Who is an Enabler?

When I founded iProdigy in 2001, I consciously used the word 'enabling' in its tagline not knowing how loosely it will be used to mean almost anything and everything to do with facilitating, helping, guiding, coaching, mentoring and sorts.

It was never meant to be so. A word that will be misused to make things look good, as glib marketing act. Enabling, to me, has a distinct connotation, backed by certain principles and differentiated by certain qualities when used in connection with human processes. And has been used me and iProdigy since 2001 in that context only

Just as training and facilitation have been used inter-changeably, the later often sounding more cool and hip, so is enabling now used to sound more classy, more arrived. So, to start with let me first get this mess sorted. While in training one is concerned more with delivery of information and content, hoping and praying some subservient souls will take in all that is dumped and convert it into learning, in facilitation it is process of learning that is facilitated in an attempt to bring about some shift in the behavior of the learner.

Enabling starts with a clear commitment to cause an impact to the context and deals with all three simultaneously

Enabling, in contrast, starts with a clear commitment to cause an impact to the context and deals with all three simultaneously. Never mind what is the content or what is the process, for an enabler the context and a clear impact to it is the eye of the fish. An enabler, thus is not stuck to any subject-matter expertise, facilitation methodology or training tool-sets. She is through and through driven by the need for impact and keeps responding in course of the enablement process with approaches, frameworks and methodologies that are most appropriate in the moment to create the committed impact. Thus, by location, an enabler, as compared to a trainer or a facilitator is a server, a 'sevak', whose very existence revolves around an ordinate / super-ordinate goal related to the other.

The key distinguisher of an enabler is the nature of her presence. Having resolved her need to prove or to be relevant, popular and praised, an enabler has no need to 'do' anything, whatsoever. Perched on the central axis of the wheel of Time and Space she is acutely sensing and responding, all the time. Her actions are never reactions. They always originate and move out authentically from the center of her existence. Just like the sun, radiating its creational energy to the lives that thrive in the solar system.

An enabler does not need or take any position of authority to draw power from to make things happen. Neither does she state that, like many a facilitator, who often carry coercive power around their implicit position of authority. The enabler instead comes with an awesome 'essential' (that emanating from the essence) power of presence which radiates all around like a contagion to infect, inspire and influence all that lives in its range of impact.

Despite carrying such pervasive power and influence, ironically enough, an enabler is often invisible and imperceptible. Because she does not 'do' anything to cause an impact, because she does not assume the authority of a position and because she does not come with any need of her own, despite significant transformations happening due to her presence, the ordinary human mind so conditioned to honoring transactions, does not get to see and appreciate the causal relationship between the enabler and the enabled.

An enabler does not operate by design. She is driven. By purpose. To enable others. The making of an enabler starts with one recognizing this purpose and living it by choice. Through rigorous practice and sustained self-mastery the individual begins to uncover and exhibit the subtler energies of compassion (towards the other) and contentment (towards self). Character and competence soon start getting replaced by consciousness. The witness comes to life, as awareness, the primordial human intelligence becomes the driver. 

Are you an enabler? Potentially or otherwise? Look back to connect the dots and see if you can spot a recurring theme of 'making things happen'. For institutions, groups or individuals. Without any expectation, either way. If you can spot it, it is quite likely that you are a potential enabler. 

Anyone with such a wiring can be an enabler. However, unlike an executive, entrepreneur or an expert, one cannot be educated or trained to be an enabler. One can only be initiated and enabled to be an enabler, by another enabler, only when one is ready to take on this overarching role in life.

Every system needs an enabler. Along with executives, experts and entrepreneurs. And if there isn't one, you can be rest assured that the system, sooner or later, devoid of its life-force, will degenerate. While in the short run it may project an illusion of value-creation, from an eco-systemic perspective it will soon show up as a value-eroding agent.

There is severe dearth of true enablers all around. It's a hard journey. Through roads less traveled. Without much assurance of worldly riches and fame. However, the boundless love, joy and sense of fulfillment an enabler receives, is often a precious enough reason for one to commit to this journey for a life-time and beyond.

If you sense a voice in you, as you read this post, that urges you to step out of your self-imposed comfort zone of smallness, if something seems to be beckoning you to step forth, if the cry of the 'little man' hurts you and wants you to enable his liberation, reachme@indroneil.com. You will find a co-traveler, a co-enabler and may be a guide to your journey of flowering.

Will this alone make any difference to the crime and punishment scenario?

Law has taken it own course of crime and punishment. For some of the cases that are reported. Case unreported would be at least three to four time more which do not even qualify for legal action.

There are questions that arise. Has capital punishment (or any punishment which is severe enough to send a message across) brought in any transformation amongst criminals? Have crimes of anger, sex, greed and violence reduced by any significant extent? Is it enough to pronounce death sentences to show the world what could be the outcome of heinous and beastly behavior? As an aftermath?

I doubt if there is any initiative (leave aside intent) anywhere to delve in the root causes for such crimes and run focused programs that can address those causes specifically to bring about some transformation. Perhaps because, deep inside we all know, that as individuals, behind the mask of of being socially and politically correct, we carry suppressed and repressed emotions of hate, anger, rejection and frustration, which, add to the repository of the collective unconscious and spread as contagions to spark actioning of crimes by some of the more influence-able individuals.

No reform or transformation is social of institutional. It has to start at the unit level - with the individual - each and every individual. To get them cleansed through catharses. Of the rapist, the terrorists, the murders hidden. Then only there could be some hope of transformation in the crime and punishment scenario.

Till such time, let's agree, that each one of us is as guilty as the convicted, contributing unconsciously to the making of criminals and hang our head in shame each time a criminal is hanged to death.



"The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked,
And the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.
Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured.
And still more often the condemned is the burden bearer for
the guiltless and unblamed. You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked..."
~ From "The Prophet"

Those who feel responsible and want to do something about it have help at hand. Reachme@indroneil.com

Why leadership development programs do not work

If one would have learnt by just reading books, all those who have read Bhagwat Geeta would have become as adept and achieving as Arjuna.

If listening lectures could have transformed human beings, all those who sit through sermons and satsang would have become saints. 

On the one hand surveys report a measly percentage of MBAs being ready for employment. On the other, leading business dailies report how premier B-schools are attracting managers, with baseless promises of turning them into leaders.

What slow-down are we speaking off? This is not new. For centuries we have been wasting precious leadership development funds on pipe dreams: send them to a branded school and they will come back as cutting edge leaders. What happened after they came back to their workplace? What value did they create? What quantum leap did they take their respective organization through after having attained leadership nirvana?

All talk about ROI and painstaking efforts of learning officers aimed towards calculating it, are seemingly more directed towards keeping their jobs intact. Nothing, much has been done to show how the current paradigm of ‘content-in, leadership-out’ development is not only ineffective but grossly flawed. Nothing much has been done to highlight that, to develop an individual to take on leadership or any other role, it needs specialist abilities to enable the process of learning, not just subject- matter-expertise and academic qualification to roll out content. In fact the latter is often a hurdle. It is more likely to make the teacher / trainer stupidly arrogant about the position he / she adorns and the ego bloated with prefixes and suffixes that embellish his /her name. This unquestionably is a dis-qualification for anyone who claims to be a facilitator / enabler of learning.

What puzzles me, ROI or no ROI, despite the futility of such programs to deliver tangible results being proven over ages, why do we continue faltering again and again in choosing wrong leadership development strategies and making wasteful investments in them? Why do we not, for once, stop, look around, consult those who are specialists and then decide on a strategy that can bring business impact out of leadership development?

There is one more reason for leadership development programs to not work. Assuming the process of learning and development is done right; those who come to learn find a huge chasm between what they learn and what they are expected to practice as leadership. Look underneath the veneer of leadership glory talked about in seminars. What do you get to see day in and day out being practiced, particularly in business organizations? Passing the buck? False agreements? Scapegoating?  Thermometer management of symptoms with short terms fixes? Strategic short changing of customers and employees? And everything that can help a manager cover his / her back side? There may be exceptions and that is worse. The leader-to-be is utterly confused. Which to follow? The exception or the rule? What will be more socially acceptable at workplace?

Learning happens through an intricate interplay of three elements: enablement, engagement and environment. While enablement can still happen effectively, quality of engagement (at least on paper) can also be ensured through elaborate role definition and fixing of KRAs, how would one deal with an environment full of inconsistencies in practices? Also between what is preached and what is practiced? The aspiring leader comes back to work, developed in the workshop, more alien than ever. He does not have an environment to apply all that he has learnt. He is not supported by the informal social fabric prevailing in the organization to practice the leadership values he has imbibed. He is better off going back to where he was before he went for the leadership development program. After all he has a family to feed and a quarter dozen EMIs to pay.   

Meditation - myths and misconceptions - the cardinal ten

No sooner had I clicked the 'Publish' button of my last blog - Meditation in Meltdown - I knew that I had blundered. I knew I had opened up a Pandora's Box for the melt-downers to come out with all their (mis)understanding of meditation which will allow them to justify why it cannot be allowed within the iron wall of corporates. And that led me to look at my four decades of association with meditation and meditative ways of living (which, of course, includes smoking and occasional indulgence with exquisite 'spirits' in liquid state)  and list down some of the many myths and misconceptions related to meditation that are prevalent all around. Here is the cardinal ten: 

1. Meditation is not necessarily sitting for a long time, with your eyes closed. You can be meditative while brushing your teeth, having your breakfast, driving your car or even attending a meeting, through Conscious Living.
2. You cannot ‘do’ meditation. Meditation is non-doing. Even in active meditation, where one is required to move, through guidance s/he is made to dissociate from the movement to be a witness, thereby getting into a non-doing state.
3. Yoga is not meditation. You do not need to bend your body and twist your limbs to meditate. You can meditate while standing, sitting or even lying down.
4. Addictive substances have nothing to do with meditation. They alter your consciousness and mimic the state of expanded consciousness that you may achieve through meditation.
5. You do not have anything to achieve, any objective to meet in meditation. Trying to reduce stress through meditation can make you more stressful. Meditating with an objective to attain enlightenment will take you farther, farther away from it.
6. Meditation is not consciousness, awareness or mindfulness. It’s a tool or a path to conscious awareness.
7. There are many methods of meditation and none of these are better than another. It completely depends on the one who meditates, the guide and ambiance on how effective a method can be.
8. Meditation is not necessarily a group activity, needing a lot of gizmos. You can be meditative alone in your own space without any prop, whatsoever.
9. Awakening, cleaning or alignment of chakras is not meditation. These are healing techniques with physical implications, having little or nothing to do with awareness, which is what meditation is a gateway to.
10. There is nothing religious or even spiritual about meditation. You do not need to learn stringent methods and rituals for meditating. You are, as a human, by nature meditative. All you need is a compassionate guide to remind you of this and you to re-member.

You may now check for yourself how wise your are - meditation-wise. And if you choose not to agree with me on any of the above, you are most welcome to invite me for an experience of a guided active mediation – So’Ham – that, inspired by Osho’s Dynamic meditation, I had designed about five years back. Since then more than 500 individuals have experienced and benefited from So’Ham. It’s an active meditation, guided by me, in groups of 10 to 15 individuals.

Leave a comment behind or reachme@indroneil.com if you have any doubts and /or if you are interested to experience the magic of So’Ham. Promise you, you will transcend all beliefs, for underlying every belief there's a doubt.

An appeal to all teachers

On this day, Teachers Day, I remember fondly all those godly souls who shaped me the way I am and my heart fills up with gratitude for their selfless service.

I am also concerned and pained to see what is happening all around and would like to remind all dear teachers today to:

1. Dedicate themselves to this noble profession by choice, not by chance
2. Refrain from telling students to stop talking. They have stopped speaking in job interviews too.  
3. Enable students to listen more for personal growth just like speaking helps them in social growth.
4. Ask students to be themselves, not just behave themselves.
5. Show them the God within, not in the sky.
6. Uphold their divinity when they challenge your smallness.
7. Be ruthless with your compassion. They need to stay awake.
8. Remember each student is a specially chosen inhabitant of this planet and there is no reason to favor one above the other.
9. Educate them so that they learn to learn. From life, with humility.
10. Mould the clay of human promise with care, lest it carries cracks and contaminants for ever.

Meditation in meltdown

Experience of meditation @ workplace

When I met Sushant, Senior Manager with a the wholly owned Indian software services subsidiary of an American mortgage bank, a couple of years after he had attended a leadership program that I had facilitated, there was something visibly different in his demeanor. He looked more at peace with himself, more poised and centered. There was more pleasant surprise in store as he shared how, after the program, he was suddenly finding more time for himself as well as for his team members. He felt there was more understanding and engagement in the team, leading to far fewer conflicts and a lot more spontaneous collaboration amongst them. What delighted Sushant the most was that his relationship with the business area counter-part in US seemed to have become more partnering, more functional. They had begun co-resolving many issues, cutting short turn-around time, significantly, up ticking the C-SAT scores.

Amused and happy with the impact, I asked him to, if he could, pin-point that element of the program which attributed to such visible shifts. “Not sure whether you will agree with me, but I am pretty sure that the hour long meditation you guided for us during the program did some trick. It was such an awe-inspiring experience that I decided to adopt and integrate meditation in my daily life, immediately after the program,” disclosed Sushant.

Similar experiences, with varying degrees of impact to their life and work contexts were shared by Suprana, Bharath and Sadanand. There were altogether 120 middle managers in this organization. Each of them had gone through this 3-day working lab on leadership in batches of 12. From what I heard in the experiences shared by a few of them that day, I could imagine what could have happened with the middle-management team of the organization, the organization itself and its customers. Not because of any leadership tip or technique they learnt from the program but because of some intense transformational experience that was brought about by active meditation sessions that I had guided for each batch.

Adopting meditation as a corporate culture

Meditation is the new rage with companies in Silicon Valley. Not just to ensure wellness of the workforce but also to boost their bottom lines. The likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter, amongst other have instituted meditation and contemplative practices as a part of their corporate culture. Promega Corp., a biotech company in the West, encourages its workforce to go for yoga / meditation sessions on company time, paying rates heavily subsidized by their employer. 

Despite the benefits of leading a meditative corporate life and its positive impact on profitability being proven, I haven’t heard of any company encouraging such practice amongst its employees, leave aside adopting and incorporating them as a part of organization’s culture, in India – a country from where it is believed contemplative practices like yoga and meditation originated. May be, with the sluggish economy and the falling rupee affecting performance and well-being of many businesses out here and the proven business strategies and tactics falling short of offering much of a lasting relief, it may be a good idea for India Inc. to consider adopting meditative experiences as part of the organizational practice. And thus go back to the future.

Meditation to metrics 

Here are some of the many advantages and benefits of meditation to a corporate that incorporates meditative practices for employees as a part of their regular work-life:

It may prove to be a boon to embrace the goodness of meditation at workplace in trying times like now. Who knows, besides improving individual and organizational performance, it may actually bring in more awakening amongst people in general making the country, as a whole, more aware, more accountable and more abundant.