In many companies, despite well-intentioned efforts, the success of change programmes doesn’t last, often because of a lack of attention to the wisdom of the body and the shape of the organisation, suggested Dr Eunice Aquilina.
By Sarah Dale
Dr Aquilina opened the conference by inviting delegates to explore what they noticed in slides of people at work, set to Rag ‘n’ Bone Man’s song, Human, involving the audience as she delivered her message that we need to focus equally on being and doing. In her keynote: ‘Living practices for navigating emergent change’, the author of Embodying Authenticity, said, “The wisdom of the body is an unexplored resource in Western culture”, sharing, “I am drawn to shape and body – how our bodies literally embody our history and inform how we show up in the workplace.”
Without paying attention to this, organisations and individuals tend to default back to an old familiar shape and way of being.
Aquilina had witnessed this ‘defaulting’ in the BBC when she headed up a large-scale OD programme, Making it happen. She found that once people learned to tune into themselves, physically and emotionally, they could lead from purpose, collaborate more effectively and embrace conflict as a space of opportunity rather than try to avoid it, among other benefits.
Illustrating her points with video case studies, participants heard how companies and individuals realised some of their challenges were not simply ‘head’ or cognitive problems.
Instead, by learning to tune in to what their bodies were telling them, executive teams and key decision-makers were more able to experience and acknowledge their own emotions and learn how these were influencing how they ‘showed up’ at work.
As the top team at case study Swarovski, discovered, this enabled them to benefit from uncovering a significant blind spot. As a collective force, tuning in to their own embodiment of emotions, they had far more power than they realised to bring about positive change.
Aquilina invited the audience to tune into their own bodies during the day.