The Owner of DEUCE’s Evolutionary Purpose

Whether you realize it or not, you are a contributing stakeholder in this organization simply by reading this sentence. You might be a student, an employee, or maybe just a distant friend to the entity we call DEUCE Gym, but you are a stakeholder, nonetheless. What is more is that the organizational stage is set for DEUCE Gym to operate as a living breathing organism. Its culture, which you are a part of on some level, is alive. It changes, evolves, and reacts to the stimuli around it. As a result, DEUCE Gym, its purpose, and its future is owned by no one.

Part of the characteristics that are unique to organizations like DEUCE Gym include anti-fragile tendencies and an evolutionary purpose. Firstly, the anti-fragile characteristic means that we’ve evolved and have been constructed in a way that, like the human body, will adapt for the better from negative stimulus. Since we are an organization of generally flat leadership and empowered freedom, you can flood the gym, tax the gym, vandalism the gym, sue the gym, and core components can be destroyed in the community and it will react, adapt, and evolve for the better. Organizations that are short sided and/or ego driven, on the other hand, are quite fragile. In those organizations, you can severely stress or remove just one part and it may die. 

Secondly, this notion of evolutionary purpose is where you come in. Like I said, the future of the gym is not owned by anyone. It is, by definition, in the hands of the organism that is DEUCE Gym. Don’t believe me? Imagine one of your favorite leaders and coaches at the gym deciding that tomorrow, the gym will now be painted blue and the main service offered changed from strength and conditioning to hip hop dance classes. Based on our structure, this silly example is actually possible and our leaders have the power to make such changes. However, I think we both know that the organization would reject such changes. It wouldn’t reject them by vote from the top or by formal action, but rather the system wouldn’t accept it. There would be internal and external resistance that would not accept such a decision as a proper evolution of the entity. Conversely, other evolutionary changes that are accepted by the organization can and are adopted, setting us on a course that no one could have planned at our inception seven years ago (SEE: the unlimited membership, program design, specialty courses, a changing leadership structure, and an emerging new “Baseline” workout, and countless other examples).

This is key. This means you have power. This also mean DEUCE Gym has power beyond anything we can imagine. Of course, your influence must integrate into the system in a way that isn’t rejected by the organism, but it is influence, nonetheless. The current organism is set on a path of development that integrates, demands, and develops excellence. It rejects people, ideas, and stimuli that are inauthentic and lack objective quality. This sets into motion an organism that will grow up into something better and better each day, week, month, and year adding elements and stripping away others.

In the same way that a single cell organism can and did evolve into much different, much more beautifully complex creatures like zebras, falcons, and Tom Brady’s, DEUCE Gym will do the same. This simple truth now brings the finger pointing back to, you, the reader. This freedom comes with immeasurable responsibility. How will you guide our evolution forward? Will your forces on the organism train DEUCE Gym to be better? Will this organism that morphs to its environment recognize your influence as helpful to its evolution?

We need you.

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach