Caring for Your Living Organization

What's working on purpose anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want Working on purpose. Now Here is your host, Doctor Elise Cortez. Welcome back to the Working on Purpose program ext for tuning again this week. I'm your host, doctor Elis Cortes, to a new line from Dallas, which is home based for me. If you've been tuning in for a while, you know this program as a thought leadership series that enlightens, it inspires listeners with insights from distinguished business leaders and subject matter experts. Our conversations are designed to elevate your thinking and entice you to take a conscious and inspirational approach towards leadership and business. Before we get to the program today, let me give you two announcements. The first is we've launched Augusta Now, which is a growth and transformation e learning platform dedicated to awakening meaning, passion, inspiration and purpose in people, leadership and organizations. It features leadership development and other professional development courses in English, Spanish and Portuguese delivered by Yours Truly. You can learn more at Gusto dashnow dot com. The second announcement I want to share with you, I'm so excited to say that my book is now out on an Amazon It's called Purpose Ignited, How Inspirational Leaders Ignite Passion and Elment Cause it's actually due for release November seventeenth, though you can pre order it now. Thank you very much for your support. It was amazing to finally get it out there. Now. On a Disweek's program with us Today is Norman Wolf. He is the founder and CEO of Quantum leaders, which is a leading voice in bringing about a transformation of the core paradigm of business. He's a fifteen year veteran of Hewlett Packard, has led and consulted with companies large and small, and he's the author of The Living Organization, an application of the core principles of how the world works and our organizations can create extraordinary impact. We'll be talking about the paradigm shift necessary to help business evolve to its best, the central element of energy in doing so, and dive deep into a few of the core elements that really distinguished Norman's work and model Norman. Welcome to Working on Purpose. It's a pleasure to be here. It's amazing that you're here. Let's just give a shout out to you if we can, because you reached out to me on LinkedIn a few months ago and just said, hey, you don't want to we talk, got a few things in common, and it has been magical ever since. I'm so glad that you took the lead to reach out to this stranger. Thank you, Alis. It has been magical and I've enjoyed it thoroughly. It's such a pleasure to meet people who are so committed to you helping facilitate this this period of transformation we're going through. Well, you know, I've had a few conversations along the way leading up to this one, and we've been talking about something that's really important to you, and what you keep saying to me is that that now is the time for this major paradigm shift that in order for business to reach its both potential leaders and organizations must completely change their view of themselves. So for our listeners who have not been eavesdropping into those conversations, tell us more about that paradigm shift. Excuse me. There are two forces going on if you think about them over the last four or five decades. One, employee engagement is abysmal. People just don't enjoy what they do. Second, the ability for leaders or organizations as a whole to achieve the strategic objectives is also quite abysmal. If you look at the statistics put out by most of the consulting firms and many of the academics, the failure rate of achieving the objectives of strategic initiatives is seventy percent. Seventy percent fail thirty percent to succeed. So let's not take that away from those who are being successful. Isn't it amazing that we have an organizational framework that isn't doing very well and at the same time, isn't creating environments where the very people who trotted with executing what has to be achieved aren't very satisfied. Something was fundamentally wrong. And as I looked at the proliferation of new ideas, new theories, new models coming out of academia and consulting groups, whether it be creating agile business coming out of the know it agile movement, right, that's apply agility to the business, or lean improvement methodologies. Or now we've got reinventing the organization and teel and new ways of working and self management, self organizing. We're still failing. So I thought something more. It's going on. We've got very smart executives, very talented people. Something is fundamentally wrong. And that's where I decided that the problem is the paradigm, simple definition of paradigm. How we see the world, what our worldview is, what some people these days like to call mindsets, and it's that mindset that causes us to do what we do unconsciously. I delved into that and said, well, what would be a better mindset or a better paradigm than the mechanistic Newtonian view of the world where everything's a machine part and we just follow this. You know, if we understand all the machine parts, we can figure out how to create something well. That worked great at one point in time. I don't want to take away from it. The Industrial Revolution was based on it and We've had a say, one hundred years, one hundred and fifty years of success from it. It just doesn't fit today's world. Something new has to be birth, something new has to be created. And what I think it is is, let's look at an organization as a living being. It has a lot of those same attributes. And what we're calling for in organizations going forward is the attributes that we would associated with a living being as opposed to a machine. We want them to respond, We want them to create environments that support others. We want them to be caring, we want them to be agile, we want them to adapt and learn. Machines don't do that. Human beings do. So I created a new model called the living organization. Well, and I've got to show you a couple of things that I thought for such pearls because as you know, I read your book cover to cover, as I'm prone to do, and I love your definition. You say. Organizations are living, breathing organisms, organisms with distinct personalities. They have a soulful purpose, which is the core reason a company exists, and the mission is how we express that. The vision is what the world will look like in the future when the social purpose is more fully realized. That is a totally different view than what you just describe before about the mechanistic Newtonian right, And you know we've talked about in companies over the years. It's a perfect example mission vision and values. But if you listen to the way you describe it and the way most people think about it, there's a clear distinction and the way most people think about mission vision and values it's a mechanistic approach. That's the old paradigm corrupting and corrupting new ideas and into a mechanistic approach which has no energy to it, no life to it, no nothing for people to engage around. But if you think about it from a point of view, if it's it's here to create something, to contribute, something to make a difference, and that we're going to take this journey of making a difference in the world, not people get excited about that so well, and that's where we get to evolution. Right, So are you and I have had a couple of really fantastic conversations talking about energy and the importance and the necessity of change. And for me, when you talk about evolution, you see which which just search itself when a species or system no longer fits its environment and creates a crisis that forces the system to adapt to the new environment or die. So paint a picture Forrest Norman of how evolution relates to your living organization. Well, let's start to really understand the living organization framework. It's really easy to think about you, what's a human being, and then just extrapolate that to a collective of human beings operating with It's the same context, right, So think about how you change. You're going along just fine. You're happy, life's working. There is absolutely no reason for you to do anything different unless you're one of those few that forces yourself to constantly change. But most of us are just happy if it's working. Don't fix it, true, broke, don't break it. Ampathy. Yeah, well, it's called comfort, and that's perfectly normal. We all seek that, So I don't want to take anything away from that. In my life, when I've looked at where have I had significant changes, It's usually come about by a major disruption in my life pattern, yes, right, which causes me an internal dissonance, dissatisfaction, Something begins to churn, right. It either comes internally by a dissatisfaction or externally by an event that happens to me. My wife decides we should get divorced. Right, that's right, there you go important handless for me too. Yes, Now, let's extrapolate that to an organization. And you typically when organizations change is when they're forced to. Facebook comes along and completely disrupts our marketing models, the Internet comes along and completely disrupts how we do business. These are evolutionary events. COVID comes along, right, So these are perfect examples. And again it's natural and it's part of the evolutionary process. Why resistant Why not learn to say, okay, COVID's here, something needs to change. Let's get creative and figure out what to do to move forward, just like we do with our personal lives. I say that intellectually, I know it doesn't happen that way. We go through the steps of death and dying, the shock, and then we deny, and then we get angry, and then we blame, and then we bargain, and then we go through all these things. But eventually to be processed through all that, which is really nothing more than the release of energy. I mean, those stages were just releasing the energy and allowing the old to dissipate to make room for the new. Why not do that consciously and facilitate quicker movements. Quicker change is both on an individual level and an organization, So embracing those things that appear difficult with compassion for self and others usually helps things move along much faster. He's lifting them, of course, not so much, not so much. Yeah, Well, I want to take that one step for the Norman. Because one of the things that you've I think said it's probably in your book somewhere, but I know you and I talked about it, which extends what you just said, and it makes it even more profound, is you say that changing identity is a death sentence, and that I find it to be arresting and spot on. So kind of what you're really saying is, in order for us to move on to the next level, we have to let go and let that other previous identity of ours die away in order to make room for something new. And that opens something for me. And that's really dramatic. So say a little bit more about that. Well, you know, the Chinese have a proverb, may you die a thousand deaths before you die, and not heard that it's a beautiful proverb if we learn to embrace it. When I create my sense of self, I invest a lot of time and energy in it over the course of my life. It's my sense of identity. It's who I am right now. If you really look inside of you, who you are is made of a multiple people, and when something changes in our lives, it usually means that one aspect of us it's no longer being called forward. It might even be being asked to go sit on the bench. Sometimes that's good, but a lot of times we have such a connection to it. It might even tie us to our family roots. My great great grandfather lived in this place, and now the hurricane has come and there's going to be a sadness, almost like some part of my life is dying, right, That's what I mean. But I mean those are just some examples. I'll give you another one. And my mom passed away. There was a part of me that consciously knew was never going to be called forward again, that I was the baby of the family, and whenever my mom called I became the baby of the family. At the age of forty, I was still the baby of the family. But that little boy in me was no longer going to come forward. And part of my sadness and my mom dying was that part of me was never going to come up again. And that's a loss, that's a death. Organizations go through the same thing. Everybody is used to working with clients in a certain way. We've got it all worked out and everything's cool, and we have this wonderful way of dealing with and selling these products, and then all of a sudden COVID hits and you're not doing that anymore. A death, that's little death of a being. So we've got to allow that process through, which is the grieving process, which is mourning, acknowledging it, appreciating it, and letting it go. Oh that's so beautiful, Norman, all of these conversations we have. And so that brings me to the last part. The last thing I wanted to talk about in this segment. Here is you focus, and here we are talking about energy and living beings. And so you say, rather than rather than an organization and focusing on profit or money making, you said, if we could change the way business relates to its role in society, which is partly identity to its customers and to its employees. We can make a very large and very real difference. And so then you went on to say that even you, in the way that you talk about your business, you say, now when I ask about what the vision of Quantum Leaders is the business that you run, you say, it is to transform business around the world into environments at support and enhanced the dignity of the human spirit. As they collectively expressed the spirit in service to society. That is so beautiful. Thank you, thank you. And it's taken me a long time. I wrote the book and published it in two elevens, so it's nine years out now. And over the nine years, well, I'll tell you this little story, John Nicky, you see you a whole Foods who wrote the foreward to my book, and I gave him a copy. He said, Norman, now you get to live what you wrote. No, that's right, most prophetic words. So for the last nine years I've had a look at what's my internal way of being? What do I have to let go to fulfill the purpose that I have? And that's been my journey for nine years now, and it continues. I continue to discover it. Nine two. Same thing for me. In fact, we have to talk about this. You refer to yourself as the hospice midwife. What does that mean? Oh wow, So I've known for a long time that I am just part of a facilitating a change that's happening. Regardless if I'm not here, it's still going to happen because it's part of the evolutionary journey. Life is morphing, and so we're caught up in the in the changing process. And so since it's life itself is birthing something, I look at myself as a as a midwife. I'm facilitating the birthing process that wants to happen. And that's really what the work of Quantum Way that's in the Living organization it's all about. It's a way of helping that new way of being, that new way of working income into birth into life. But at the same time, nothing is born without a death. Change. Just what we talked about, change does not happen. It's something that we're comfortable worth going away. So part of my journey is to hospice. That's which needs to end, and so a lot of our work is built around understanding that and being compassionate with it and starting it along. Norman I'm so grateful to share you with with our listeners and listeners. What I hope you're hearing here is I hope you're hear hope, possibility, inspiration. We're going to talk more about this. Let's let's grab our first break. I'm a Lease Cortez your host. We've been in there with Norman Wolf. He's the founder and CEO of Quantum Leaders and the author of the living organization transforming business to create extraordinary results. He joins today from Vancouver and Washington. Stay with us, We'll be right back. Doctor Release Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at a Lease Coortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise ali se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to Working on Purpose. Thanks for Jane, well us, and welcome back to Working on Purpose if you're just joining us. My guest as Norman Wolf. He's the founder and CEO of Quantum Leaders, which is a leading voice in bringing about a transformation of the core paradigm of business. He has a fifteen year experience set with Hewlett Packard and has leading consulted with companies large and small. He's the author of The Living Organization, an application of the core principles of how the world works and how organizations can create extraordinary impact. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez, So for this next segment, Norman, I really wanted to focus on energy and energy is a really amazing thing, and I have talked about that quite a bit, and people oftentimes say to me, you're all about energy. I love your energy, and here you are. You've really done something amazing. And I find what you say in your book riveting about this. And you say, if everything is energy, which cannot be created or destroyed, it stands to reason that creating results is a process of transforming energy from one form into the form of our desired results. That is so profound. Tell us more about this notion of energy and desired results. Well, if I look, once I came to the realization that organizations are living beings, the question was how the living beings created outcomes? How do I create I've had experiences where sometimes the outcomes happened so effortlessly, even to the point where I forgot I set that goal in the year later it's like boom, here it is. And other times I struggle, and I struggle and struggle, and it's what's going on. And that's really what I wanted to set out to accomplish, not only for myself and my personal life, but for myself as a leader of organizations and consulting with leaders of organizations, and what I concluded as part of my engineering mathematic scientific background, if everything is energy, and energy can be created or destroyed, then obviously what we're doing is playing with energy. So what is that energy? In my book, I describe three fields of energy, the activity, what we do, and how we do it. That makes sense. You know, you can look at that as kinetic energy. You can see it's it's energy expressed. But there's other energy fields that come into play as well. Some lie the field of potential energy waiting to be expressed and some actively being expressed. And the other two fields is what I call relationship energy. Relationship energy is the energy of interaction and it takes on two meanings for companies. One internal to the company. It's the energy with which people interact together. And if you just think about that from an energy point of view, contributing to the production of an outcome. If there's harmony within the team, if the team supports each other, we call that synergy. The definition of synergy is off. We referred to was two plus two weekls five, Right, you get more out of it in physics term and engineering terms. You've got two waves, energy waves that are in phase with each other and so amplify confect We know what happens with conflict. Nothing gets done. Everybody's busy arguing and victorying in and nothing's happening. But that's two energy waves out of phase or attenuating down to close to zero, so nothing's happening. So again, from a pure energy perspective, you can see the dynamics in an organization being represented as fields of energy. We're either actively focusing our efforts, or we're distracted by conflict in relationships, or we're being supported by supportive relationships, and there's more energy to contribute. The third field of energy. Oh and the other part of relationship energy is external. In this recall the energy of experience. Now, there's a lot of talk today about customer experience. If you think about what an experience is, it's really an energy that's branded inside the experience of another human. Again, it's a relationship exchange, it's not a transaction. So when we optimize customer experience, that's very different than optimizing customer transactions. And often we confuse it too because again we think in the mechanistic paradigm always, so reoptimize the transaction the customer, I'll have a better experience. That's not the case. So you look at Starbucks. It's a cup of coffee or the AMPM Big Day, You're buying a cup of coffee spent at buck seventy. Why do I spend four dollars and fifty cents of Starbucks? It's the experience, It's the it's the energy of walking into that place. That's the energy of somebody smiling at me. It's the energy of being greeted by my name and somebody remembering what I ordered the last mine because I'm a regular that does something to me as a human being. The interaction the relationship creates a different experience. You can think of it as in a service business. It's easy. But think about Steve Jobs and his products. He was so fanatical about the user experience right that his products weren't the best in the world technically, but his products were the best from a user point of view. Is Morgin went up compared to commodity products like PCs because of that value of the experience. So relationship energy really key to the outcomes we create. And the third that's context. Context is really best understood as the framework I have inside of me. So as an individual, I hold a context about how life works, and it literally defines one what I see is possible and not possible into the way I respond to events the trump in my life. So it's like an energy pattern that causes me to filter everything through that causes my responses and my beliefs, and they come out of the stories we tell. I won't go I mean, going into context will take a long time. So just to give you a clip in an organization, the same thing happens. An organization has a contextual field of beliefs about how forwards. Starts with the founder, but then it grows as more and more people come into it and it begins to build the storyline. Like any community, it has a way of being. What's important what do we believe and how do we respond to customers? How do we respond to supply? Is how do we respond to each other? And it's often referred to us culture. The culture is the expression of context in our model. Context is the belief systems, the underlying call its psychic DNA or the programming of the of the way we ought together, which causes us to express in what you see as our culture. So let me take this home for our listeners and viewers, because this is so so important. It's such an important part of the work that you have here in Norman. So I want to distinguish this so you you refer to that as the arc so a again for its activity, and what I wrote down for my notes is again as the energy of doing we do. It's linear, it's cause and effect, it's categorize left brain and its mental intelligence IQ. Listeners and viewers just understand. Just distinguish that. Now, contrast that to the R relationship, which is the energy of interaction, and that's who we do it with communication. Empathic patterns, right brain and an emotional intelligence are EQ, so really really huge. I really appreciate how you've got a comprehensive view of that. And then of course the context, which includes the culture. So I just wanted to make sure that our listeners understood because there's so much meat in that model, Norman, So I just want to make sure that they got it beautiful. All right, anything else you want to say that before I go on to the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is money. Well, yeah, since you brought up IQ and EQ, I like that that's an SQ. Well, yeah, we're gonna talk about that later. Hold that thought because that is so so important. Hold that thought because we're totally not going to pass without talking about that. Okay. Well, the other thing that you said that I just really compel to me is you also go on to say that all results and even money is energy. That is very intriguing. Tell us how well, I'm not the first one to say that. I think Lynn Twist talks about the energy of money. If everything is energy, then everything is energy. So money is energy. So on one level, that's a simple explanation. But think it from from this point. When I'm interacting with somebody, whether I'm providing them a service such as a consulting service or a service such as a waitress in a diner, I'm exchanging something with them. I'm giving them something of myself that they perceive has value, and that contribution is energy. Now, if you translate that to a product, the people who help design the product created, they put their energy into the manifestation of that product, creating a certain value which they have then sharing with somebody. Energy has to be balanced. So if I give you energy, you're going to get me energy back in one form or another. Right, that's just the law of nature. So the process of commerce, if you will, is just an exchange of energy, one type for another, because it can't be mad to destroy it. So I give you a product or a service, you give me something in return. Though it used to be goats or sheep, or casks of wine or loaves of bread, but that got really cumbersome. So we said we'll give you paper, and the paper will represent Now we give you bitcoins, so you don't even have paper anymore to give my credit card. It will be electrons in the system. But all we're really doing is exchanging value for value, and that's the important thing. And so that's really what money is. It's just an exchange. It's ad to exchange value in a easier way than goats and sheep and milk, cottons and all that cumpasome stuff and even money. Now nobody wants to handle paper money, credit cards or bitcoins or you know, somewhat the electronic transaction. I think that really opens something, Norman. So when you consider that that money is energy, I think that that that gives possibility, It gives a clearing for people. So I just really appreciate how you distinguish that. And then adding on to that, you have to talk about this concept that I am so great. You talk about how we communicate our messages is really through our own internal state. So speaking about energy exchange here and you say, of course we can control this, this this internal state, but and how this talk about how this concept manifests and in vision and organizations. Will you say more about how it is that we communicate through our internal or just an interstate, either one internal state. I think of it as a state of being, right, So and think about states of being. The probably easiest to understand if you think about emotions, because emotions carry energy, right, and the energies cause our bodies to be in a circumstance. So think about what your body feels like when you're in a state of anger or frustration. Right the body is usually tense, it's got heat to it, I mean energy. Right now, think about your body in a state of watching a sunset and seeing or seeing a baby smile, or as being on a beach watching the ocean rolling and the sunset over the horizon, and all of a sudden you're in a state of calm and peace and relaxation and everything's okay. And think about what your body feels like in that kind of state right now. If you go into say a relationship with somebody, and you're in the conversation and you're in an angry state inside, but you're trying to select your words carefully, guess what they're going to experience, right, They're going to sense, they're going to feel, because what you're transmitting along with the words, it's this energy that lies within you if I walk into a room. I just had a consultant share with me. I was just teaching a workshop which we just launched. Actually, our pilot was over the summer. We're going to have the first public one starting November three. And I was taking some consultants through some of the stuff and one of the exercises we do is teach them how to shift the state of being so that they enter into a more what we call heart scented connected place with people. And he said, you know, I was in the conversation. I was coaching this executive, the CEO, and I just shifted myself into that state. The CEO did not know what I was. And yeah, he said, she changed, And she actually said to me, something's different. He opened up, and not only opened up, but the sculpts some new things just because he was in a different state. That's what I mean right that statement. It's awful powerful when we become conscious of what state of being a man when I'm in relationship. Again, that goes for individuals, teams, companies, organizations, and it's such a powerful concept. That's why I had to have you talk about it. It really grabbed me for a lot of the things that I'm doing in my personal life and my business, so that the beautiful Norman beautiful. All right, let's grab our last break. I'm Elise Cortez, your host. We were on the air with Norman Wolf. He's the founder and CEO of Quantum Leaders and the author of the living organization transforming business to create extraordinary results. He George to day from Vancouver, Washington. Stay with us when right back. Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose and inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at Elise Cortez dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortez. To reach our program today or open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise Alis at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on Purpose. Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back. To working on purpose if you're just tuning in. My guest as Norman Wolf, he's the founder and CEO of Quantum Leaders, which is a leading voice in bringing about a transformation of the corpare dime of business. He's a fifteen year veteran of Hewlett Packard as lead and consulted with companies large and small. He's the author of The Living Organization, an application of the core principles of how the world works and how organizations can create extraordinary impact. I'm your host, Alice Cortez, So for this last segment here before we get into it, I want to I want to share something with you listeners and viewers. As Norman and I began our conversations a few months ago. In one of the conversations, he said, you meet my friend Ellie, he said, sometimes I want to talk with you. I forget that I'm talking to you, and I think I'm talking to her. Just talk to her. So of course we took you up on that and immediately had an amazing conversation and we saw why you connected us, and it is about energy. And I want to share listeners and viewers that Ellie's up to something remarkable. She is out to create an energy institute and so she's so if you look for her, she's in New Zealand. Ellie to Hart is her name. And I just wanted to share you when you start enormous at the beginning, when when you just put yourself out there and you just do it on faith and out of out of goodness from your interstate, amazing things happen. So I just wanted to give her a shout out as to what she's up to in the world. It's certainly smacks of this conversation, so comments before I go into the next question. No, Ellie's a wonderful person with a beautiful heart and really committed to doing wonderful things. And just the kind of grounds were a little bit. She was a CEO of a farmer company, New Zealand Farmer, and now she's also a CEO of a company that's helping Nepalese women bring their products to market and she's working magic throughout the whole global supply chain to help this. She's a beautiful person, she really is. I'm so grateful that introduced us, and that goes again back to you know, just the notion of energy and exchange and I would say the way to say it is riding the wave. Yep, right, That's what you and I have been doing for the last few months now here we are together online, so on air. Okay, So the next thing I want to talk but and this gets to what we've it'll build on what we've been talking about so far. But you say, and I quote, experience is the energy that lies underneath the activities of the interaction of your people, processes and products. It provides them with an unseen but quite real jolt of energy that either repels or attracts them to you unquote tell us more about that. Well, you ever wonder why some companies, well again I use Stop Books or Apple draw a crowd that becomes almost evangelistic in the mechanistic way of thinking. We try to understand it by talking about brand identity. I gotta tell you, brand is a byproduct of the energy that people experience, and it goes to this relationship energy I talked about earlier. It really is something tangible, and that's why you can't spin your way through crisis if you're not authentic. People feel that energy. They do. I mean, it's just it's so palpable. But we pretend it's not. And here's here's a perfect example. Go into a room of people that you have no knowledge about and just stand and observe for a few minutes. You'll pick up exactly what they're feeling. You'll know you just sense it. Or walk up to somebody you're close to and you feel something's wrong and you can just feel it and you'll say what's the matter, and they'll go nothing, and you go, yeah, right, everything's fine. I'm just okay, I'm just tired and I don't think. So where does that where does that knowledge, that awareness come from? Well, it's it's literally energy. The body is like an antenna in the field of energy that surrounds us. And when we learn to tune that antenna to different frequencies, you pick up all sorts of information. Uh. When in my HP days, we were taught how to do management by wandering around. This concept goes back many, many years decades. In Lean operations, they talk about the Gemba walk, which means go to the place where it's happening. And people think that you just go and observe. No, you don't just observe with your mind or your your your eyes. You observe with your body. You feel what's going on around you, and there's so much information in that little in that sensing. Right. So this this field of energy that I talk about, recognizing that it's all energy, it's just so useful to really know what's happening. Some people might call it reading people, Well you can, you can put all sorts of names on it, but just recognize it's just energy and the bad The body is lowly designed to sense energy, and we trust our experience of the energy we experienced rather than the words said. That's why people are either authentic or they're not. M Okay, now we get to go take it another step further and talk about that spiritual quote, and you're talking of spiritual intelligence. So another really compelling idea is you say, and I quote the next frontier is to expand our ability to assess one skill with the use of contact energy spiritual intelligence or SQ. And then you go on to say a company such as Nokia, Unilever, Mackenzie, Shell, Coca Cola, Hewlett Packard, merch Pharmaceuticals, and Starbucks are using models for developing and measuring spiritual intelligence. I was blown away by that, thrilled to read that tell us more about that? Well, as I said earlier, you know, when I realized that EQ was really in some ways a measurement of emotional intelligence, I began to search for So how do I measure context? Again? I'm a manager, I'm an executive, I'm an engineer, so I know the importance of what you measure is what you get. So if I can measure activity, we have all sorts of tools for that. And now that we have this thing called EQ, where we have some tools to measure emotional intelligence, or our ability to relate to each other and relate to each other's feelings, what about ask what about the emotional spiritual intelligence or context intelligence. At the time I was writing in the book, there was two things happening. One days I read Donald Soha's book, who wrote a book called Spiritual Capitalism, I think it was or something along those. And at the back of the book she had an assessment instrument simple. I don't remember how many questions, twelve questions or twenty questions I gave you a sense of your spiritual intelligence. And then I came across a woman named Cindy Wigglesworth. Throughout this spent years eloping this assessment instrument she calls SQ twenty one, which try to measure what she calls spiritual intelligence. I have some I don't use the word spiritual intelligence as much now if they used to, because it carries some baggage, unfortunately, and unfortunately it's just sort of a reality. A lot of people hear the words spiritual intelligence and they kind of rebel against it. So let me break down what spiritual intelligence really is. It's really a degree of maturity. If you think about what it means to be mature over time, and the easiest way to think of it as contrary as a young child two to five years old, a teenager, late twenties, early thirties, midlife forties, fifties, and then a senior elder seventies, eighties, nineties, and what you see is a pattern of maturity hopefully, right, that's part of our goal. And when you look at that, you'll see a pattern of me and mine and now right, real tight, and I only care about myself in the very young and it begins to expand in terms of a sense of who I am and how I relate to the world, and I can handle more different points of view. I become more solid than my point of view, but less rigid about it, less defensive, less dogmatic about it. I have an ability to both be in relationship with my own point of view and with other people's points of view. I can handle uncertainty and complexity more because I have more experiences that tell me I'll be okay. Okay, things are happening, but that's okay. I've been through this before, and I don't die, or I die and be born. However you want to look at it based on our earlier conversation. So spiritual intelligence as measured by CYNDIESQ twenty one and is really giving you indicators or where you are in relationship to values and the way you live them and the way you can appreciate other people's values. So if EQ is how you relate to feelings and emotions of other people, SQ is about values and how we relate to our own and others. And I say values, I should say values, beliefs, core assumptions, and how fluid and flexible are we about those? So that SQ becoming more and more recognized as a vital still in its early days, it's only been taking twelve years now. If you look at Q. It took about twenty years before EQ actually got it more and more mainstream, and even today people are still discovering it. So I suspect in the future you'll have SQ and EQ as part of the way we evaluate or I hate evaluate, feedback to people to help them grow. That's the way I like to look at these tools. Well, I really really appreciate reading that I had never heard of this before. And of course this show is really a thought leadership platform that stewards the conversation toward advanced meaning and purpose in the workplace. Because really what I'm out to do, normanist to help leaders create a workplace where people actually want to come to and they can thrive, and we can start to talk about notions of spirituality in the workplace and certainly and as an organization, and that organizations are living, breathing beings that needed to need to be continually nurtured and grown and to evolve. Well, that's why I wanted to have you on the show, because you steward that conversation. You advanced that conversation. Let me, can I just jump in and they have one thing to what you just said, And I say this in my book. Towards the end of the book, since we're changing the paradigm, one of the things I paid attention to, which is why is the new role of leader and so in the machine paradigm or the machine worldview, we look at the leader's role as plan lead, organizing, control, or fundamentally, the leader decides what the machine is supposed to do, programs the machine, so to speak, and people execute it. In the new paradigm, the leaders shifts that we're all from plan, organized, leading, control to set the context, because the context is a defining feel and it helps guide everything else. Developed the people, and I say developed the people, I really should say developed the organization because you're developing the collective body in both the capabilities and its maturity, so you're developing the whole living being. Build community because community builds a sense of belonging, which is one of the three innate needs of human beings. Belong contributing, and growing are the three innate needs of human beings. So build community where they feel a sense of belonging and where customers feel like they belong. To be of service, which is a way of giving to the society something of value. Where you're enhancing society overall. So those are the four responsibilities. I was giving that speech early on when I was just introducing the book to the world, and somebody in the back I remember saying, wait a minute, that's what religious leaders do. I stopped me. It literally stopped me, and I said, you know, you're right. Perhaps the CEOs of the future will be their spiritual leaders of our society. And I actually wrote that at the end of the book too, So I think you know where you're growing, what you're doing with purpose and meaning. That's that's at the core of context is the expression of our purpose and meaning the energy and giving its shape, and that's so important. And I do hope that spirituality, the essence of spirituality, which is to grow and develop and contribute them to it, to life, becomes the reason companies exists. I do too, Norman, and that's absolutely why I get up in the morning and do what I do. And I look for people like you to come on the show to advance this conversation. And as you know, I used the show's platform really is a way to catalyze my ongoing thinking, growing learning. As you and I've shared, each of us recognize that we are on an ongoing journey. Everyone is, and then the opportunity is to get present to that and being gratitude about it and let it carry you along. Which I hope listeners and viewers, that you've got from this conversation, and I hope that you're all feeling elevated by this conversation. I certainly did. The moment I met you, Norman, I felt elevated, touched by an angel. And then when I read your book, I felt slightly smarter. If it's only slightly smarter than a contribution, I've given something to society. Absolutely did. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I really appreciate very much that you wrote the book and you're here sharing sharing some of the high points of it. And with that, here we are the close of the show already so knowing that our show is listened to by people across the globe who are interested in the notion of increased meaning, purpose and passion in workplace. What was your deliver listeners with today, go on a journey and be courageous. Begin to look at the organization as a living being, a child, if you're if you're a leader, a positive sense of a child a young adult. Let's say that your job is to help them, sure to contribute to society. Put on that perspective to start with, a lot of things will shift for you. That is so beautiful, Norman. Thank you so much for a beautiful finish for your beauty full soul. It's great to be able to share you with my listeners and viewers. Thank you for being on working on purpose my pleasure. Thank you for having me absolutely Listeners and viewers. If you want to learn more about Norman Wolf, his book The Living Organization, or the work he and his team are doing, go to Quantum leaders dot com last week if they miss If you missed the live show, you can always catch it be your recorded podcast. If we were on the air with Australian Rob Bruce, the founder of go On movement course and past talking about you guessed it, what it takes to go all in and left to get the results that you want. Next week will be taking a totally to return than we have in most of these shows. Well, we're talking with a previous guest named Danny Gutneck and we'll be turning the tables and he'll be interviewing me to showcase the technique of essence mining, so will be showcasing my journey to purpose. See you there. Remember that work is at least a third of our life, so let's work on purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose, featuring your host, doctor Alice Cortez, each week on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires impassioned performance, and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.