requirements.

Number 2: What vs How

Engineering, Science, and IT project leaders do not always recognize when it is appropriate to define the process, the “how things should be done,” that will move the project from current state to desired state versus when to only define the target work-product or goal, the “what should be done.”

This issue creates communication problems either by the team not getting enough feedback on a regular enough basis, or conversely, by the leader tending to overly micromanage their staff which generates hard feelings that create ego issues that disrupt clean communication across the team.

Recommended Solutions: Leaders must assess the capability and maturity of their team members by chunking the project into very small sub-tasks that are less critical, and then assigning these with early deadlines to see how well staff can handle them.

This also provides the advantage that team members get to practice working together quickly and repeatedly on pieces that are typically not yet on the critical path. This is one foundation of the latest iterative development approaches like Scrum and Agile project strategies in software development. But they are generally applicable to many types of engineering projects. To use this strategy effectively, you will have to build in ramp-up time to make this happen, which means you must be able to negotiate these time requirements with your customers and management.

The basic strategy is that your most highly capable staff should be facilitated to define and review the target work-product deliverables, the “what,” in detail. But rookie staff can benefit from defining both the end goal work-product, the “what,” as well as the process by which they will move from current state to desired state, the “how.”

Review cycle timing for work-products should be defined according to the capability maturity of the individual, not based upon a single standard for the whole team. Otherwise junior staff will never get the feedback that they need to learn how to be their best. Additionally, mature staff who are over managed will tend to begin to disengage from controlling their own efforts and provide only the minimal production and quality that they can get away with.

The guiding principle is to over manage beginners. Then as they prove their capability and responsibility to manage themselves, move toward less management control and more autonomy. It seems obvious, but many new leaders who come to management from technical, science, and engineering often don’t remember to differentiate between the how and the what of work tasks.

Next time, in the final installment of this series, we will look at how miscommunication can lead you to believe that everybody else around you doesn’t care as much as you do. Why can’t people just be more committed, like you are? Then wouldn’t everything work a lot better?

Previous In Series ◄ ► Next in the Series

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Leadership, Rituals, Standards

posted on September 2, 2013 by Fail Keith

Leave a Comment

Do Ethics Create Success or Is that Just a Sucker Move?

In the dog eat dog world of Western corporate interests, being a nice guy often seems antithetical to success. Our competitive cultural norms create a reality where to be nice is seen as being “soft.”

But what if being nice is more than just the right thing to do? What if ethical leadership actually creates the long-term conditions for success?

For example, take the extremely successful technical manufacturer, Lenovo. You may not have heard of them yet. But you will.

In the past few years Lenovo has become the worlds biggest maker of personal computers. They are leading the sales to the developing economies of China, India, and Southeast Asia. All of this growth has been built on the backs of thousands of workers who have burned the midnight oil to get out record sales and shipments this year.

Their CEO, Mr Yang Yuanging, has decided to do what most American CEOs would find unthinkable. He is gifting most of his three million dollar plus bonus among his workers.

Why should he share his leadership bonus with them? He says,

“I have reason to believe that 60% of our employees are not fully engaged and involved with the meaning behind what they are accomplishing. If they were convinced that their organization was doing the right thing and cares about them, which we do, I believe they could be up to 30% more effective. It only makes sense to take care of the people who are taking care of you. We can make a bigger difference together than all of us could individually.“

In the competition driven economies of the West, we forget that cooperation and collaboration almost always create more synergistic value than dominion and force ever can. People don’t give their best because they feel coerced to; they give their best because they want to. People don’t work for money first. They work for meaningful lives.

Part of a meaningful life is authentically “belonging” to something greater than yourself which you believe in and feel proud to be a part of. By valuing humaneness and commitment to reciprocity we not only make life worth living, we make more profits and thereby improve everybody’s standard of living.

So consider for a moment —

How are you treating your bosses, peers, and employees? Are you engendering reciprocal respect, or competitive one-upmanship?

If humaneness and ethics are of interest to you and your organization, we want to hear from you. Join the discussion or get involved in one of our on-going professional dialogs.

At Technical Leadership Skills, we sponsor individuals and events where technical, science, and engineering professionals choose to explore the development of authentic and powerful leadership skills. Our purpose is to help people grow and make a difference both to their cultures and to the bottom line, while treating individuals with authentic respect and appreciation. Give us a call to find out what new discussions we have scheduled. 512-507-5464.

Filed Under: Blog Article Tagged With: Leadership, Values

External and Internal Monitoring in Engineering Leadership

Happiness Doesn’t Come From Getting What You Want

What It Really Takes to Be a Leader

What Makes Work Worthwhile to You?

Successful Engineers Need More Than Technical Skills

Pragmatic Tools, Techniques, and Rituals of Cultural Shamans