№009 Geese Speaking
Listen to Theeo Thoughts Spotify Playlist | January 2025
I hope everyone is adjusting easefully into 2025. Go slow. You have time.
Evidently and as promised, we are riding substantial and significant waves of change this year. I say this to remind that we train in the ability to do change. We practice techniques that enable and sustain that ability. In doing so, we lessen the "Oh my!" of it all and stay squarely on two balanced feet facilitating and levering amidst change winds. We lead from this position.
As a practice, we move constantly toward a neutral, observational, and poised interactivity with the flows. We learn to see and honor what may not be obvious, but is fully recognisable when viewed through clarity. We lead from the less apparent to effect best outcomes.
What we don't do is personalise it. We grieve. We feel. We sit still. We accept. We adjust. We remember. We heal. We grow. We practice patience. We honor our hearts. We be.
When we have capacity, we can then ask questions into the change. What is it teaching us? What are the signals and patterns? Where is the narrative resistant? What of the stagnation? Why now? How can this experience create alternative momentum? What are the blocks? Any fears triggering for release? How can I/we use this now moment to catalyse new change amidst the change?
Individuals. Systems. Collectives.
Spirals, not Lines.
Evolutionary Cycles.
Natural Systems Designing.
Geese Speaking
I drove back into my neighborhood late Saturday afternoon this past weekend. The winter Sun was beautifully setting in the Western sky. It was just me, the concrete and asphalt, and the very quiet road (literally) when four geese did a fly-by across my windshield.
I smiled at the signal. Laughed at the stunning visual dichotomy.
On Monday (while impatiently waiting out a car servicing exercise), I distracted myself with a google on "geese meaning." I dug for a pen and grabbed several of their fancy paper towels to use as notepaper. Upon completing the car chore, I threw the "paper towel geese notes" into my tote bag and began my journey south. Within 20 minutes of driving, another set of four geese kindly did a confirmation fly-by across my windshield.
Message received. Thank you.
If you know, you know I delight in the signals and navigational aiding of the sky. Apropos of 2025's signature, I share with you the final act! "The geese speaking."
10 Geese Principles
| Guidance | The way is the path unfolding. |
| Protection | Looking out for, protecting one another, and watching out for danger is built into the co-design. |
| Community | In the air and on the ground, geese stick together, knowing they achieve more as a collective than as individuals. |
| Loyalty | Standing with one another in the good and the difficult makes the challenges more bearable and the joys sweeter. |
| Journeying | Life is a series of long flights individually and collectively. To sustain the rigor, our traveling partners matter for support, to encourage and help reach our goals. |
| Trust | Leaning on and trusting that we’ve got one another is the netting that knits a collective on long flights, during the ups and the downs. |
| Teaming | In graceful, changeable, moveable formations, we take turns holding roles, sharing tasks, and helping out to go further and achieve more. |
| Determination | Not losing sight of the destination while journeying aids us in reaching places we never thought possible. |
| Adaptability | Adjusting to what comes our way and changing course with grace when the winds are too strong or because we need a new source of sustenance enables our flexibility, pushes us beyond our limited thinking mind, and grows us. |
| Communication | Speaking directly with (not at, about, or around) one another as a key means on the journey provides safer, real-time passage. |
Designing System Boundaries
3 System Boundary Types. Only one is the objective.
We made this many months ago, and I've been holding it. What I share broadly is often timed with what becomes thematic in the collective. Across systems. In the news. Patterned in conversations. What is needing an alternative or refreshed discussion to catch up to this moment in time.
Here is the designing deal.
Nobody is getting in or out of 2025 without serious boundary awakenings. Everything you thought you knew about the art of a boundary will likely be challenged. Be open to re-factoring how you think about (1) what they are, (2) how you "set" them, (3) why they matter, and (4) if you have them built.
A system becoming a more mature, evolved, and strategic cast of characters is highly reliant upon how it imagines its strategic boundaries.
- Open boundaries are diffused boundaries. We don't like diffused boundaries.
- Rigid boundaries are the makings of redundant, reductive, gerbil wheeling as an operating design. Not good.
The evolutionary goal?
A system of clear boundaries. Clarity is your system design objective. Open communicate all the way home to clarity. Stop confounding open information or open communication with open boundaries. They are not the same.
Clarity holds a system in the rigor. Clarity is demanding. Rigid and/or diffused are defaults, immature, and lazy ways of the past.
Clarity is the work of dimensional, real-time, rigorous, honest, effective whole system designing through intentional people in crafted roles achieving outcomes — to elevate and expand continuously.
Spirals, not straight lines. Remember.
Links
Barnes and Noble Org Transformation. The pendulum swings by design. From big box, soulless, and redundant to locally sovereign, emboldened managers, meeting the needs of bespoke customer segments. Newly unafraid of variation and committed to books. Huh? What novelty! ;)
Building Conscious Systems. The horse has left the barn on moving the human experience well beyond its formerly constrained limitations. What intermediaries once did to sustain, maintain, advantage, or disadvantage the equilibrium of former set points is being revealed, recognised, and reckoned with. New game. New players. The cautionary tale is "at what consciousness state are you or the technology designing into the new?"
Through the Looking Glass
In 1989, up Sugarloaf Mountain in Boulder, Colorado, our house along with ~30 other structures burned to the ground in a forest fire. I was just finishing university so my worldly possessions lost were my album collection, photographs, and travel mementos. All else was replaceable — once the shock lessened. The wait to be allowed back up the canyon, to know if it did or didn't burn, and buckling at the knees when the police with the clipboard ever so gently said "I'm so sorry" still floats back there in the memory canvas. We too shopped in a fog to buy toothbrushes and underwear. Telling this tale is to say feeling the feels this week is real.
Not my first, yet an early direct experience with and understanding of the dynamics of change; the force field and its invisibility operating around me.
The experience of change, whether a catalytic or planned event, rarely fully normalises itself. We viscerally know it is a key part of this grand experiment of living an embodied life. When it arrives (and it does with regularity), it does still surprise, bring up pain, and can feel deeply unwanted. And yet, magic lives in the change paradigm. This is important to not ever forget. Service. Generosity. Kindness. Love. Connection. Unity. Faith. Humility. Grace. Fearlessness. Purpose. Re-generation. Goodness. Beauty.
Why do the humans face crisis? Why is it that the magic often shows up there? Contrast. Ascension. Reminding. Meanwhile, the magic is actually always available. It is our work to create alternative set points by which we operate as individuals, systems, and collectives. Set points of better balance. Harmony as a co-design. Dignity as a shared value. Love as the baseline. Freedom and truth as core. Friction as energy. This is so they can set in and sustain without crisis as the catalyst.
Send checks, hugs, and high frequency thoughts in the direction of this latest tragedy. Then, get down to the work within yourself and at your own places of influencing and leading that will matter most for grafting and scaling magic to a new set point. For creating as a principle means to a new baseline. For maintaining the rigor of clarity as you journey with your flock.
It's an action, not an ideology — this thing called change.
Cheers, peace, and discernment as we slip into 2025.
You’ve got this. x
Kathryn
Head of Theeo