Agile, Lean, Design Thinking, the wheel of Deming, Fail Fast, Lean start-ups are magnificent models of openness to innovate, rethink its organization, its product or simply a rear view mirror to ensure that nobody gets left behind.
So many models that put the employee at the center of a learning system that the company must be, where the client finds an adapted and scalable response to his needs. The client is both the focus and the starting point for any solution, application, product or service, but he is also its moderator.
But now, when we observe these tools 20 years later – and yes Agile was officially born in 2001, it will celebrate its anniversary in less than a year – the concept is now mastered. The first adopters have swarmed and moved on. To spread the concept was reduced to its simple use, classified, organized in a well-oiled process. So use is spread and enriches good practices and is installed in our performance systems.
The forgotten philosophy, the tool encloses the one who uses it often making the results obtained sterile and unproductive because by aiming at standardizing too much, there is no more room for the individual and his personal creativity.
So, psst … more innovation, more simplicity, more change but a simple procedure that has become obsolete by simply integrating a toolbox into the company’s information system.
What has happened to make the concept so promising ineffective?
Well ask that to your left brain.
All of our thought patterns are often reduced to two hemispheres: more commonly known as the left brain, which have generally been attributed logical and rational reasoning and the right brain being rather intuitive and emotional.
The asymmetrical functioning of our brain, which we have known since the end of the 19th century and which we find under the name of Broca area, gave birth to a rigorous scientific education aimed at promoting the search for proof (i believe what I see) at the expense of an intuitive and free education (I see what I believe).
I would argue that the frequent use of this part of our hemisphere aimed at rationalizing all our remarks has favored the lateralization of our brain.
This lateralization, aimed at making decisions faster, has strengthened the domination of the “left brain”. All of our education has therefore strengthened the scientific streams to the detriment of other streams. This leads us today to a depletion of our connections within our brain.
Rehabilitating the 4 parts of our brain and inscribing them in our body as a way of innovating, of being ourselves in any situation, would allow us to get out of a lockdown in our organizations, and our respective stresses. It would allow to break out of the confinement brought by processes, and to rehabilitate our work in its proper place.
This is why, I propose that 2020 be a decade of harmonization of our 2 cerebral hemispheres in order to rehabilitate the 4 areas of the brains.
The rehabilitation of these 4 zones, the acceptance of multiple intelligences will allow us to reconnect with our emotions. This emotional intelligence is felt in our belly. It is probably the first to react when you enter a room, or in contact with another person. This intelligence will activate one part of our brain and trigger our behavior.
The more we accept forms of intelligence, “emotional” responses first on an individual basis, then from those around us and then in our organizations the more we will be able to eradicate inappropriate behavior in our organizations.
For example, authority may for some represent order, for others an obstacle to their freedom. The tools called change or innovation, separated from the concept, and whose deep sense of demand escapes the employee, then become a simple request for execution. It has become an order that will trigger our usual operating principles and anhilize our creativity.
Depending on their experience as an individual, the employee will accept the order received or resign from it. If the person submits when he would have preferred to resign, then the latter will trigger stress. If this stress is repetitive, depression is not far away. It is this behavior that I would qualify as inappropriate.
Why is this behavior inappropriate?
Starting from the principle that we are equal, and willing to do the job for which we are employed, to execute an order without challenging it, is to fear to speak or to lack self-confidence. We mask our emotions and bury our uniqueness deep inside.
Let us rehabilitate our emotions to reconnect with our uniqueness. For that, you have to feel them, flush them out.
By detecting his emotion, like this pinching in the stomach, we will identify this sign of discomfort, or fear which makes our functioning automatic. By identifying the object of our emotion, we tighten up then able to judge whether that emotion is appropriate or not.
When we restrain our desires, which we execute without thinking, and this repeatedly, we cut ourselves off. We are disinterested, and close to our reptilian fears
I propose here, a technique to unmask them.
How to deactivate our reptilian fears?
Simple discomfort can mask fear. For example, repeated frustration will trigger my anger and generate the fear of making mistakes, failing … We will consider that the repetition of this discomfort is therefore a fear to be discovered. Of course, reptilian fear is sometimes exact. In case of danger, for example, it warns us well before the danger is evident. In a professional framework, between equals, it should no longer be there unless we choose to be the victim of this link of subordination.
Here’s how to turn off your so-called unsuitable fears.
- If fear is appropriate, run away and believe in your reptilian brain, it is your best ally. But, if the fear is inappropriate, I invite you to breathe with it. AND identify where on your body it is. This will allow you to recognize it each time it presents itself to you. Then move around the room and respond to the person or manage the situation that triggered this fear.
- Fear returns, it is in the same place. Is it justified or not? if not justified, breathe with it. Identify what causes this fear in you in the behavior of the other. Move, respond or manage the situation.
- Out of context, come back to the place of the body where this fear reasoned. Warm it in contact with your hand. And reason with it. Rethink the situation and give a word to this fear. or simply agree to say FEAR to name it.
- Fear has become conscious. You can therefore consciously decide to exceed it by adopting a behavior against the foot. Celebrate this victory to yourself.
- You now know how to recognize it and that this fear no longer exists since you have changed your behavior. However, there remains a marker.
How to destroy this marker, residual egregore of a past situation?
When you find yourself in a similar situation, or facing the person who once triggered this fear, you think of that fear again. Sometimes this results in the desire to break the situation, to express one’s feelings, to flee this new context. So before you run away check this:
- do I categorize this character with a label such as a manipulator, an idiot, an irresponsible … If the answer is yes, then you are still trapped in this old fear, whose egregore endures through the negative categorization of the character.
- So transmute it by visualizing your fear next to this character or situation and break up the link between you and this fear. Also destroy the link between your fear and the character-situation. Not only have you overcome your fear, but you have transmuted that fear by destroying the character-situation association. You naturally defuse effortlessly any attempt to submit again and enter into an effective collaboration devoid of a priori on the character or the situation.
Try this protocol. The hard part will be to recognize and then locate your fear. The rest comes more easily.
Perhaps you will have to repeat this exercise until you discover your deep fear, sometimes masked by another, to transmute it in the same way. So you will become a little more each time, this unique being assumed.
If you don’t have a fear-situation context, I invite you to watch the 1917 film by Sam Mendes with George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, currently in theaters. This film will take you through deep fears that we have not known. Identify the fears felt by the hero of the film, and feel if some are present in you, far, far in your body. Your back pain, the urge to move, boredom, annoyance, anger, pinching in the stomach will be information sent to your brain indicating the resonance with the hero. So do the exercise, locating the slightly painful spot and see how that spot reacts.
Legend has it that the left hemisphere is associated with 1, with the Male. The right hemisphere, 2, in the feminine. This is the classification used in France in our social security numbers.
I dedicate this article to the right hemisphere, to the 2, to the feminine and to this place in us where multiple intelligences are present. May we rehabilitate it and thus regain our creative power, our right to dare, to be unique and to accept that each one, as we are also unique.
It is also for all the men who recognize a feminine part in them … and also for all the 1, since the latter accept to see their emotion, and to manage the situations by taking it into account even if a woman is crying in their office …
As a unique individual, come back to each of the tools offered Agile, Lean, Lean start-up, Design thinking, or each proposed change model, and see them as an invitation to go back to the concept and then look at them in relation to business needs. Compare them to your personal aspirations. Then accept to learn from these concepts and then decide which ones are useful for transmuting your organizations, or your personal transmutation.
I wish you a beautiful decade of rehabilitation of the 2, feminine.
If you liked this article, I invite you to read also:
-The articles on “A collective aura”
Article written by Dominique Popiolek – Ollé, founder of In Imago.