The Natural Systems Institute Uses a Management Approach Consisting of Three Aspects:
Management by Objectives, Participatory Management, and Structuralism

Participatory Management

Using Participatory Management with organizations requires flexibility, insight, and a patient, understanding orientation. Both the organization’s people and its structure are the client. The whole and the parts must move in synchrony for improvements to be realistic and enduring. The following is a description of how one can achieve these objectives.

One of the first premises in making a positive difference is to learn to truly see and accept the reality you have facing you. Step back and regard carefully and slowly the people around you. Then, when you feel you have a really good grasp of what they are like, what their pattern is, consider that they have a big investment in staying the way they are. Consider that to get them to change their feelings, beliefs, habits, their whole way of being, would be extremely difficult. Next, step back and regard the system, the patterns, the roles and relationships, the jobs, the way people structure their time, the places they spend their time. When you feel that you have a really good grasp of the system, the dynamics of the system, the investment that each of the people has in maintaining their part of the system the way it is, then get very still and calm and try to feel how enormously hard it would be to get any part of the system to change. Feel how each part is maintained by the inertia of all the other parts.

When you hear people in meetings talk about doing something that you feel is completely unproductive and unworkable, consider what function this type of talk must have for them. You see, the first premise is to accept the reality with which you are presented. The next premise is that you have to learn patience. You have to learn to wait. But, you are not waiting idly. All the while you are waiting, not acting, you must listen, listen very carefully and deeply to everyone you encounter. Listen to see the world from their perspective. Listen and accept. Let them know you are really listening and ask them if you are really understanding their perspective. You will eventually find, welling up from deep inside every person you listen deeply to, that way down deep, buried very deep, is a caring, a longing for the good, a longing for those very personal feelings to be heard. Yet, there is a desperate fear that those deepest feelings, longings, and caring will be trampled on. Then you will hear an agony not unlike your own. You nurture and encourage those longings even if they seem different from yours or wrong. You nurture them because you are communicating respect and acceptance of the little bit of authenticity that they are allowing you to see.

It is an honor to have someone show, with authenticity, some of his or her precious feelings and hopes because this is so very hard to do. It shows they are developing a trust with you. A time will come when they will reciprocate and you can begin a genuine dialogue. You can come to see the disagreements, in this new atmosphere, as informative missing pieces of what can become a more encompassing perspective. The next thing you know, you will be wanting to try something, even with a former adversary, to see how it will work. This will be a mutual endeavor and not a condition of mine against yours or yours against mine. As a mutual endeavor, it lends itself to honest, mutual self-correction. You are groping together toward vague feelings of how you wish things were. But, your groping is activated only toward that which is at hand, that which is most natural to grope toward at this moment. It may not be much, and may not be successful, but it is a common venture. You are creating a common destiny. You are forming a bond. This tiny little step is enormous in its implications.

If you keep moving in this manner, day by day, month by month, trusting the process, you will wake up one day and find that fabulous things are transpiring. It does not mean that a royal carpet is laid out for you from now on. Set backs are to remind you to trust the process, to make you aware that you are to trust the process and how in the end, paradoxically, greater, more stable results come from this than from forcing the process. Wait and see, calm and still, very patiently, and when the right moment comes, you are ready for your next small step with its enormous implications once again. You never know where it is all going, you are not in control, you are trusting the process and realizing that in the depths of each of us is this delicate, care-filled, longing. Remember that this precious longing has been kept hidden for a reason. These precious hidden feelings and wishes are carefully protected by psychologically barbed armor, weapons for repulsing, and narrow devotion to offensive strategies designed to force our own way and keep all others at bay. We all see these and know that this side of each other is there because this is what we feel we must show in the non-trusting environment. Now you know that beneath all of this defensive posturing is the same delicate, frightened, true longing and caring that is present in all of us.