Research

Resistance in Organizations

How do people understand and work with resistance in organizational settings?

Work informed by this research:

• Building a Relationship with Change
• Working with Discomfort

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.

Coaching Cultures in Organizations

How do coaching cultures increase organizational effectiveness and strategic advantages??

Work informed by this research:

• Course: Leader as Coach
• Newsletter: Words Make Worlds
• Medium: Words Make Worlds

Coaching is a comprehensive approach to leadership that transforms working relationships through learning conversations that impact individuals, teams, and business outcomes.

In a world of rapid change and increasing complexity, organizations must be able to sense and respond to challenges and opportunities as they arise. This requires the sense making abilities of every individual in the organization and open communication across all levels. Coaching cultures are the foundation of responsive learning organizations that can quickly adapt to the world around them.

Working with Paradox

How do impactful leaders work with and manage complexity?

Work informed by this research:

• Keynote: It's Okay to be the Boss

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.

Ontological Design

How do we shape the world, and how does it in turn shape us?

Work informed by this research:

• Ontological Design: Literature Review
• Keynote: Eat Only Elk: Authenticity, Transformation, and the Business of Design
• Medium: The Design of Things

"In ontological designing we are doing more than asking what can be built. We are engaging in a philosophical discourse about the self – about what we can do and what can be. Tools are fundamental to action, and through our actions we generate the world. The transformation we are concerned with is not a technical one, but a continuing evolution of how we understand our surroundings and ourselves – of how we continue becoming the beings we are."

If design is a process of what we can be and do through what we create (via language, form, symbols, and systems), then we we must also attend to how our own being and doing is simultaneously constructed, else we run the risk of perpetuating the being and doing of the systems that created us, an ouroborous of our own clever demise.

Reworlding

How might we rediscover and reintegrate ourselves back into the world?

Work informed by this research:

• Newsletter: the becoming

The over-reliance on the left hemisphere of the brain has given us a world of abstractions, categorizations, dominance, and control. A world of fragmentation and parts. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, gives us a deeply connected world of relationilty, interdependence, and wholes.

This line of research is slowly becoming what I consider to be my life's work. It is one of scholarship but also of healing, weaving, and integrating. I seek to understand the ways in which we have deworlded ourselves from nature, how our neurobiology became complicit with technology to abstract us from the feedback loops critical to our connection with each other and with the more-than-human world. And to also understand the practices of tending that bring us back into right relationship with our brain, soma, technology, and nature so that we can remember the deeply spiritual role we play as an integral part of the Gaian system.

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.