Ever since Neolithic times, when we first started to chip stones for tools and weapons, our ability to learn new skills and concepts has directly related to a continuum from survival, to improved living conditions, to wealth and power. Today, we are chipping digital stones in a global community, but our rate of learning is still the controlling factor in the same continuum. Expanding your personal competency in “learning agility” and “wisdom agility,” and your organization’s competency in these same areas, will help ensure a rapid response to new potentials for a better future, just as it did in past times.
Learning agility is the ability to learn new things while unlearning outdated concepts. Wisdom agility is the ability to know the difference, and to know when to apply new verses old concepts. Combined, both create a positive, healthy mindset that adapts readily to change and takes advantage to new opportunities before others.
At the risk of sounding “New Age,” both your personal learning agility and your organization’s learning agility are as much depth psychology as they are global competitive analysis. Whatever happens within you at an archetypal level is then projected to your work environment and to the greater community at large.
In working with companies who are trying to create greater innovation in a globally changing business paradigm, very often as we dig deeper into what hinders their ability to sustain beneficial organizational change, the decision maker’s personal archetypes begin to surface. Archetypes are patterns of thought that extend over time, across cultures, and are ever present beneath the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
For instance, do you know anyone who feels that the universe is fundamentally unsafe, thus causing them to create an “us-versus-them” work environment? You know, someone who feels they must beat others at their own game for their own good? This is the Warrior archetype, and it is very limiting in a rapidly changing environment where mutual cooperation leads to greater teamwork and greater opportunities.
On the other hand, there are some who have an amazing ability to learn quickly. They seem to discover new, almost magical win-win solutions to previously unproductive situations. These people have completed enough in-depth personal work to enable a Magician archetype to surface.
The Magician archetype is the ideal archetype for today’s rapidly-changing business environment, and there are two researched-based contemporary business books that, combined together, guide individuals and organizations in creating truly magical learning abilities.
The first is Jim Collin’s “From Good to Great.” In researching 1,435 public companies with stock market data from 1965 to 1995, his team identified 11 companies (that’s right, only 11) that went from average or below-average to truly great within their industry and sustained the improved change.
The first step was choosing a “Level 5 Leader” as he defines them. These leaders have both the strength of will to enforce competency and loyalty within the organization and the humility at accept guidance from all levels within themselves, their organization, and their global community. These individuals have a willingness to express true modesty, thus enabling their Magician archetype to expand their awareness to include unforeseen opportunities.
Awareness expansion develops by understanding what Collin calls the “Hedgehog Concept”. With respect to the hedgehogs of the world, they are rather simple animals that do just one thing very well—in self-defense they curl into a ball with all of their sharp quills arraying out 360 degrees, making them a rather undesirable meal. He uses this analogy to describe the ability to know what you are best at and then to do it, as the “hedgehog concept.”
This concept is pictured as the intersection of a Venn diagram formed by three over-lapping circles. One circle encompasses what you (or your company) are truly passionate about. In this case, what is it that really energizes and excites you to produce or perform? Another circle encompasses economics, or what the world is willing to pay you to do. In a business sense, this is what drives your economic engine. As his research shows, a too diffuse understanding of your economic added-value weakens profitability. Finally, the last circle is what do you truly excel at doing, potentially becoming the world’s best.
As these 11 business leaders developed the learning agility to understand what was contained within these three circles and what should be “let go of” as now being outside of the circles, they created the opportunity for that magical “sweet spot” for sustained greatness within the intersection of the circles.
The second book describes the archetypical depth work necessary to create a “Level 5 leadership” in your own life or for your organization. This book is Carol Person’s “Magic at Work, A Guide to Releasing Your Highest Creative Powers.”
This book explores two archetypes extremely present in today’s global culture: the previously mentioned Warrior and Magician. The Warrior archetype emphasizes a dominant win/lose approach to life through either/or choices leading to hierarchical and adversarial relationships. There certainly is a time and place for such a world view and in the past has been very beneficial to growth and development. Unfortunately, an overuse of this ability leads to destructive competition, lack of trust-building, and an unwillingness to communicate across barriers to form new partnerships.
The Magician archetype reveals unforeseen win/win potentials creating the new potentials for the best possible outcomes while still being wary of pitfalls, such as holding onto outdated concepts or identities. Magicians create a consensus vision using a systemic contextual awareness where the energizing utilization of individuals brings new energy (and new money) for mutually beneficial gain.
A company filled with active magician archetypes does not lay off employees. Rather, it asks “with all this talent on board, how can we generate new income opportunities and what do we need to let go of to energize our employees to achieve their greatest potential?” There are numerous examples of this type of environment within the Information Technology industry, such as the early days of PARC or Apple or HP, to name just a few.
The book contains fun readings using the Camelot stories and other mythologies and present day exercises that can be completed daily over a suggested five-week period to expand you or your company’s awareness of magical principles and actively create new potentials. As you explore this process, new energy comes from untapped sources as you increase your learning agility on several new levels.
Whether you are a Hedgehog, a Warrior, or a Magician, I recommend either of these books as positive aids in developing your own learning agility and wisdom agility. As we’ve seen, as you display a positive archetype you will be firmly on the path to a better future, and so will your organization.
