What is the value of cultivating robust relationships?

Why bother enculturing abstract  ideas  such as authenticity  trust, accountability and willingness?

The value of laying the ground work emerges when it is time for growth and change.

A healthy culture can be engaged with a gentle hand , build a structure  for the  living network  and cultivate it.

In Fritjof Capra’s 2002 book The Hidden Connections, he describes the gentle nudge a wise manager can introduce into a living system to effect the desired response.

A living network responds to disturbances with structural changes, and it chooses both which disturbances to notice  and how to respond.  What people notice depends on who they are as individuals, and on the cultural characteristics of their communities of practice.  A message will get through to them not only because of its volume or frequency but because it is meaningful to them.

Mechanistically oriented managers tend to hold on to the belief that they can control the organization if they understand how all its parts fit together.  Even the daily experience that people’s behavior contradicts their expectations does not make them doubt their basic assumption.  On the contrary, it compels them to investigate the mechanisms of management in greater detail in order to be able to control them.

We are dealing here with a crucial difference between a living system and a machine.  A machine can be controlled; a living system, according to the systemic understanding of life, can only be disturbed.  In other words, organisations cannot be controlled through direct instructions.   To change the conventional style of management requires a shift of perception that is anything but easy, but it also brings great rewards.  Working with the processes inherent in living systems means that we do not need to spend a lot of energy to move an organisation. There is no need to push, pull, or bully it to make it change.  Force or energy are not the issue; the issue is meaning.  Meaningful disturbances will get the organisation`s attention and will trigger structural changes.

Giving meaningful impulses rather than precise instructions may sound far to vague to managers used to striving for efficiency and predictable results,  but it is well known that intelligent, alert people rarely carry out instructions exactly to the letter.  They always modify and reinterpret them, ignore some parts and add others of their own making.  Sometimes, it may be merely a change of  emphasis, but people always respond with new versions of the original instructions.

This is often interpreted as resistance, or even sabotage, but it can be interpreted quite differently.  Living systems always choose what to notice and how to respond.  When people modify instructions they respond creatively to a disturbance, because this is the essence of being alive.