Resets are Perceptual Wonders

This post has taken time in my mind for a complexity that spans a time-scale, if you will. It spans my childhood, adolescence, youth and middle-age. And then it relates to another’s too. That another is Dr. Zafar Iqbal, a most liked teacher of Marketing on the DePaul campus in Chicago. (http://www.depaulmba.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6:professor-profile-zafar-iqbal-&catid=8:professor-profiles&Itemid=23. ). An interaction in December 2010 in Pune, India prompts such a post. We were both reminiscing the times since we schooled and went into our tribulations of the rat race. I was the more determined of the two, stepping out of the conformist ‘engineer’ or ‘doctor’ moulds parents of our generations desired we become. I took to the Humanities – Sociology, Political Science and Settlement Geography and Geo-Politics being my favorite subjects. Also remember how the University of Pune granted me 106 on 100 for a paper in Logic and Epistemology! Zafar took to a regular ‘engineering’ course, only to realize mid-stream that he had to resolve what Karl Albrecht may today describe as the Popeye Point. (http://www.karlalbrecht.com/surveys/popeyepointsurvey.htm). “A "Popeye experience" is a sudden decision to break out of a troublesome life situation and start doing what's best for you. It usually involves some period of continuing dissatisfaction, and a feeling of being stuck and unable to muster up the determination to make the change.”

“The BPO ship is sailing fast…so fast that it is not worth the hassle for foreign companies to come to India . And real innovation in India has yet to happen…” said Zafar who visits India every 6 months over the last few years. Pride and anger are the two strongest perceptions he experiences with the variety of people he meets in India as part of his teacher role. Pride in the way certain things are progressing in India - airports, road-dividers, foot-paths, coffee-chains; frustration over the scams and corruption all over India. “Economic agenda, Rural agenda, Secular visions– potent for the long-term and mediators of economic progress”, he says – “I feel a sense of confidence, a sense of can-do that has never happened in independent India”. I said “A sociological trend is happening too – you’ve come from Chicago, yesterday a junior from school dropped in from Singapore, my TISS batch-mate dropped in from new Jersey. What went right that we do this today?” “It is the social network need” he says. That prompted me to recall “Well, let me tell you of a family that came up to dine in a restaurant in Goa the other day. Seeing me and my son Allan dine in a corner, they ask – have you dined here before?” …a little later “Are you from Sri Lanka?” I ask, sensing such an accent as I may've heard on the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) in childhood. “No, we’re from South Africa”, said the family who wanted to visit Puttuparthi, a place for spiritual solace, not too far from Bangalore. That to me was another genre of migrants, making the long trip after generations of settlement in South Africa.  

Reminded me of another migrant scholar, Sheena Iyengar, a name that surprisingly was not known to Zafar.  (http://groupsarelife.blogspot.com/2010/12/ferrari-and-rolls-royce-weve-got-choice.html) So why do we make the choices we do? Huh? Resets – we experience them differently at our personal levels than the large scale at which Richard Florida experiences them as a phenomenon of rising from economic depressions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Florida ).  Looking toward the future, Florida identifies the patterns that will drive the next Great Reset and simultaneously reshape virtually every aspect of our lives—from how and where we live to how we work to how we invest in individuals and infrastructure, and how we shape our cities and regions. Florida shows how these core elements, when taken together, will spur a fresh era of growth and prosperity, define a new geography of progress, and stimulate surprising opportunities for each of us. These forces include:

• new consumption patterns and new assumptions about “ownership” that are less centered around houses and cars,
• new forms of infrastructure that speed the movement of people, goods and ideas
• a radically altered and much denser economic landscape organized around megaregions that will drive the development of new industries, jobs and a whole new way of life.

We’ve weathered tough times before. They are a necessary part of economic cycles, giving us a chance to see clearly what’s working and what’s not. Societies can be reborn in such crises, emerging fresh, strong and refocused. Now is our chance to anticipate what that brighter future will look like, and take the steps that will get us there faster.

In all of this we figured, the normal citizen in India gives up his or her identity for the sake of keeping up with others’ expectations. One sixth of humanity that are in India alone could inflict such lasting impacts on their progeny, that sure sources of originality and contribution are probably kept suppressed. Another classmate whom I visited asked my son just two days before I met Zafar “Why don’t you take up sports? Next time I see you I want you to take up some sport, like your father and me. I still take my son for a run”…Then he says ”We’re going to give all exams for medical college entrance next year 2011. We’ll be busy with that”… "Excuse me, did you say we?” “Yes, we (father and son) prepare together”. And I saw his teen-aged son and defensive mother squirm as if waiting on me to pounce on the overbearing father. “In my profession” I told Zafar, “I tend to come to terms with such after-effects, of suppressed ‘wills’ and lack of ‘inspiration' as if stuck on the road to life at the workplace”. Zafar reciprocated with recent learning from many others that went like this - “When I was twenty years old I always worried of what other people thought about me. Now that I am forty, I don’t give a damn of what others think of me, and like I heard from a sixty year old ‘Others don’t even care about me”. That is when you realize others were not thinking of you all along!” Some perceptive angle this one!

So what happens to the student generations of today who’re exposed to the media that precipitates the effects of the scams and the exposes? “They’re going to spill out from such repression and take on the world... If you’re engaged, you can’t fear it. If you fear it, you had it…” We agreed too that there’s a whole range of migrants from rural India taking to urban retail and mall jobs oozing with optimism about their own abilities. They’re not exposed to the trials and sacrifice of their earlier generations and their reality is startlingly different. Perception again!

I reflected “What happens to the entrepreneurial generations today is the challenge of job creation, business modeling, identifying future leadership talent and sustainable economic development”. Zafar responded “A tripod of forces is at play. One is supply-side infrastructure that spurs local demand like in China. Then there’s Japan and Korea that are export led manufacturing models. India’s recent spurt has been Information Technology led. Its real problem is the rural 700 million, where the current 200 million have to scale their contributions to. That is the tipping point. Rural credit got to be managed well.”

And what about USA? Zafar seemed to touch a passionate theme “Never underestimate USA. They’ve always reinvented themselves. India is only learning to do so. American children think more globally today than they ever did. Indian children need to do so soon..”. And so it went until I seemed to come to a Popeye point most companies face in India. “How do companies plan for the long-term?” Zafar quickly summarized what his wise students surmise when they visit India “Indian success is premised on short-term deal-making. They’re not thinking beyond 2-3 years. If you notice, everyone wants to exploit you as if tomorrow would never come. The porter, the shop-keeper, the real-estate agent..." Maturation on that front is a question mark today. “The concern is that even sustainability is not more than a few measures on environment friendliness. Sustainability of corporations themselves is eclipsed by short-termism?”

I recall mentioning that none of us imagined the India we live in today, when we were in school! Conscious leadership is probably the reset awaiting us into the future. Institutions that reflect second and third-order learning will have the edge. Or so we thought 25 years after schooling from Pune.

What are those Helping Hands? All Heart and No Head?

Recently a colleague asked me to differentiate something she thought was essential to her understanding of how employees may be assisted. She wished to know how we could distinguish between a coach, a counselor and a mentor. I mentioned "You have challenged a lot in our identities." That need for clarity is the happier part of the anxiety. From that comes a knowing that is of experiential growth. Here’s my take as below….First  - a backdrop from a Coach position perspective to frame the rest…

Coaching : A coach is a facilitator of development whose specific act is to facilitate conversations aimed at stimulating a coachee’s thinking about transformation. A coach does so by qualifying the demand of his/her client by distinguishing motives of self-reliant personal growth, external dependency and mere curiosity.  The coach thus begins with rapport building and closes each conversation with support and appreciation for the coachee’s commitment to the process of reaching identified development goals.

If the client demand for facilitation is based on needs of self-reliance, the coach proceeds to establish a contractual process which can trigger the client’s self-renewal. This is through the coach's powerful questioning aimed at the client’s thinking and corresponding actions on self-development. In doing so, the coach addresses old attitudes by disrupting problem frames, affects ways of thinking by holding up effective beliefs and develops an outcome-frame with the client that instills relevant method to the act of choosing directions in development.

Essentially therefore coaching is a series of conversations over time, that make a transformative difference to the mind-body-emotive system in terms a range of choices that are generated in the inner dialogue that the coachee engages within himself/herself.

How is the coach approach to working with people different from:

a.    Training?

Training is generally job or role specific. It is skill focussed and information intensive; whereas coaching is more generic across life-situations and personal growth oriented that spurs development for relatively future focused responses. Therefore, coaching is a position of relative detachment from the coachee’s problems; as the process is for the coachee to develop a solution using his/her own resources. The Trainer by contrast ‘tells’ the client how he/she may develop the solution. A coach asks pertinent questions for the coachee to think in terms of effective Solutioning.

 b.    Consulting?

Consultation is relatively problem centered in that the client offers the ‘consultant’ a scenario of dependency where a ‘problem’ forms the basis of the relationship. Coaching by contrast is a ‘solution’ focussed relationship, where the client can expect to develop the solution using the coach’s process expertise in thinking systemically around outcome frames. While the ‘consultant’ is viewed as an ‘expert’ on the problem, the coach is regarded as a ‘process’ support who can be the person who asks the questions that guide the development of the solution.

  

c.    Counselling?

Counseling is a relationship that is centered on the client’s problem, and requires the counselor to be close and proximate to the client in emotional frames. Therapeutic effectiveness notwithstanding, there is an overwhelming sensation of client detail, that is likely to prevent the helper from seeing the bigger picture beyond the problem. Coaching on the other hand is assistance at a distance that is solution-oriented in outcome and detached from the sensory engulfment that the therapist counselor will entertain. Coaching therefore is likely to be more generative about future possibilities than counseling. Counseling when effectively done is likely to assume completion of business with the past problem, without necessarily developing outcome frames for effective actions for the client's future.

The search for patterns in the client’s thinking with non-judgment awareness describes a critical factor that distinguishes coaching from counseling or therapy. The coach requires different ego strength from that of a counselor to engage in the coaching relationship.

How is coaching distinct from:

d.    Mentorship?

Mentorship is more often a role related skill oriented support that the mentor provides from core experience in the target role; whereas Coaching is a more person specific value-laden and identity focused self-development; that often views skill acquisition as incidental to and not instrumental to one’s core development. While both Mentoring and Coaching are solution oriented, the position of the Mentor is in a “tell’ mode, distinct from the ‘ask’ mode that the coach will assume.

e.    Friendship?

A friend is prone to offering advice, which a coach will not. Advice defeats the self-reliance principle of the coaching process. The coach aims at getting the client to draw on his/her own inner resources. Friendship could derail the coaching process through unconscious and unintentional co-dependency wherein parties to the friendship would find it difficult to ask confrontational questions that challenge each other to development. Such interpersonal dynamics in friendship seek to ‘preserve’ the comfortable aspects of the relationship, and thus views conflict as a risk not worth taking. A coach knows in contrast aspects of rapport and challenge that engages the client to the solution.

Ferrari and Rolls Royce, We've got Choice?

If you have lived through the time of the Wall mania of the Pink Floyd, then you’ve probably heard Roger Waters go solo later in life. He made that choice. In the concept album Amused to Death, Roger penned this amazing lyric for the tile “It’s a miracle” –
 

“By the grace of God Almighty
And pressures of marketplace
The human race has civilized itself
It's a miracle
We've got warehouses of butter
We've got oceans of wine
We've got famine when we need it
We’ve Got designer crime
We've got Mercedes, We've got Porsche
Ferrari and Rolls Royce,
We've got choice..”

It is not easy to describe the thin line that separates decision making from choice. When you read the lines above, you probably realize how from almost 2 decades ago, the wisdom of the poet singers descended down the ages. Contemporary to that music was National Geographic’s famous 3-D holographic cover of our stressed planet and CK Prahlad’s exhortation to stick to the knitting in terms of corporate strategy. Today, corporations that vend their wares need to reckon with their impact on sustainability and triple bottom-line accounting methods. How did we ever end up making those choices? Who would you expect to break ground on such thinking? Would it be Daniel Kanhemann, the Nobel Laureate with his heuristics that explains bias in decision making? Or would it be the confluence between efficacy and challenge to be in the state of flow?

Well, challenges she overcame indeed, and her efficacy is now endorsed by famed journalists Atul Gawande and Malcolm Gladwell. Sheena Iyengar’s dissertation in 1993 “Choice and its Discontents,” asks the question: are there circumstances in which people are better off when they have their choices limited or entirely removed? She received the prestigious Best Dissertation Award for 1998 from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. Undeterred by an inherited disease of retinal degeneration, and her visually challenging life, she has brought her learning and insight to our lives in her book “The Art of Choosing” (2010), published by Little Brown UK, and also available as an electronic book in audio form.

In early depiction of her work on choice, she was known to be derided by people from Rush Limbaugh to McKinsey consultants – from airports to social events, for her rather hard-boned grit in offering choices in experimentation at popular marketplaces. Take a mundane question: Do you choose to brush your teeth in the morning? Or do you just do it? Can a habit or custom be a choice? When Iyengar asked Japanese and American college students in Kyoto to record all the choices they made in a day, the Americans included things like brushing their teeth and hitting the snooze button. The Japanese didn’t consider those actions to be choices. The two groups lived similar lives. But they defined them differently.

Sheena’s book is fascinating not only because of her narratives of choice, but also for the way she has it unfold. Autobiographical and personal at one level, it takes a reader right into her world, and then slips smoothly into our skin to explore dimensions of choice in social informal settings, performance on the job, cross-cultural behavior differentiation, stress, judgment and decision-making, perception, intergenerational diversity, cognitive dissonance, happiness, conscious and unconscious intelligence, self-referential predictions, medicine, neural representation of thought, attitude, culture and history.

At another level, such sagacity is balanced with a story telling persuasion that makes it easily a style reminiscent of Carl Sagan who popularized science through his writings of the Cosmos. Here’s a sample from page 72, “One civilization can no longer fully consume another, and it also cannot set up a giant barrier to keep the other out. Tolerance and respect don’t cut the mustard, either, especially not when deeply held beliefs and lives are at stake. So we seem to be at an impasse, thinking we have little to share and no clear way to move forward. But there is common ground, though it may sometimes seem to be no-man’s land. At the broadest level, it’s unquestionable that the basic values of life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness truly are common to people around the globe. Indeed,..we have a biological need for choice and control.. ” …..and then page 73 “I can’t offer a 3-step plan, or even a 30 step plan, for how to reach whatever it is that comes after tolerance. But I know we cannot live solely by our own stories or assume that the stories we live by are the only ones that exist.” I am left wondering therefore, if such perspicacity could have dawned on one more gifted by eyesight and multi-sensory perception.

Sheena admits that one book cannot contain the fullness of the art of choosing. Yet, she leaves us with provocative thoughts about ourselves and others whom we impact through our choices. Her seven chapters and sub-chapters therein are clearly a vantage point that is uncommon in its field of enquiry and its depiction.

Her mark of tolerance leaves the reader to imagine how life itself may unfold. Her choice in such a style is to uphold values that led to her own insights. Such gregariousness is surely a gift of the scientific temperament. It also tells in the variety of methods science uses to uncover truths. Some of her findings come from positivist survey methodology, and some from qualitatively ethnocentric case studies. She cleverly and at times, teasingly engages our attention, as she legitimizes her grip of the knowledge she is passionate about with evidence from her studies across the globe. Her trials and triumphs in engaging with people from her personal and professional worlds are impressive to say the least. Convincing and perceptually wealthy, this book is not a passing fad like some of its apparent predecessors; but a classic that will brew its magic as time passes us by. And if I were to add another dimension to this review, do recommend this book as a role model feat to those who are challenged in life. This monumental labor from Sheena Iyengar could not have culminated without love and grace. Pass it on.

Relevant Design of Organisations

Some stories remain in my head for its symbols. I have the silhouette remembered far greater than the image in the center. I know that some of my classmates from my alumni institution brought back shawls from Tilonia, in Rajasthan. The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) had its spin-offs in learning no matter what you learnt. I don’t quite recall how the following pieces stumbled into the storyline. I remember it for sure because of its delightful meaningfulness. So I present the silhouette with some definition, characters and a little imagination.

Once not very long ago; it so happened that a Scandinavian donor wished his development funding for a model village in the north Indian state of Rajasthan be scrutinized. There was to be an audit, presumably to learn of how the funds were spent. So the Head of the audit team, Ingvar Wunderbar arrived from Delhi on a rustic 5 hour drive from the airport.

Conscientious and dutiful, sleep did not come easy for Ingvar and the first night seemed like the protracted Scandinavian hours of evening for Ingvar. At 0430 or so Indian Standard Time, a singing male in the new settlement not far from the original village rent the air potential energy, long before the first rays of the sun could invigorate the forlorn cactus shrubs fencing his abode. A turban on the head, and the loin cloth wrapped around the legs, in the joothi footwear of a fifteen thousand suns, the lone voice agreed with the caressed sands as they lapped the morning dew that was in harmony with the pristine dawn. Ingvar knew that life had to be different here. Curiosity had him step out of the visitor’s room in the Guest House. He caught a glimpse of the villager for his orange turban color shone in the solar powered streetlight as he kicked the more unkempt fine dust to its freshest destinations. The mystery for Ingvar was in the large pail of water that Bharat, the villager, was carrying in what promised to be a model village. Drainage and sewage lines were installed. Bio-gas from the village dairy piped to houses for cooking purposes, reducing wood based cooking fires.
As the day’s audit schedule unfolded, luck brought Ingvar to the very settlement from which the orange turban departed into the morning fields with water that could hardly irrigate the fierce land. Ingvar politely summoned the social worker to pose his mystery question. ‘Why did this gentleman with the morning voice go to the fields with water dripping from a vessel?’ “Oh, he wished to commence the ‘lota parade’”; giggled the perky social work graduate who did her best to save the turban its expected honor. A friend in the crowd who gathered around the visiting auditors, was Arun, a sustainability architect from Delhi. Arun whispered “Ingvar, she’s not making fun of you, but trying to defend morning constitutionals of the locals here. You better check if toilets are getting sufficient water”. Little did anyone realize, that Ingvar’s curiosity was not an ordinary one. Beyond culture, Ingvar represented the best traditions of audit. So Ingvar insisted that he examine Bharat’s toilets.

However, little did the Lonely Planet guides on India, or the niche Inside-Outside magazines published from India prepare Ingvar for what he was to see in those toilets.


Firstly the stench of manure greeted the curious senses approaching the toilet. The next sense was visually challenging and novel beyond measure. A young calf sat peacefully across the sanitary ware of the Indian toilet, chewing hay and fresh grass placed specially for it. Ingvar’s disbelief had him place his hand across his forehead with tissues soaked in sweat of the mid-day sun. “So what is cattle doing in here?” queried the exasperated Ingvar. Arun explained the situation in a maturity that left the delegation of auditors stunned. “Bharat is no ordinary soul”, Arun ventured, with a realization that he too had a sight that explained the paradoxical constraints that Bharat had managed. Ingvar noted in the corner of his eye that Bharat’s face was a picture of prayerful submission, that sought understanding for his creative utilization of space and shelter. Arun continued, “Bharat decided that one feature he would not compromise on is the concept of his extended family. He is willing to retain his old habit of visiting the fields for his morning constitutionals, for the sake of his cattle. You see, in his previous settlement, cattle were more proximate to the living quarters, than is the case with the model village design. Bharat wished that this calf be given special shelter so that he could release it to its mother only during scheduled feeding hours. The cow’s milk is precious to him too. So he decided to house the calf in his own toilet, as it is Bharat’s extended family..” Ingvar began to see the bigger picture and saw the beauty of the uncovered situation as more than a story to tell back home. Architectural designers and settlement planning designers least expected to encounter such a need as they went about their blueprinting for the model village. Cattle as extended family was only a matter of precept and not a concept in architectural design. Again, it became clearer to Ingvar as to why India could not innovate the model village for itself, but how Bharat, an Indian innovated within his set of conceived resources. Only lately did I Vijay Kumar (IVK), the Chief Technology Officer of WIPRO’s IT business comment at an Innovation Summit in Bangalore that “India does not innovate, but Indians do”.


Considerations of Vision, Context, Structural material, and collateral technologies are what architects use to realize their designs. In the Tilonia story, the Vision for modern hygienic sustainable living was strong, but , the social context was uniquely differentiated. The structural material, of local stone and brick; and collateral technologies used like street lighting powered by solar cells, and piped cooking gas notwithstanding, the user’s perspective of a tenable design is as important to consider. An inhabitant uses the design to finally make the concept village come alive.

When we design we fantasize a future. Nothing wrong with that. What did we learn from our past designs that got implemented? So the next time you notice a Green building or an off-beat design, would you also check for how the user’s needs have been met? When your organization is designed, does the designer’s expertise override the employee's practical organisational needs? What criteria do you consider when designing your organization? What can you do to ensure it is effective? How will you know it? Whose responsibility is it anyway, when online collaborative technologies pervade our senses? Does Organisation Design ever get audited? Like Bharat, do you have innovative coworkers who don’t wish to be in the limelight and can unwittingly challenge the expert model of organization design?

Groups need Design thoughts

Dave Hanna so profoundly put it once when he said "Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they deserve". It mildly states and yet deeply registers the effects of organisation design. Most HR competency models do not throw up organisation design as a competency. I salute Dr. Worley and Dr. Mohrmann who've graced this thought discipline with finesse and scholarship of the highest order. With Dr. Lawler's timeless grace, USC's Marshall school has managed to keep this flame alight. This ever-so silent and remotely sensed faculty is otherwise perhaps the most acutely felt and poorly expressed dimension of organizational longevity and adaptation.

While a level of abstraction is necessary for most new learning of this kind, organisation design is at once a systemic and interdisciplinary dimension. It is probably the reason why specialties in HR that differentiated around Compensation and Benefits, Performance Management, Learning and Development, Policy and Administration and the like seems to find little integrative intellect to synthesise these specialisations.

I suspect that certain aspects of organisation design are whole system while others are not. Again, since this has to do with our cognitions, am wondering why leaders seeped in learning from their pasts would relinquish explicit or implicit aspects of organisation design to employees at the core of economic value adding processes. The economic or financial outcomes of a firm are scarcely perceived to be the outcomes of sentient organisation design principles. HR leadership who oversee employee concerns from their standpoints of HR specializations may never see eye to eye with business leaders who oversee business value creation. So the professional aspirations and motives of business leadership and HR leadership often tend to conflict over values. Employee championship versus shareholder concerns? Tense connections now exist between the two - a condition ripe for dialogue and wholesome conversations on our collective aspirations.

Organization Design is a wholesome conception today that involves effects of integration between business strategy, rewards, management processes, structure and systems, managerial decision systems, collateral technologies and job or role design. To conceive of such in the absence of a stakeholder review and consciousness regarding ecological balance and sustainable economic development is perhaps irresponsible. It is like seeing how the oil spills over the Gulf or how the thousands got maimed and gased out in Bhopal, India - where the effects are known and the cause is only ambiguously attributable. Like Bill Taylor says http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/2010/06/if_your_company_went_out_of_bu.... would anybody notice? Is organisation design that silent killer competence that we did not care to pay attention to? Has the power of unleashed change outstripped our capacity to design for the future? Did systems principles popularized by Senge get to our realities faster than it got to our senses? It appears everybody knows of this in some sense, and nobody is talking on this one for want of its fullest comprehension. Silence zone! Design thinking time has arrived. Leadership of character could mark the difference between the sentient organisation and the leadership of competence that marks the opportunistic organisation. Character is about mutuality. Competence is about individuality. Hence, leadership for design is about teaming to a common purpose, as against a leader dealing in hope as a hero in waiting.

What does Organisation Design mean to you?

Pace - Within and Without

Roland Sullivan has been the prolific social networker before the age of the net. From the greybeards in OD (Organisation Development) to Bob Marshak and Chris Worley of today; from Swami Shivanand, the late Udai Pareek to the Far East practitioners in developed and developing economies of the world, Roland is known to editors, conference events organizers and university professors all over the world. He has been at work with his Whole System Transformation agenda lately. He introduced me to the term 'dizzying' pace of change. That was in 2008. And the world has been a different place since then, right? Richard Florida's book the Great Reset is a virtual mind-grabber. IBM, Bersin, you name it - and they all have a phenomenal view of the future. It begins with complexity and is followed by creativity and expertise. Within work groups, I see the restlessness writ on the faces at discussion tables. They reflect the response, nay the reactions we offer to the environment around us at a Pace without precedent.

When cycling on a homely street for morning exercise, a few insights flashed by as the 'good pain' of cycling uphill got to my senses. Firstly, there's the self that is experiencing the change. Do I cause the change? What will inaction do to it? What action will enable it? Am I changing merely because all and everyone around me is changing? Whose action and inaction am I to be bothered about? The deterministic view is to say that adaptation is either to change one's expectation about the future or to change one's experiences as they come. There's the probabilistic view that says the deterministic view is possibly right. 

Slowing down on the uphill was a great leveler. The pain of adaptation is a reminder of the resources within me. The Pace within me had changed without me knowing it. The relentless and relaxed unconscious was already taking care of my needs. The determination and the probability were both at once upon my awareness. I was determined to reflect within, and accept the goings on around me. This was a determination that was without intent. This was a change with intent whose destination did not matter to me. The Koan and the Zen, the Yin and the Yang as forces of an abundant Nature. Awareness of being still is most valued in the turbulence of the dizzying paces.

So if the self did that, what do groups do to distill their collective awareness? What is in the collective unconscious that serves a group? What is within each group member that seeks the force of that or those outside of the self? What unifies the spirit of togetherness but the uniqueness of each member? What can we do to facilitate that state of awareness and resourcefulness? As my mind searched those answers, words and images flashed by from the virtual connect of the internet. 
The empty Nobel Chair in Oslo and the empty Parliament seats in New Delhi were more than the symbols of the large country economies. The noise of democracy and the stillness of communitarian control shone through as though each needed the other’s shadow. The virtues of moral conduct and the insanity of moral crusade are matters of deep intrigue. The nature of selfish attribution in success and the relinquishing self in the joy of selfless teaming explains much. The poverty of the spirit in the self that acquires all glory; and the richness of the group that shares all or anything at all that becomes of togetherness. stand apart. What is the 'will' that determines against the 'grace' that accepts? 

We take liberties with nature, assuming all the force in the space of a moment to make it grander than it can be. The grandeur of that thought is but a fleeting moment. The humility of self-acceptance will grace our surrender to the unknown. But that is slow in awareness. What unifies a group is in the light. What tears a group apart is its ignorance of what is in the group's shadow. Business aiming to be at the speed of light can slow considerably due to individual folly in the longer shadow of time. A minute of selfish glory could give way to years or millennia of genuine striving amidst the masses. Striving without sharing the moment with others could give way to endless search for meaning in a self that vainly seeks sanity from the multitudes who survive their moments.

Harmony is a pace within that resonates with what is without the self.

Structure of Magic Reframed

On Sunday, December 5th, 2010 Azeem Bolar joined us for what we called as practice sessions in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. We ended up realizing that we learnt more than we bargained for. Azeem is a rare kind of optimist. His zest for excellence is refined to the point of an absorbing state of mind he calls 'passion'. While in Africa, he progressively began to lose vision, and he is often recalling his father's description of him then - VIP - and that could mean at least two things - Very Important Person or Visually Impaired Person.

In September 2004, in Bangalore India, Azeem struggled due to a paralyzing stroke, that got his right hemisphere frozen (arms and legs too); and his jaws clammed up to speak anything. Again, he recalls the doctors writing him off for his neurological condition. He bloated having been fed soft sweet - the MysorePak, just to get his energy stoked. But while at home, when he thought he was a vegetable, his father tried feeding him and while on the bed, he recalls his father's utter disbelief. "My son's a fighter. This cannot be Azeem". And fight back he did. Today, Azeem is a preferred counselor to many, and his learning in NLP a tribute he owes to Rev. Fr. Richard McHugh, SJ (Dick); through whom we learnt of Azeem.

In a rare series of events, and sheer dint of the human mind in Azeem, Dick ensured that Azeem got a seat at the course for the Basic, Advanced and NLP for Health courses in one go. Azeem had only his ears to rely on for pedagogic content and process knowledge. Later Azeem also learnt of Deep Hypnosis via NLP through Owen Fitzpatrick, who also taught at Ashirwaad, coming in all the way from Ireland. Azeem's high-point is that he climbed the two floors of Ashirwaad the Jesuit training center off St. Marks Road in Bangalore - twice daily to be with the learning process. Azeem also acknowledges critical nudges from those of the Ali Khwaja tradition of counseling and the Banjara Academy, where he gives his Saturday to rare cases in Counseling.  Azeem remembers one lady speak to him on the phone while everyone thought he was a vegetable. The voice said "Don't let those neurons give up. Get it going again. Anchor your recovery".

I seem to miss having my digital voice recorder on December 5. But my auditory senses are heightened in this recall. For what Azeem actually did on December 5, 2010 was to re-frame our own understanding of re-framing. Firstly, he knocked off the 6 steps to non-content re-framing. Secondly, he established the rapport he required to get his client to a lower deep hypnosis in a jiffy, a tribute he says he owes to his sixth sense. Next, he provides an alternate reference modality for the one he wishes altered in his client. Then, from that stage of kinesthetic dissociation and sub-conscious suggestion, his voice retraces the journey back to reality. If you descended down the escalator from th 9th floor office, he'd reach you back there, with the staff exactly in those seats as they were when you walked out. Then, he confirms sensual awareness to break the trance. Then the favorite question with a shrug of achievement and the smile of smartness "So how does it feel now?"

Azeem's magic is his inventiveness of the visual walk or the kinesthetic journey in the dissociated state. He revels in qualifying the client's need, so that he anchors or hypnotizes for desired effect. I look forward to learning more from his impassioned state of co-responsibility. He is not only a picture of achievement and confidence, but a source of inspiration and contribution. I write to keep his indomitable spirit alive. VAKOG - Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Auditory, Olfactory, Gustatory. What is your modality of choice? More another time.