Book Summary Preview : Teaching An Anthill To Fetch

The Big Idea

Whether working with a small group of five people or a big organization of 100 or 1,000 people, one major challenge facing today’s leaders and business managers is how to get their team to deal with change in a fast-moving environment.

“Teaching An Anthill To Fetch” by Stephen James Joyce provides a key concept and tool for this – collaborative intelligence or CQ. The book argues that in today’s world, IQ and EQ are no longer enough – we must also need CQ or the capacity to harness the intelligence and energy of people.  This book teaches tools on how to attract and retain high quality employees, create meaningful participation and effective collaboration, instill a strong sense of purpose to teams, and balance leadership with “followship.”

1. Check Your Assumptions

We need to embrace a new paradigm. We must see all living things as deeply connected – an idea called “entanglement” in quantum mechanics. If we do this, then it follows that there is a collective intelligence to which we all contribute and to which, potentially, we all have access.

One of our most persistent assumptions, for example, is that we can only succeed through being competitive. But if we look at nature at its most fundamental level, we will realize that natural systems are cooperative rather than competitive. Competition takes place within a larger context of a highly cooperative system.

This worldview requires that we look at ourselves and others in a new way. And how do we do this? We need to start by gaining the skill of Checking and Adjusting Our Individual and Team Assumptions.

We need to change our assumptions so that we can change our behavior. Assumptions are the building blocks for our beliefs, which drive our attitudes and behaviors. In some ways, our assumptions often drive our behavior when we go on auto-pilot.

What we assume about ourselves, life, and other people has a tremendous impact on how we operate as human beings. In other words, the assumptions we make about reality play a large part in creating that reality. Negative-thinking people, for example, who expect the worst, often are not disappointed.

But consider for example, if we start assuming that “we are all inherently resilient to change.” Making this assumption affects the attitude we take toward ourselves and others.

What are some of the assumptions that underpin the new worldview we must take?

• Change is a constant process.
• Our ability to adapt is the central role of resiliency.
• Resiliency is our ability to adapt, bounce back, and recover in harsh or challenging situations.
• Resiliency is an innate capacity that we all have.
• Certain definable traits make up our capacity for resilience.
• Resilient teams are built from resilient individuals.
• None of us are as smart as all of us-- a resilient team further strengthen its individual members.
• Everyone wants to make a difference with their lives. And work is a great place for that to happen. 

2. Adjusting Your Perception

Perception is reality: this means that our perception affects our reality, and for the purpose of this, our perception of our individual and our team’s resilience affects this resilience. We see what we choose to see.

There are five important elements of resilience: attention, perception, filters, perspectives and frames. These make our perceptions relative and affect how we develop habits of seeing. Changing all these five elements can have a huge impact on our reality.

How do we change our attention or our focus? We do this by giving order to our thoughts. Team mission statements can serve this function; they help team members harness the collective attention around specific objectives, drawing people around a common purpose.

Perception, on the other hand, is how we feel about things, which impact on how we see things. If you become angry about something in the morning, for example, it may make you notice many other things during the day that also make you angry.

Choosing how to look at things, then, or how to master our perception, gives us emotional mastery. If we look at problems in our organization as caused by one person, or one thing external to ourselves, it will be hard to resolve the problem. What we need to see is that we must change ourselves in order to change our organization, our world.

Adjusting our filters, on the other hand, allows us to set our intentions. Goal-setting is a good way to do this because it is like programming our minds to filter for things that are important to our goals.

Perspective is about where we look, or from what position we choose to view our world. We have at least three perspectives that we can use to view reality. The first position is the perspective of us looking through our own eyes. The second perception is being able to assume someone else’s perspective. The third position is not assuming being inside our own body or anyone else’s, or being a “fly in the wall.”

People who explore all three perspectives of an event or situation are better informed than someone who only explores one.

In the end, learning how to choose to see something, or gaining mastery over our thoughts and perception, is how we gain perceptual flexibility.

 

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