№004 Cycles Closing Out

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October it is, lovely humans.

Turning the corner fast into the New Year, and planning work for 2025.

• Are you thinking about how you are setting up the year ahead?
• Is your strategy envisioned and animated?
• Do you have prioritisation structures in place so it can roll out with everyone horizontally and vertically rowing with decent levels of adjacency?
• Is the team formed and cohered?
• The culture humming?
• What broader initiatives might you be launching?
• Are the communication and technology lines wired?
• Are you attending to what are the blocks or pains?

Let us know if we can help.

Cycles Closing Out

If you aren't feeling some level of dissolution, disruption, or new depth — hang on! If you have been splunking through it, know you are in good company.

Cycles are life. They begin, maintain, and they end.

• The leaves fall from the trees because it is time.
• The Moon waxes and wanes.
• The harvest seeds, sprouts, blooms, blossoms, and dies back.
• The tide comes in. The tide goes out.
• Teams disband.
• Technologies lose favor.
• Economies shift.
• Mindsets driving war paradigms (with weapons or as weapons) eventually realise light.
• Eras turn.

A feminine principle within cycles is allowing endings so regeneration and renewal can occur. A masculine principle is seeding the new. A second feminine principle is vision-keeping. Another masculine principle is structures and structuring.

Nature is our school to eschew unconscious programming learned. Just about nothing is a straight line, fixed, or "settled law." However, the laws of nature and their spirality are non-negotiable. Learning to work with them to shape your direct experience, evolve what is next, and appreciate a less volatile way is where we can meet ourselves in the depth, drop the attachments, and lead from more expanded versions and elevation.

We are mere specks in her cycles. Waxing and waning. Creating, growing, and evolving. Imagining, seeding, structuring, and flourishing. And, we all die back to release, renew, and regenerate. We free fall so we can re-emerge.

In cycles.

With grace and beauty (and some mucking about.)

In service of a more integrated wholeness.

Like the leaves.

Changing Tangibly

Fear

Fear is our greatest enforcer. Often unconsciously. To teach.

Life has a way of putting us in the practice of letting go of fear by situating us smack in the midst of it. On repeat, until we get the message. 

Fear has many faces, sacred tricksters, and scale. You do the work to prevent starring in your fears' unconscious hold.

As you lead teams, product builds, business launches, life and growth, unconscious fear(s) — your own and others — are generally what interfere with flow. You may believe it is money, time, access, information, unclear roles, a risk too great to take, a failure of leadership, the team's inadequacies, or whichever other projection you can find. But, you are (mis-)placing the cause.

Fear narrates denials and dodges ways to work with what is.

• When you commit to operating in the flow of change, you effectively commit to working with conscious interactivity with your personal and shared fear(s).
• You learn to leverage rather than avoid and sweep them under the office carpet.
• You externalise and transmute them into power generators.
• Different than indulgence, the transmutation practice becomes a key instrument of strategically building in and with flow.
• You design ways to continuously move fear(s) out of the way so progress and of-the-moment evolving becomes a system design norm.

Upgrading and growing beyond the fear frequency is the work.

Control

Rather than trying to assume control over that which feels threatening or scary (be they people, structures, ways, roles, failure, personal authority, accountability, responsibility, etc.), you shift to working with the higher mind, not the brain. You begin to operate from the heart, not simply within your limited, critical thinking.

Sense-making, pattern-weaving, and interactive structures ground you in presencing rather than pole vaulting. Growing beyond reactivity (aka control) and upgrading wishful, fantastical thinking (aka control) to be rigorously strategic in your being and doing.

You endeavor system designing to engineer and architect flow as a first principle. The normed designing and resulting flow become transmuters of low frequency, invisible system fear, becoming and enabling presence.

In the day-to-day.

Elegantly.

A Tool

Shadow Dancing

We began using an expanded version of the following during several Client Strategy Meetings in the 2020 and 2021 darkness. To crack open the dross and enable deep diving and dream weaving, this series of prompts can push up limited thinking in the Field and the humans to create better conditions in the room for visioning and prioritising.

• What is the story in your head about sharing/using your voice?
  • Who gives you permission?
• What is the story that is in your head about judgment?
  • Who is your judge and jury?
• What is the story in your head about safety?
  • What large animal is chasing you, threatening your life?
• What is your internal story about conflict?
  • Who leaves because you speak and be your truth?

Work with them yourself for a while. I suggest this so you are practicing responsibly, not projecting virtue or performing wok-i-ness. To design and hold others in tender and adventuresome spaces, commit to building your own mastery (and humility) first.

You'll know.

Open, Not Closed

Building according to how we are naturally wired is not business intuitive.

Why?

Because the world's systems and structures have been busy teaching humans out of their innate strengths, power, confidence, and best qualities in service of control, dominance, and division agendas.

Nature is an open system. Open systems are cyclical. Cycles have beginnings, middle, and ends. Systems flow. At times, they also falter and fail.

When we talk about open systems in business, we're walking the long walk out of deeply entrenched, closed system, man-made, not naturally wired mindsets. Closed systems design themselves on the fear frequency. Open systems design themselves on an intuitive knowing, direct experience, expansive frequency.

Performance-obsessed and control hokey pokey are the anti-pattern of open. Woke re-imaginings are too often performance-obsessed and hokey pokey in disguise. The reason being you have not yet excavated the underlying frequency of fear living within the build.

Designing for open first means breaking down and through the old habits, tools, structures, stories, and legacy living deep within humans and their system processes and structures. All done while concurrently building up, designing through, and transmuting the conscious and unconscious fear frequency in attendance, to become alternative structures.

Mindfully.

Links

Through The Looking Glass 

These are mighty fine moments to release, shed, and give in to that evolutionary pull to grow beyond. When it feels hard, you are leading from the reference point to elevate.

• What doesn't serve any longer?
• What skin(s) need shedding?
• What has been said enough?
• What needs saying?
• Where does space need opening?
• What endings can serve new beginnings?
• Where can you direct love rather than judgment or indifference?
• What if you do the opposite of your normal way?
• What if you just say "No"?
• What clarity lacks?
• What is being avoided?

Building to work within flow isn't drumming circles, check-in rounds, and trello boards. Designing evolutionary teams and organisations is learning to be constantly willing to release, revise, and re-imagine so tomorrow flows better than today — in service of a greater vision.

With smart tools, grounded theory, an open heart, modular structures, invincibility, and learned practices.

Tangible change is this.

You’ve got this. x

Kathryn
Head of Theeo