Yoga and the Art of Post-Modern Management

Deliberate Practice or Natural Talent?

I’m pretty good at yoga. I’m not an expert, as there is always more to learn, and it is a lifelong undertaking to learn. I have seen some positive results with my practice of yoga, though these were not always the results I had expected. I’ve been doing yoga for years, sometimes I go do other things for a while, then come back to yoga and discover new ways of doing things, as well as be reminded of things I already knew but forgot how to do properly. I also find myself pushed to try things I would not have thought I could do before, by applying things learned before in new ways and being willing to challenge myself. Yoga, in the Western styles, can be moulded to suit the practitioner, who in turn evolves and grows in their practice, never perfecting, but always improving in their yoga practice.

Now, read the above paragraph again, substituting the word management for the word yoga. Perhaps not the most perfect metaphor, but it’s worth exploring.

The practice of yoga has evolved from its beginnings as a spiritual practice thousands of years ago into countless styles now practiced in the West, some of which are well known and relatively traditional, while others are arguably antithetical to the very nature of the ancient practice of yoga. Some styles everyone has heard of, such as Hatha, Kundalini, Vinyasa, Ashtanga (i.e. Power Yoga), Iyengar, Bikram (this one is also known as Hot Yoga). Others are a bit more obscure or niche forms, such as Forrest Yoga, Laughter Yoga and even Christian Yoga (for those concerned about the potential spiritual consequences of a predominantly Hindu-derived practice). USA Yoga and the Yoga Federation in America are trying to have competitive yoga added as an Olympic sport (btw, I’m an American, so this is in no way a slur against my countrymen, just a curious observation of how things wander to new places and evolve in sometimes surprising ways). Most of these Western yoga styles have training and certification requirements to teach it, though obviously not to actually practice it. A lot of this is simply packaging something to make it a “product” or a “brand” so it can be sold rather than creating anything new, sort of like the difference between two brands of canned tomatoes (sun-dried or Italian-style?).

The practice of management has evolved similarly, beginning as a way to improve production and evolving into a myriad of styles and schools to address specific needs of specific businesses. What we have ended up with are competing schools of thought on the “best way” to do things, training in certain ways to do things, specialised certifications and CPD units, and inevitably, job descriptions with lots of acronyms required that have no real bearing on how good someone might be at managing a project (or a team). How much of this recent evolution has to do with actually managing projects and businesses better and how much has to do with the people who sell management and leadership training needing to have a “product”, I will leave to others’ more cynical minds.

?The yoga asana (or pose) Adho Mukha Svanasana, aka Downward Facing Dog, is common to almost all styles of yoga, and in my experience the most difficult for beginners to get right. In fact, walk into most yoga studios and you’ll see half the class doing it wrong. I practiced yoga for years, and I didn’t really get this one until I was really struggling with the pose one day, shoulders burning and hands aching, and my instructor came over, placed her hand on my low back and said quietly, “Relax into it.” The flash of realisation was immediate.

What I was doing at first was the same thing people who are new to management try to do, overcontrol, micromanage and force things to look how they are supposed to look. As soon as I realised this and relaxed into the pose, the form followed easily and my mind was able to move to the higher purpose of the practice. As a bonus, my shoulders stopped hurting.

This happens with every management “system” as well. For example, a Project Manager is chosen because they have the required acronyms on their CV rather than because they know the client, understand the project, can track a budget and, most importantly, can lead people. The project team is selected according to a “form” of organisation, rather than the organisation adjusting to suit the makeup of the team you have. Every system seems to have boxes to check and processes to follow (with handy swim-lane flow charts, colour-coded of course), but the processes, once set down in a training manual, become written in stone, because someone somewhere said “they work”. The process overtakes the purpose and instead of struggling to accomplish the purpose of the project, you are struggling to conform to a system. Whether it actually works or not for your project, for your client, for your budget and your team, is really at best a guess. What happens more often than not is that the management system equivalent of Hot Yoga (selected by a Type A executive, or worse, a Wall Street analyst) is imposed, burns out your team and your project fails.

I should say at this point that I am a pragmatist. If something old-fashioned works, then I’m all for it, but if it doesn’t, I’m not going to keep doing it just to check the box. I hate the idea of prescribing that a project must be run in a certain way with certain pieces of paper produced at the requisite time and resulting in precisely predicted and achieved financial and tangible results. I think this is at best unrealistic, and at worst the quickest way to ensure that we are all ultimately replaced by a robot.

Humans are by their very nature adaptive individuals, and this is why we are still here and dinosaurs are not. It is also why we keep developing new forms of old practices, yoga and management included, to adapt to our environment, which is constantly changing. My management philosophy takes this one step further, shedding the labels (and the acronyms) and making it more organic and flexible, but still within the basic rules that govern business – give the customer what they need and make money. My focus is always on outcomes and on people, because without both, you cannot sustainably run a business. My intent is to explore management and leadership practices that work, and for the ones that don’t, to figure out how, why and in what circumstances they might work, both for myself to grow into a better professional and to share and learn from others who are learning just as I am.

And also to make sure I’m not replaced by a robot.