Chapter seven: All the dots connect

What does giving birth have in common with BEING Entrepreneurship? Both require a significant period of gestation. A period of time where most of the work happens beneath the surface, at the level of our inner being. It will feel like there isn't much to show for your efforts, however, in reality, you are simply getting ready for an incredible outpouring of creativity and inspired manifestation!

The film and writing projects were all part of my apprenticeship. They were effective at generating curiosity and intrigue but there was still a way to go in turning this research into a tangible proposition that mainstream organizations could say “yes” to.

My last boss during my corporate career was somebody who deeply understood my ambitions and remained a friend after I left. Every once in a while, we would meet for coffee and share updates. As a highly respected leader in the organization, and somebody who had a great overview of the development needs internally, she was always sensing whether or not there was an opportunity to bring me back in as a coach or consultant. For me it was a great gauge to see how far, or close, my work was from the needs of the business. After every meeting I would walk away feeling encouraged with the progress but also with a new insight on how I could get one step closer to bring my services back into my old workplace.

I remember one meeting in particular where I had come to present the overall findings of my Heart in Business project. She not only loved the insights but also how I had gone back to my researcher roots. It was in that conversation that she encouraged me to look at what it would take to build on this qualitative research and create a quantitative measure of how much “Heart” was being expressed in an organization. We referred to it as the “Heart Quotient”. I loved the idea and immediately knew that this would eventually be the bridge to making this work more accessible to organizations.

Quantifying Heart may sound like an oxymoron. Afterall, how can something so subjective be measured? Is it crazy to imagine that one day it could become the new metric for organizations to track and evaluate themselves on?

Common sense would suggest it is not possible but in that particular moment in time I knew it would be the next step on my Being Entrepreneur journey. Afterall I had spent 10 years perfecting the art of quantifying and validating consumer insights during my researcher career. Why could I not apply these same skills to help bring more objectivity to the subjective nature of Heart (in Business)? Could it be that all my past experiences had set me up for this moment in time? I was up for the challenge, and I was not the only one!

My good friend, Sujith Ravindran, who I met during the late 90’s during our MBA studies had been walking a parallel path over the past years. After graduating, he also joined the ranks of a large multinational corporation, became disillusioned and went on his personal transformation journey. For him this meant reconnecting and reclaiming his spiritual roots. As a child growing up with Guru’s in India, he was a student of the rich mystical traditions, but over the years this wisdom had taken a back seat as it seemed incompatible with the demands of his modern life. It was during our many late-night chats that his rich mystical essence could freely shine through. In these enlightened moments I remember having many fascinating conversations about infusing corporate life with more depth and meaning. Although we weren’t ready for it yet, we could both sense that one day we would create a business around these ideas.

I remember a crucial moment, as we were wrapping up our corporate careers, when we had to acknowledge that the time to join forces had not yet come. The idea of co-creating with such a good friend was compelling. However, we had to accept that, despite the similarities in the vision that we held, there were also important differences. Sujith’s calling was to support individuals in their personal growth while I was passionate about working with organizations. At the time we could not reconcile the two and therefore concluded that it was best to walk our separate paths. Accepting that I first had to walk on my own was scary. It was not the comfortable choice but definitely turned out to be the right one at the time.

So, while I was researching Heart in Business, and learning my lessons on how to effectively bridge this work with organizations, Sujith was writing books and offering his talks and seminars. We continued to nurture our friendship and follow each other’s adventures until one day, several years later, the “Heart Quotient” idea came up. This was the spark we had been waiting for. We instantly knew that the moment had come for our paths to converge. Creating a measurement tool that reveals the deeper essence of an organization was a huge challenge, but now we were ready to take it on.

What followed was six months of profound co-creation. We spent almost every evening on Skype sourcing the characteristics of a “Heart-centered” organization. We drew on the Heart in Business research, Sujith’s extensive knowledge of the Indian mystical traditions as well as our personal experiences in the corporate world. We downloaded as much as we could without feeling rushed to structure and organize what was coming through us. Eventually a beautiful canvas of concepts and ideas had emerged.

With this extensive brainstorm in place, we could start to see some natural clusters starting to form. As we continued to play with all of this material, an overall framework appeared. It was in the shape of a house with each pillar being one of the clusters.

Now that we knew how to break this big fuzzy idea of Heart in Business down into more specific dimensions, we could start the next phase of our co-creative process. This involved developing the questionnaire of the Heart Quotient survey. After several more weeks we ended up with a list of 83 questions. Some of them spoke directly to our rational mind and others took us to a more intuitive place where we had to imagine how we would behave in certain situations.

At the end of these 6 months, we had an overall framework broken down into 23 different measures. We had an extensive list of questions that could be clustered in a multitude of ways to inform the scores. We had created the foundation of a product that was sourced from our unique life experiences and designed to make our lofty visions more relevant and accessible to organizations.

These six months were without doubt the most fun and productive of my working career. When I think back on them, they appear as a blur. We had entered into such a flow, similar to what artists must feel when they are creating from a deep place of connection and inspiration. We often talk about this creation process as something being channeled through us. Sujith and I happened to be the right people at the right time to “receive” it and bring it into form, but we never felt we “owned” it. Therefore, right from the beginning, we chose not to copyright any of this material, despite being advised to do so by many people.

These adapted words by Kahlil Gibran ring true when thinking about our creative process:

Something comes through you

But it is not from you

And though it is with you

It belongs not to you

At the end of this first creation phase, immediately another one opened up. One of Sujith’s many qualities is his ability to think big. He helped me see that the next step was to leverage technology to develop the artificial intelligence that would automatically translate a user’s response to the 83 questions into a detailed, personalized report. This was a bold vision but, given the flow we were in, we decided to take on the challenge.

Sujith’s connection to India opened the door to some of the most brilliant tech resources I have ever worked with. For the next six months we were fully immersed in creating the intelligence of the tool and the backend structure that would enable the automation and scaling of this work in the future. At this point we were feeling the huge potential of what lied ahead. We were ready to formalize our business and commit to a partnership. We were ready to go to market.