Ajay Narayanan

Background

About Ajay Narayanan

My mission is to support organizations and other collectives, as well as leaders in unlocking the deeper potential of human systems. Through my presence and work, I deliver interventions that foster empowerment and create deep alignment towards collective goals. My approach seeks to integrate Eastern wisdom traditions that enable insights through Presence, Mindfulness, and Polarities with current Western Organizational Development approaches such as Social Constructionism, Dialogic OD, Gestalt, Adaptive Leadership, Anthro-Complexity, and Use of Self. Left brain approaches were my default mode of operation since my undergraduate and post graduate programs in engineering. My decades of technical and leadership work in diverse disciplines only reinforced this mode of operation. However, even as my proficiency at work grew, I noticed challenges in getting collective alignment towards a common cause. My approach of devising "brilliant technical solutions" while helping me progress, also caused resistance and frustration. My approach had clear limitations in moving collectives. In parallel, since my twenties, I have participated in various personal development programs including, T-group laboratories, the Landmark forum, and meditation/energy practices such as Taichi and Vipassana. This inner-work helped me ground and cultivate deeper sensing skills to help me find balance in life, even as my personal and professional lives remained unintegrated. I feel particularly grateful to have worked at the World Bank Group for the last fifteen years, a wonderful petri dish of multi-cultural complexity of structure and mandate. My last job in Internal Audit in particular, with a mandate to improve the organization, gave me a vantage view of and the authority to work with the organization’s processes and its human complexity. It is here that my years of inner work and my rationality driven proficiency began to integrate. I saw the key to strengthening organizational effectiveness and efficiency lay as much in the realm of human dynamics, as in the realm of systems and process. This realization led me to pursue my third Master’s degree in Organizational Development and Knowledge Management, and more recently leave my job to dedicate myself to this pursuit. I am now in service to individuals and organizations that are interested in holistic approaches to unlocking organizational potential. My current work at the NTL institute.