A question I am often asked is ‘How can I make my people do what I really want them to do?’ My usual answer is ‘You can’t.‘, often followed by the question ‘How can your people make you do what you really want to do?‘.

Thousands of books and millions of articles have been published on methods for getting your staff and colleagues to do what you want them to do.  The first of these publications were about dealing with simple situations that were known and familiar and declared that a command and control regime would yield the most efficient results.  This was the domain of the Commander, and although this method can be efficient in very specific contexts, it usually ineffective when dealing with the unfamiliar.

The vast army of writers then went on to describe how to deal with complicated situations that were unfamiliar to the people involved, although the nature of the particular situations was known to others.  This is the territory of the Manager, whose main task is to make specific and unambiguous decisions based on collected information and accumulated management theory.

However, although Commanders and Managers are usually competent at dealing with known situations, they often struggle when having to work with the unknown, the uncertain and the unexpected.  In the unknown, there are often no clear cut answers, and ambiguities and paradoxes may often need to be embraced.  Rather than decisions being made about whether to do this or that, they become about how to achieve this and that.

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Although liminoid sounds like something a Cockney may have in their vodka (I apologise in advance to those wearing pearly jackets and encouraging each other to have bananas), a liminoid state is often experienced when we become completely and utterly absorbed in an activity.

The word liminoid has its roots in the Latin word limin, meaning a threshold.  In a liminoid state, we experience the threshold between conscious and unconscious awareness, with our senses being heightened and our perceptiveness widened. One of the key aspects of liminoid experiences is that the individual usually finds them to be intensely meaningful. 

The anthropologist, Victor Turner, described two different types of threshold experience.  These are the liminoid which is a uniquely individual and often spontaneous experience, and the liminal which is a collective and ritualised experience.  The key difference between the two experiences is that an individual chooses to be immersed in a liminoid experience, whereas they are usually obliged to take part in a collective liminal experience.

In many organisations, staff are usually under obligation to be involved in liminal rituals such as a meetings, change initiatives and executive worship. Although these events may have once been real threshold experiences that generated genuine transformations, most liminal rituals now seem meaningless, usually because the context of the original experience has been lost.

When individuals in an organisation no longer find any meaning in ritual liminoid activity, their need to find meaning in what they do often becomes more subliminal. They may appear to be taking part in liminal activity, but in reality, they are just going through the motions until they find the space and time to immerse themselves in a splash of liminoid experience.

Recently, a predominant theme for dreamers has been losing their cars or having them stolen.   When we dream about our cars, we are often dreaming about our ambitions in life, and how we might travel along our chosen career paths.

Dreaming of losing our car suggests that we are perhaps losing our ambitions in waking life, and somehow we have lost our drive to reach our goal.   If we dream that someone has stolen our car, then we may feel that others are trying to diminish our potential achievements.

Usually these dreams can be resolved by exploring the dreamer’s chosen path and revisiting specific ambitions, but many of these dreams seem to reveal a more general anxiety. People feel they no longer have the resources or the encouragement to reach their chosen goals.

This is reflected in the vocabulary and imagery experienced in these dreams  where the car thieves are often government officials rather than hoodies, and no assistance is given by the authorities to help find a lost car.  The more the government tries to restrict and control individual mobility, the less likely it is that individuals might achieve their chosen dreams.

In our dreams, we often use our memories, habits and beliefs to furnish the rooms we find ourselves in.  We can reflect this experience back into our waking life and use it to construct a personal Memory Palace.

Memory Palaces are thought to have been in use since Roman times, with the first recorded use of a Memory Palace being in the late 16th century by Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit priest on a mission to China. Ricci used his memory palace to learn the 50,000 pictogram characters of the Chinese language.

The key quality that makes the Memory Palace so effective is that it relies on our innate potential to remember spaces and connections. This is far more powerful than our ability to recall a series of individual objects. The World Memory Champion, Dominic O’Brien, uses a memory palace to memorise 54 packs of playing cards in sequence, looking briefly at each card only once.

In Dreamwork, we use a variety of ways to spatially represent what might be emerging from the cultural memory of an organisation. These include Maps, Journeys and Palaces which all enable the creation of the rich spaces and deep connections that help an organisation to connect with its potential.

When we dream, we often find ourselves in a house.  It may be a familiar house, it may be unfamiliar, and frequently it is the house we grew up in. 

In our dreams, a house usually represents our self, and the different rooms in our dream houses reflect different aspects of our identity. As we move through these rooms during our dream episodes, we usually encounter different types of furniture.

In our dreams, furniture often represents our memories, habits and beliefs.  If the furniture is heavy and antiquated, we may unconsciously feel that some of our habits in waking life are out of date and weighing us down.

If we are rearranging our furniture, we may looking for a fresh perspective on our beliefs, and perhaps would like to turn the tables in our present situation.  When we find ourselves frequently sitting in an old easy chair, we may be remembering when we had more time and things were easier.

Until relatively recently furniture was by made by specialist furniture makers, or handed down by parents and relatives. In the same way, spiritual beliefs used to be provided by specific religions, or learned from our elders.

Now furniture is most often assembled from flat packs in the same way that people now tend to assemble their own beliefs from a variety of sources.