Schlegel Consulting

Evolutionary Team Effectiveness

Matt Schlegel

Online Enneagram Workshop: Exploring the Path of Disintegration

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Under stress? So many of us are as we deal the realities of life during a pandemic—finding ways to work safely—school our children safely—care for our elderly and vulnerable friends and family safely. How are your behaviors changing in response to these stresses? The Enneagram can help us identify our unhealthy responses, understand why they happen, and guide us back to healthy responses. Teamwork 9.0 author Matt Schlegel leads this complimentary workshop in which participants dive deeply into the Enneagram’s Path of Disintegration and explore what it can teach us about ourselves.  We will share how we are coping and learn from one another tips for staying healthy through these challenging times.

Date: Tuesday, September 22

Time: 7:30pm to 9pm

Access: Contact matt@evolutionaryteams.com for the Zoom link to the workshop.

You can find more details to the workshop here:

https://www.centerforspirituallife.com/events/2020/9/22/the-enneagram-path-of-disintegration

Hope you can make it—we want to hear your story!

This is Not a Movie—This is Real Life

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Our planet’s landlord is warning us. Teamwork 9.0 illustrator James Yamasaki expressed in this image exactly how I felt as I looked out at the burnt-orange smoked-filled sky of the San Francisco Bay Area—somewhere at the intersection of horrified, angry, and terrified. What should I do now?

Melancholia

I recently watched a film that I do not recommend to anyone susceptible to feelings of depression or despair. Spoiler alert!  This movie examines the human response to humanity’s inevitable demise as a rogue planet collides with and obliterates Earth. That was the end. There was nothing anyone could possibly do to prevent the inevitable Newtonian fate. This movie makes me think—which problems can we take on, and which problems are just too big for humanity?

Shared Common Problem

Nothing bonds a group together like a common problem, a common enemy so to speak.  The more dangerous the enemy, the more likely people will band together to protect themselves from that enemy.  Identifying the common problem is the first step in problem solving.  In Teamwork 9.0, I take the reader through a story of a medieval village beset with fire-breathing dragons. The dragons served as the common enemy that brought everyone together.  In my wildest imagination, I had no idea that a freak summer lightning storm with 14,000 lightning strikes (the dragons) would ignite our landscapes filling the skies with smoke and creating an ominous, dark-orange hue in the middle of the day, just as depicted in the book’s illustration. Now the fires and smoke have spread to the entire western United States. We certainly share that common problem.

While in the Bay Area we suffered toxic, acrid air, others have endured the loss of their home and some even loved ones. My heart sincerely goes out to all those who are suffering loss. Compounded by the threats of Covid-19, this moment is truly tragic.

Root Cause Analysis

A group of blindfolded people in a room are experiencing a variety of problems.  One person complains that it stinks.  Another is getting dripping wet.  Yet another groans that they are being crushed against a wall.  They take off their blindfolds and realize that there is only one problem—that there’s an elephant in the room.

Climate Change

In California we see a fire season that now starts in January and ends in December; record-breaking heat; rolling blackouts; a mass migration of beetles that have decimated forests turning them into a tinderbox; a freak summer electrical storm with 14,000 lightning strikes; and thousands of newly-displaced citizens.  Further out we find hurricane-velocity “derecho winds” that decimated Iowa’s corn crop; frequent “blue sky flooding” in low-lying coastal regions; 5 tropical storms hurling towards the East Coast at the same time; and, the earliest ever R-named storm (Rene) during hurricane season. Even further out, we find wide-spread bleaching of coral reefs and a staggering 68%(!) of wildlife species gone extinct since 1970.

Climate change is the elephant in the room.

100 Seconds to Midnight

On January 23, 2020, Doomsday Clock keepers, Science and Security Board Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, moved the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than it has ever been, releasing this statement:

Humanity continues to face two simultaneous existential dangers—nuclear war and climate change—that are compounded by a threat multiplier, cyber-enabled information warfare, that undercuts society’s ability to respond.

Race Against the Clock

In a conversation with a conservative friend, I questioned him on global warming and climate change.  After we worked through various layers of his belief system, he finally admitted that even if climate change were real, he would not trust the government to respond. This friend does not live in California, has not experienced what we here in the Bay Area are experiencing, and has not yet felt any adverse effects of global warming.  Curiously, this same friend is fine with a government response when our nation is posed with a national security threat, a threat that he feels but understands he is unable to address individually.  His ability to have faith in the government to address national security threats on his behalf gives me hope that he will come around to a governmental response once global warming threatens him and his family directly.

The question is not IF we will all feel the threats posed by global warming but WHEN we will feel them. Once we feel that threat, we will demand a response from our government, local, state, or national. When enough of us feel that threat, it will serve as a tipping point; the point at which we demand concerted action and a proportional response.

Meanwhile, global warming proceeds unabated with its own set of cascading tipping points:  methane releases from thawing tundra, dramatically reduced reflection of solar heat in the polar regions, and Manhattan-sized ancient ice sheaving off of Greenland and Antarctica.    Will humanity reach our tipping point to action before global warming’s cascade of tipping points puts our ability to respond effectively out of reach?

How do we want this movie to end?  How will we respond? Like with the planet Melancholia, global warming’s path is predicted by science.  While the global warming movie will play out over the course of the next few decades, centuries and millennia, the movie has already started, and we humans are the screenwriters with about 10 years left to finish the script.  When blue skies return will we ignore our responsibility and forget what happened, or will we take action to ward off future catastrophes?

How will your part of the script read?

Introduction to the Enneagram

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The team effectiveness concepts that I share in Teamwork 9.0 are based on a system called the Enneagram.  In this video, I share an overview of the nine Enneagram dynamics and give you a peak under the hood of the underlying mechanisms that drive motivations and behaviors of the nine Enneagram types. Understanding your own Enneagram type is the first step for leaders to better access all Enneagram types depending on circumstances. Which Enneagram types resonate with you?

 

How to Hire the Right Person

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In this video segment, I share how you can use the Enneagram to find the “Superhighway” that enables team members to excel in their role.   Grateful to Mari-Lyn Harris and Heart@Work (www.heartatworkonline.org) for the opportunity to share topics in my book Teamwork 9.0–Successful Workgroup Problem Solving Using the Enneagram on Mari-Lyn’s Impactful Legacy Podcast.

You can watch the entire interview here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsNRJlLETdw

 

Video Transcript

[Mari-Lyn Harris] I wonder if people would start to hire based  on their number. We’re looking for a person for this role in the company, gee we need a number 2 or we need a number 8.

[Matt Schlegel] You know, so when I was–this was a long time ago–when I first started studying this as a manager, and I read this book called “First, break all the rules,” a very popular management book,  and I’m like, “oh, this makes sense.” The rule essentially says that you find the right person for the role–that you don’t assume that anybody can be anything. A lot of us are told if you try hard enough, you can do anything you want–that you can be anything.  And this book essentially says no, that’s the rule you’ve got to break–that there really are people who are designed for to excel at certain things. And they call it in the book having a “superhighway” or a “bumpy country lane.” You’ll still get there, but it will just take you a lot longer. If you’re on a superhighway, you’ll get there very fast. So I read this book and I was like, “this is great.” This was before I knew about the Enneagram. What it didn’t answer, though, was how do I figure out who has that superhighway that will get you there the fastest,. And, once I understood the Enneagram that’s when I understood that it is a framework for understanding everybody’s superhighway, the thing that they are going to excel at. And that way, if you understand that, then you can put them in that role, they will do well, they will be happy, and you’ll just have a good fit.

[Mari-Lyn Harris]  For me I got to say, “oh I can start.” I’m very new at it of course but sometimes I can recognize their behavior and attune it to the Enneagram and what the number right be and now I have a book and I look at it and that’s how you can respond to that person and that’s why I’m becoming more and more of a big fan of it just because I can see how it improves the workplace communications, your relationships, whether you’re at work or you’re at home

[Matt Schlegel] Yes, absolutely. You illustrate a really good point is that certain types are drawn to certain roles.  You know, so Type 2s love to help people so they’re drawn to roles where they can continuously help people and so you’ll find them in service roles, nurses, teachers, things like that but even in organizations taking operational and service roles within the company because they are supporting and helping people all the time that’s what they love to do  and that’s what they feel comfortable with and they tend to migrate to those roles.  And that’s the other fascinating thing is that you’re seeing how certain types really can essentially thrive and allow themselves to contribute all of their natural gifts to the team when they’re put in the right role.

I am 2% Neanderthal

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The 23 and Me result that surprised me the most was my ancestry from 40,000 years ago. Testing positive for 281 Neanderthal variants out of 1,436, I am more Neanderthal than 56% of 23 and Me customers. What I learned next shattered everything I thought I knew about my ancient ancestor.

You Neanderthal

When I was kid growing up, calling someone a Neanderthal was not intended as flattery.  My belief about Neanderthals was that they were, well, stupid.  Clearly, Neanderthals did not survive because Homo sapiens outsmarted them, right?  Every school kid knew that, so it must be right—Right!?!

Not So Fast

It turns out that our schoolyard common sense may not have been correct.  Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind—A Hopeful History provides an alternate model.  Looking at the fossil record, Neanderthals had relatively bigger brains than Homo sapiens.  It’s likely that they were smarter than us.  They were also bigger than us.  So, if they were smarter and bigger, why isn’t the world populated with Neanderthals rather than Homo sapiens?

Lone Wolf

Bregman draws the analogy between wolves and domesticated dogs.  In general wolves are bigger and smarter than dogs, but there are many more dogs than wolves.  Why?  Because dogs are fun, kind and delightful, and we want them around.  Bregman makes the argument that Homo sapiens were the cuddly puppies of the hominid world, and Neanderthals probably liked having us around. They may have protected us.  And, according to my 23 and Me results they mated with us.  But that alone wouldn’t explain why there are so many of us and none of them.

Network Effect

Although Homo sapiens may not have been as smart as Neanderthals, Bregman asserts that we possess a capability that the Neanderthals did not—the ability to share information and learn from one another.  While those smart Neanderthal individuals were trying to figure out things for themselves, Homo sapiens were happy to let one person figure it out and learn from them how to do it.  They would pass that information along to others in a veritable verbal network.  Social media has turbocharged our ability to share our thoughts.  Now, a single individual has the capability to share with millions (perhaps billions) of others. This trait that distinguished Homo sapiens from Neanderthals is as prevalent and important today as it was 40,000 years ago.

Gullible Puppies

While we Homo sapiens may be highly capable of accessing information from one another, we aren’t always good at discerning the information’s truth.  Our critical thinking skills may be compromised for the sake of us all going along to get along. Apparently, lacking the ability to consistently discern truth did not impede Homo sapiens ability to procreate and populate.  The Neanderthals may simply have been overwhelmed by their kind and talkative hominid pets.  Homo sapiens succeeded Neanderthals and spread themselves and their information – both truths and untruths – to every corner of the planet.

Not Invented Here

Once the wheel was invented, humans shared that information widely—no need to reinvent it, right? And yet we so often do just that.  Sometimes that tendency leads us to discovery and innovation. Sometimes it prevents us from accessing pre-existing solutions that would easily solve our problems. I must admit, I do love puzzling things out.  Sometimes I would rather figure something out for myself rather than research and learn from someone else.  When I feel that way, maybe it’s one of those 281 Neanderthal variants guiding me.  On the other hand, it has become exceedingly easy to access information online.  My phone is rarely out of reach and a quick search often leads me to an answer. Whether that answer is correct or not… Well, that’s a different story.  I wonder what my intelligent Neanderthal ancestors would think about my “smart” phone habits.

How do you balance your time between researching existing knowledge and attempting to invent on your own?  How do you determine the truthfulness of information you access, especially information that appears to be “common sense”?  What have been your epiphanies, the ones that have led you to change your perception of the world?

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