Last week I was working with a team of business school professors meeting in their annual retreat to plan their teaching for an integrated introduction to their MBA program. The professors themselves come from all facets of the business world: logistics, accounting, organizational behaviour, ethics, marketing. The often use the terms “hard” and “soft” skills, but only in reference to the stereotypes they are trying to confront in their students.
It’s always interesting to me to see where “hard” and “soft” skills blur, because in practice they truly do blur. In general “hard” skills refer to those practices in business that are about the external world: financials, accounting, finance, market surveys, logistics. “Soft” skills are associated with human resources, relationships, learning, personal development and ethics.
There is a false dichotomy in the business world between these two skill sets, and one of the professors obseved that one can be a good manager knowing hard or soft skills, but one can only be a good leader with both.
I have been thinking about this when today Rob Paterson posts an interview he did with the staff of silverorange, a tech firm in PEI. In the interview there was a great short summary of what it looks like in the real world when hard and soft skills blend:
Do you have a financial plan at all?
“Yes and no – most business plans are also based on a fantasy that you can predict the future in detail. Most also set tight goals when the environment is shifting that is also very risky. You can get trapped doing the wrong thing very hard when the environment has changed.
Instead, we set broad goals. (here is a link to Dan’s view of how best to plan for the future) In the context of never being able to know the future in detail we…(quote from Dan’s post) have no master plan at silverorange. The cat is out of the bag! We do however have broad goals and ideals that factor into our daily, monthly, and yearly decisions. We always have these goals and ideals in mind. We also make decisions the good old fashioned way. The necessary people sit as equals and hammer it out. Often the conversation becomes heated, in the good way. When we are done the best decision has been made for us.
When I look back over the past seven years of silverorange I see a route that has veered its way around tremendous obstacles, some we saw coming, and others we had no idea that we were dodging. Our process of quick, frequent, and small decision making has led us down a safe and secure path.
If I was an investor I would know that you pulled your cash flow projections out of your ass. I wouldn’t care. I would look for the following:
- What are the overall goals & ideals that you are striving for?
- Has you surrounded yourself with a team that can hammer out good small decisions?
- Are you willing to have your idea bend, warp, & mutate based on frequent, small, decisions?
I propose that we all change to process and people based business plans. One, maybe two pages at most.”
The religion of scientific materialism has privileged data over intuition, but the silverorange team is calling for a change, for a balance. It’s great to see this happening in business, and in business schools.
[tags]Rob Paterson, silverorange, business skills[/tags]
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Pema Chodron, a well known Buddhist teacher, is one of my favourite teachers on facilitation practice. She has enhanced my understanding of dealing with tricky situations and scary places with practices, advice and stories which are beautifully rendered.
In this article, “The Answer to Anger and Agression is Patience” she writes about her own struggle to cultivate a practice of patience as the antidote to anger and aggression:
Patience has a quality of enormous honesty in it, but it also has a quality of not escalating things, allowing a lot of space for the other person to speak, for the other person to express themselves, while you don’t react, even though inside you are reacting. You let the words go and just be there.
This suggests the fearlessness that goes with patience. If you practice the kind of patience that leads to the de-escalation of aggression and the cessation of suffering, you will be cultivating enormous courage. You will really get to know anger and how it breeds violent words and actions. You will see the whole thing without acting it out. When you practice patience, you’re not repressing anger, you’re just sitting there with it–going cold turkey with the aggression. As a result, you really get to know the energy of anger and you also get to know where it leads, even without going there. You’ve expressed your anger so many times, you know where it will lead. The desire to say something mean, to gossip or slander, to complain–to just somehow get rid of that aggression–is like a tidal wave. But you realize that such actions don’t get rid of the aggression; they escalate it. So instead you’re patient, patient with yourself.
In situations where groups are in conflict, it is pointless to pretend that there isn’t anger and aggression in the room. The presence of this anger and aggression calls for this radical honesty and trust in what is real, and it means being very grounded as you approach what is there and give it your attention. There are few things scarier for a facilitator than leading a group towards the honest appreciation of the true anger and emotions in the room. If you are unable to stand in the fire, exhibiting patience to be there fully yourself, you will not be able to invite others to join you there. The shakier you are, the more afraid everyone else will be.
The challenge is to remain of service to a group of people for whom an honest relationship with what is real is important. Remaining of service means being able to address the anger and aggression honestly, without judging it, which only adds to it. If you think anger is wrong, you won’t be able to be a peacemaker. If you think anger is true, you can go there.
This is a fundamental skill needed in the world right now, on all levels. Think about how you deal with confrontations in your work environment, in your family or in your community. Do you shy away from the anger, or do you let it overwhelm you and do you take a position?
Imagine you were called to facilitate a ceasefire in the Israel – Lebanon conflict. Could you do that? Who do you know in the world that has the capacity to do this? If the answer is no one, what do you think it would take for you to become that person? Trust me, if you are that person, the world needs you right now.
Cultivating patience cultivates peacemaking.
Thanks to my blogless life partner Caitlin Frost for the link.
[tags]pema chodron, patience, peacemaking, peace[/tags]
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From j a c k / z e n on the limits of seeing:
A typical example of zen practice. Put a flower on a table. Write down every word you can use to describe the flower with full analysis of it, your reactions to it, the history of the flower and flowers in general, comparisons with all other flowers and living things and speculations backed by scientifical data about the flower. Put the flower to poetry, do a drawing and sculpture on it, write a play and feature length film on it, write a song about it. Take a picture of it from every angle possible.
Now place all of this on the table next to the flower.
Look at your stack of what you’ve expressed about the flower.
Look at the flower.
Notice the difference.
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I’m preparing to teach at an Art of Hosting gathering in Nova Scotia in a few weeks and as part of the conversations on design, we have been talking a little about what is required in order to confidently step into chaotic and unknown spaces.
This morning, my friend and other co-host Toke Paludan Moeller sent a short poem from an Aikido master that sums it up nicely:
When you step up,
claim the mat as your own.
Everybody you encounter
and everything that happens
is there by your invitation
and your invitation alone,
even the unexpected ones.Your job is to respond with
grace and compassion.
You can’t hide and you can’t fake it;
we will all see.Let the skills you have learned
and the wisdom of this art
flow through you
and all will be well.
[tags] aikido, art of hosting[/tags]
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I am a very mindful driver. For me driving is an exercise in flow and self-organization and I even see it as a bit of a giving practice.
So I was intensely interested when my friend Kathryn Thompson told me of an article entitled “Why don’t we do it in the road? recently published in Salon, which talks about how to make streets safer by removing controls.
“One of the characteristics of a shared environment is that it appears chaotic, it appears very complex, and it demands a strong level of having your wits about you,” says U.K. traffic and urban design consultant Ben Hamilton-Baillie, speaking from his home in Bristol. “The history of traffic engineering is the effort to rationalize what appeared to be chaos,” he says. “Today, we have a better understanding that chaos can be productive.”
In the past, in this space, I posted a video of traffic in India which demonstrates this point.
Chaos does make us more mindful. We make better choices in more chaotic environments because we pay much closer attention to the subtleties of what is happening around us. You cannot be on your cellphone, or talking to others or letting your mind wander when you are driving in unregulated traffic. You have to use all of the capacities that every driving instructor tries to teach you when you are sixteen. Pay attention, anticipate, leave space and be careful. Good advice for a chaotic world.