Dr. Pravir Malik is the Chief Strategy Officer of Galaxiez. His expertise is in creating solutions using Systems Science.
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In the previous article in this series, "General Approaches To Increasing Positive Complexity In An Organization," I highlighted four drivers—self-organization, interconnectedness, distributed control and feedback loops—that can help an organization create positive complexity. These drivers can be leveraged regardless of the structure of an organization.
As a reminder, positive complexity is the result of conscious effort and design and can create sustainable wealth for an organization. We can contrast it with the more common negative complexity, which destroys wealth and is the result of unconscious patterns that are easily created at the individual, team, division and business levels.
But even the drivers of positive complexity—self-organization, interconnectedness, distributed control and feedback loops—will be different and will have a different impact on positive complexity depending on the level of authenticity at the individual and team levels. A different kind of authenticity will create a different kind of driver. In a previous Forbes HR Council article, I suggested that authenticity fuels boundary-breaking innovation but must be balanced with practicality in order for an organization to remain sustainable.
Developing authenticity is itself tricky and requires a balance between inner psychological shifts that can then fuel different outer behavior and action to practically influence project and work outcomes. The inner and the outer need to function as a feedback loop so that gains in authenticity remain relevant.
While the jury is out on the best approaches to develop authenticity, here, I highlight two approaches based on my practical multi-year experience at several organizations.
The first is based on a sophisticated radar system everyone is equipped with—that of emotions—that can effectively signal important personal, interpersonal, organizational and business shifts. Like a muscle, emotional intelligence (EQ) needs to be built so that emotions aggregated at the team or even department and divisional levels can be made to provide important data on how organizational shifts are being perceived and received. But more importantly, learning to adjust individual emotions to such shifts can in fact be bolstered by the right aggregated energy.
Working through emotions allows innate processing capacity at the individual and team levels to be freed up; this in turn more easily allows truer individuality or authenticity to surface. Individuals and teams that can process negative emotions in real time are therefore less occupied by such negativity, allowing something deeper and truer to become the driver of their actions. In turn, this positively influences their ability to self-organize, interconnect, make distributed control more effective and promote the right feedback loops—which in turn drive positive complexity.
The second approach is based on leveraging inner light to drive outer organizational change. The process of leveraging employees' inner light can diminish the negativity of pressing issues—instead, they feel a greater sense of control, regardless of the challenge. A feeling of inner control can be associated with growing authenticity. Like the building of EQ, practices in leveraging inner light must be repeated, just like a muscle must be repeatedly exercised to be built.
Seeing light in oneself allows space for authenticity to more easily flourish. But further, the nature of light is such that it exists in and connects everything together. Cultivating light, therefore, not only allows authenticity to grow, but also to more easily act more widely. This in turn boosts a different kind of self-organization, interconnectedness, distributed control and feedback loops—reinforcing a more powerful positive complexity.
As we continue to experience the effects of the pandemic, where decades-long norms have crumbled and the unexpected continues to occur, it is the unique depth that each person is naturally endowed with that must begin to propel thought and action. It is only so that the surface-level thinking, being and consciousness that has arguably cemented these unusual times will change, potentially ushering in a more welcome future.
HR has a key role to play here. Practices such as EQ and leveraging of light must be boldly adopted in organizations so that a different quality of thinking and being, fueled by authenticity, can reshape the future.
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