John’s post of 15 December 2002 in a thread on the Group Partners discussion forum, written in reply to a student’s questions. Other members’ posts are left out.
Jenny I have copied this and it is actually the background to our work and I felt you might find it useful...…
I got frustrated....I fround my life was a bout frustration. Frustration that people communicate but don't really understand, frustration that employees are not at liberty to really contribute in a valuable way to their own destiny, frustration that managers are often embarrassed and make excuses for their actions as part of a bigger problem with the root cause elsewhere perhaps.
These managers or employees often make choices and give or receive instructions without fully or properly defined purpose, they follow strategy when it's clear that goals are poorly defined or too rigid and clearly failing, they carry out tasks which promote low motivation and are often disrespected by themselves or wider teams, managements make decisions and defends its positions because "that's the way things have always been done around here".
Corporations defend their strategies by pointing to the inadequacy of larger politics and circumstances, politics argues that it has to defend the rights of citizens as a whole whilst serving only a favoured few who make most money, politics are victims of larger systems and larger systems are very difficult to affect...we live within this fractal logic.
The word we use to describe all of this is context.
When it comes to context, it can get very confusing very quickly as there is a mass of information and input from all sides and the key issue really is to make sense of this as you make decisions throughout the day and as that input continues to change. Effectively our assertion is that the better you understand the whole the better the ability to make better decisions and edit out the low quality data by assessing the values of the alternatives.
"You are what you edit"
Our view, in order to stand any chance of success in managing this in a complex system, is to create ‘frameworks of understanding’ and on quite a wide-scale to positively reset this context. We aim to do this wherever and whenever we can for individuals teams and entire enterprises and in so doing give them bigger and better context; frameworks so that they can understand themselves, and if possible construct, themselves.
We do this visually and through self-discovery.
The Holistic and Heuristic dynamics of Contextual Mapping allow us to create shared understanding and in the process uncover a real sense of what is possible, what exists and where the issues lay. We do this because it works and we have proven it over 400 times across the world.
We work as small expert teams in session directly with clients, with their teams and with individuals, in major multi-nationals and all sizes of business in an attempt to alter this 'frustration' dynamic. We draw the maps LIVE in these sessions and based on the conversations we create new meaning and purpose through our questioning.
We have now built together as a team the maps you see, these are built initially in freehand. Much of the success of this approach is that this result is integrated and in the teams own language. It is then effectively reflected back after what may seem a random series of questions contained in our 11 steps of contextual logic and at the end of each stage. A major component of the approach is the inference that goes on during these programs and the implication of the insights and the debate around the questions we posed.
We distil and synthesise the data as we work with the client on this 'journey of discovery'. What the teams have experienced have is a very serious logic although it’s hiding a story which the map will not tell on its own without the correct narrative.
We discover the stress and gaps within systems by intervening in these systems with a blend of rich questioning and also by deploying experts with passion and relevant experience and discovery techniques. We draw on the community of practice, a pool of significant talent that we have built over time at SPAN style=COLOR: black; mso-ansi-font-size: 11.0pt"> face=Arial www.grouppartners.net/SPAN.
This is an ever-growing selection of caring, enlightened and globally spread experts who are tired of value-less or opaque consulting practice, system or accounting dogma and wish to bring passion and life back into the world.
This heuristic process is of real significance to the clients as it a self discovered journey; this changes the dynamic of the understanding and widens deepens and enriches their own context. As well as liberating major breakthroughs in understanding, integration, creativity, connectivity, value, transparency, leadership and 'unlearning' we can begin to build an active and sustainable new hypothesis for the benefit of the whole social enterprise.
Our 11 Laws of the Contextual Framework is the critical business equation. We have built it this way and proven its results and now know that it is effectively combining all the key parts of the business 'Context'. This is then the balanced maths, purposes, risks, meanings, systems, ideas, needs, values, intangibles and assets of the whole organism in harmony.
As this is a large task as the world and the marketplace is a complex place, ever changing and of course therefore somewhat of a paradox we must maintain an adaptive structure so this has to be a constantly 'active' system; we might call it a constantly progressive machine.
We aim to make this equation work equally hard for individuals, teams and enterprises alike. We also build individual project, community and national level frameworks.
First posted on the Group Partners discussion forum, 15 December 2002. See the copy in the Wayback Machine. Kept as John wrote it.
More from What we were saying back then