Zafer Achi

Spoken in English. Their words, as they said them.

I love teamwork. It's so fascinating.

I love watching just observing it's such a privilege just observing a team struggling with working together when things are super ambiguous, when pressure is high, etc. It's just fascinating. It's really hard.

I'm currently, really interested in this question of how do we get teams to work better.

And particularly teams at the top of organizations. A question that has, you know, bearing on the future of humankind. Right? I've been a consultant, right, for whatever number of years, thirty plus years. In a strategy consulting firm, I've worked with teams at the top in countless countries, countless industries over decades. The amount of waste, the amount of waste in terms of, psychological suffering, in terms of time wasted, in terms of impact on the families of those team members, in terms of poor decisions affecting thousands of people and communities, is just unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Used to have a client that said, he was a truckerland, larger than life Quebecer, really a big guy. He used to say, you know Zafar, the biggest cost of business, you know what it is? No. Biggest cost of business is ego. And I love that, thing. It was like twenty years ago, I didn't understand what ego was. I didn't understand what he meant, but he was more experienced than me.

And so I'm I'd love for the next few years for my contribution to the world to be around, improving that a little.

There's nothing out there that's, that's compelling, I think. Nothing that is compelling. I think there are traditional recipes and formulas about how teamwork should happen, but those don't don't necessarily make room for constant change and ambiguity and unpredictability and absence of perfect control and stuff like that. So I'm really really interested in what we can create in this area.

Yeah, so enoughness and openness to change. This idea of stability and constant change is polarity between the two. I find that profoundly interesting.

There's a there's this project that has been gestating in me for a while about writing writing something a book about teamwork in complexity.

And like I feel that this is this is mine to write. Like, there there's a book on teamwork and complexity that isn't as high minded and and and hard to access as, you know, Stanley McChrystals, Team of Teams and that isn't as mechanical and whether to predictability and control as Lancione's five dysfunctions of it. There's there's a book there that is missing in the middle and that I've wanted to write for not wanted to write, but I felt I I will write for a while and I think I'm gonna start making, decisive steps in that direction in 2022.

I mean one of my one of the things that I love doing is being in the outdoors, backcountry skiing, hiking etc. And in those those environments offer actually a really powerful metaphor for teamwork in ambiguity and complexity. It's this idea of, you know, having to, achieve something and remain safe and whole in difficult unpredictable circumstances.

There's a lot to learn from the way you know, mountain guides create both safety and permission to dare and explore and how these are elastic qualities that get created in those environments. If we had this on our teams, If our teams could could operate with the same same ability to navigate safely together and for themselves and for their organization, but also to dare and explore.

And not put each other in danger by being reckless or that would be powerful. So, this idea, this metaphor, keeps me going.