Lá Fhéile Bríde Weaving New Stories

Here we are coming up the eve of the feast of Bridget in the midst of our economic turmoil. What can we learn from ancient Irish and Celtic traditions when looking at the myths of our own making today?

Bridget, the centuries through, has been a symbol of leadership strength particularly for female wisdom.   The Celtic tradition honours her with storytelling, dancing and putting out "Bridget's cloak" imbued with prayers for the year ahead.   The prayers are prepared by thinking and talking whilst each person weaves a Bridget's cross, usually from reeds.  The crosses are then blessed through a group ritual and then hung over the doors of the household of the family for whom the prayers are said.

Magical thinking?  Perhaps not, there is more to it.  Recently, a male Anglican cleric told me of his PUSH method: Pray Until Something Happens.  It is not so much the handing over of responsibility of a solution to "the great God in the Sky" but more the act and energy of weaving your prayers which begins to weave new thoughts which weave new things.  The weaving brings focus on the issue, whilst talking and sharing lets in new light and insight and the offering up to help, the openness to receive unknown inputs from unseen resources.  A simple explanation of how we might approach complex problems. 

Here's a modern day context. At Xenergie, we help the weaving of corporate prayers for answers to complex problems through facilitation of large and small group dialogue events.  We bring people together to think and talk together, during which people learn to listen to themselves and others, stories are shared, hearts are opened and new ideas are weaved.  The whole process gradually builds layers of insights and sets new ideas and new things in motion.  It may take PUSH to get started, but something does happen which could never happen through traditional management practices.
 

So now it's exposed that Governments certainly do not have the answers, the onus is on each one of us to make a difference with the resources that we have.   The new world calls for us all to stand up and be counted for our thoughts and actions.  This is not a time to be paralysed by your own fear, but to be resourceful with your thoughts. Start by weaving your corporate and personal prayers this Bridget's Day.   Find out more about Xenergie world cafe

To find out how to weave a Bridget's Cross visit Xenergie's Facebook page.  

New Year's resolutions already fading?  Research demonstrates that only 20% of resolutions are still in effect after a two year period, so what happened to the other 80%?   Resistance to change is generally categorised as organisational OR individual and when the first studies about organisational change started coming out in the early 1990s, the failure rate was 70%. So how come nothing has changed? 

In this article we explore how organisational and individual change are not separate, but part of a need for a more systemic approach to both individual and organisational change involving attention to webs of competing commitments and energy flows.

The usual explanations about the difficulty of New Year resolution say that people aren't sufficiently motivated because they aren't genuinely committed to the change.   Organisations, like people, suffer from the same difficulty in shifting their behaviour through organisational change and it's not because they do not know HOW to do it because behaviour change is not merely a matter of knowledge or skill.   It is also a matter of "energy forces and flows" and "connecting parts" in a sea of "lived experiences" which make up the environment in which a person exists - in organisational jargon, this is called "systems thinking".   Experience also tells most of us that finding your voice inside an organisation can be a struggle, the reason why being cited as a sense of block, futility and fear of being wrong, not being understood properly etc

Organisations often try to make radical shifts when they are facing financial ruin or other disasters with great intention.  Such contexts have the advantage of creating a compelling case for doing something about a situation - fear of annihilation is the ultimate kick up the backside.  However, this fear usually brings forth a reactive focus on corrective rather than innovative behaviour with blame or shame attached.  Xenergie has experienced this with organisational clients, at such times, asking us to coach executives in order to "correct" remedial issues of an individual or a team - a sort of last chance coral -  rather than to place the focus on reading, transforming or innovating what is happening systemically around the person in their role.  Onto one person can be projected many of the woes of the organisation in a changed context.  It is important that such people don't become martyrs or scapegoats, because what's critical is to recognise that a changed context requires a different approach and that the person in question is connected to others and implies their inputs to the desired changes.    What was once relevant and right for the times that were, may no longer be relevant to the new context.  Change, therefore is not a linear thing, it has many facets and it is both individual AND organisational.

The frequent corrective focus adopted by organisations is grounded in a critical difference in motivation or energy flows:  one that is moving AWAY FROM problems, contrasted with one that is MOVING TOWARDS new states.   Both types of flow have a developmental gap to be bridged in which there is both fearful anxiety and aspirational hope, but the force of movement in the first moves largely back to the past with a focus on the individual, whilst the movement of the second moves into a future of which the person is an architect of something new and calls on the resources of others for collective and individual movement.   These directional energies flow - or get blocked - through organisational rituals and mantras, from Monday morning meetings to performance management systems.  They are propelled through a set of unconscious values and behaviours in individuals which replicate in outcomes and experiences which are holograms of this energy.   

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