The Undercover Mystic's Playbook Pt 1.

For anyone starting a new role, particularly in strategy, your approach to the onboarding process will define your ongoing success, and sometimes, make or break the job itself. So how do you do it? Here below are my own observations arising in the course of working with others. I’m not assuming I’m telling you anything you don’t already know… consider this a kind reminder of the innate knowing already within you..

Feel the room…

When you enter a 20 word prompt into ChatGPT, you are providing around 100 bytes of data for it to process and respond to. In contrast, human beings receive approximately 10 gigabytes of information per second through our Central Nervous System. That’s 100 million times more raw sensory data in a single second than the average AI prompt. So whilst you are being given background information on the business you are stepping into, it is your ability to receive and process sensory data that provides the most powerful insights in how to shape, guide and collaborate with an enterprise and its people. These abilities are what we might call higher intelligence. I have been actively cultivating this through personal and professional experience as both a spiritual human, and a business and brand advisor and would like to share some insights.

At a fundamental level, intelligence is your ability to effectively and authentically receive, metabolise, interpret and transmit information. I say effectively with some emphasis as there are opportunities at every step to distort information with our own plotlines, buried in our personal microtraumas and genetic propensities. Discerning the difference between the signals inside and outside of you, how these interact and the meaning we impose to decode them, is a life-long process. One simple hack, that brings a spiritual dimension to stepping into a new role or project, is accepting that every experience, challenge and interaction provides an opportunity for personal growth. At a more esoteric level, this might be referred to as the “Mahaguru”, translated simply as the Great Teacher. Tuning in, and observing the “signals” from the world (The Mahaguru) at a sensory level, invokes the sort of evolutionary consciousness required to meaningfully lead any Transformational Management process. Great transformational management calls upon the practitioner to metabolise the energetics of the enterprise they are working with.

How does one do that exactly?

What do you first notice when entering a new business environment?

Are you tuning into pace, language, structure, energy, or something else entirely?

Perception & Pattern Recognition “First, listen like a strategist and observe like an anthropologist.”

- Michael Watkins Your first task is to sense the system. Feel beyond the org chart to the unofficial power lines. Tune into what people believe, what they fear, and what isn’t being said. Spend more time reading energy and dynamics than reviewing documents.

Initial investigations might include: What’s the real reason this role was created?

• Where’s the friction that no one talks about?

• Who carries informal influence?

As a leader, you’ll be inheriting a narrative you’ll want to discern and speak to, early. Your power and authority is in what you can see and name with clarity and precision.

In early explorations, lead with quiet compliments of how well things appear to be being done. This will allow you to read the energetics as to what extent those statements are true. This creates an opening for people to share, enabling you to align with the energetic dynamics, frame the context and illuminate the positive. At this stage, the less you speak and the deeper you listen, the more you establish authority. The words you use early, often become the architecture for consideration sets and decisions, so use them with precision.

Position before you Perform

Most organizations will unconsciously place you into one of four frames:

• The Savior: Come fix what’s broken

• The Successor: Protect what works

• The Scapegoat: Absorb past dysfunction

• The Symbol: Represent change or a new direction
  

You’ll want to recognize the script in play, so you can consciously consider how to meet or reframe it. First impressions set your ceiling. The energy you emit needs to be aligned with the needs of the system, the culture of the community and what you can authentically sustain. Temper the impulse to overperform prematurely. You risk getting ahead of your team, bringing yourself out of balance and creating unconscious discomfort.

Don’t make any promises. Instead, focus on:

• Strategic introductions with key stakeholders;

• Shaping your presence and symbolic role in the system, and

• Setting a calm, confident rhythm that signals clarity, gravity and grounded integrity.
  

Beyond business metrics and performance pressures are a group of humans in a dance together. In this, perhaps the most powerful presence you can project is care. The felt presence of care immediately puts people at ease. Moreover, it’s not something you can sustainably fake. Either you care about the people around you or you don’t. By taking a posture of light curiousity and admiration in the essence of the people you are interacting with, you’ll enjoy the process and create a culture of trust.

Align Fast, Change Slowly

Leaders don’t fail because of strategy. They fail because they assert direction without aligning with the organism (organisation) they’re in. To get aligned in the first 30 days, you’ll want to:

• Clarify the enterprise context: financial, cultural, structural;

• Validate unspoken priorities of the entire team;

• Connect meaningfully with the momentum holders;

• Exercise deep listening to build “signal lines” that give you fast access to behind-the-scenes tension, cultural intelligence; and emerging truths;

• Absorb the timing sensitivity of the system: feel where urgency lives and patience is needed.

• Continuously seed the language you are going to need to lead.
  

Ultimately, these early observations are not a prelude to your real work; they are the real work. The success of future efforts hinge on the energetic foundations laid in your initial encounters. By choosing to align before you act and to sense before you speak, you are building the most critical asset a leader can possess: trust. A strategy can be brilliant on paper, but it will fail if it doesn't align with the organism of the organization. By leading with curiosity and care, you cultivate the cultural intelligence required to ensure that when change comes, it is welcomed as a shared and necessary step forward. You’re there for reasons seen and unseen. Tune in to that…

Breathe in awareness, breathe out clarity, keep smiling, and enjoy the journey.