Practices for thriving in the new era of work
The Thrive framework comprises eight key practices for you to integrate into your organizational culture and private life.
By mastering these eight Thrive practices, you will be equipped to design and facilitate better conversations, collaborate effectively, and manage yourself and others resourcefully in your personal and professional life.
These practices draw from various domains such as Generative and Regenerative Leadership, Living-Systems theory, Social Neuroscience, Dialogic Practice, Ontological Coaching, Critical Thinking, and Emotional Intelligence.
#1 Lead generatively from wherever you are.
There is generative and regenerative potential and opportunity in any situation and Generative leadership is something anyone, no matter where they are, can do.
In developing this practice you’ll learn how to make the most out of any situation, and how to take action to help realise those greater opportunities. You’ll learn why and how to develop and communicate a clear meaningful purpose, ‘affectively’ involve stakeholders, declare explicit intentions, and focus on specific desired results.
#2 Nurture your social field.
With a healthy social field almost anything is possible. Without one, nothing is possible. A robust collaborative environment that feels safe, social, and connected allows you to access all the resources and processes needed to attend to a situation successfully.
In this practice you will learn why actively monitoring the ‘tone’ of your social field and nurturing your relationships is vital.
In developing this practice you will learn about human centered system thinking, social safety and human needs. You’ll learn how to proactively attend to social threats and opportunities, and how to build, maintain and restore virtuous partnerships.
#3 Manage your way-of-being.
Managing your way-of-being enables you to be your most resourceful self in any situation.
In this practice you will learn how your inner way of being, your neurophysiology, thinking, and feeling affects your outward behaviour and communication, relationships and results. You’ll learn to be mindful of how you and others are thinking, feeling, and orienting yourselves towards situations, each other, and yourselves. And you’ll learn how to manage and reorganise your body and orientation in order to be most open to potential and opportunity.
#4 Voice authentically, cleanly, and clearly.
In this practice you’ll understand why communicating through the four channels of Plain Talk is effective and efficient. And you’ll understand how making projections creates confusion and defensiveness. You’ll learn how to communicate authentically and collaborate powerfully by taking responsibility for cleanly and clearly communicating your data, your thinking and language, your feelings and emotions, and your wants and needs.
#5 Communicate Dialogically.
Dialogue is the art of thinking together and while it is just one mode of conversation, the mindful use of its principles, practices and skills are critical for good communication.
In this practice you’ll understand that in any situation people have predispositions for how they like to control their environment and what aspects of a situation they are most drawn to take care of. You’ll also understand that through the use of Dialogic practices, you can manage the underlying structures that shape collaborative sense-making and aligned action and avoid common conversational traps and actively create safe and healthy environments for collaboration.
You’ll learn to balance the four conversational actions with the Dialogic practices and how to voice authentically, listen participatively, suspend judgment and challenge respectfully, to communicate with clarity, care, coherence, and commitment.
#6 Manage cognitive agility and collaborative, critical thinking.
To better comprehend, learn, and make sound decisions and choices, it’s important to slow down, cultivate a fair-minded approach, and pay attention to the bigger picture as well as the pertinent details of a situation.
In this practice you’ll understand how people draw conclusions and take action based on their perceptions, assertions, assessments, assumptions, and inferences. You’ll also learn how to foster cognitive agility and collaborative, critical thinking by inquiring from various perspectives with curiosity and tentatively offering your thinking with well-grounded advocacy.
#7 Manage emotional agility and intelligence.
By managing emotional agility and intelligence, you nurture a social environment for yourself and others that feels natural, safe, social, and connected.
In this practice you’ll understand that rather than resorting to unproductive and damaging interpersonal games and drama, you can use your emotional intelligence to manage stress and difficult emotions and negotiate your needs in healthy ways.
To this end you’ll learn how to be mindful of your feelings, emotions, and moods, and how to take resourceful action to negotiating your needs in a timely manner. You’ll also learn how to support others in doing the same.
#8 Manage reliable delivery, rapid learning, and change.
To ensure reliable delivery, rapid learning, and change, it’s crucial for you to follow the full promise cycle and adopt a positive and proactive approach to breakdowns.
In this practice you’ll understand what you need to take care of to ensure that you collaboratively contract with care and commitment, to improve the likelihood that work is completed on time and to the correct standard. You’ll also understand why it is that in the event of breakdowns, taking radical responsibility and embracing collective accountability is critical.
And you’ll learn how to safely and productively reflect on the quality of your contracting and commitments, your choices, and their consequences and impact. And how doing this collaboratively supports the necessary adaptive behavioral and technical changes necessary to learn your way rapidly into the future.