We have uncovered tens of thousands of groups experiencing extraordinary success every day. In this article, we highlight what we found about how they achieve and sustain these off-the-charts outcomes, often for decades.
What does this extraordinary success look like? A Texas-based community health center provides services typically only found at top hospitals for a mostly uninsured population, when all other community health centers have been drastically reducing the basic services they provide. A textile mill changed the whole hosiery industry, moving from a focus on pretty foot coverings to preventive foot health products, while paying US-based employees middle-class wages, sustaining a very loyal customer base, while the rest of the industry outsourced its low-cost production to low-wage countries. A global bank’s Latin American back-office operations showed a 10X financial benefit in efficiency gains from fomenting individual potential and respectful relationships within and across teams within a broader outcomes-based business focused predominantly on power through information hording. What is happening in these examples that allows them to realize such unusual outcomes? What are the possibilities and strategies for increasing the incidence of such organizations? What are the implications?
Mainstream, economic resource efficiency-based analysis classifies these groups as outliers, with special resource endowments or situational effects. They are fortunate winners who just happened to show up with the right resources at the right time and place. The community health center’s doctors and nurses were really committed. The sock company’s charismatic founder saw a new niche. The bank operations paid high wages for highly educated leaders. From this perspective, these exciting examples of lucky outliers are interesting but not imitable. We find otherwise. When we used a different analysis, based on the agreements at the foundation of these groups, we found that these seemingly unrelated exemplars share a form of formal and informal agreements that are based in abundance, not scarcity. This distinguishes them from the rest, and this is replicable.
This article’s evidence-based research derives from a validated survey with 2,500 responses from 94 countries and longitudinal field research with 93 of these groups in Belgium, Germany, Guatemala, Mexico, The Netherlands, Romania, South Africa, UK, and the USA, which we have described in a recent book Ecosynomics: The Science of Abundance (Ritchie-Dunham, 2014).
In our work with these extraordinary groups, people were asked to describe their experience of being part of the group. Over and over, in English, German, and Spanish-speaking groups, individuals from the high performing groups used the word “vibrancy” and closely related terms to describe their experience, by which they said they meant a flourishing relationship with a sense of vitality and high energy in contrast to energy-depleting experiences. A typical description was like this one a German leader shared:
“When I am with the people in this effort, I experience a lot more of myself showing up. I learn more about who I am and who I can be. I feel appreciated by everyone, seen for what I uniquely contribute, just as everyone else makes a unique contribution. I love these folks, and we are always seeing new possibilities, what we might achieve from those possibilities, and pathways for developing our capacity to generate those outcomes. It is like creativity is everywhere all of the time, and we are constantly looking for it.”
This contrasts with the description from people in most efforts, like a leader in Guatemala:
“This effort is deadening. I am no better off for having been here. None of my gifts are used here: nobody sees me. I am completely replaceable. Any time I try to share a spark of interest or a new idea, someone stifles it telling me, ‘That’s not the way we do things here.’ No creativity at all, and we only focus on making sure we get the outcomes we were told to get.”
We have heard stories like this in hundreds of groups, where people talk about the experience they have of groups in terms of the energy they have before and after they meeting with the group. They experience their energy depleted in interactions when they leave the group feeling less creative, excited, and engaged. They experience their energy enhanced in interactions when they leave feeling more creative, excited, and engaged. Across cultures as diverse as Mexico, Germany, South Africa, and the USA, these people consistently described five ways they relate to the experience:
Self. How much of my own capacities, growth, and potential do I experience when with this group?
Other. Do I acknowledge and support others and do they support me in being my best and their best?
Group. Does the group invite each participant to contribute our own unique perspective to the group?
Nature – the creative process. Does the group focus only on the reality of outcomes and things or also on the reality of learning and developing capacities, relationships, and possibilities?
Spirit – the creative source. Does the group see only the creative solutions we inherited from our founders or does it look for creativity from experts, or from all of us all of the time?
Strategies for Extraordinary Success Every Day
We have uncovered tens of thousands of groups experiencing extraordinary success every day. In this article, we highlight what we found about how they achieve and sustain these off-the-charts outcomes, often for decades.
What does this extraordinary success look like? A Texas-based community health center provides services typically only found at top hospitals for a mostly uninsured population, when all other community health centers have been drastically reducing the basic services they provide. A textile mill changed the whole hosiery industry, moving from a focus on pretty foot coverings to preventive foot health products, while paying US-based employees middle-class wages, sustaining a very loyal customer base, while the rest of the industry outsourced its low-cost production to low-wage countries. A global bank’s Latin American back-office operations showed a 10X financial benefit in efficiency gains from fomenting individual potential and respectful relationships within and across teams within a broader outcomes-based business focused predominantly on power through information hording. What is happening in these examples that allows them to realize such unusual outcomes? What are the possibilities and strategies for increasing the incidence of such organizations? What are the implications?
Mainstream, economic resource efficiency-based analysis classifies these groups as outliers, with special resource endowments or situational effects. They are fortunate winners who just happened to show up with the right resources at the right time and place. The community health center’s doctors and nurses were really committed. The sock company’s charismatic founder saw a new niche. The bank operations paid high wages for highly educated leaders. From this perspective, these exciting examples of lucky outliers are interesting but not imitable. We find otherwise. When we used a different analysis, based on the agreements at the foundation of these groups, we found that these seemingly unrelated exemplars share a form of formal and informal agreements that are based in abundance, not scarcity. This distinguishes them from the rest, and this is replicable.
This article’s evidence-based research derives from a validated survey with 2,500 responses from 94 countries and longitudinal field research with 93 of these groups in Belgium, Germany, Guatemala, Mexico, The Netherlands, Romania, South Africa, UK, and the USA, which we have described in a recent book Ecosynomics: The Science of Abundance (Ritchie-Dunham, 2014).
In our work with these extraordinary groups, people were asked to describe their experience of being part of the group. Over and over, in English, German, and Spanish-speaking groups, individuals from the high performing groups used the word “vibrancy” and closely related terms to describe their experience, by which they said they meant a flourishing relationship with a sense of vitality and high energy in contrast to energy-depleting experiences. A typical description was like this one a German leader shared:
This contrasts with the description from people in most efforts, like a leader in Guatemala:
We have heard stories like this in hundreds of groups, where people talk about the experience they have of groups in terms of the energy they have before and after they meeting with the group. They experience their energy depleted in interactions when they leave the group feeling less creative, excited, and engaged. They experience their energy enhanced in interactions when they leave feeling more creative, excited, and engaged. Across cultures as diverse as Mexico, Germany, South Africa, and the USA, these people consistently described five ways they relate to the experience: