Learning to break out of our limits or management for “elasticity”

Copyright (c) <a href='
http://www.123rf.com'>123RF Stock Photos</a>

We are lazy, and idle, and inoperative, and we'd love to sleep late, and so many other worse things. So, what damned thing does human being becomes a wonderful living creature on Earth? Well, we are all potentially wonderful if we are willing and able to exploit that “magic” inside us.

That “magic” is nothing other than a powerful energy inside that motivates us to undertake activities that otherwise we’d never do, and which require great motivation and determination to be fulfilled.

Management for elasticity is the capacity of organizations to motivate and train their own people to take themselves beyond their current limits.

“To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.” (Goethe)

I’ve been digging in the literature about management for a while, mostly on psychological journals, and I’ve found some interesting stuff about self-esteem, confidence, control, need for achievement, and many other concepts quite known in the HR literature. However, there is out there, in the real world, an intriguing phenomena: it’s not uncommon find institutions that permanently succeed and others that..well, they don’t that much often..Let’s think, for instance, in the planet football. Isn’t it true that the winner stage used to be occupied for mostly the same institutions?

Many say that the reason is that those institutions have access to greater resources. Well, that could be a good reason, but that doesn’t explain why these institutions actually reached that status in the first place. Let`s look out there curiously. Possibly you’ll find many more examples. Countries are the same thing.

Well, I don’t want to dig deep on this rather than to suggest an hypothesis which I’ve been working on since a while: Institutions have the power to transform people`s mind.

Some individuals with identical capacities, knowledge and paths can actually perform totally different depending on the kind of institutions where they land on. Reasonably? Some professional suggest to change the way we understand HR departments(see: People Performance Management)

Let’s think in our personal experiences for a moment. Have you ever experienced a feeling that you are in a certain place, with certain people, in a certain environment where you’re actually expected to behave out in a certain way and you feel compelled to do so. It’s an inherent force, invisible, subtle but effective that moves you in a certain direction that otherwise you’d do. In other words, these institutions are able to make us pull our limits beyond our borders. That’s basically management for elasticity.

Well, institutions must work on designing “these invisible forces” that motivate people to pull their limits, and act in certain ways that produce better results. How to design these invisible forces? I invite you to read on my blog!

Rodrigo Figueroa Reyes

rhfiguer@gmail.com