Why Self Awareness Is The Key To Business Agility
If there is one thing we’ve all been pushed to embrace these last couple of years, it’s life-affirming change. And organisations are increasingly seeing the value in being able to change direction quickly when needed. Like a cheetah chasing down prey, the ability to turn on a dime will allow businesses to weather the storms of the coming years.
Many of the hypergrowth companies we work with are extremely adept at thinking on their feet, making rapid decisions and tenaciously digging into the to-do list. Of course, this has many pros, but there are some pitfalls. Detail gets overlooked, people and what’s going on with them aren’t addressed, and difficult conversations are pushed aside. At Untapped.AI we encourage people to be agile, but we also remind them to be mindful of the broader view and the fallout when missing the more hidden aspects of their ever-evolving culture.
The Power of Self Awareness – for Individuals and Organisations
When an organisation is stuck, it’s usually because its people are stuck - and no amount of command-and-control, telling people what to do, will help in that situation.
That’s because the ways we get stuck, whether as individuals or as groups, often have to do with unconscious and automatic thoughts, feelings and behaviours. This is normal. We all operate through these automatic thoughts for a huge amount of time. It’s how we are able to drive the car to work and realise suddenly that we’ve got all the way there but can’t remember any specific decisions we made en route.
When organisations get stuck, it’s usually because this automatic behaviour is occurring at scale in their people. And when this happens, training or consultancy won’t work because as much as people might say they want things to change, how can change occur when no one is even aware that this default behaviour is so pervasive?
So that’s where self-awareness needs to come in…
Why Self Awareness Makes the Difference
The process of building self-awareness involves peeling off the layers of defences that hold us in rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. It’s the process of getting to know and recognise those automatic and unconscious thoughts, feelings and behaviours that hold us back.
At Untapped.AI, we are experts in helping individuals understand themselves better. Through our regular, one-on-one sessions, our clients are able to build trust, knowledge and insight, allowing them to examine ingrained ways of being and start to consider new responses and behaviours to open up different vistas of thought and feeling. When individuals, and groups, are more self-aware they are able to identify the areas where they get stuck and realise that new, alternative choices can help them respond and behave more positively.
The Impacts
As self-awareness unlocks the parts of ourselves that we didn’t know so well, our choices about how to act widen and we are more able to make informed responses to our feelings. This allows individuals and groups to:
- Move away from ruts, stuckness and ingrained ways of thinking, and be more open to difference – in people, in ideas and approaches, and within themselves.
- Recognise and focus on key factors rather than getting bogged down or overwhelmed by the big picture.
- Acknowledge their own patterns of thinking and feeling and therefore explore other choices, building innovative ways of thinking and interacting better with others.
- Work with resilience, bringing knowledge and acknowledgement of the strengths they have as individuals and as groups. This gives deeper confidence to make courageous choices and take informed risks.
- Experiment and make mistakes. Feeling safe to do so allows individuals and groups to own errors and therefore learn from them.
These deep changes in individuals and teams mean that organisations become more transparent and open, they are able to make decisions more quickly and experiment outside of their usual ways of working. In a word, they become agile.