Sometimes things just simply don’t happen. Things that could take you where you want to be. Impediments, in many cases, have a psychological reason. Knowing it can help you address the problem.
Making changes and implementing the necessary stuff for growth, you know you have a clear vision, you involve your colleagues, you talk to them about the reasons, you show good examples, your enthusiasm is visible so your constructive behaviour is contagious, and yet, the organisation is stuck. Have you ever wondered if you might need to go deeper?
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi created the term flow in positive psychology, it is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
In general, this state can be achieved when the challenge meets your skills. If the challenge is bigger, you will get anxious that you cannot do it, and if the challenge is smaller, you will get bored that you need to do something easy or what you have already done several times.
As a nature of work, there will always be tasks that are out of the flow state. But watching out for the right balance is crucial.
It is related to the concept of self-efficacy: the individual's belief in their innate ability to achieve goals. When a person gives up trying to parry the negative happenings after they have occurred repeatedly and unexpectedly is when learned helplessness takes place. Even when these negative stimuli can be avoided, because the person has come to the conclusion that they cannot influence them, they have a real or perceived absence of control over the outcome of a situation.
Helplessness comes with negative preconceptions about the future, hopelessness and passive behaviour. People of this might seem to be lazy and uninterested, but there might be something else in the background. Let’s take a look at it!
Gestalt therapy is a form of psychotherapy that emphasises personal responsibility and focuses on the individual's experience in the present moment.
The gestalt cycle of experience is about decomposing how people get aware of their needs, how they act to satisfy them and how they close their action so that they can get ready for another need.
It might seem to be a lot of phases, but each one has its important role in the process and each can be blocked for whatever reason. There are indications that help you identify which phase is blocked so you can help your colleagues differently as there is no one for all solution.
Gestalt therapy reached a zenith in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, it has influenced other fields like organisational development, coaching, and teaching. In her book, A gestalt coaching primer, Dorothy E. Siminovitch also talks about the organisational implications of the cycle. Here are some thoughts from her book and I will add some interpretations to them.
“Framing anything makes that thing figural and the priority over other things and needs. There can be more than one in parallel, but the clearest figure becomes the uppermost figure. If it is compelling enough to take priority over other figures, I’ll have the sense to do something about it. Or I may feel anxiety if I cannot go for it for whatever reason.” [...]
“When a figure that had been prioritised can so easily and quickly be displaced by another figure, we experience loss of focus.”
There are lots of things to do in your business. In order to make the most effect, you need to align all the necessary resources and attention to the problems. To do so, you need to make priorities on each level: company level, organisational level, individually.
“When perceptions become a habitual process, awareness becomes narrowed.”
Your operation can get used to certain happenings and your vigilance is eased down. It is not just about negative things. When you have been the market leader for a long time, you might get the inability to escape the past and you overlook important changes that can erode the status quo.
“Viktor Frankl said that ‘between stimulus and response there is a space,’ and that space is the place for awareness, which influences choice.”
How you interpret things can make a difference. When Covid hit the world, some felt miserable that their business would be going down. Others started to look for new possibilities and adapted to the new situation.
“Often there is a jump from perceiving a figure into action rather than choice. ‘Automatic’ reaction becomes a habit instead of a conscious choice. Don’t act immediately based on your imagination, you’d rather gather data and validate your perception as a first step.”
Though companies are good at allocating resources (mobilisation), if they miss the direction, they have mobilised the wrong assets.
I have seen many times that companies look at data to know what is going on and instead of defining the right learnings, they jump into action mode immediately. But proper preparation in the right direction can be invaluable. The carpenter measures twice and cuts once.
“Contact is the experience of meeting the conditions of satisfying the figure so that the boundary of the figure is changed. If no sense of shift occurs, no change occurs, no satisfaction has taken place.”
The world and the circumstances of our business can be so complex that we do not know exactly how things interrelate with each other. Showing the effort is already a sign of ownership, so the team is not necessarily addressing the issue the right way as they have no clue about the exact reasons. It might deceive us that we change something that affects the outcome, but if it is not a direct connection, we might not be sensing the right shift.
“Learning and growth are the outcomes of satisfying our needs and wants in relation to challenges confronted. Ideally, each point has to be adequately completed.”
In business, growth can be easily visible, the right numbers increased or decreased. But the learning is often overlooked or neglected, especially when there is success. It is easier to start looking for the reasons for failure because we do not want to repeat what went wrong. When it comes to success, we feel no urge to understand it, we take it natural and we move on quickly.
“Our culture now perceives time to be in short supply, and we live and work under pressure to keep moving on to the ‘next thing’. Closure is thus becoming neglected or marginalised. Withdrawal without closure is increasingly the ”new normal” for leadership. Yet closure is vital for learning and growing from the experience. Daniel Kahneman tells us that ‘what defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings.’ If you have a positive experience that ends badly, that experience may become a ‘disaster’; if you have a horrible experience that ends well, that experience may become a ‘blessing’.” [...]
“Those who habitually withdraw from figures of interest without reaching closure well enough to feel content run the risk of feeling chronically unfinished and unsatisfied - the experience of being stuck.”
Without the proper closure, your organisation won’t be fully ready for the next challenge.
