Our leading-edge approach to performance breakthroughs is built on two fundamental, coherent philosophical frameworks, delivered from a rich background of business acumen and experience.
We say that ontology (the study of the nature and function of being) offers the most effective, efficient and powerful access to individual, team and organizational performance.
A few core principles:*
- Who a leader is being allows him or her to lead effectively regardless of position, environment or circumstances.
- Leadership is about realizing a future that would not have happened within the prevailing context.
- Individual, team and organizational performance is determined by individual actions, and those actions are wholly consistent with the prevailing context and agreed-upon realities.
- The prevailing context and agreed-upon realities are carried entirely in language and exist in organizations as networks of conversations (what we often call “organizational culture”).
- New realities can be purposefully created through language, generating new actions and naturally bringing forth a new level of performance.
- Organizational performance is highly dependent on organizational integrity, which is a matter of organizational members giving and honoring their word to each other and to external stakeholders.
For more on ontology:
- Course Materials for Being a Leader & the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological/ Phenomenological Model (authored by Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen, Steve Zaffron, and Jeri Echeverria)
- Click HERE and type “Werner Erhard” in the author search box to read Mr. Erhard’s and his co-authors’ other scholarly papers. Werner Erhard’s ideas, models and associated applications are the principal source for our work in creating access to breakthroughs in leadership and organizational performance.
- Being and Time, by Martin Heidegger
- The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life, by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan
*These core principles are drawn from Course Materials for Being a Leader & the Effective Exercise of Leadership: An Ontological/ Phenomenological Model (authored by Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen, Steve Zaffron, and Jeri Echeverria, January 31, 2019) and other closely related work.
We view organizations as living systems. Hence, the design of all our work takes into consideration the natural attributes of living systems.
A few core characteristics of living systems:
- All elements of a living system are interdependent and coherent.
- Intelligence is dispersed throughout the system; that is, intelligence can be tapped at all levels and across all areas of an organization.
- Synergy is a natural phenomenon.
- Living systems are self-organizing, self-managing, self-regulating and self-transcending.
- Living systems naturally adapt to perturbations in their environment. (However, the default tendency for organizations is to systematically defend their old ways of operating, even when they are no longer successful.)
- New properties naturally emerge from the interaction among and between organizational members.
- Change is not linear in living systems. It can be sudden, dramatic, and unexpected.
For more on living systems:
- Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, by Margaret J. Wheatley
- Rewiring the Corporate Brain, by Danah Zohar
- Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership, by Joseph Jaworksi and Peter M. Senge
- The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, by Fritjof Capra
- Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems, by John H. Holland