»As fluent as the director is today, it is always a burden to me when I have to clear this table. I only piled up the things on the table that were absolutely necessary for the daily work… well, there may be many of them, but when I need almost everything. And with a system like mine, I always know where things are. I really do not understand why it weighs. But with her, the table is so clean that nothing works. He does not even understand what creative order means.«
This is what one of the project managers of a marketing agency told me yesterday. We met again today for an interview, but we left the office building to make the conversation more relaxed.
He said I hope I do not blame the director for speaking out against her. Without hesitation, I assured him that he could trust me completely. As we were drinking coffee outside by the stream, he said that he appreciated the freshness of the water, especially as the stream flows just fast enough to create a relaxed and refreshing atmosphere. Not far away we heard the voice of children, he turned around and said he had two such decomposers at home.
I asked him how they were getting along, he said he was great now and recently there was another disaster and he hoped it would be like that. I asked him what he thought! He said that they had filled the room so much that you get the feeling a bomb had exploded, I do not even know how they found anything. They even said they had a system so they always knew where things were. I really do not understand where they inherited it from. The last time my wife and I cleaned them and they went completely crazy, they accused us of getting two unjustified lessons because of us, because they did not have all the things to go to school, the teachers sent them home. But they did not have all the things because they could not find them at home. They attacked us because we ruined their lives, because we did not understand them, because we allowed them to organize themselves. I really do not know who they have all this for, because my wife and I have tidy cupboards, we really have order in the house.
I looked him straight in the eye and asked him if her room perhaps reminded him of his desk. No, he answered quickly and then held his breath. Yes, but maybe he really did! However, they have never been to my office to learn how to do the same thing (expert explanation of how causes and examples are passed on from parents to children).
After we had worked through all these handovers of causes, he finally added Only yesterday the boys came to our terrace where we had coffee and thanked them for cleaning up their room. We were very surprised because a few days ago we thought they would throw us out of the house. Now a complete turnaround. Why did we ask for thanks? They said that they find things much faster now. Above all, we noticed that they have become much calmer and more creative; creative in a positive sense, as even the teacher praised them, something that has never happened before.
Before he continued, I told him for comparison how the basic memory works in the computers we use every day. The computer memory is like a big room into which we put a lot of things every day, actually something new every day, and we go into that room every day to look for the same things. So every day we need more and more time to find them.
Because we are moving, we are storing… in short, we are always looking for a growing pile of things. … That is why our computers work slower and slower because there are more and more things in them and instructions for using computers, they say we need to run an application that cleans this room at
least once a week. And so the computer runs faster again.
He looked at me, but you tell me to clear the desk. But you do not understand, I find it quicker to master this system.
I asked him how long he’s had all this stuff on his desk,
he said he’s had it since his time at the company,
and how long have you had,
five years.
I looked at him a bit surprised and asked him if the five year old documents were not already out of date.
Some maybe, but in our company the projects are connected and it’s good to have them at hand.
And then our conversation stopped.
I asked him if he could look through the contents of the documents on his desk together.
He replied cheerfully, he can do that now.
And we really drank our coffee to the end and recovered in his office again. After we had spent three hours looking through the documents, we created three stacks of documents. The first was for transcription, the second he folded according to archives and folders, and the third he folded according to priorities and wrote down on them the dates when they had to be completed and found
out that in 14 days they would no longer be on his desk. The clock just struck 3.30 pm and I invited him for another coffee. We sat by the creek again and then he said.
I used to refresh myself here, now I feel calm and serene. What have you done to me?
Just like you did with your sons! I was cleaning up!
Remember when I told you how the computer memory works? And if you want it to run smoothly, you have to clean it up every week. If we had not cleaned it up in five years, it would have been very slow. Just as your condition was on your desk, so was your subconscious. Your subconscious mind works in the same way as the computer memory. You also have to clean it, and when you have cleaned the
brain, you have just cleaned it. It is finally no longer necessary to remember under which pile exactly this information is hidden. Now you have created space in your head as well. You no longer feel any stress in your head, suddenly your head is breathing. So you feel calm and lighter.
That is when he understood what we had achieved by cleaning up.
How can you achieve that such lightness and calmness is preserved forever; and that you do not forget by chance and a pile of things on the table does not pile up again.
The answer to this question could be found in nature. If we only look at the stream in front of us, we see how clear it is and how fresh it is. And if we look at this pond, which looks more like a puddle at the end of the park, we have already noticed that there is no longer a pleasant guide to clarity, and we cannot even talk. If we want to be bright, we have to create so that things always stay in flow. There should be no traffic jams anywhere if puddles are not starting to form.
And all it takes is to start implementing the projects that you get on your desk, even within the agreed deadlines.
You are right about that, but not everything here depends on me. Even an employee in the next office has to do his own thing. That is exactly why I had so many projects on my desk, because I found it myself before he told me.
As I saw where his colleague was sitting, I told him, but it would not be better if they had an open door or maybe even a shared office.
Anything would be possible, but because of the infrastructure we simply cannot do it.
I talked to the director in the morning and in the afternoon the masters removed all barriers so that they got a big, spacious office. And even the conversation between them went smoothly. When the three of us sat together for coffee at the end of the work day, we realized that first a “puddle of communication” formed between them because the room was not working, then a “puddle” started to
form on their desks because they needed too much data for a certain use, and finally a “puddle” formed in their minds because they had to think about the same things.
When they looked at the whole company, they realized that they only had one big puddle. They were just shaking, so where is the solution? I told them they had it in front of them, it’s a stream. The work process must be streamlined so that every business transaction and every person is clear.
There are too many information jams in the work process, leading to information “puddles”. Therefore, it is necessary to check the whole company.
Of course, in the next question, the question was
but how does this ensure that the flow in the company never stops?
This is primarily about the individual, namely congestion first starts in our heads, not at desks, offices, but in us. So we have to get ourselves “running” first. We need to start living holistically and dynamically. Namely, we humans naturally prefer to be warm rather than cold. And if we measure the temperature in a stream or young, we see that the puddles are much warmer. That’s how people prefer to hang out in puddles. Here, however, we forget that over time, puddles get an unpleasant odor, which of course we do not notice. Until others start avoiding us. Therefore, we must not stop in any area in life, but we must live dynamically, so that where we are in the stream, we must swim all the time so that we are not cold and the current does not carry us the way he wants us to. And such is our life, it can be like a puddle or like a stream.
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The conversation was quite pleasant and so we sailed into philosophical waters. We began to notice many similarities between nature and real life.
Puddles in nature are caused by stagnation and then various animals begin to give birth in it… it is most uncomfortable to look at frogs. And so even in the company, unpleasant things begin to be born in the “communication puddles”. Unpleasant thoughts begin to be born in the “mental puddles”, if we do not have all the information, we start wondering what is happening, probably someone hates us, wants to get rid of us, something is pushing us…. just because we don’t have all the information. And if we think to the extreme, we suddenly find that puddles can become dangerous, just like swamps (a few more examples of animals).
We have also seen that “communication puddles” in a company cause duplication of work, not an even distribution of responsibilities…
After four hours of philosophizing, we also said to ourselves that we need to slowly move from words to deeds. After all, in today’s society there is too much talk and too little to do. And this is one of the main causes of the formation of “puddles”. This is beautifully described in the Italian proverb »que tú,
mi amor y la belleza con la que«; “Between saying and doing is Ocean in between.”
In the morning, when we arrived at the office, we set ourselves the task that there would be no more puddles in this company, and so we began to introduce a dynamic model of communication in the company, the basis of which is “Stream Stream”.
Dynamic Leadership model
The purpose of the book is to present a dynamic leadership model, which in more than a hundred cases has proven to be a great way to get out of business and personal crisis and how to overcome difficulties without even going into crisis.