March 2003

Innovation Tips

…ideas for thriving on collaborative innoation

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Bringing the Soul to Life: Enthusiasm and the Implicit Order

“All this time we have created trouble for ourselves by confusing control with order.” Margaret Wheatley

In setting up strict, highly defined control systems in organizations, we fragment and disable the collaborative genius of the whole. In every organization, an implicit order—a rich and enlivening order beneath the surface of things—directs and animates the vitality of the organization. Our own control mechanisms too often interfere with that more invigorating order of life.

We can find that order by following our enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, energy, interests and imagination all guide us to the implicit order. We notice our imaginative enthusiasm; we can’t really control it. It is of the soul, and the soul is beyond our control.

For an enlivening order to emerge in organizations, people must feel free to follow their imaginative enthusiasm. When the enthusiasm of the soul is alive, it brings an enduring vitality to the entire enterprise.

People won’t pursue their enthusiasm when managerial rules and controls hold them in harness. The more rules imposed on them, the less enthusiasm they will bring to the work; the more controls, the less imagination. Both enthusiasm and imagination are vital to a thriving organization.

An organization’s deepest value is not in its fragmented and disenfranchised parts. The deepest value lies in a passionate and connected diversity. Promoting diversity does not always look orderly, yet it will produce far more human energy than any system of compartmentalized controls. People don’t get passionate about conforming to other people’s standards and expectations. They grow passionate about expressing their own ideas, their own enthusiasm, and their own creative response.

As diversity born of ideas and enthusiasm emerges, it gives shape to a new fluid and dynamic order. It gives expression to a living implicit order that is so much more effective, enlivening and responsive than any managerial control systems could ever hope to be.

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