It has recently been revealed to me that the more I let go and allow for others to participate in my life, the less control I have, but the more connection. I have always known I was a control freak, the typical kind, trying to manage exactly how things are done around me, with my children, in my house, at work. I blocked my parents from helping with our wedding, I blocked Jon from helping with our first child unless he did it my way. I’d rather not collaborate on projects because I can do it better myself. This has been changing over time, and I see it most clearly now, with a second child recently joining our family, trying to work, and keep it all going. I simply can’t do it all myself or block people from helping.

So, I have different people coming in the house to help – friends and family – and I notice that I lose control, but something else happens. Things might get messy and are certainly not done my way, but those times get more fun. Innovation and creativity increase. Connection rises. I feel less lonely, my older child is comforted. To me, at this moment, there seems a direct correlation between control and innovation/creativity/connection. As one goes up the other goes down and vice versa. It is actually too simply to invest time into generating a visual chart to express this concept!

So I started thinking about our clients and organizations we work with and follow in the press. It is already known, to some degree, the more freedom and space employees have to be entrepreneurial and solve problems in the moment, the more innovative that company becomes. The more bureaucratic and slow to respond due to control mechanisms, the less creative. I would be curious to know how the employees in different cultural settings would respond to a question about how connected they feel? To themselves, their colleagues, their customers. I would guess that they feel more connection when they can innovate and create. Less when they feel controlled by someone else or the system.

This seems so simple, but as a practice for someone more comfortable in control, it is challenging. It is difficult to let our children make decisions for themselves, or direct reports experiment and fail. It is worth looking inside to see what Weapon of Scarcity is at play to motivate us to cling or block flow. My experience is that the flow is always happening and that the control is actually an action that directly stops it. Scarcity ceases to allow sufficiency, which already always is, even in business, baby.