The CEO Who Felt HEAVY!!
By Stanley Fong
A client of mine serves the community space. I meet the CEO once every month, and being the organised person that he is, he always prepares for our session by writing on his whiteboard an agenda of the 3-5 items he wants to discuss.
One day, I arrived at his office and noticed a list of 10 items written on the white board along with the word “HEAVY!!” spelt out in large font. Suspecting that “heavy” might have to do with having all those things occupying his mind, I figured we should not go through them one by one (nor did we have the time to do so).
Instead, I invited him to explore broader patterns around those items.
First, I asked him to identify and group those items that may be more related. This draws from the HSD tools of Same and Different. When the world feels messy or overwhelming, and we are stuck, this simple tool helps us to notice basic patterns and begin to make some sense of things.
The CEO grouped the 10 items into 4 buckets. Even though we have not talked about any of the items, he was already starting to see some patterns between what HSD calls the Parts, the Whole, and the Greater Whole.
Next, I drew a Landscape Diagram on the whiteboard. The CEO is familiar with this tool, which HSD practitioners use to identify which of three zones people are operating in: Stable, Emergent or Unstable. I invited the CEO to position those buckets of items within the diagram. As he did so, it became clearer to him that the different work straddled rather different zones, and required different stances and approaches.
It seemed to bring some revelation to the CEO. He let out a loud sigh and said, “This is why things have felt so heavy recently…” He paused for a moment and continued, “But now that we can sort things and visualise them, it doesn’t feel so overwhelming now.” I was glad to hear that.
As an OD practitioner, I want to help the CEO, and other leaders like him, to find their footing in the complex environments they are in. I want to help them to make sense of things, so they can lead their organisations to take wise actions amid the uncertainty.
As an OD practitioner, I often find myself in unfamiliar and uncertain situations. Even with a regular client, sometimes their context can shift so much that it feels like we are living in a new world. I used to get quite unsettled by this uncertainty. But HSD practice has helped me find my footing - whether it is the mindset and stance towards complexity, or a curiosity for the messiness of human systems, or the HSD tools I can use in many ways. In fact, some HSD tools are so simple that I don’t even have to explicitly teach my clients or tell them that I’m using them. It helps me to feel calm even as the world swirls around me.
Stanley Fong is an OD practitioner working and living in Singapore. He supports leaders and organisations in the public and nonprofit sectors to create thriving human systems. He has been practising HSD since 2018.