Zombies — unaware, semi-conscious, distracted individuals — are all around us and running many of the organizations we work in or with. And just like combatting real zombies there is a need to target the head.
There is much musing about what a zombie apocalypse might look like, but anyone paying attention to what is going on around them might not have to imagine what that looks like as they’d be forgiven for thinking it is already here. Whether its people glued to cellphones while walking/running/biking/driving, asking ‘dumb’ questions immediately following the answer, or scientists lazily allowing junk to pass peer review, we are surrounded by zombie-like behaviour.
As discussed in a previous post, the zombies are already here. A zombie in this context exhibits mindless attention in a manner that restricts awareness and appreciation of one’s immediate context and the larger system to which that behaviour occurs. Zombies are great fodder for horror movies, but lousy companions on the journey of life and even worse problem solvers. Building resistance to them involves more than just aiming for the head, it means aiming for the heart (of an organization). Thankfully, there are methods and tools that can do that and thus, CENSEMaking brings you the Zombie Resistance Kit.
Building resistance to zombies
I am a professional zombie hunter. I do this by helping organizations to be more mindful. A mindful organization is aware of where it sits in the systems it inhabits, connects the current context to its past, and from those places envisions paths to futures not yet realized; it is part psychology, part strategic foresight, and part research and evaluation. How it expresses this knowledge into value is design.
Building a mindful organization — one resistant to zombies — requires inoculation through awareness. There are eight broad areas of attention.
1. Grounding is a process of holding to where you are by first revealing to yourself where that is. It is about locating yourself within the system you are in and connecting to your history. Mindfulness is often seen as being focused on the present moment, but not at the expense of the past. Understanding the path you took to get to the present allows you to see path dependencies and habits and mindfully choose whether such pathways are beneficial and how they relate to the larger system. Surfacing assumptions and system mapping are key methods and tools to aid in the process of grounding an organization.
2. Attunement is a means of syncing yourself to the environment, your role within it (after having been grounded) and increasing your receptor capacity for sensing and learning. It is about calibrating ones mission, vision, and strategy with the system purposefully and intentionally building your awareness for understanding how harmonious they are for your organization. When attuned to what is going on — literally being tuned into the signals around you — the potential to see and process both strong and weak signals is heightened, increasing sensemaking and sensing capability at the same time. The ability to see the system and understand what it means for who you are and what you do is a terrific means of combating zombie-like thinking.
3. Discovery: Encouraging curiosity and promoting a culture of inquiry is another key means of enhancing awareness. Kids are constantly amazed by the things they see and experience everyday. The world is no less amazing today than it is was when we were kids, but the pressures to act and ‘be’ particular ways can greatly inhibit the natural curiosity that we all have about what is going on around us. Encouraging discovery and asking critical questions about what we find is a means of enhancing overall engagement with the raw materials of our enterprise. It is risky because it might call into question some long-held assumptions that are no longer true, but if people are genuinely supported in asking these questions an organization increases the number of ‘sensors’ it has in it across conditions, roles and sectors generating new, context-ready knowledge that can seed innovation and enhance overall resiliency.
4. Creativity: Application of creative methods of problem finding, framing and solving via design thinking is a means of promoting engagement and seeing systems solutions. Design thinking can be a means of creative facilitation that guides mindful development, discovery, synthesis and solution proposals. Encouraging generation of ideas of all types, firsthand research, creation of prototypes, and the opportunity to test these prototypes in practice allow for individuals to claim legitimate ownership of the problem space and the solution space. This ownership is what creates true investment in the work and its outcomes, which is what zombies lack.
5. Strategic Foresight: By envisioning not only what a design can produce in the short-term, but see a future for what is created today into the years ahead, we build commitment to long-term goals. Strategic foresight brings together all of the preceding components to start envisioning what possible futures might look like so that an organization can better prepare for them or even create them. Strategic foresight is a structured means of visualizing possible futures based on current trends, data-driven projections, models and strategic priorities of the organization and connects the present activities to the past and projects possible futures from all of this giving the zombie a reason to stop its relentless blind pursuit of an unaware present goal.
6. Focus: While creative thinking is useful in enhancing divergent perspective taking and seeing new possibilities, focus allows for attendance to the critical path and refinement of strategy to fit the context, desires, capacity and intentions. Of the many futures that a strategic foresight process might produce, focusing the energy on those that are the most beneficial, congruent with goals and desires, and synchronous with the systems that an organization engages is another way to shock mindless thinking out of its zombie-like state. A focus provides a richer experience and something to strive for.
7. Knowledge integration. Introducing possibilities, building a creative culture, enhancing receptor capacity and building a focus is not sustainable if knowledge isn’t integrated throughout the process of moving forward; it is the knowledge practice behind developmental design. Knowledge integration involves critically examining the organizational structure and culture to observe current knowledge practices. Do you have the right tools? The ability to use those tools effectively and make sense of the findings? Is the system understood and aligned to the purpose and resources available? When your system is aligned and the structures are put into place to work with that alignment knowledge is put to use.
8. Design Cycling: Developmental design is the means of engaging in ongoing evaluation and design simultaneously, while knowledge integration is taking the learning from those products and incorporating it into the DNA of the organization. Design cycling is the process by which this unfolds and iteratively repeats over cycles of innovation. Invariably, organizations tend to drift a little and by framing the innovation process as a cycle it acknowledges that even the best ideas will reach an ebb and flow and require renewal. This cyclical process encourages us to return to the first stage. This is an approach consistent with the Panarchy approach to life cycle development in complex systems. Everything runs its course. This approach is consistent with a natural systems perspective and a pillar of the work on sustainable development in natural systems.
This model of development and organizational awareness provides balm against zombie-like behaviour. It gets people excited, it produces visible results that can be scrutinized in a transparent way, and it heightens engagement by bringing everyone in an organization into the role of problem framing, finding and solving. It enhances accountability for everyone who are now enlisted as creators, researchers, designers, and sensemakers.
By being more aware and alive we better engage brains rather than use that grey matter as food for zombies.
For more details on using this approach with your organization contact CENSE Research + Design.
Photo credit: From Zombie Walk 2012 SP collection by Gianluca Ramahlo Misiti used under Creative Commons Licence
Comments are closed.