When the head honcho of the corporation invites the employees to embark on a journey without a destination, when the boss calls for willingness to explore the unknown, not a wonder that the workers think of the garden path and cast a jaundiced eye on any game of follow the leader. Where? It's a natural question.
Travel has been known to expand horizons. Travellers have been know to bring back valuable ideas and methods. However, some travel is a mere tourist junket in to the territory of the same old same old. Some travel is a round trip to nowhere. Worthless, either because it is so safe and produces no growth in wisdom or because it is so dangerous there is a real risk of dislocation and permanent drifting.
How much locomation do you really need for a transformation? Can you trust the guide, the pilot or the ship?
A company transformation of the way it works is more than an easy makeover. Cosmetics are no cure for a lack of rootedness. This not to suggest that metaphors of the growing tree should supplant the journey quest. Trees after all get felled for timber or struck by lightning. No one story or image can caputre the process of organizational transformation. Risk is not distributed evenly.
Well, almost no image can account for uneven development nor harness the reality of a non-uniform distribution of risk . But there is the practice of musical invention.
The music of organizational transformation is built out of questions. They sound the notes, indicate the pauses and shift the tempo. Good questions come from listening.
When the management team invites colleagues and staff to embark on a journey without a preset destination, when the accountable managers call in their diverse ways for will, courage and a sense of adventure, when the chorus of voices chime in to explore the unknown and the becoming known, is it not a wonder that the workers all together contemplate all the biodiversity along the paths, walks, avenues and thoroughfares, all the roses, petunias and hyacinth. And they all together worker-workers and manager-workers throw themselves into the game and lead and follow and ask questions. Everyone is intrigued by who, when, how. Quite the jive session -- where on earth but here?
Yeah, it is old sixties wisdom: be here. Feel the groove. A leader of an organizational transformation is helping folks get it together. Bringing the best to bear in the here and now. It's not about getting somewhere. It's about being there.
A trip further out than any slide show of a promised land glimpsed over the hump of a hill. Not a get-there. But a bring-it-here. A song where both singing and listening contribute to the improvisation, the transformations and the reinventions.
It's not a phase. It's a state of being.