Four Patterns

By studying successful organizations we get an image of what is possible. Four great organizational patterns emerge when we look at what great companies do and how they doit.

1. Trust

Bonds of mutually trusting, high quality and intensely positive stable relationships predominate.

2. Systemic, constructive pattern of communication

A defined process for problem solving, which utilizes an appeal to those higher in the organization for mediation, is leveraged.

3. Mission alignment

The personal mission of the individual, the mission of the team, the mission of the division and the mission and vision of the whole organization are aligned with a deep enthusiasm, pride and commitment throughout the organization.

4. New structures of organization

Progressive structures such as self-managing work teams and clusters encourage participation, innovation, quality, service and excellence. Everyone owns their own job and behaves with enthusiasm and responsibility for the success of the whole organization.

Application

Many people who have studied the work of Tom Peters, Peter Senge and Dr. Deming know examples of these four patterns. In fact, most business leaders have studied their work on the characteristics of top organizations. They have seen case after case of what great organizations do.

Other leaders have studied the work of Bennis and others describing the abstract qualities of individual leaders and have put quality programs into place. Vision, intuition, flexibility, trust, integrity, charisma and more are described in these works.

The problem is this: These same business leaders who know so much about these aspects of organizational excellence, leadership and quality, are missing the most important part. The evidence can be found in a common fact: their business organizations have failed to bring about the real changes required to actually achieve these four patterns. The reason the work of researchers in leadership and management has often failed to bring about lasting change is not because their work is not good. Their work is great. The problem is that something is missing. What’s missing are the inner thinking skills possessed by some of our greatest leaders past and present…business leaders like Thomas J. Watson Jr., Ewing Kauffman, Sam Walton and Warren Buffet, and political leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King.

So what’s the solution? How do we find these missing thinking skills? The answer is found in a personal process of mindfulness and awareness.

The Mindfulness / Awareness Approach

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness – attention to the process as it unfolds – is a simple technique albeit not easy to master. It has been described as the application of oneself to the present moment. That is, the observation – with non-judgmental clarity – of the processes arising in our surroundings and ourselves.

What does the individual leader’s inner functioning and profound self-knowledge have to do with the creation of these four great organizational patterns? Nothing short of everything.

To be mindful and aware of our own behavior is necessary for bringing about real organizational change. It is the inner functioning and profound self-knowledge – the Synergistic thinking – required for great leadership.

If you don’t feel a profound bond with all the people in your organization, or the deep desire for such a bond…if you don’t journey through time and envision a grand and glorious future…if you don’t intensely feel the spirit of your organization…if you don’t feel delighted when one of your people feels joy, then all the cases analyzed, principles understood and qualities of leadership verbalized won’t bring about change.

We Control Only Our Own Behavior


What brings about change in an organization are leaders who know how to integrate traditional opposites in their thinking. Master leaders are compassionate and objective, using multiple perceptual positions. They are proud of self and proud of the organization, having an extraordinary self-definition and self-boundaries extended outward to include the whole. They are we oriented and me oriented, through extending self-boundaries out and bringing them in again. And they are action-oriented and contemplative, utilizing fully integrated conscious behaviors.


The person-to-person relationship is primary. The exchange between you and the other person is designed not to control the behavior of the other person, but to understand it. The challenge is not to come to a quick conceptual conclusion about the other but to use your sense of the situation to intuitively guide the interaction and reach a tentative understanding of the other person that remains open to continual revision. In encountering another person in this way, you may need to review and modify your own opinions and attitudes, even letting go of some of your own values and beliefs. Because of the primacy of the in-the-moment one-on-one relationship, in the process of thinking through issues together, both of you may be changed. None of this can take place without awareness of the constantly changing you and mindfulness towards the people and situations in which you are working.

Leadership Can Be Learned

The question regarding this awareness/mindfulness is not: “Can these skills be learned?” Learnable awareness and mindfulness create synergistic thinking. The real question is: “When will you master them?”


Once you embark upon this journey of learning these skills, be prepared for your life to change in significant ways. There is no turning back once you reach a certain stage. The benefit is that you will find a happiness that exceeds what most people dream of, as well as creating the foundation for greatness as a leader. The difficulty is that mastering leadership with the mindfulness approach requires practicing, rehearsing and drilling in these fundamentals of thinking. It requires persistent efforts to enrich relationships through skill building. It requires you to make the deepest commitment to learning leadership skills.

Mindfulness can be learned as a simple process but its continuous application, or practice, is what makes it profound.

What is Practice?

Practice is defined as performing habitually in order to polish a skill. In the context of developing awareness, it is the measure of people’s ability to stay present with what is real – and perceive what’s available at any given moment for movement towards transformation. Being mindful is being aware of what’s going on – people either are aware of the present moment or they run on “automatic pilot”. If they are conscious, they can choose their response. If they are not, they become subjects of recurring, often painful patterns. That is why mindfulness is a prerequisite for change. Practice of mindfulness is an ongoing process regardless of what activity is undertaken.