The Direction of Intention

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Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

There are those wonderful rare weeks that the dials of my mind turn a notch or two, the penny drops, the door of the safe opens, the apple hits my head, and something that I have been wrangling with for years becomes crystal clear. I always know the insight is worthy if it seems too simple. As I learned in school and experience in life, a complexity is never changed with another complexity; systems always change through local simplicities. I am living in one of those zones. The apples are raining on me everyday. Over the weekend I saw with absolute clarity how to create structures within organizations so that they might function as fluid, dynamic, self-organizing systems: systems for our times and not the 1860’s. It’s so simple! And, of course, it requires the creation of power-with-others – no managers necessary.

I learn something new everyday and ironically most of my new learning comes from those that I teach or coach. Today, another penny was dropped on my noggin by a brilliant class and this time it wasn’t a revelation about something new, it was an explanation of something old, a piece of a puzzle that I didn’t even know was missing. Here’s the reader’s digest version (or for those of you under 40, the blog version):

Master coach, teacher and author, Alan Seale, developed a simple but profound model he calls The Four Levels of Engagement. This model is extraordinarily useful for personal and/or organizational change – it’s the same thing.

According to the model we plug into life, into our conversations, into our thoughts at one of these 4 levels:
1) Drama – (to blame)
2) Situation – (to fix or to solve – to try to contain a complexity)
3) Choice
4) Opportunity

The rule is to get the third level as fast as possible: learn that you are always in choice. Always. Our actions will reflect which level we inhabit. Most of us run our lives from levels 1 & 2: driven by circumstance, reactive, blaming, problem solving, defending and justifying. If you doubt me, listen to yourself for 24 hours or pay attention to the conversations happening around you for a day; most will be blame stories, a few will be tales of fixing problems, occasionally you’ll hear someone in choice.

Here’s the apple that hit my head today: when teaching the 4 Levels most people will report that Choice and Opportunity feel powerful, but Drama and Situation are more comfortable. I’ve always explained to myself that Choice and Opportunity require personal power and responsibility: when you recognize that you are in choice every minute of every day you of necessity must own your choices – and it feels good to be powerful but not always comfortable. But, that’s only part of the picture –and this is what occurred to me: Drama provides an illusion. We go into drama when we are feeling powerless; blaming (Drama) provides the illusion of control/power. That’s where the comfort comes from: the illusion of power to soothe feelings of powerlessness. The same is true for the Situation: when you don’t know what to do, fix something. We enter fix-it mode when we feel helpless; the illusion of competence is most comfortable in the face of helplessness. This is the business world’s Achilles Heel. In the face of complexity (so we don’t know what to do), we reduce everything to a problem and pretend it can be solved, tested and fixed. Voila! Competence.

Living in choice is not always comfortable. Moving into power often requires releasing the security blanket of knowing. Growth, in all its forms is a step into not-knowing and that can be many things but rarely is it comfortable.

Filed under: Surprises, Truly Powerful People |