Individuals & Citizens

We hear it over and over again: The world is changing faster than ever… We find ourselves swimming in a soup of too much information even as we seek wisdom. So much so that, it seems it all has become old news, a given and easy to forget. And the human search for ‘understanding’ is perhaps more lively than ever. Understanding oneself in-depth, so as to connect, and to adapt in the moment, to discover meaning. Understanding the world we live in, in order to create solutions to complex problems. Finding other “choice-seekers” to engage in serious play, the kind that has a positive impact beyond ourselves. Planting seeds to achieve our results. Don’t we all hunger and thirst for it?

Well, if you raise your hand with a yes, a couple things are likely to be true: You too seek knowledge and understanding, even perhaps a bit too intensely? You are a member of one or more tribes, perhaps none of which define you and in all of it which you are a node. You see yourself a member of the human species and a denizen of the planet, and your circle of impact is the sliver of the universe around which you find yourself in the moment. You have ideas you want them to become manifest, that would actually make a difference and satisfy you too. You seek new tools to manifest your aims: be it to get ahead, to bring about change, or to make some sense of a world gone wild in complexity!

Social-i, was founded with just such ideas and sentiments in mind. We dwell mainly in three areas:

Social … Intelligence … Networks … Networks, the connections we form out of which the force of the collective becomes manifest. Fueled by the social ties and human understanding that brings us together. Intelligence out of which our understanding about what something is and what to do about it arises. This triadic logic drives everything we do.

Whether it is :

• Big Data analytics & applications
• Change Management studies & interventions 
• Assessment & Mentoring of professions.

As a citizen, this means you will more clearly and cognizantly be able to align your values with the actions that you take. Such that, should you choose to, you can make a difference within your social sphere of influence, with integrity.

As an individual, you can better understand yourself and others, through patterns that are universal to human development and have been vetted for decades. Allowing, what are common ‘human’ foibles, squabbles, or irritations to just fall away. The old dictum remains, ‘people like people like themselves’ and yet nobody is quite like you. Whether it’s someone you work with, live with or otherwise love, we often find ourselves ‘having to get along with’ with people that just seem different than us: What makes them tick? Why did they just say that? Where the hell are they coming from? Come and discover, this new map of world views, a theory, many boldly claim, “explains everything” and suddenly:

• Relationship problems disintegrate as parties understand what drives the other person
• How to communicate with them to address individual and common concerns.
• Teams work more effectively together.
• Couples understand each other’s preference and reignite their spark.

Come join this journey of self-efficacy, self and social discovery, and personal mastery. Be the change you want to see in this world. Join the movement!

Organizations: Leaders & Managers

Leadership Challenges and ‘People Problems’ in Complex Systems

Leaders today must deal with many challenges:

• Uncertainty in the global markets, whether caused by an external shock such as Covid-19 or shrinking resources for the development of new applications.
• The amount of information overflow, and the generally accelerating speed of change both in the marketplace and in their own organisations.
• How their communication is received in terms of:
  • aligning their direct reports to respond to changes in the marketplace as they are happening to create effective collaboration internal to their organisation,
  • how it is received outside as it translates into social impact, 
  • or understood by their broader associates in a way that translates into bottom line performance.

Ultimately, everything a leader does is ‘translated’ into organisational behavior by the actions of who they delage to. This brings out attention into the human element in organisations and firms. When Your Organization Is Afflicted by Costly “People Problems,” what we most commonly observe are:

• Customer complaints that keep increasing.
• Valuable employees that are disengaged and distrustful of higher leadership and team members
• Declining employee retention and frequent turnover and associated costs
• Conflicts, both within teams, and across the organisation, with associated “defensive behaviors” with no clear way of handling them
• Sunk costs in training and consulting that don’t deliver wanted outcomes
• Incentives that fail to mobilize the required players
• Misalignment within the organization and leaders that despite doing their best, remain unable to move their direct reports to desired actions consistently
• Highly invested change, transformation and strategic initiatives that fail to deliver

Change Management:

A remarkable 70% of change initiatives fail to provide anywhere near the outcomes anticipated. It would appear that the successful 30% incorporate the values of the individuals involved and the aggregated culture at large into the organisation into the change effort. 

Not only do we take ‘values’ and ‘organisational culture’ into account, that is where we begin. We start from the assumption that what we can’t identify, measure, and talk about, we can’t change. That is where our assessment toolkit comes in. We identify individually and collectively where any member and team is. Where they think they should be. Where their leadership thinks they should be. Where the organisation as a whole is, and where it sees itself going. All that data is coalesced into a simple to follow comprehensive report. That is where we begin. 

The magic happens as we begin to identify and address the gap between the currently identified state and the desired state. This is the proprietary methodology that in conjunction with our partners ValueMatch we employ.

iDNA: Integral Development Needs Assessment:

At Social-i, we call this iDNA: Integral Development Needs Assessment. True to our background in management consulting and health informatics, we employ an evidenced based, trackable and quantifiable process: Anamnesis &Tests, Differential Diagnosis, Care Application, and the next Iteration.

All our change management efforts, come off a positive bias. We believe in more than problem solving and the dissemination of expert opinion:

Our expertise resides in “processes” that leads to actors excelling in their current environment. In our industry there is an oft treaded difference between ‘change’ and ‘transformation’. While many talk about change, transformation happens when nothing in the environment changes and yet you suddenly find yourself well equipped with many more choices than you had envisioned before we began.

That said, we know that we don’t and will never know enough about the local environment that your organisational actors act in. And yet, our expertise is based in bringing out the best in your actors so that they can perform with the least amount of tension between them when they are aligned, even as they may be competing internally and externally – essentially a shared state of flow.

As absurd as it sounds, we aim to make ourselves not only dispensable but redundant. Once we deliver, you will reach your efforts; so as when we meet next time, we will be aiming for different, higher targets.

Contact us today to schedule a call to see what we can do for your unique organisational needs

Coaches & Consultants

Who you are:

Is this you? You’ve been a coach, a consultant, an independent professional. You have developed skills, you know you can help people and organisations. And you have an innate sense that something is missing? Perhaps you have encountered or are seeking a map that brings together all that you know and intuit about people and how they relate to the world, and in turn how the environment responds to them. It has to be relational and yet it’s different for different people, but how exactly?

 What if there was a map, that we could all follow, patterns and a language we could point to describe the commonalities and differences we see. And why? And why now? And why here? To help our clients locate, for themselves, where they are and where they want to be going. To offer them universal patterns within which they can locate themselves and the key people they interact with.

 

Adult Human Development:

You may have heard of Spiral Dynamics, or the broader Adult Human Development literature it springs from. Perhaps you’ve read a Don Beck book, or Ken Wilber, Dudley Lynch, Lalouch or even Sussanne Cook Greuter or  Bill Torbert. There is a great wealth of material there. But, how do you digest it all and apply it into your current practice? How do you tailor it all to the client in front of you? Be it an individual, a group or an organisation. How does it inform your being as a change artist?

 

Assessments and Training:

As coaches and consultants who have been there and done that, we promise you one thing. Whether you are using the proprietary VM assessment tools or are coming to a training … you will leave with a sense of having deeply internalized the material and where you are on the map and how to respond to others with different attractors.