Neometric – some background
This is a thank you card to those who have been concerned about why I left a law firm partnership, and curious about what has kept me occupied since. I hope this gives some insight.
Twenty years of commercial dispute resolution experience allowed me to observe conflict within and between high quality organisations and people of unquestionable competence and capacity. The best and brightest lawyers lined up to advocate for each side. The contest was on! It was high stakes and often high emotion. An old fashioned duel in new fashion suits.
Even at the top of our game, I came to question my alignment with the model we operated within. As you might imagine, this was a deeply uncomfortable thought. The status quo was addictive. Our team (and our opponents) would always give our best – sharp minds working long hours drawing on all of our resources until a resolution was reached. At times we would trumpet what had the objective characteristics of a ‘win’ – a court judgment in our client’s favour. More often there was a tolerable compromise, and at times a humbling judgment in favour of our client’s opponent.
Understanding deeply what led me to be so troubled about continuing down that path gave way to excitement about something new.
Neometric.
New measures. Fresh ways of assessing progress. Enhancing the connections that define our organisations and their capacity to collectively pursue shared purposes.
We have been working and refining our model for some time, building partnerships and pressure testing our approach with clients and colleagues.
How can success be measured differently? How can we step more confidently into relational complexity? How can the resolution of conflict feel more worthy of celebration?
We think the answer lies in helping leaders reframe the opportunity of conflict, and to equip them to use that opportunity to build more sustainable, purposeful and connected organisations. We are convinced that conflict can be leveraged to propel health and growth, rather than operate as a handbrake on it.
Neometric steps into the seismic shifts happening in our commercial world. Allow me to summarise some reflections that shape our offering:
- Individual rights and protections can obscure our collective interests. We have stretched individualism to breaking point. We are surrounded by evidence that this isn’t serving us particularly well, but we have lacked the frameworks and mechanisms to attach fair value to our connections, and to measure growth in our relational capital
- Being experts at transactions is not enough. We have made sure that our transactional models are incredibly efficient and effective, often with no human contact. Our supporting legal structures have themselves become highly transactional, and promise to become automated in the near future. As this unfolds further, a premium attaches to those who are also sure-footed in building and sustaining aligned relationships
- Conventional conflict resolution strategies tie us to transactional models. When we feel at risk, we blame, entrench positions, and rely on adversarial mechanisms to bring ‘resolution’. Even an acceptable outcome under these models rarely brings restoration, and almost never results in strengthened relationships or enhanced trust
- We are relearning that we are all connected. If our environmental changes did not give us sufficient reminder that our individual actions have collective consequences, COVID-19 certainly has. My behaviour impacts on your outcomes (and those of people on the other side of the world). We know this instinctively, but have misplaced the language to confront it without sounding like a dangerous revolutionary or a televangelist
- Our leaders are assessed against metrics that anchor them in old thinking. Existing measures of our commercial performance are inadequate to give leaders or boards reliable guides to long-term success or sustainability. They drive widespread imposter syndrome in leaders, and widespread disengagement from those they lead. Few of our organisations operate in closed systems where outputs can be reliably delivered through a top-down command and control structure. Our economy is too complicated and change too swift. When we acknowledge that our organisations operate as and within open systems that demand self-organising responses, we begin to give priority to adaptive leadership skills, mindsets and metrics.
Our invitation is to let us help you lead your team courageously into the mess, where:
- Conflict is treated as an opportunity to strengthen relationships
- Relationships are reliably measured, and become the heart of all you do commercially, shifting definitions of success and your experience of leadership
- By giving attention to the relationships between them, Board members set the tone and culture for the entire organisation.
Please get in touch through the Contact page, or explore our insights to help you see the possibilities in your organisation.