The experience and effects of an authentic community are fairly uncommon these days in our workplaces and where we live. Yet it is an ancient part of human interaction. It is not uniquely human to form groups but we are by far the most sophisticated and dominant practitioners of it.

When we form authentic communities we share deep, rich and intricate interdependency that allows simultaneous individuation and powerful social emergence. As our world increases in complexity, the industrial and reductionist approach to our organizations have left them devoid of life and vitality.

When a group is struggling with complexity, individual engagement or authenticity, a powerful platform for improvement is strengthening capability in community building. Your responsibility in a community building capability is first to achieve alignment. Without alignment, the existing organization will fracture further.

I work with you first to achieve strategic alignment throughout the organization, usually through a combination of resource based strategy and some form of policy deployment (i.e. hoshin kanri). This typically takes a minimum of 6-9 months to realize enough alignment before introducing community building. The actual community building practice then follows a group coaching path where we collaborate on a program design and work through the necessary cycles of transformation to reach your desired end state.

Although much has come out in the last 20 years in the West regarding mindfulness, it is an ancient way of life in Eastern and Native American traditions. The usual context of interest today is for leaders or organizations seeking peak performance. I help you cultivate some basic practices that will facilitate more thoughtful interactions and purposeful action. I work with you, and perhaps a particular group, in a coaching relationship to understand, design, and implement the necessary cycles of transformation to reach your desired end state.

Alongside mindfulness is field setting. This type of work cannot proceed without a degree of awareness of self, others and a collective group situation. Once mindfulness reaches a high enough degree, being able to set a productive field to bring out the best amongst people becomes possible. This capability is typically sought after by leaders, with or without a title. The benefits are numerous but typically is in support of having more effective communications and congruent actions. Purpose and passions blend for a much more impactful way of work and being. This too follows a coaching relationship pattern and varies in length and depth depending on your situation and topic selection.

A slightly deeper understanding of a learning organization typically comes to the fore in the world of the complex. Peter Senge’s work around learning organizations is limited to more converging problems; those that through proper structuring come to a single or small set of solutions.

Unfortunately, many problems we face today are divergent and have the properties of emergence. These types of problems change as we work with them and cannot be adequately bounded or structured to have a predictable outcome at the start. Instead, we can adopt a series of capabilities that are designed for these types of phenomena and equally mature as Senge’s work, albeit less known.

Although we never ‘solve’ the problem, we can become quite skillful at bringing about more desirable futures with less side effects. You will gain skill and comfort in inherently unknowable, unmanageable, unnavigable and unorganized contexts. This becomes a competency of considerable strategic advantage since you and your organization will be able to shape the future, environment and conditions to your favor while handling emergent challenges.