Towards Thriving: the ?P-framework

[Discovery with and edited by: Helena ?nneby ]

What does love and fear have to do with control and flow? What if what we need access to in navigating the complex, bordering chaotic world we live in would be greatly aided by being able to access a state defined by flow and love? The ?P-framework is a 2x2 that proposes that it’s useful to consider the polar states of fear and love on one end and and between flow and control on the other. This simple image gives insight into, potentially, important activities and movements that would ultimately lead towards thriving. We believe the framework is relevant for individuals, teams and organizations as a prism through which we can investigate and explore our current situation and potentially reorient ourselves towards.?

Sometimes serendipity allows you to discover things that are great. Sometimes play allows you to do the same thing. Especially when you get to play with people that you have cultivated trust with for some period of time. The ?P framework (pronounced [UP]) that we’re presenting here is one of those things that evolved from ideas being shared back and forth without fear or a need for control but rather a lot of natural flow and love. As we’ve kept playing with it after the initial discovery there seems to have some interesting implications. This article will spell some of the initial findings out.

THE FEAR - LOVE AXIS

Love is one of those things that have been making its way into business. There is heartcentred leadership, leading from love and love as a driver in caring, regenerative organizations. Love would be described by neuroscientists as an expansive emotion with lots of signal substances like oxytocin, endorphins and other elevating expanding chemicals available to you. When we are in a loving state we are safe and relaxed. Our potential is increased and when we feel loved and safe, failure is less of a threat to us. We move through failure with more ease and ability for learning as we don’t feel like it’s a threat to our identity or self-worth. There’s a lot less ego and a lot more heart involved. Data from the HeartMath Institute shows that the energy and operation of the heart informs the brain and has an electrical field that’s about 60 times greater than the electrical activity generated by the brain.?

Fear on the other hand is a contracting emotion. If you feel into it you can almost sense that closing, the direction towards freezing. It is one of those orienting emotions that has served us well. Fear is sometimes felt as a slow creeping, paralyzing motion and sometimes, in situations of great stress it can activate your flight-fight-fawn response. It’s an emotion that many are pointing to as a dominating emotion in our society today with lots of devastating outcomes as a result. For instance some are talking of social media given the ad driven business model as initiating “a race to the bottom of the brain stem” (e.g. Your Undivided Attention Podcast) in other words content that generates fear and outrage is much more sticky and viral than positive content - hence the algorithms will prioritize it. Fear is an emotion that takes up so much energy, from an evolutionary perspective that is reasonable. It is an elevated state of attention that is designed to keep us safe.? In our current world however with the amount of stimuli, interconnectedness and sensory (over)load, most fear is unwarranted.

The move from fear towards love. From closed towards open. From frozen towards curious and exploring is a key in the world we live in today. The BANI world. The Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear and Incomprehensible world. In this world we can no longer afford to stay with old strategies, we need to be in a process of discovery to sense our way forward. As Dave Snowden recommends in the Cynefin framework - in a complex reality processes of planning and forecasting break down. What we did last year is no longer a good predictor of what next year will look like and hence we need to access our curiosity and engage in testing. Statements such as “I love my work” or “I could do this until I die and not get tired of it” are important indicators that we are in a generative environment. Because it’s likely that whatever ‘work’ and ‘it’ is, it’s likely that the main reward we are going to get is engaging with the process. If we do that long enough, success might be an outcome but to engage in activities to maximize financial return also is increasingly difficult without burning out. Playing with a metaphor that is commonly used: We are not five minutes before 12. Rather it’s time for us to realize that we’ve had the lunch, it was way more expensive than what we had in our wallet and our sms-loan didn’t come through. It seems now is the time to roll up your sleeves and work off your debt in whatever way you can. If we can love that situation, stay with the lingering enjoyment of the exquisite meal that civilisation has offered us, the sheer luck that we made it into this particular restaurant, at this particular time then reminiscing with some good friends in the same situation over the dishes, then paying off your debt can perhaps be a loving activity. What we’re saying is that doing dishes can be an experience full of meaning and awe if we can engage in it with care and love. If we can find that relationship to the working, then what becomes possible?

Love is related to meaning. And meaning in itself is related to engagement. Something that our current work life is desperately lacking. A Gallup study showed that 85% of people are dis-engaged at work. The way our western societies are currently organized, much of what we do in the world revolves around work, one could argue that the world we create is actually the world we work in. So if that world happens to be loving, open and meaningful it’s likely that those emotions would propagate into the world beyond just work. Reasonable, right?

THE CONTROL - FLOW AXIS

Control is another one of those words that are positively associated for many but it’s also a word that might be said to have overstayed its due. ‘I’m in control of this’, or ‘don’t worry it’s under control’. In some contexts those are very reassuring statements. Unfortunately very often that is more of an illusion than any actual control. In the BANI world control is an impossible dream state. There is no such thing, except in very limited, well defined situations, if you’re lucky. Control is the management paradigm for the organization seen as a machine. Not in the ecological paradigm of organizations as ecosystems overflowing with complexity. In our current reality those that have a coping strategy that depends on a high amount of control tend to get burned out, lose energy or not succeed.

The other side of the axis, which, according to research, would be a better predictor of high performance, efficiency etc is Flow. Flow, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis definition,is a state where there is a certain level of stretch, outside of the comfort zone but not too far outside. We are fully present and connected with what it is we’re doing. Flow is a state an individual, team or organization can be in. It is contagious in many ways.?

The move away from control towards something that looks like flow is also an opening emotion. It’s an increase in speed of computation and it is when an activity becomes a “being" rather than something we’re merely “doing”. The flow state is a state of becoming part of something bigger, it points towards a wholeness that is not present in a control paradigm. We are not exercising power over but rather we are full of power with. Flow is like dancing, without knowing where we need to be in the next instance we seem to be exactly where we need to be at the opportune time to be able to catch what was ours to move. If you’ve ever been in a flow state I think you know what we’re gesturing towards.?

So those two axis make up the backbone of the 2x2 that we ended up with as a result of our playful dialogue. But there is more. This next section is an attempt to tell stories about the different states one might be in or orient towards in the different quadrants. A person will most likely inhabit different quadrants in different contexts so the practical relevance of trying to put yourself in a particular box overall is probably less helpful. This mapping is rather an invitation to make a specific set of emotions and states come alive to you so that you can start seeing them in your reality and at a later stage also have some regenerative strategies to break certain patterns. This work can be looked at for individuals but also for teams and organizations. So let’s move into the matrix. The descriptions below are archetypes, exaggerated and somewhat 2 dimensional. We’re trying to transmit a feeling of what it is to inhabit the position.?

PARALYSIS: CONTROL AND FEAR

If we are afraid of the context we live in, perhaps because it does not make sense to us anymore and we try to act in the BANI world with a preference for control, or with the coping strategy of control as our default, this will paralyze us. The BANI world tells us that there is no way to go for this type of worldview. All you would want to do (since you are not really understanding anything of what is going on) is to ‘call a friend’, or perhaps an expert. And all the real experts you call say: “What, that’s your question? There is no way to answer that in this incomprehensible, non-linear world we live in. No way you can control outcomes like that anymore.” *Click*. And there you are. Stuck in the tautology. You cannot control anything because you don’t know what to control and when you’re not in control you get really scared. Getting away is not an option because you are afraid of making a move, unless you have control that is. So you’re stuck. Paralysed even. Unless something shifts.

ESCAPE: FLOW AND FEAR

We’ve caught a lucky break. We cannot believe it! Or we are in the current, hoping that no-one will find us out, what has been labeled imposter syndrome. We are doing things, they are working and we are stuck in the doing. We are in a sort of flow but it’s not very joyful. We are ‘doing’ out of fear and it is self-reinforcing. I imagine this quadrant to be what Robert Quinn talks about in his book ‘Deep Change’ as the trap of success when it comes to change. We did something, it made us successful and now we’re trapped. Most of what we did we did out of fear or perhaps it was pleasurable and then the world changed. Our story is that we knew exactly what we were doing, but the actual fact of the matter is that we were just trying to escape. Build a better life, move to a better house, earn more money, buy another car. And we keep trying to escape. In a way it’s this dynamic that is holding the billionaires in Douglas Rushkoffs new book “Survival of the riches” when they ask him “How do I retain the control of my security force after the event?”. Rushkoff is arguing that you make sure to do it right in the first place, if you paid for the guards’ kids birthday party and dental care perhaps they will not kill you when the apocalypse comes. That is not perceived as a solution. These are people that are winning on every definable metric was bent on finding ways to get out of ‘here’ as soon as possible, dominated by fear regardless of how much they have been winning. They just have so much to lose. Instead of becoming part of, helping out, digging in, they are trying to escape. If it’s to a bunker somewhere in New Zeeland or to outer space. As long as it’s away from here. As far as the money they were able earn will take them. Or perhaps even: as long as it’s away from themselves.

PARENTING: CONTROL AND LOVE

In this quadrant there is love. Love is a good start. But there’s also a need to control. In a way it is the picture portrayed in some parenting books. It’s the loving control of your kids. Because you know best. And even if you don’t know best you are in control so they’ll have to surrender to your will. At some point when the discussions get past a certain point, there is a way to make them yield. Not all parents are like this. Others control by limiting options. You cannot choose between all the cereals in the shop, you get to choose between the Rice crispies and the Cornflakes. That’s it. Which one do you want? This is a less confrontational way of controlling but it is nonetheless control. As we are doing it with love there might be somewhat less of a sense of stuckness and as the kid evolves one might fall in with a good (or bad) crowd and eventually parents become obsolete anyway. The challenge in this quadrant is going to be that we care so much. In leadership this dynamic would be a passionate innovator, inlove with his life work, unable to let others contribute on their own accord. She cannot stop herself from micromanaging. Because her way of doing it is better, she knows it. In other words we risk smothering our ‘baby’, we just don’t want to let go so instead we stifle. Love is a central piece around which a lot can revolve, “all we need is love”, you know. And there is a sense that there are skills lacking, worlds being kept too small and potential left on the table when we attempt to control the outcomes. Especially since we are still in our BANI world. If you are going to remain in control you better have a sizable trust fund. Because the thriving kids are all well off and yours are about to be left behind. Since you’re in (perceived) control, what are you going to do about that? It’s not unusual that leaders slip into parenting their employees instead of creating a context for thriving.?

There is also another move in this quadrant. More subtle that relates to our cultural conditioning. It has been referred to as our inability to dissent. I’ve explored it as cultivating an ability to “say no and stay in relation”. It is so hard. Some leaders in innovative, decentralized organizations, working consciously with empowerment have seen this dynamic. People keep deferring to them. They seem to prefer to stay in the paradigm of control rather than take the risk to take initiative and full responsibility. This paradigm can be found in the assumptions of Peter Koenigs and later Tom Nixons work on Source. And seems to have been a familiar dynamic in movements like the extinction rebellion (at least as I hear Daniel Thorson on the Emerge podcast).

THRIVING: FLOW AND LOVE

Here we are. We have arrived. In the quadrant where we truly inhabit the emotion of love, it’s driving us and propelling us forward. Directing our attention and care into the world. We are less biased, less judgemental, less oppositional, more curious and overall quite open. Based on that we can successfully navigate the world. We are not afraid to make our strengths visible nor our shortcomings. We are vulnerable yet confident. Things go our way but it’s also less important for your self-image that they do. There is a high likelihood that you are stretching, just outside of your comfort zone but still not enough of a stretch to make you afraid. You have meaningful relationships and close connections which amplifies the sense of joy, and your working environment is full of people that share this sense of purpose and meaning as you are contributing towards something worthwhile. You are thriving and so are the people around you because it tends to be contagious in the long run. BANI or not does not matter too much to you at the moment, you can look at it clearly but it doesn’t bother you too much. It’s not slowing your flow. You are wayfinding, sensing your way forward into the unknown terrain, enjoying the journey. You have enough because you’ve decided that whatever you have is enough, no matter what. Another way of saying it is that you are living in abundance.

That’s the ?P framework in a nutshell. There will be a part 2 in this exploration describing some of the journeys we can take towards thriving. As individuals and teams. Depending on our starting point. What are the orientations we can set sail for on our adventure towards thriving?

If you found this useful we’d love to continue the discussion. What frameworks, practices, ideas, and stories come alive in you as you read this? Get in touch.