Did the German Soccer Team Use Unity Consciousness to Win the World Cup?
MIT professor and leadership expert, Otto Scharmer, commenting in the summer 2014 edition of The Intelligent Optimist, magazine speaks about how the Germans and Spanish have migrated to what he calls Soccer 4.0 , or total football:
“Yes. That’s called ‘total football’, invented by the Dutch in the 1970’s. This involves the total collapse of the idea that each individual has a specific role. There is no distinction between strikers and midfielders. Everyone is doing every thing. It requires a shared development and collective consciousness. Players no longer perceive the game with themselves as the center. There’s a sense of simply knowing where the open space is, where the opponent is, where the ball is. Everyone is attending to an ever-evolving situation and adjusting his own position relative to that. That’s what the best teams are doing such as Barcelona and the Spanish national team.” Mr. Scharmer goes on to suggest how this new way of organizing team performance could be applied to work in companies: “ Yes, all organizations can create places where this ‘sensing’ can develop. It simply requires practice, so that everyone is in synch. Once you get there, you’ll have much more flexibility to improvise and respond. I think that’s what great teams and great organizations pay a lot of attention to. It’s what we’re seeing now with Bayern Munich. Last year, Bayern Munich already had a great system, but it was imposed on each opponent. Now they’re much more adapting and evolving, switching their system twice a game. The players constantly evolve and respond as a team. They are really sensing what the situation requires them to do.”
Do It for the Team
A number of sports commentators have noted Germany’s unified team approach and how the future of soccer will move away from reliance on one or two major “stars” with supporting casts in favor of a unified and highly adaptive team approach. Otto Scharmer clearly sees this as an approach that companies should use in structuring their organizations. Of course, it’s not a new idea – start ups have been favoring this way of working for decades. Start ups, due to their limited size and scope rely on employees taking on multiple roles as needed to get the job done and working in alignment with organization versus individual objectives. Sure, everyone has a specific job description and responsibility, but start ups know that given the dynamic and fast moving nature of their environment (like sports), they cannot rely on the more rigid forms of organizational structure. One for All and All for One as they say…
WL Gore Keeps it Small, Collaborative, and Adpative
Achieving this in large corporations is more difficult to do by nature of their size and inherent sluggishness of command and control structures. Big companies have been trying to solve this dilemma for decades and with some success institute smaller teams within the larger structure who can be more adaptive and move faster. One company in particular that I know of, has taken an even more definitive step. American company WL Gore, the maker of Gore Tex fabrics and medical devices among other things, limits the size of its business units to 150 people. This is driven primarily by the understanding that above that number, people lose touch with each other which makes it harder to know people well and collaborate. They also maintain a flat hierarchy – no fancy titles, everyone is called an Associate. In other words, Gore wants people to have close relationships, collaborate, and to view everyone as an equal whose job is to achieve success for the team. (Gore has 10,000 employees, $3.2B in revenue, is very profitable, and interestingly is a private, not public, company). *To be fair, everything is not perfectly rosy in this scenario as some former employees at Gore have commented on lack of speed in decision making (with no strong authority centers, that can certainly be a problem). But overall, a very interesting approach to organizational structure and they are number 22 on Fortune’s top 100 companies to work for.
Mom and Dad Keep Roles Fluid
Of course, there is another organization that could benefit from this unity consciousness / adaptive response approach – Families. I have seen my wife and I using this fluid approach to getting things done around the house and for our children more and more over the years. With two teenagers and all of their commitments, and the seemingly 24/7 life of parents in our modern, always-on world, being able to shift and adapt roles and tasks as necessary to meet commitments I find unleashes a higher level of productivity, generates a more unified team oriented culture, and helps to keep everyone a bit more sane. Sometimes Mom is Dad and at times Dad plays Mom – keeps the kids guessing…
What If…
Could other organizations and institutions benefit from this Unity Consciousness approach? Hmmm, let me see… the U.S. Congress perhaps? Think of it – politicians coming together and dynamically adjusting their positions to be in alignment for the common good. The tricky part is the definition of the common good – it’s easy to define in sports – winning the game is the common good for the team. But in a society with vastly different view points, interest groups, and more, the common good is much more difficult to identify. Unless of course, you understood that there literally is no Us and Them and that helping all members of society achieve minimum levels of success, health, education, safety, nutrition, etc is the right thing to do. Why, because They are Us. All for One and One for All… Learn more about Unity Consciousness and see the scientific basis for why we are all One: Seeing the Oneness of our Reality
What the German World Cup Team example and others happening around the world every day, is that we are always evolving towards higher levels of integration and interconnectedness. When we are in alignment with that trend, things go well.
~Jay Kshatri
www.ThinkSmarrterWorld.com
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