The contract of creativity and engagement is essential now. Enthusiasm cannot be legislated or coerced. It must be based on a courageous vulnerability that invites others by our example to a frontier conversation whose outcome is yet in doubt.
Whyte believes that we need to join a multilayered conversation on four or five levels at once and in that conversation experience love, physical closeness, satisfaction, frustration, small griefs and large losses, sometimes all on the same day, and sometimes all at once.
Companies need the contributing vitality of all the individuals who work for them in order to stay alive in the sea of changeability in which they find themselves. They must find a real way of asking people to bring these hidden, heartfelt qualities into the workplace. A way that doesn't make them feel manipulated or the subject of some five-year plan.
Every organization is asking desperately for more adaptability, vitality, imagination, and the enthusiastic willingness to go the extra mile - qualities which they cannot give at the press of a button. None of these qualities can be legislated or coerced. These qualities have their own life and go their own way within a person according the elements of a person's makeup and especially according to the way those power are invited from the interior of an individual to the surface. (p.237)
There is no lever to pull inside a person that will activate their creativity and no specific slogan that will bring about a passionate response.
Programs are programs, and creative people are creative people, and the two do not meet happily.
If there was a specific lever for all this inside them, the individuals would have pulled it for themselves a long time ago. But it is just as difficult for any individual to find their own creative powers as it is for an organization. When it comes to the moment of truth, both the organization and the individual are equally afraid of the creativity, the passion, and the courage that accompany the those powers hidden within them and that are central to their vitality. This meeting place of creative anticipation and fearful arrival is the elemental core of the new conversation in the workplace.
Courage, Conversation, Fear and Failure
Whyte believes that what we have to confront in the present workplace is the reluctance to engage in conversations that really invite the creative qualities hidden deep inside each human being. It is a reluctance born of the knowledge that by inviting creativity and passion, the organization must also make room for fear and failure. There is no creativity without a sense of high stakes or a sense of potential loss, and almost always, if the risk is real, then some of those potential losses become actual ones. It is a high stakes game both for the organization and the individual.
Fear, loss, difficulty, failure: these are the qualities and themes which make the conversation about creativity in the workplace real.
To acknowledge the hidden part of human beings is to make a home for them and to create a loyalty beyond the bottom line, especially in the new territory of creative engagement into which the organization is now tiptoeing. In trying to engage people without these foundational qualities we cultivate a conversation which has no heart and no affection.
Whyte believes that conversation is the heart of human life and conversation is also the heart of commerce. Every organization must keep several different conversations vital at once.
· Firstly, a conversation with the unknown future gathering around their industry or their products.
· Secondly, a conversation with their customers or the people they serve right now.
· And thirdly, the conversation that occurs between those who actually work together in the organization. But the depth and usefulness of all these outer conversations depend upon an internal conversation that is occurring within each individual. It is very difficult to make any of these conversations real if the people who come in through the door every day have no real conversation with their own individuality.
Whyte notes that the word "manage" derives from manege, meaning the training, handling and riding of a horse. It is strange to think that the whole spirit of management is derived from the image of getting on the back of a beast, digging your knees in, and heading it in a certain direction. The word manager conjures images of domination, command and ultimate control, and the taming of a potentially wild energy. It also implies a basic unwillingness on the part of the people to be managed, a force to be corralled and reined in. All appropriate things if you wish to ride a horse, but most people don't respond very passionately or very creatively to being ridden, and the words "giddy up there" only go so far in creating the kind of responsive participation we now look for.
The new role of leadership embraces the attentive, open-minded, conversationally based, people minded person who has not give up on her intellect and can still act and act quickly when needed. It is the artist in each of us we must now encourage into the world. We must bring our visionary artistic powers into emancipation with our highly trained empirical powers of division and deduction. (p.241)
Whyte believes that we need to join a multilayered conversation on four or five levels at once and in that conversation experience love, physical closeness, satisfaction, frustration, small griefs and large losses, sometimes all on the same day, and sometimes all at once.
Companies need the contributing vitality of all the individuals who work for them in order to stay alive in the sea of changeability in which they find themselves. They must find a real way of asking people to bring these hidden, heartfelt qualities into the workplace. A way that doesn't make them feel manipulated or the subject of some five-year plan.
Every organization is asking desperately for more adaptability, vitality, imagination, and the enthusiastic willingness to go the extra mile - qualities which they cannot give at the press of a button. None of these qualities can be legislated or coerced. These qualities have their own life and go their own way within a person according the elements of a person's makeup and especially according to the way those power are invited from the interior of an individual to the surface. (p.237)
Programs are programs, and creative people are creative people, and the two do not meet happily.
If there was a specific lever for all this inside them, the individuals would have pulled it for themselves a long time ago. But it is just as difficult for any individual to find their own creative powers as it is for an organization. When it comes to the moment of truth, both the organization and the individual are equally afraid of the creativity, the passion, and the courage that accompany the those powers hidden within them and that are central to their vitality. This meeting place of creative anticipation and fearful arrival is the elemental core of the new conversation in the workplace.
Courage, Conversation, Fear and Failure
Whyte believes that what we have to confront in the present workplace is the reluctance to engage in conversations that really invite the creative qualities hidden deep inside each human being. It is a reluctance born of the knowledge that by inviting creativity and passion, the organization must also make room for fear and failure. There is no creativity without a sense of high stakes or a sense of potential loss, and almost always, if the risk is real, then some of those potential losses become actual ones. It is a high stakes game both for the organization and the individual.
Fear, loss, difficulty, failure: these are the qualities and themes which make the conversation about creativity in the workplace real.
To acknowledge the hidden part of human beings is to make a home for them and to create a loyalty beyond the bottom line, especially in the new territory of creative engagement into which the organization is now tiptoeing. In trying to engage people without these foundational qualities we cultivate a conversation which has no heart and no affection.
Whyte believes that conversation is the heart of human life and conversation is also the heart of commerce. Every organization must keep several different conversations vital at once.
· Firstly, a conversation with the unknown future gathering around their industry or their products.
· Secondly, a conversation with their customers or the people they serve right now.
· And thirdly, the conversation that occurs between those who actually work together in the organization. But the depth and usefulness of all these outer conversations depend upon an internal conversation that is occurring within each individual. It is very difficult to make any of these conversations real if the people who come in through the door every day have no real conversation with their own individuality.
Whyte notes that the word "manage" derives from manege, meaning the training, handling and riding of a horse. It is strange to think that the whole spirit of management is derived from the image of getting on the back of a beast, digging your knees in, and heading it in a certain direction. The word manager conjures images of domination, command and ultimate control, and the taming of a potentially wild energy. It also implies a basic unwillingness on the part of the people to be managed, a force to be corralled and reined in. All appropriate things if you wish to ride a horse, but most people don't respond very passionately or very creatively to being ridden, and the words "giddy up there" only go so far in creating the kind of responsive participation we now look for.
The new role of leadership embraces the attentive, open-minded, conversationally based, people minded person who has not give up on her intellect and can still act and act quickly when needed. It is the artist in each of us we must now encourage into the world. We must bring our visionary artistic powers into emancipation with our highly trained empirical powers of division and deduction. (p.241)
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