Holding a Safe Space of Dialogue among Young Leaders of a Company
“Zooming out on Zoom” is a 1-hour online meeting I facilitate for young leaders of my client company (a Philippine based software development, testing and solution company primarily providing both offshore and onsite services for foreign market.)
This session, as many online sessions are, started in response to Work From Home (WFH) in COVID-10 pandemic. The session offers a space for honest dialogue among people working in many different teams of one company from different locations, on topics that may not be discussed in any other meetings in the company. I consciously design the topics of dialogue to alternate between global issues and inner works.
Today, in our 7th session, I used one of the Theory U introduction videos in which Dr. Otto Scharmer from MIT discusses the iceberg model with three divides (ecological divide, social divide and spiritual divide) as symptoms manifesting on the surface level, the tip of the iceberg.
After watching this less than 6 minute video and spending 3 minutes in reflective silence, they did journaling on 2 questions.
- Q1: What resonated most in the video?
- Q2: What do you feel is ending and what do you feel is wanting to be born around us?
Do Such Sessions Make Any Impact?
It is so hard to measure in any quantitative manner to prove if something meaningful for my client company’s leadership development is happening, by running such session every other week. But I am hoping, as I continue such sessions, something in them is shifting.
Here are some of the output I harvested from the session, as they shared during the session.
What’s Ending
- U.S. as Super Power
- Physical Dependency / Physical Collaboration
- Waterfall model
- Selfishness / Ego
- Growth chasing
- Capitalism
- 2 phases of major change (1 Poverty to a better life, 2 Electronics and technological)
What’s Emerging
- Virtual World, Virtual Country
- Virtual Presence
- Scrum
- Self-Organization
- Looking after other people. Taking care of the weak.
- Attention to the well-being of all
- Strongest generation
What Resonated
• Disconnect between current self and future self
- More people die from suicide than war
- A few people owning most of the resources.
- Intention
- Self
- We spend too much time creating unwanted results
- We are collectively creating the end results that nobody wants — this is deep
- Results nobody wants
And as we checked out today’s session they said the following as there feeling…
- Now I have a lot of questions in my mind!
- Relaxed to be able to express my thoughts
- Relaxed and happy
- Enlightened
- Happy to see you all.
- Happy to talk to someone else (being stuck at home and working 16 to 18 hours per day)
- Feeling philosophical because of today’s discussion.
- Hopeful
Trusting that continuing having such space could slowly cultivate the soil from where the future leaders of the company emerge.