Art in Motion
We’re pioneers on the frontier of management consultancy, focused on high potential organizational and leadership development. Excuse the cliché, but it fits. We’re the arrival of the refrigerator in the era of ice block home delivery.
Form follows function as we design, develop and build high-performing habitats and talent management systems visualized through a vertical lens. Together with our clients, we create what needs to be created to serve what needs to be served. Relevant understanding comes through our assessment, training and succession planning processes.
“In managerial hierarchies, it is little realized that it is the nature of the organizational setting, and not the personalities of those concerned, that is by far the most powerful factor in determining how we all get on,” meaning how successful we are.
This understanding from the visionary Elliott Jaques, the researcher who designed and proved the science-based OD theory and practice known as Requisite Organization, along with aligned understandings from Dr. Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics, strongly guides our work. Systems drive behavior. We call it the habitat’s influence.
Our trainings are self-organized and experience-driven, promoting creative, autonomous people. Our process is a living example of how organizing, leading and learning can be understood.
If you’re on the frontline, you can’t explain everything. If you know everything, then you’re not on the frontline. Paraphrasing Stanford neuroscientist Pribram highlights one of the ways in which we live what we teach. It expresses The Starting Point.
All one ever really knows is the starting point. Where we go from there is the creative process. Where the process ends can be most opportunistically viewed as the next starting point. Learning, development and creativity happen. They happen continuously if we let them.
Within this expanding process of learning and development is as much complexity, chaos, confusion, uncertainty, conflict and tension as one can hold. And when we say hold, we mean allow not control.
Once it opens up beyond our capacity to hold it, we distill it down to a point of new understanding that we’re able to integrate. When we’re ready, we allow the process to continue, once again opening up as far as we can hold it before distilling it down to our new understanding. This is The Starting Point process.
It takes guts to work in the zone of the unknown. We know. It’s what we do better than anything else. It’s also what we help others learn to do, hopefully better than anything else.
Because we believe the most important skill to cultivate when organizing and leading is the ability to hold the uncertainty, conflict and tension inherent in the unknown, inherent in any truly creative process. It’s key to growth.
