Be Do Have
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust
By: Matt Auron
Usually, people come to us with a gap in mind: be it engagement, revenues, execution, or even something more vague like “scaling leadership”. What follows can be an incredibly deep exploration that results in both the transformation of the individual and the business. A hallmark of our work is depth. What does this mean, exactly? Many people working in personal growth and coaching use this term liberally. Despite its liberal usage, we know when we see or feel depth. Depth is an insight into the things under the surface that drive our behaviors or insight into the heart of issues and life itself. This insight might be our personality, where we grew up, our family of origin imprint, or the operating model we hold of our role at work.
Driving the way we show up in our world is our internal operating system: models that live inside of us and guide us every day. Our operating systems contain depth and are the path to sustainable transformation, although they are notoriously difficult to change given how these operating models shape who we are at our core and have been ingrained from years (and generations) of patterning. Operating systems and depth also exist in companies and can include aspects of organizational essence; values and core beliefs; suboptimal norms and shared negative beliefs; and purpose. Both individually and collectively, who we are drives how we show up which in turn drives the results we receive. Be → Do→ Have.
Have
The top-level, “have,” comprises the results we achieve or the things we have. Organizational metrics on this level can include: financial performance, execution, engagement, fulfillment, happiness, and effectiveness. For individuals, this can be a personal set of development goals or a plan they have created for themselves. In coaching, we support people to look at the gap in their leadership, or what they have vs what they want to have. As we say, “with no gap in what you have and what you want to have, there is no driver for coaching.” Wanting to have something we currently don’t is the most important input for successful coaching, beyond coach skill or technique.
It is critical to have clarity at this level around what we are trying to achieve. This is somewhat a given! It is important, however, to scrub this level as having a perspective on the results you want can be more difficult than it seems and the act of getting clear is powerful in itself.
Examples of the Have level include:
Revenue
Engagement metrics
Trust
Growth
Net promoter score (NPS)
Feelings of peace, joy, etc.
Do
This level tends to get the most focus and for good reason: the first step in addressing a gap is to look at what we are doing and not doing to support a given result. On an individual level, this involves taking rigorous accountability and looking at actions that are supportive and not to achieve a desired result. Much of the time in coaching, we support others to be accountable to certain actions that will behaviorally move them forward.
Taking responsibility for our actions allows for conscious choices to be made. It can be humbling to see how we are creating the things we aren’t happy with, sometimes by simply not saying or doing anything. This moment of sobriety can wake us up to a clearer picture of why our life or business looks the way it is. Accountability and action-taking are critical - change requires doing something different.
Similarly, at the organizational level, we help clients assess the processes they have in place and if they are working or not. Organizationally, we can look at every process we have, be it onboarding or feedback or tracking goals or accounting, and align it to the results we want to have as well as down to who we are. Process design for an organization that creatively supports the deserted culture and goals is what creates the most coherent and aligned organizations.
Once we align with what we want to have, we can usually define a set of new actions that support the desired outcome. However, we know that the most sustainable changes are made when the beliefs blocking the change shift as well.
Examples of the Do level include:
Behaviors
Rituals and routines
Actions
Processes
Habits
Systems used
Be
The principle of our being, or the Be level, shows up everywhere: we have internal world views and ways of seeing things that guide our actions, which then create a result that reinforces the original worldview. Where we were born, our parents' influence, and our personality all make up parts of our operating system. We look at the world through lenses and our glasses are colored by who we are: our being. These lenses are narratives, mental models, principles, and values that can be reframed and shifted. By looking at ourselves or our lives differently, transformation occurs. This level of depth is the root of sustainable change and Robert Keegan, and others long before him, have written that the true blockers of human and organizational change are beliefs that (sometimes secretly) oppose the desired result. We call these beliefs that are hidden, repressed, and denied shadows and they exist at both individual and collective levels. We can become aware of them, and shift our perspective to allow for a new set of actions aligned with a more purposeful place. When we shift how we are and how we see our world, the behaviors that follow are far more sticky and sustainable. We know that behavioral change is driven by emotions and depth, and rewards-based motivation amounts to white-knuckling success.
Organizationally, this amounts to assessing the essence of an organization, its deep identity or even soul that is articulated through its culture internally and brand externally. This is discoverable through social constructions like language and stories. Similar to an individual human, organizations can have distorted beliefs that are oppositional to what is espoused. These collective shadows can be brought to the surface and integrated like individual shadows and trapped energy that blocks performance is unleashed. Constructs at the Be level are values, principles, metaphors, and even key phrases and linguistics. They are embodied by specific organizational ways of being, several notable being The HP Way, The Disney Way, and The DaVita Way, which are mental maps that articulate the essence of these businesses. Building these mechanisms into every process such as manager competencies, onboarding, feedback habits, and even the tech systems that are used create Do-level reinforcing mechanisms for the organizational being, just like good behavioral goals can reinforce who we are at our individual essence.
Examples of the Be level include:
Beliefs
Feelings
Mental models
Mindsets
Narratives and stories
Feelings
States
...
At Evolution, we utilize Be-Do-Have every day as a holistic way of working with people and organizations in change. We know that businesses are built to achieve results, and these results are guided by aligned actions and at the deepest level from a sense of purpose and clarity of who they are and aren’t. Embracing the entire vertical chain of leadership and business facilitates transformation and evolutionary development.