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The Translucent Revolution by Arjuna Ardagh Companies become translucent when they are influenced by translucent people. The influence may come from the CEO or top management, but it may just as easily come from an outside consultant, the shareholders, or the collective wisdom of the employees. It requires only a very few instrumental translucent people to begin to transform an entire organization. People become translucent when they wake up from their contracted self-preoccupation and feel themselves to be bigger than their personal story. They discover they are both no one in particular and at the same time part of everything around them. From this recognition of connectedness, translucent people become more humorous, more honest, and less fearful. Their lives get reorganized around service and contribution. It is possible for the same awakening process to happen to an organization. When a business starts to awaken from its self-preoccupation with profit as the only justification for its existence, it starts to display translucent qualities. Translucent businesses wake up from the myth of lack, of our gain at the expense of others’ loss, and explode with possibilities: Of course! This is where all these creative people gather every day, where they spend most of their time. It could be a place of inspiration, of creativity, a place of community. It could even be a place to feel love, to feel spirit! Translucent businesses demonstrate a recognition of connectedness. They too are more humorous, more honest, and less fearful. They too become reorganized around service and contribution, to their own employees, to society and the environment, and to their shareholders. And, as it does when an individual becomes more translucent, the awakening of a business brings as many challenges as it does triumphs. HeartMath One group having a dramatic translucent influence on a wide range of businesses is a small firm in Santa Cruz, California, called HeartMath. Founded by researcher, author, and consultant Doc Childre, HeartMath offers an array of simple techniques and technologies to reduce stress and improve health and performance, with its unique hallmark an emphasis on research. Since 1991 HeartMath has accumulated rigorous scientific validation for the benefits of one simple intervention: shifting our attention from the mind to the heart. They have proven what we already know but do not always dare to trust: the heart is more than just an organ to pump blood; it a vital instrument of healing that brings us back to ourselves, back to our senses, back to the present moment. As soon as we shift back to the heart, it sends messages to the brain that change our perceptions and behavior. HeartMath proves in a host of studies that this process launches a cascade of beneficial nervous system, hormonal, and immune system activity “in a heartbeat.” Their PC-based software system, Freeze Framer, uses a unique heart-monitoring technology to create a form of biofeedback that helps the user rest in a more relaxed and open state. Bruce Cryer, CEO of HeartMath, has taken their tools to hospitals, federal agencies, and hundreds of other companies like BP, Hewlett Packard, Cisco Systems, and Boeing. “At the end of the day,” says Cryer, “people feel more in touch with who they really are. While the approach is based on scientific principles, it’s really a way to help people relax.” HeartMath takes what Cryer describes as a “Trojan horse” strategy toward transforming large organizations. They found out early on that most organizations are not very interested in being transformed until they can see the benefits in practical ways: “The idea of transforming their culture is maybe appealing to a small group of human resources people, but it doesn’t play well to most CEOs, especially if it has a spiritual slant to it. Most people who run organizations today are concerned about business, about bottom lines, and about themselves, their own health and viability.” In 1997 the Chief Medical Officer at what was then British Petroleum asked Cryer and the team at HeartMath in the U.K. to consult with their company. The issue was stress. Because of high stress levels the performance of the company was dropping. “They were intrigued that we had a technology that could help their senior people effectively deal with the pressures of running a rapidly expanding global business,” says Cryer. “They recognized that HeartMath tools were a powerful way to rebuild the heath and vitality and resilience of their leaders.” The entire board of BP went through the HeartMath program, and from there the program rolled down through the ranks. Cryer feels it was easily accepted throughout the company because of its strong scientific basis: “ This technology is very intriguing and interesting to people who would otherwise never touch a spiritual or a self-help topic, or would not necessarily say they’re interested in personal awareness. The instant feedback and hard data make it extremely compelling to otherwise skeptical executives and engineers.” In the case of BP, our work has been to help them see the connection between individual well-being and corporate effectiveness. Many corporate leaders are still in the model of: if an employee can’t hack it, get somebody new. They don’t necessarily see that the decisions, the image, the social responsibility of an organization is necessarily linked to how the individual feels about themselves, about their organization, about their life. At BP, we’ve seen a strong recognition that the health and well-being of the individual does impact organizational performance and does lead to the kind of decisions that are in the long term, more sustainable. Bruce Cryer has been inspired by the transformation HeartMath has catalyzed, not only at BP, but in dozens of other corporations as well: We’ve found that this emotionally based approach, with the foundation of physiology behind it, can help leaders to validate some subtle promptings they’re already getting inside themselves but don’t know how to talk about. The average CEO can’t relate to the concept of spirit in business, but they can relate to their own health and longevity. They can relate to the disconnect they feel between the kind of legacy they want to leave behind and what they have to do on a daily basis, the stress and the pressure they’re under. We come into an organization to help them where they’re hurting, which are the areas of stress and performance. When HeartMath steps into an organization, they see a pattern to reward the "stress athletes," those who work their tails off at great personal cost: "At BP, we have been playing a key role in helping a conversation begin to happen. We have seen the birth of the recognition that it is legitimate not only to talk about stress but also to do something proactive about it, and that makes good business sense." Many people refuse to believe that a company like BP can embrace translucent ideas. Our image of oil companies is of entities only interested in raping and plundering the land for the almighty dollar. Cryer himself is amazed at how much benevolence and goodwill are stored away in the recesses of a large company like BP, just waiting to be recognized: In fact, there are good people everywhere, dealing with the same pressures and anxieties and personal-growth challenges in oil companies as anywhere else. They aren’t necessarily only interested in digging black stuff out of the earth. That’s been an important part of our approach, to recognize the humanity, the goodness in people everywhere, to recognize that people are the sum total of what they’ve learned. Obviously, as a planet we’ve got to learn some new stuff, some new intelligence and new ways of thinking and being and feeling. This willingness to recognize the goodness in people has borne ample fruit at BP. Change a few trees, and sooner or later you have a whole new forest. HeartMath started working with British Petroleum in 1997. In 2000, after acquiring several other companies, the company changed its name from British Petroleum simply to “BP,” adding the slogan “Beyond Petroleum.” They instituted a campaign, largely completed by now, to power all their gas stations in Europe, as well as their office buildings and refineries, with solar-power panels installed on the roof, making them the single largest user of solar energy in the world. BP has initiated numerous wind-power projects in Europe and is actively exploring the role of hydrogen in its pursuit of a sustainable energy future. Although the project is highly experimental at this point, with Daimler Chrysler they created a ten-city European Bus Project, to fuel public transport in London, Barcelona, and other big cities with fuel cell, zero-emission vehicles. Their “Sustainability Report” for 2003 is startlingly realistic, honest, and responsible. BP does not avoid the fact that it is still a major contributor to world pollution: the report diligently lists all the damage they are still creating. But it also offers a road map out of that position, along with a vision of energy sustainability. (c) 2005 Arjuna Ardagh |