Making Fires That Feed Us
I see my role as a consultant as making fire. This isn’t the fire that burns everything down; it’s the fire that we need to cook over. Fire to nourish ourselves and our community.
In my experience, people and cultures don’t change by being told how to show up differently. It can be tempting to use my expertise to tell people what I have seen as best practices and to think that this might influence future decision-making. However, telling people what to do simply doesn’t work.
So what creates movement and change?
I am most effective when I can breathe just the right amount of air into the flame. Individuals, teams, and organizations all have specific motivations, and when I can tap into and amplify motivation, we make fire, and together we feed organizations what they need to grow stronger and more capable.
I have found many ways to tap into motivation. With one organization, I helped team members notice which leadership tactics were already working and learn from their own leaders. With another, I facilitated team building sessions so colleagues could better understand and embrace different perspectives. In recent years, fire-making has also involved spotlighting where past decisions and behaviors are incongruent with the organization's stated mission and values.
Fire-making is very different from firefighting.
I often hear people who are overwhelmed in their organization describing themselves as firefighters. “My day is just putting one fire out after the next,” or “with all the competing priorities, it feels like everything is on fire.”
When everything is treated as an emergency, it becomes hard to distinguish when you need to call for help. It also makes it difficult to spot and nurture the flames meant to feed us because they might look like the flames that burn everything down.
As a consultant, I am not as familiar with your day-to-day fires. That distance and outside perspective make it easier to spot the sparks that are there to nourish, not to destroy. My role is to give people who are firefighting an opportunity to pause and take stock of their surroundings. When we can look up from the project right in front of us, it becomes easier to notice which fires aren’t as necessary as we thought.
If firefighting feels too familiar or you want to discover the fires worth tending to in your organization, reach out. I would love to connect and learn more about what you're facing.
Photo below from a favorite fire I made last summer camping in Salida, Colorado.
Camp Fire with bright orange and yellow flames against a black backdrop