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Mental Maps
November 2009 
CCQ, Community Consciousness Quotient
JM
Storytelling - Walking out of our shadows (part two)
Pygmalion coaxes Galatea out of stone and she comes alive. The Pygmalion position is that of the facilitator who catalyses performance, who has audacious expectations of performance, of sustained high performance, moving from peaks to still higher peaks. The expectation is not unfounded because Pygmalion has experienced the magic of sustained high performance. Every stone may not be good enough to be turned into a beautiful statue but every human has the potential to be an outstanding performer
How does Galatea respond to the hard knocks by Pygmalion in his efforts to coax her out of stone? If she can see the results of the hard knocks, she would certainly enjoy the process because she can see that between the caterpillar and the butterfly, the seed and the tree, there is the world of a difference. She knows that this is the moment of truth that she had been waiting for ages. Like what happens in the story of Ahalya and Rama. Ahalya has been waiting for that divine moment of Rama's coming. The process is certainly complex and miraculous and the catalyst is integral to sustained high performance. Pygmalion and Rama play the role of catalysts, facilitators, in the transformational process.
People are waiting like Ahalya. Nations are waiting. Billions are waiting - like the farmers and fishermen, at the ‘bottom of the pyramid' (sic), essentially because the top is unable to connect with the bottom in the exchange and valuation process. It is debatable who is at the bottom and who is at the top. If you change the criteria of measurement, the bottom will become the top and vice versa. For example who leaves a larger ecological footprint? The cathedrals (Taj Mahal - Gurcharan Das) remain to be built.
Sergei Bubka, Isinbayeva. They do it over and over. They take the position - I can and I will do it. I will outperform myself, again and again. Can we take the same position, as individuals, a team and as a community? Nations have taken such positions. Kishore Mahubani asks this question to all Asian countries - Can Asians Think? Like Singapore has been thinking together since 1965
As individuals we don't have to go on waiting, for miracles to happen or for another prophet to turn up. While billions are waiting we can have islands of sustained high performance around each one of us. The islands will eventually connect together for that defining era of collective transformation. We are in that transition phase of achieving critical mass and gaining take off velocity of the process, of more and more of us transforming our SELVES to catalysts for the tectonic shifts.
So what is your position? Pygmalion and Galatea got to come together on this, the alchemist's marriage. Later Galatea will take the Pygmalion position, and the process continues.
Back to Bubka and Isinbayeva, what is the pole that we are talking about, the lever? How long is the lever? Where is the fulcrum? How does a community of practitioners ALIGN and LEVERAGE themselves for sustained high performance. Longer the lever more is the mechanical advantage. The visualization tool, FD framework, helps to create a mental map of the process of aligning and leveraging
On the potential quadrant (conceptual, intangible) the lever has 9 levels and on the performance side (tangible) another 6 levels/layers. All these levels need to be in alignment for sustained high performance to become reality. At the centre of the four quadrants is the self, positioned to perform. The fulcrum is at the end of the lever, the threshold level of your previous performance.
The self has all these levels/layers designed into it. The levels are
That of the internal compass/gps, which gives us the position and direction - the map of the journey
The clock, which measures the process in time, quantity and quality
The thermostat, feedback system, which keeps providing the information for course correction and ensures that the process is in tune so as to improve on its pervious performance
The cell, the beginning of the organic level, self regulating, negentropic, maintaining itself, where the mechanical and the biological come together
Plants, Animals, the ecosystem
The human
Organizational
Accumulated learning, the knowledge capital, ‘Intellectual property'
The same alignment holds true on the performance quadrant (the physical world) till the level of the animal where there is no gap between potential and performance
The problem, gap, waste, unrealized potential, begins from the level of the human, because we are unable to see what leads to improvement, not that we don't want to improve. The drive for improvement is part of the design. Our uniqueness as a class of systems is our ability to IMPROVE and when we don't realize this possibility we become SUB-ANIMAL. This is where the fulcrum of the lever is located
Visualize Bubka or Isinbayeva, positioned, and aligned to leapfrog, in our context, an individual, team or community being facilitated to be positioned for sustained high performance. The rest of it is but practice, measurement (metrics) and continuous improvement, faster, better and still better, stretch and more stretch. Invincibility follows in our respective areas of practice
The quadrant SW is about continual learning and renewal, NE is about the environment in which we operate. Both impact on performance. The environment offers the challenges to learning (LLL). How best the self and the internal community respond to the challenge will decide the future.
Metrics - The Community Consciousness Quotient
Less is more. At 59, I am not a gadget geek. Yet I love my mobile and the way it has been shrinking over the few years that I have been using it, accommodating more and more of my requirements. I have accumulated a lot of electronic waste over the years like my compass, VCP, music player of progressively smaller sizes and better quality, the desktops. . Very soon my notebook too will join the list. We are consuming less of the material and deriving much more. Small is beautiful and smaller is still better. The tangible is shrinking and the intangibles are scaling up becoming more tangible than the tangibles. Capital too has been shrinking being substituted by intellectual capital, brawn by brains. My wants (not needs) too have shrunken, at least most of those that I considered important in my thirties and forties, like a gas guzzling SUV. Being glued to my LCD screen and not travelling to work I have earned a few carbon credits, not using my car except for the weekend shopping trip. (It would be much better to dispose it off and hire one when I really need it) But all needs do not vanish with age, perhaps they grow with age. The need for community (to be connected), quality and richer experiences, need to learn and express myself. Sometimes more is less. Intelligence has evolved into intelligences, multiple intelligences, emotional, gender, social and in the process we have become less intelligent in community consciousness. So the metrics need to take into account improvement in community within and without along with conventional measures of improvement in performance. Community Consciousness Quotient (CCQ) is an imperative for sustained high performance. The absence is killing us in many ways which I don't have to go into greater detail. The blasts keep us remindedWhat are we waiting for ?
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