Publications

Eglė Daunienė / Photo by J. Suslavičiūtė

LRT.lt

Eglė Daunienė, Adaptive Leadership consultant and expert, explores the processes of change in business organisations and the importance of awareness and intuitiveness in them. We talk to her about living systems companies and the leadership they require. 

- Thinking of business organisations as lively systems that are self-organising, non-hierarchical and cyclical rather than expecting continuous growth is a theme increasingly heard in the Western business environment. Is the idea of business as a lively system also becoming a part of our consciousness in Lithuania?

- In Lithuania, thinking about the organisation as a living organism is still not widespread and rather niche. However, there are many attempts to identify naturally occurring changes - someone is creating tribes in organisations, talking about self-management, sociocracy, flat organisation, etc. In other words, we are looking for a name for the hard-to-touch side of organisations. Of course, there are still a great many companies that have simpler tasks, are not so ambitious to reflect on themselves and use simpler terms. I think that we are now at the beginning of this wave of best practice.

One of the great practices, and challenges, of a mature organisation is to reflect on oneself, to allow the organisation to correct itself. I set a goal, I act and I measure and reflect.

- You recently contributed to an event organised by the HAI Institute, which focused on the principles of lively systems that we can apply in organisations. The format of the event combined a conference, a concert, movement practices...

- I see this event as an experiment first and foremost, an attempt to create new learning environments where people can learn not only from speakers and experts, but also from their own experiences. The event had three big parts: the first part was about sharing experiences. People who use the principles of living systems in their own way spoke to the audience and told us how they are doing. This was the most standard format - at most conferences you go to listen to others. However, in one presentation there were five speakers from one company who shared very realistically how they live their lives, which was no longer a very common way of talking.

The second part was very much about experience. In it, the Kybartai brass band played and the participants could sit among the musicians of the orchestra, then change seats and listen to the music from different places. It was a very powerful experience - we felt as if we were taking part in a piece of music ourselves, and finally we felt the music with our bodies, how it moved us, and there was a lot of sound. At the same time, it was a very unexpected opportunity to enter an unfamiliar system and experience it. You can always turn the unexpected into a lesson for yourself. It's a very valuable experience where you can allow yourself to reflect that if you want to understand a system, you have to find a way to go inside it, to sit in it and see how it works. And then what changes in perception.

The third part was about a way to participate, to read the information with my body. We were able to reflect on how we participated in the event, what role we each played, what expectations we had.

- You say that this event was an experiment to create new learning environments where we could learn not only from experts but also from our own experiences. How is this learning different, perhaps superior?

- We can learn for different purposes. For example, we learn to learn new skills, to be able to do a certain job. Another purpose of learning is to learn about reality, about the environment, to experience insight. Insights and skills are very different outcomes. To experience insight we need knowledge that others have, but we also need contact with other people. In this way, a person's thinking and ability to act is broadened. For professions that are socially complex, this is particularly important. For example, I thought of school principals - their work requires more than just skills, it involves many people, their needs, their problems. So, especially in socially complex professions, it is necessary to have insights and to be able to create environments where others can get them.

- What kind of leaders are needed in living systems organisations?

- I would say that people in an organisation need to learn to engage in leadership that moves from one person to another. We "take" the lead on a project, a job, do our own thing and hand it over to another person. In living organisations, it is not the duties that are important, but the specific jobs that require a certain amount of leadership, which is taken on by the person who is ready for it. And finally, there is a discussion within the team about where the time is now. In my view, leadership should increasingly become a way of doing things that is itinerant, intuitive, perhaps less defined, but very necessary.

- Such leadership is empowering and highly motivating for some employees, but there are certainly others who are used to being led by others and feel very uncomfortable when they have to take responsibility themselves. Are the latter people out of place in living organisations? Is it possible to "learn", to find different ways of doing things?

- To go somewhere or to do something together, we need not only to lead but also to follow. And not every job requires leadership, just doing the job well. A healthy and vibrant organisation needs all kinds of people. Sometimes this focus on leadership feels like a kind of 'obsession' and unduly detracts from the day-to-day work. Taking responsibility is not just about leadership, it is also about the day-to-day ordinary work. Doing what you promised to do, on time and to a high standard, is as important a responsibility as the responsibility to explore, to learn, to take on new things.

- You mentioned that leadership should be an intuitive skill. And what is intuitive life for you in general?

- At the moment, it seems to me that it is the integrity between what I think, how I feel and experience and how I act. I would like to achieve a state of being where what I say and what I do are not different. I find myself wondering why sometimes I say one thing and do another. For example, I always say that connecting with people is very important to me, but I spend quite a lot of time alone. I get nervous when I feel that I am able to consciously express emotions, say anger. There are times when it is really necessary to show anger, and it is employed to achieve a constructive result. Intuitive life for me is the ever-shortening gap between experience and perception. In other words, it is a growing consciousness.

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