Leading Service Organization Innovations Begin with Attunement
Developing A Mindful Presence
By Dr. Janice Ryan
Leading service organization innovations are a bottom-up process because the first changes must occur within the project leader.
By “minding the gap” between organization leadership stories and the daily lives of observed staff members, the project leader develops a mindful presence of understanding called attunement. Innovations require such a deep form of change that only a project leader who takes time to understand an organization’s living system pace, will be able to tip the scales toward an opportunity for all needed system processes to change.
Leading service organization innovations are a bottom-up process
Attunement means that a project leader begins by observing, listening, and noticing contradictions or paradox. Sometimes there are contradictions between people’s words and their actions. Other times there are contradictions between what people say and what we have learned they really feel. Paradox is easiest to sense in fragmented systems that naturally create tensions between department leaders who have opposing and tension-producing perceptions of who is actually in control.
The Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant
Tension-producing perceptions are always fear-based and a project leader must learn how to overcome them ourselves and empathize when we see them in others. Just like the parable of the blind men describing an elephant by feeling it, divergent points of view of department leaders working in a fragmented system can teach us a lot. Over time, a project leader develops an internal compass that clarifies the deeper meaning of surprising silences during one-to-one coaching sessions or repeated messages voiced during team conversations. Sometimes the deep feeling of attunement even comes from what is NOT said, rather than what IS said during a meeting.
All habit change is a bottom-up process
For all of us, time management improves as emotions become more self-regulated and our habit reactions more accurate and reflective. Occupational therapists like me have been helping people improve their time management skills since the profession began. Our founder Eleanor Clarke Slagle used meaningful habit development in her treatment approach with World War I veterans and wrote about it in the 1920s. She called her mental health approach habit training and the consciousness state we need for habit change a habit reaction.
My current work as a sensory program designer is just a new application of what occupational therapists have always done. In 21st Century terminology, new habit training unfolds through a process called complex adaptive system self-organization. Complex adaptive system self-organization is emergent change that starts in the smallest part of a system and then spreads. It is the process model that 21st Century scientists use for explaining bottom-up natural system change.
Trauma-Informed Therapy is a bottom-up process
Complex trauma-responsive processes are now known to help individuals process previous traumatic experiences, rebuild or expand their sense of self, and develop greater stress resilience or sense of safety in increasingly challenging environments. Milder forms of stress-based environmental adaptations including compassion fatigue and workplace burnout, are commonly treated using complex trauma-responsive processes. Occupational therapists consider time management an important aspect of engagement with environment such as in the context of education, work, play, rest, health maintenance, and social participation. Time management responds well to interventions using complex trauma-responsive processes.
Mental health OT in the 21st Century is trauma-informed.
Sensory integration is a bottom-up process
Occupational therapists are now applying this understanding to treat a wide variety of populations including the one I see in my private practice. My practice is in a large non-profit organization serving individuals with sensory processing disorders and intellectual or developmental delays. There I create therapeutic ecosystems that support better habit training, learning, and knowledge integration by positively shifting emotional self-regulation. The first two methods I developed intentionally, and the third was developed out of a surprising necessity.
Outpatient multisensory environments help de-escalation from anxious moments.
First, I created a small de-escalation room for adults served in the outpatient mental health department with moderately low emotional self-regulation. Now, I use this environment to promote habit-change in the form of higher level social skills and more complex activity engagements. In this context, individual habit changes and improved group interrelationships often lead to my clients feeling more empowered.
A therapeutic multisensory environment can relax or engage attention.
Second, I created a large multisensory environment for individuals with extremely low emotional self-regulation. Currently, I use this environment to create habit-change in the form of tolerance for dealing with routine sensory and social environments that are often experienced as overwhelming. In this context, individual habit changes and improved tolerance can provide benefits to clients and students. These are the benefits of increased agency and a faster positive response to peaceful environments.
The surprising necessity for accomplishing this 3-year program design and development project had to do with the time management of organization staff members. We realized that I had also applied the principles required to overcome complex trauma-responsive processes for work habit change in the form of staff member talent development. Organization staff members essential to our program design and development project were given new opportunities to follow their passions and apply their dormant creativity. Improved time management was a byproduct of our focus on their talent development rather than us focusing on them “just getting their jobs done” (Read more about it on my blog).
Leading service organization: innovations happen at their pace rather than ours
Since complex trauma-responsive processes are a sensory and social phenomenon associated with stress, we tend to only notice them when they are outside of a range that we consider “normal”. This is one important reason that service organization innovations happen at the organization’s pace rather than ours. Our sensory program project showed that more benefits can be derived from understanding how to recognize and overcome stress reactions in all of us. This led to us applying the principles of complex trauma-responsive processes on all three scales of an organization that serves individuals with sensory processing disorders and intellectual or developmental delays.
Talent development: organization-wide benefits
We used therapeutic environments to promote motivated and meaningful engagement in the individuals we serve who have moderate and extremely low emotional self-regulation. This happened because I knew as an occupational therapist of almost 40 years that sensory integration happens at our client’s or student’s pace rather than ours. To our surprise, we also discovered organization-wide benefits of applying the principles of complex trauma-responsive processes to promote talent development in staff members. This was how our 3-year program design and development project prepared us for tapping into each willing staff member’s “sometimes dormant” talents and creativity for boosting their time management skills and increasing motivation.
Just-right emotional self-regulation increases motivation and is a boost for time management of individual and group projects.
Better time management is one aspect of positive habit change that occurs as a bottom-up process. We can all benefit from developing better time management and this happens for an occupational therapist during treatment when we promote change by using the self-motivating effects of meaningful engagement in environment. Better time management also happens for a program designer-developer when we use the mindful presence of understanding called attunement.
Want to learn more about how we accomplish our deep system process changes? Let’s stay connected.
Dr. Janice Ryan is a Doctor of Occupational Therapy and the owner of a sensory-based program design company that develops innovative service solutions for dually diagnosed persons with intellectual disabilities and mental illness.
Janice lives and works in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States.