Dao at Work by Dr Gemma Jiang.

In this sequel to Dao and Three Games of Personal Mastery, we will be extending our conversation around Dao from the personal realm to modern organizations. How might the Dao philosophy offer insights for challenges today's workplaces are grappling with?

In this week's DD session, we will share original texts from the classic Dao De Jing, complement the philosophy with stories and crowdsource cases from the audience.

We will explore three aspects of Dao philosophy and their applications in organizations:

• None doing: None doing is often misunderstood as passivity, while in actuality it is more than proactive as we understand it. We will illustrate the point with stories from big organizations such as Alibaba and Apple, as well as close to home stories and tie everything together with complexity leadership theory.
• Diversity in unity: How do things turn out different than what they seem to be? Why do policies produce unintended consequences? How do patterns of othering continue to perpetuate themselves? How do the oppressed become the oppressors? What might the inner work of social justice look like? In this section, we will explore all these questions from the perspective of Dao.
• Respect the cycles: Dao teaches people to achieve success then let it go. It is similar to the way of nature just as the moon wanes after it is full. How might organizations enable individuals to honor the cycles? How might organizations honor their own lifecycles, and the cycles of the market they are in? In this section, we will integrate systems thinking with Dao philosophy.

 
Gemma Jiang (PhD) specializes in providing comprehensive leadership support for large complex science teams funded by the National Science Foundation in the United States. Her primary roles with these teams include: 1) Identifying and amplifying assets within the team; 2) serving as buffer and connective tissue for disparate parts of the team; 3) leading cultural change towards collaboration and co-creation; 4) holding shared vision for scientific research that includes societal impact; 5) generating new knowledge by integrating theory with practice.

Through her position as the senior team scientist with Colorado State University, she serves as the chief team scientist of two National Science Foundation funded, multi-year, multi-institute, $15M budgeted projects. She also nurtures a thriving private consulting practice to help smaller science teams with their team leadership needs.

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