“No men can act with effect who do not act in concert; no men can act in concert who do not act with confidence; no men can act with confidence who are not bound together with common opinions, common affections and common interests.”  – Edmund Burke

This perspective reflects a way of thinking about where and how truth is established, and how standards of behaviour are shared in the way things get done in teams, organisations and communities. When any group comes to an agreement about what they care about that is true for them, it becomes their normal way of doing things.  The behaviour, jargon, and actions considered acceptable by the group then belong to the group and are defended by them in their relationships and conversations.

The power of shared values

What Clare Graves explained as the “Green vMeme” is a culture that values community and social interaction because it promotes human bonding and cooperative relationships. This supports a democratic way of thinking by viewing human beings as equal and to be treated accordingly, with decisions made by consensus.

This video challenges the top-down, command and control perspective to explain the advantages of engaging people in thinking for themselves in order to gain confidence, clarity and enhanced performance.

Organisations that seek to impose a set of values seldom succeed because they fail to engage their employees in a respectful and democratic way. Culture is something we adopt almost unconsciously as a preferred way of being in the world, simply because it feels “natural” or “normal” to us. It enables us to trust each other enough to act together and collaborate for mutual benefit.

For example, the difficulties faced by Greece in its efforts to stay within the Eurozone Community were that it must accept the same constraints as other member states if it was to stay in the club. Rules are rules and must be adhered to prevent chaos. Greece was free to choose where its best interests and value lay. The price of membership would be high and the pain considerable, but the energy needed to belong had to be greater than the energy required to go it alone. Trust proved to be a major issue. The lack of trust makes the price even greater and the conditions even harsher than they might otherwise be.

The confidence we have in others will to some extent determine the confidence we have in ourselves. Bottom-up energy emerges in organisations where managers lead by coaching their staff and creating the best conditions to promote individual, team and organisational learning. It’s about encouraging individual responsibility and enterprise by enabling employees to create solutions themselves so they can produce viable solutions for their team. This is how they discover the values and beliefs that work for them, and discover what it takes to make change real and sustainable. Of course, a dynamic balance has to be struck with other competing sources of energy outlined in the diagram below.

At different times and in different situations we can find ourselves both competing and cooperating with “THEM”. There are times when we have to comply or challenge what is demanded of “US” and then collaborate by combining our energy sources to coordinate action to achieve a common goal. Sometimes a balance has to be struck between the demands of customers and the resource constraints of the supplier. Each group seeks to cooperate or compete as their interests intersect.

Performance always improves when people’s creative ideas and actions are listened to and appreciated. Managing problems or solving them with old thinking and habits will not generate change. Top-down and bottom-up sources of energy must complement each other. Bossing people around fails to engage their energy. Doing the same things faster won’t do it either. Without a change in thinking and collaborative action, the change will just not happen in any meaningful way. Productive relationships have to be fostered and embedded.

Your Energy Producers

Bottom-Up Energy comes from a need for cooperation. We align ourselves with our team or community to energise our shared goals and concerns. We collaborate to take collective action and draw our behaviours and values from a shared culture.

It seems that few people are prepared to stick their neck out and open up their minds to the possibility of new ways of thinking. Seen from the top-down, front-line managers and staff are often suspicious of proposals for change, yet little attention is given to energising the minds of those who will do the work for them. We can all appear resistant to change, but we are naturally unwilling to engage in mindless activity or the extra steps of bureaucratic procedures that seem pointless and sap our inside-out energy.

Living in tribes

We live in “tribes”, such as families, political parties, teams, social networks, hobby groups, etc. To lead a tribe we need a strong desire to make something happen and be willing to share our passion. Remember, authentic leadership will always defeat the selfish or theoretical effort made by others just because of their top-down authority. We need to know where our efforts are taking us and feel part of a shared idea, a cause or vision. An online or virtual tribe can be self-organising, using social media to find and bring like-minded people together. This technology is

An online or virtual tribe can be self-organising, using social media to find and bring like-minded people together. This social technology is energising bottom-up approaches to change. It involves the work of many people collaborating to create a “tribe” culture from which they can access the capacities of like-minded individuals and apply to a specific issue, concern or context. The energy comes from the interactions and the generation of commitments to serve a common cause or calling.

Engage and co-create with those who will be affected

It is vitally important to create opportunities that engage people to give them a stake in the outcome and contribute to more engaging and productive conversations.  This increases the chances of finding common interests and needs, whilst understanding and accepting differences. This is the way new possibilities are generated and can feed ‘homegrown’ solutions here people take responsibility and make a personal investment in securing positive change. What’s more, it builds that critical ingredient called trust because the process is transparent.

This website contains practices you can use to engage others in more powerful conversations, where you can demonstrate your sincerity, reliability, and commitment to pursue shared activities that drive a shared understanding of what is important to the majority. This values the principles of democracy, collective responsibility, and community.

This dimension is often lost, even neglected, when change is imposed from the top-down. This is because performance improvement is felt to be contingent on carefully integrated planning mechanisms that link strategic goals with action on the front line or on the streets. So much energy goes into securing compliance that those with the authority to decide for us “at the top” lose sight of the fact that they need the energy of people at the “bottom” that is needed to make things happen.

Often downsizing means there are even fewer people to invent new ways of working to deal with the pressure of a sudden workload increase with less capacity. When people are scared that they may be next to “go”, or to take a pay cut, the demand for innovation is high, but tolerance for risk is low. Leaders fair better when they are aware of what contributes to a person’s way of being. Language, mood and body posture reflects the inner tensions, concerns, and needs that we face both individually and collectively.

The tension between two competing energy sources is summarised in the table below.

“Somehow we have got to find the integrating principle for our lives, the creative power that sustains our balance in motion, and we have got to do it quickly … The task is urgent: we must not push it into the future; we must not leave it to others; we must do it ourselves, and we must begin now and here.”  – Dorothy L. Sayers ‘Begin Here’.

Collaborative and coordinated action

What matters most is the quality of the local interactions between people who deal with each other on a regular basis. It is their values and preferred way of doing things that will create the hidden (real) culture – the way things actually get done. Top management may espouse a set of shared values, but they may not be the values in use at the front line.

It may not be possible to involve someone, particularly those who feel disengaged and feel they have nothing to gain from making a contribution. Likewise, those involved do not feel they have any role to play or have any responsibility for creating or maintaining productive and meaningful relationships. Such people will only seek to blame others for problems and look to “THEM” to fix things. When people are engaged with heart and mind they”see” a role for themselves in making things

When people are engaged with heart and mind they can see” a role for themselves in helping to make things happen and are more open and willing to learn and take different actions. On my website, I explore how seeing those around, above and below you as customers can transform their relationships, seeing themselves as both customers and providers.

The Promise Cycle Model (see below) outlines the actions involved in declaring and managing mutually binding commitments to get clarity into conversations between customers and providers. 

If the minimum effort is put into negotiating mutual concerns a shared understanding of what the ‘top’ of the organisation wants and how they can get buy-in from others. The skills involve overcoming damaging defensive routines, poor communication, low morale, wrong assumptions and a growing misunderstanding of what is really wanted. What often makes it worse is the avoidance of conflict or strategies to deal with growing anxiety and tension. This website offers you a number of strategies and actions you can try out and reflect on to discover which ones can work for you.

Manage relationships through conversation

Conversation (speaking and listening) is a core skill for energising bottom-up change. Finding out what really matters to people means establishing rapport and engaging them in meaningful conversation. A starting point introduced by this website is to set up a dialogue (not a discussion) about how to work cooperatively to get at what’s needed and to be creative in finding ways of bridging the gap between where events are now and where we both need to be.  It’s not about solving problems, it’s about doing things that count towards getting what we both care about.  This way the energy for change stays positive and problems can be eliminated by default when one action makes another redundant.

It can be helpful to see families or organisations as networks of conversations, as they coordinate the actions needed to take care of each other’s concerns. Success depends on how well they make and manage their promises to each other. You can record and evaluate the results as facts, but achieving them is a human experience with all its messy interactions and misunderstandings. In my website, you can learn how to engage with and use productive conversations to create a different future and work with others to make it happen. Relationships have to be managed in every moment as the future is affected by them in many subtle yet powerful ways. If you can lead some actions and support others you will liberate the leader in yourself and others.

The power of the story

Stories can change minds because they connect with people at a deeper emotional level than cold hard facts. It’s not so much the facts as the message and the feelings conveyed.  They are more memorable as they create movies in your head which give the context colour, meaning and ownership. It’s easier to decide what to do if you can see the possibility of a way forward and stories can do this. Winning elections is often the power of the story to connect with what people care about

David Drake talks about stories being powerful resources for leaders and coaches as they shape the way we see ourselves and our relationships with others. We can connect past, present, and future in a reflexive loop when each one of us offers information and receives meaning from each other’s insights. We may be living in the present but we are constructed by past experiences, cultural conditioning, personal history and imagined futures. We flourish when all are aligned in a coherent story.

When seen from a bottom-up perspective we are sharing our subjective experiences and assumptions. This is how culture is created and passed on – both truth and lies. It’s embedded in conversations that reinforce how things are done, the appropriateness of the mood state adopted and what is deemed to be acceptable performance. It’s the way values and beliefs are lived and relationships are formed and broken. Stories can communicate the spirit and passion that lies behind our interpretation of “what” we are observing, asking “so what does it mean to us” and deciding “now what” to do about it.

It’s the leader as storyteller or scriptwriter that empowers the process. The leader takes on the responsibility to declares the direction of travel and define the boundaries within which others can make new connections and change direction. A good life story is like a good movie. It sets the scene, creates expectations, deals with challenges and overcomes adversity to eventually find happiness. How we see your life movie becomes the spirit that determines it’s structure and makes our soul sing,

The structure of a life story can be shaped by someone’s spiritual nature and the stories they tell themselves. They can be inspired by how they want to be seen and judged from the outside-in and by those in authority, maybe parents or bosses. But as they take leadership for their lives they become aware that real change comes from bottom-up (in friendship) and from the inside-out (self-worth) energy.  This builds resilience in dealing with the stresses that are generated by top-down pressures (delusional and weak bosses) and the outside-in pressures (socio-economic or customer demands).

References

Appreciative Inquiry by Barrett, Fraklin, and Fry. Taos 2005

The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. Basic 1984

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. Penguin 2008

The Spirit of Leadership by Harrison Owen. Berrett-Koehler 1999

Tribes by Seth Godin. Piatkus 2008

Narrative Coaching by David Drake. CNC Press 2015