Leadership Reconstructed: IDEAS WANTED!

Invitation to contribute to a new approach for leadership development in large complex organisations

Update: Following the superb engagement and energy after the original post (below) we have decided to eventually launch our Freethinkers Corner series to stimulate further dialogue and conversation. We intend to collect all the ideas from the community, and also facilitate the encounter with some especially noteworthy thinkers and practitioners who might provide new insights and inspiration.

If you are interested, please join us for the #FREETHINKERSCORNER LAUNCH WEEK starting with an Open Dialogue session on Monday 12 September at 8AM UK 9AM CET — and fortnightly follow-ups. The full programme will be announced on the website during the coming days.

Below again my original question — I have collated some of the current answers in a Medium post in the comments. FURTHER IDEAS more than welcome…

We’re building a fundamentally new #leadership development approach for a number of large and complex multinational companies.

Our intention is to develop systemic and ethical leadership — combining a moral interpretation of #business #purpose with appropriate interventions at the organizational level (structure, policies, processes, norms etc) as well as team and individual #development.

For this purpose we are integrating #virtue #ethics, critical theory, pragmatism and positive #psychology. We are also combining organizational evolution, moral development, communities of practice and cognitive/constructive leadership development. And we’re using a blended action/service/civic learning framework and (psychodynamic) #coaching to support transformational “shifts” in individual and organizational identity and #character.

Complex enough? You bet! :-) Of course, all of that complexity “in the backend” at some stage will have to be radically simplified.

We are currently wrestling with the question which specific interventions to select. If the duration of the development is five to six months, what would you focus on? What are the most important “epiphanies” at the different levels (organizational practices, team, individual, leader) that can be achieved, which are most important, and what are the experiments or activities “that work” in practice? What’s your favorite techniques that really build “disorienting dilemmas” to support transformational learning?

Views very welcome!!

Selection of contributions from the original posting - many thanks go to, amongst many others, Jens Alsleben, Annabel Beerel, Benjamin P. Taylor, Gergely Hodicska, Jean-Baptiste (JB) Dernoncourt, Jonas Gebauer, Sonia Allinson-Penny, David Medina, Eugen Oetringer, Kelly Byrnes, Martin Collinson, Julian Saipe, Mandy Young, Michael Kuhn, Artiola Shabani, Robert Ogilvie, Tim Mooney, Christian Wandeler, Mandy Young, Tjomme Reeringh, Aneeqa Malik, Isaac Phoenix, Tiffany Zamot, Mark Emdin, Jesús Martín González, Mark Downham, Naveen Khajanchi, Johannes Willms, Eric Crowell, Thomas Braun, Cameron Parr, Pavel Charny, Wolfgang Rathert, Paul Crick, Bea Gerber, Martijn Derksen, Dr. Martina Olbert, Ade McCormack, Frank Calberg, Marie Thulesius, Dr. Amina Aitsi-Selmi MD PhD, Jean Létourneau

• Great invitation Otti the recognition of and then psychic/cultural disinvestment in old behaviours/process reveals emergent purpose and creative intelligence which is the starting point for change. A genuine openness to doing this work is a critical starting point. Presencing practices allow for true responsiveness in the system. Open mind/heart is innate (not a doing) and is revealed through necessary ‘holding containers’ where safe, facilitated spaces allow leadership to let go, and co-sense what Is, and what is needed. Open Will is the harnessing of new purpose into action. Multi-day multi-group discovery sessions can be powerful (usually preceded by 1–2–1 coaching so that leaders come to the group work with more openness). Also, embodiment practices (from simple interventions to full blown social presencing theatre) tap into intuitive/creative intelligence, natural resourcefulness and imagination.
  In terms of moral premise, I am with Laloux on the idea of higher purpose, where vibrancy in the human system (teaching collective self-responsibility not passive participation) is the fulfillment sought, and the outcomes Are the evolution. Shout me down for my idealism! 😎
• I think openness requires a willingness to be vulnerable, which requires an organizational culture where people feel trusted and supported and give trust and support to others in return. That is quite an advanced level of maturity both in an individual and an organization!
• Hm… what leads to disorientation… If you are exposed overtired in unknown terrain and someone is there who cares?
• Hello Otti, an intervention activity to consider is the impact of pressure on ethical and moral decisions. Once defined and discussed, scenarios would be useful. The scenarios could escalate from benign to gut-wrenching, which is what people face. They could be used in all four levels you mention. I would be glad to talk or help if you would like.
• Fascinating, and certainly thorough! Looks like a great goal to strive for. Have you considered any of the following 1. action logic e.g. https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership, as well as 2. reducing the cult of the outspoken leader and shifting the focus to more introverted leadership styles (where listening and observation can provide deeper insights and power perception is not based on the loudest in the room, even if they are the least competent) e.g. Susan Cain’s work…. and finally 3. the diversity link to reduce homogeneous group think and ‘bro’ culture in making ethical judgements? Re. interventions, I find tailored and realistic simulations provide opportunities for action learning in a safe environment and facilitate deep reflection to aid the learning process and mindset shift. Good luck!
• Otti, I would
  1. Create awareness moments by going straight to the field and show how productivity could explode if #control was replaced by #trust (perhaps going there with the following question in mind: how would you do this if you were home?) For 1) — my advice would be to make them do and experience. Remember the HBR case of the NYPD police? He got what he wanted from the people in charge because he made them spend a day as a police officer, especially with the heavy armed coat in a minuscule car. Awareness came from self experiencing. I would design a very field oriented leadership course which is mostly experience and “course as a consequence”.
  2. Start obtaining the pain points of the business (“what would help you do a better job”) from the people who experience them. PS: this requires inner strength; when the box is open, frustration will have to be vented out before pain points can really appear. On 2) — I would go simple. In between the people in the room, what would be make you do a better job? Imagine if those things weren’t there, how better would you be? Now, what you felt was true for everyone around you, how much do you think your business will grow?
  3. Put capex into helping the inner work for as many people as the one who raise their hands, wherever they are and whatever their rank. (PS: any transformation requires capex, there is no reason this one would not).
  4. Implement agile / collective intelligence / continuous improvement / design thinking / job to be done…. methodologies of their choice, to be applied to as many business functions and segments as possible. Focus on having inside people become accredited trainer with the intention that they create as many other trainers as possible inside their organization. On 4) — This advice was meant to spread. Perhaps, it should come in an ulterior stage? In 5–6 months, this would plant seeds and create the spreading framework. The growing pace is not up to any of us to decide.
• Seems super interesting Otti (I would be happy to participate, but that wouldn’t be a conscious commitment from my side, but if you need somebody proofread materials with a fresh/outside view, feel free to reach out to me)!
• Few thoughts:
  - It is half related to your question. It would be interesting to create a readiness checklist/protocol, and only those companies can start the program which passes this phase. This might sounds strange/elitist, but in some way, this is a very correct approach, it saves wasted efforts on both sides. For example, a very general problem is, that the top leadership wants such a program to “fix” the rest of the organization. And this mindset (see do get cycle) is actually a major part of the status quo. So if they are not ready to take responsibility, then it makes no sense to start the program. (If you start in such an environment, that would be very similar to when you “agilize” product development, which is only one step of a huge, corporate waterfall process.)
• - And from this perspective, I think a critical part is to make the leaders realize that they actually create reality. I am not talking about any “esoteric” topic (which I have nothing against it, just I don’t have enough knowledge about those topics), but even on a cognitive level, it can be proven (leveraging the ladder of inference, Johari window, see do get cycle, transaction analysis, talking about myself versus the others → the second automatically generates resistance, my internal situational games preheats my frames of digesting information, etc) that the way I behave sets up the reaction of the people around me.
• - In my experience, a very useful trojan horse is teaching NVC, as people are okay to improve their communication, even without realizing that with a good teacher this will start them on self-awareness training. But of course, there are many other ways to start this journey. Much wasted energy is because not the people are talking in a meeting but their fears. And here the next level could be to turn these “weaknesses” into a “superpower”. My experience is, that after a while, I can learn my major triggers, and I can train myself to be aware of the bodily sensation those, and when I feel them, then I know I need to stop and turn on the “consciousness flashlight” to understand what am I actually doing.
• - A related topic is to teach them some System Thinking and CAS (complex adaptive system) knowledge. This is useful from multiple angles. First, they have to understand that the behavior is pretty much defined/impacted by the external system (policies, roles, physical environments, communication, incentive systems, etc.). Again, my experience is, that in more corporate organizations leaders are surprised if something doesn’t work the way they want, but actually what happens is exactly constraints by the system. Secondly, they need to realize that planning won’t work anymore that way they got used to it. Also, there will be mistakes/failures, and this is part of the game. You need to embrace it, but this won’t happen in a blaming culture. Also, in a CAS you need to amplify “weak signals”. Otherwise, you lose critical feedback. My experience is that if there is an issue, many leaders with a lower level of consciousness try to blame somebody, in their mind this must be an attitude or capability issue (this is why I was referring to the previous point which is about fundamental attribution error). In reality, in most cases, this is not the case, but the system makes the person behave in a certain way. Like lack of clear goals, lack of providing the right tooling, and having policies sending mixed messages to the individuals/teams (like we are innovative, but all the support functions are very slow and absolutely risk averse, no skin in the game). CAS is important from a very similar perspective. Probably we underestimate how much Taylorism and Fordism impacted the way businesses think or what business leaders are thought in an MBA. They try to apply mindset, tools (Gantt chart, waterfall, etc.), and methods to a complex domain, and then they are surprised that the team/project has failed, people are extremely busy, are burnt out, etc, only because they try to make up the mistakes used by the wrong way of planning (in a complex domain by default you can’t plan certain things, those are non-linear systems).
• - Cynefin model: It is surprising that most leaders never heard about it. It is critical, as leveraging complexity can show that actually everything you “sell” by your program is not an option but a necessity for a company operating in a complex domain (which is true for most companies, also, you are talking about a transformation, which by default is an emergent process, so it is in the complex domain.) We developed a model based on complexity and consciousness with 5 external (Purpose, Values, Empowering the whole person, System ownership, Transformation) and 5 internal (Wisdom, Compassion, We-Focus, Self-Awareness, Perseverance) areas a conscious leader has to be aware of and has to develop themselves, their teams, organization, company, and ecosystem (it shows that this whole topic has a fractal nature).
• - Incentive systems, org design, etc. If you check the book Sooner, Safer, Happier, it has many great patterns that one can leverage from this perspective. Also, Humanocracy can be interesting from this perspective. If those systems are not aligned with the expected changes, then I think it will pull back the whole effort. Ideally, people should organize around value streams, and the goals have to be set in a way that the outcome is defined not the HOW. This implies, that a from project to product type of mindset change is important. Also, investing in building transpersonal leadership skills (versus “only” servant leadership, in which case leaders might lose sight of the goal they should achieve.)
• - Scope: It can be interesting whether you want to work with the whole organization or only with a subsegment. People can change at a different pace, so pushing through the whole org might create a “cargo cult” type of behavior. So if you can start in smaller steps, and create social proof, that can later accelerate the process.
  - Culture: I am sure this is obvious to you, but psychological safety is another crucial pillar. It is important to make sure people understand this is key, there is no way one can turn an organization into a learning one if people don’t feel safe.
  - Maybe this seems outside the scope, but performance management needs to be changed as well. My experience is, that in bigger companies this process is more like a theater. In such a transition and in the new world people need much more support. Leaders need to realize that they are not responsible for the outcome (they are accountable for it) but they are responsible for the mindset and providing clear goals and context, so teams work on their own. Also, it is important from shifting from individual development to team development. Nowadays teams should be the base building blocks of a company.
• - Another important topic is Team Topologies. It was developed for product engineering organizations, but the concept I think applies to any organization, as I think Conway’s law is more general than it could be only applied to software. Topics like team cognitive load and interaction models between teams can have a strong influence on any organization.
  - Maybe a good constraint could be using OKRs the right way (like explained in the Moving the needle book). This can force the top-level leadership to shift more toward outcome-focused thinking, defining the WHAT, not the HOW. This can provide space for the teams to figure out how they can contribute, this can improve engagement, ownership, etc. Also, shared OKRs on the lower levels versus strict cascading OKRs can help build out the natural “value streams” inside a more silo-based organization.
• - Oh, and very simple change management techniques (like Kotter). But simply just understanding that change means building a new habit (or transforming an old one) needs energy until the new behavior becomes a habit (the leader or a delegate has to put that energy into the system during that period, so if you don’t have that energy, don’t start the change, or otherwise, you just increase the resistance against the next change). Also, basic principles in building a high-performing team. (Like the framework outlined by Christina Wodtke.)
• I mean, that’s a mega big and open question! I would certainly prioritise:
  - back to the floor (this one should be self-explanatory)
  - whole systems search conference: (there are many methods — see
  https://stream.syscoi.com/2021/02/09/a-collection-of-collective-systems-facilitation-and-delivery-techniques/ — I am partial to FutureSearch, also Appreciative Inquiry, and some people simply prefer Open Space, whereas I also know incredible practitioners of the MG Taylor Method)
  - active leader-led culture change (as I’ve adapted from Systems Leadership Theory) and productive conversations and the rest of the five core practices, which includes triple-loop learning — embedding practice for honest conversations, clarity (of roles, tasks, programmes, relationships), triple loop learning, leader-led culture shaping, and good and clear intent!
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_organisation-leadership-needs-activity-6770608640333377537-JGmC/
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_leanagileuk-culture-leadership-activity-6821329835034595328-VG44/
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_five-core-practices-activity-6818796903392784384-WIDi
• https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6742346429211136000/
  - whole-system power+systems organisation workshop and encounters with the other: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_power-and-love-in-parts-and-wholes-oshry-activity-6828582068298018817-tD4T
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_middle-systemsthinking-organisation-activity-6793063215292121088-Eeih
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_organisations-society-activity-6689067857860546560-WRFc/
• (and see reading list below)
• - observation and challenge in leadership meetings (self explanatory)
• - viable systems-model-led organisation design: See the viable systems model entries in https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/05/06/a-very-rough-and-partial-draft-systems-thinking-reading-list/
• - through that, personal development with private sessions leading into (as appropriate, and private and confidential), therapy, coaching, Torbert developmental work, long walks on cold mountains, whatever (self-explanatory? long walks on cold mountains is a fun Nietzsche reference ;-) )
• - CDAI with a focus on power and ethics — yes!
  see https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/08/09/learning-for-timely-action-an-introduction-to-the-cybernetics-of-collaborative-developmental-action-inquiry-cdai-torbert-and-erfan-2019-cybernetics-human-knowing/
• I love virtue ethics (my undergraduate thesis was on Alasdair Macintyre) and I love pragmatism (I think my systems | cybernetics | complexity tends towards it) — and I’d love to know how you propose to integrate those?
• Otti this is a question which I am trying to answer for myself since many years. „Ohne Ethik keine Ökonomie“ — „No economy without ethics“. Over the last 18 months I developed a concept with 11 different views on how to develop the right leadership ethics and the right „Menschenbild“ in leadership.
  For me there is a causal chain:
  Verstehen 🌬 Vertrauen 🌬 Vollbringen
  (Understand 🌬 Trust 🌬 Perform).
  Therefore we need to make people better understand each other and themselves first. My 11 main focus areas are:
  1. 11 golden rules of credibility in leadership — what makes you credible as a leader
  2. Stoneage Rituals in Teams and Top-Leadership-Level — why are we who we are and how can we handle ourselves
  3. Psychology in Teams — what dynamics and behavior can we expect and why
  4. Human communication — why do we receive and send messages how
  5. dysfunctions of teams
  6. Emotions in Leadership with PERMA Lead — how can Leaders increase the wellbeing of their teams by increasing Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment
  7. Most important Values for ethical leadership
  8. Thinking Environment („Der Denkraum“) — how to create the right athmosphere that people need to think freely
  9. Mediation as a necessary leadership tool to solve conflicts before they escalate
  10. Coaching for performance — how can I coach my people and help them „pulling things out“ instead of „pushing things in“
  11. Strengths based Leadership — how can I uncover the talents and strengths of my people — using psychometrics like CliftonStrengths, VIA24 (Values in Action) or PERMA-Lead-Profiler
  These 11 „spotlights“ on how to put my people in the center of the organizational focus enable Leaders on all levels to become more sensitive regarding the responsibility and impact they have on other peoples live and how they can support them so that they get in the flow and thrive.
• Hi Otti, That sounds like a very ambitious project. I am not really one for techniques as such but rather for wrestling with reality in the here and now. The most important task of leadership is to identify, frame and mobilize people to adapt to new realities. That requires being highly attentive, curious and systemic in one’s thinking. It demands a certain frame of mind, a capacity for cognitive complexity and great courage and people dislike new realities — especially the unpalatable ones. I suggest begin there and the rest will follow. Our current mess is due to the fact that we don’t face reality until it brutally hits us in the face and by then our options are closed. We need perspicacious leaders with courage NOW.
• So what outcomes would be possible in 6 months of executive or leadership coaching? 1) you could reorder your top 5 strengths & also add in and thus drop 1 strength in your top 5. I’m thinking VIA character strengths. 2) you could, after 2–4 sessions once you have good familiarity & rapport, do a 360 assessment on them & have them work to change 1–2 specific things. Receiving a leader 360 well (as the client) is VERY difficult and a great litmus test of overall perspective taking, EQ, and roughly cognitive ability in terms of data complexity. 3) Using a competency based assessment, like EQ or various Leadership or motivation assessments, select 1–2 competencies to improve and show some progress after 6mo.
• Otti — a lot of thoughts come to mind based on your prompt. More questions than answers or suggestions… What is it you would sense for in the organization to understand the current reality? How would you go about that sense-making in a way that prompts the cohort you are working with into discernment about the current reality? What reflective questions help the cohort articulate a future ‘organizational character’? What is the framework that helps the cohort turn their reflections into potential actions? How will the cohort sense the impact of actions they take to nudge teams toward a desired organizational character?
• Who has power, and what do they use it for?
• Otti great question about what core components to include in an innovative leadership development program with so many possibilities. 1. core of leadership is who you are — getting back to our roots in nature is a great place to explore your own authenticity. In wilderness places that are harmonious, tried, and tested over time, you can be yourself because you are accepted for who you are. You can’t fit together well with a team if you don’t know who you are. 2. Then you need to relate to others which involves connecting, communicating, celebrating diversity, and cooperation. Wild animals and tribal people learn from a young age how to be leaders, and how to care for their pack, clan, or community as a way of caring for themselves. 3. The intervention needs to be sustainable, duplicatable, and leave a legacy. There needs to be a rich culture of leadership that is less focused on who is the boss, but on who is best at getting a specific task done, as everyone works as equals towards an end goal.
• Otti awesome to hear that you are considering how moral development and civic actions projects and service learning relate to leadership development. Here is an idea for you: Over the last 3 years I have had the privilege to work on action civics and service learning projects with students in California. They focused on transportation related challenges and developed their agency as change makers and leaders in their communities. I often thought that our combination of agile learning and design thinking in the context of action civics could also be a transformational experience for adult leaders. Happy to share more about it if it resonates
• I’m not sure if this might help and if is your point, but what I’d love to see more is a clear communication within any organisation.
  Something that might help to brain storm cross functions teams can be a “Curiosity game”, one team member starts off with only one word ( for example product”) and next team member just adds another sentence/word (for example innovation….. Etc) until it has been created a story on that brain storm session.
  This can be adapted and change to fit the purpose but the idea is to remove communication barriers, bring people from different hierarchy at the same (almost) level, more inclusive, faster and open minded to resolve problems.
• Otti Vogt Great to see #VirtueEthics, Character Strengths from Positive Psychology, Critical Theory, and so on…
  Another powerful idea (I’ve been a procrastinator — or perfectionist- for not finishing my article about that) and explaining better the approach of focusing on needs. As Mallmann suggested almost 50 years ago, needs are few but wishes, satisfiers are almost infinite. Even we have a great basket of values that most of the time confront them. So the idea of a few needs (for example the framework from Mallmann or Max-Neef) and working with it could be a big change in paradigm and leadership. Look at the powerful idea of this game (What if what we have is no money but time (the coin in the game is “Kronos”, where do you “invest” your time. Just playing and changing the framework of money over time, one start to be aware that the place where you put your money is mostly “wrong” and that there is a better “metaphor” for dealing with life (I like to see “Life” through 3 triads of this 3 metaphors, Life is a game, Life is a journey, Life is a Theatre). Let’s “play” and “travel” through the first one, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/less-max-probably-best-educational-game-world-society-jes%C3%BAs/
• I have the first version of the game (for teenagers and young adults -the only version in English) and I’ve played with another set of cards (for senior people but there is a 3rd version (set of cards) in Spanish that the creators of the game used in a project with the job center of the regional department of their region. I haven’t seen this set of cards but I think that this is the closest to the business world. In the project with unemployed people, as far as I know, when I talked to the creators, they use this new set of cards for framing the world of jobs, business, and so on to the 9 needs framework. Some people react in a normal way, the need for “protection”, just earn money is very important for life because they are unemployed but some people realised about this idea of paradoxes I wrote down in my post about paradoxical thinking, that life is not only earning money but anything else and what if both concepts (money & time) could join in a framework.
• Otti I am interested that you are using a psychodynamic style of coaching, usually that approach intensifies “disorienting dilemmas’ and impedes the adaptive capability for “transformative learning”. I like the commitment to “epiphanies”, experimental heuristics that “work in practice” and “transformational shifts”. The most interesting dialectic is between the use of positive psychology and psychodynamic styles of coaching — so that you feel this tremendous surge of energy, clarity and efficacy and then get coached through the existential metacognitive crisis of why it is happening to you. The interesting thing about you Otti is the way you do Presence. When you walk into the room people feel the energies ricocheting off the walls and all their thoughts become open to possibility, purpose and potential.
• Leadership is about having a spirit of the need for this too and that too. The focus is on being and doing. It’s not a choice but is the only way forward for the genuine well being of people, society & environment
  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beingdoing-naveen-khajanchi/
• Otti what’s the specific outcome that these orgs would hire you for and / or what is the outcome you (think you) are seeking to achieve over that timescale? I personally think the timescale is quite short and would focus on deeper interventions eg three day workshops (with a focus) and of course you know I will say one to one coaching (or team) because provoking insights and understanding the capacity for insights is more valuable than implanting knowledge (and is what you are aiming for I think?) I find that people in organisations first need to understand and experience this for themselves and then a more sophisticated exploration is how to facilitate that in others. My favourite techniques for provoking the disorienting dilemma is disorienting questions but I have colleagues who practise many other techniques around improv, embodiment, etc.
• Immunity to Change is definitely a part of the Programms we would create! And having the leadership dilemmas of each stage translated into challenging questions for individual and collective inquiry would be another powerful ingredient — when we understand leadership more as a relationship than as something a ’leader’ is doing.
  With Boths it will be a little longer than 5 months but if we choose only one as a pillar 6 months is a great time for a transformative challenge.
• As an Executive Leadership Coach to CEOs all over the world I believe a critical component to support a CEO with their organization to experience a shift in mindset, the conversation must start with Self-Awareness and an openness and humility to say “I don’t know” Like I don’t know when I am stuck and unable to generate action on this issue. Transformational change starts with Leaders willing to explore their own responsibilities for poor performance in their organizations and be willing to say I am part of the problem as to why a specific system that I am in is not working to support our organization. With that level of self-awareness they can then say I am committed to being part of the solution to transform a system or systems to support a different performance that is sustainable for all.
• The root causes of the highest damage appear to be much the same across large companies, government organisations and even science: Missing relevant Laws of Nature, Core Human Values and Behavioural Essential… In turn, they guide to common yet tailored solution needs. My contribution to the question (a draft at this time): see https://lawofnaturemanifesto.org/home-for-update-discussions/
• Has to start with Vision
• Start to think about Think Waste and Business Theatre. Then forget fokus and combine fokus with fuzzy. And then, „just looking orderly at things — together“. That creats a common sense based collective intelligence within minutes.
• Interventions ideally should be based on a specific self-awareness level of the coachee.
• Listening — as a very basic foundational element! Which shows a great influence to participants in our journeys — Do you listen to understand, fix or win? ….
• Hi Otti, two and a half suggestions for your initiative:
• 1.) I am in the middle of watching John Vervaeke video series on the „Awakening from the Meaning Crisis“ and find it very inspiring. It resonates with the „epiphanies“ you mention. If you want to include / start from a ethics point of view, this might be valuable: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ
• 2.) Another productive angle I can recommend is the topic of „paradoxes and polarities“ (as opposed to „problems“). As far as I am concerned, a lot of issues related to „leadership“ stem from the fact that people confuse the nature of situations they want to intervene in (think „getting from A to A+“). Problems can be solved, paradoxes and polarities can only be balanced or dealt with in a way that is fundamentally different from a „solution“. Getting this difference right will be crucial. Sources on that topic: https://amzn.to/3oLcUUf and https://amzn.to/3Jn6e8i
• 2.5) I am currently developing a business simulation to address the leadership / values / dilemmas / ethics topic in a university program on „Leadership for Sustainable Business Development“, starting in summer 2023. Maybe there are synergies with the program you have in mind?
• Teach the principles of Aikido (no falling, no throwing required). Leadership practice — and I suggest we call it that — is a ‘contact sport’. Teach body based presence, sensory acuity, compassion, love (not romantic love), empathy and humility. Teach decisiveness, competition as collaboration and teach Deep Democracy (see Myrna Lewis) to cultivate creative conflict. Use serving others less fortunate than those being trained to teach selfless, servant leadership and leave a legacy. Be a candle that lights other candles. Consider the systemic elements. How will your work change the environment in which the leaders you educate work? How will you promote continuous learning and self reflection?
• I think it’s a perfectly good waste to — as always and over and over again — think about/focus on/develop another… LEADERSHIP approach. It is 2022. Want to have impact? Really want to bring about the change that our world definitely needs? Try altering the structure, dynamics and perspectives of the system itself including the characteristics that shape our perceptions of that system. Shift the ‘leadership/mgmt development’ to the majority of the workforce community that produce value — the followers/servants/contributors/stewards or whatever you want to call them. Leadership remains a cascading system with positions instead of roles (most of the time). Developing ethics etc. doesn’t change that, it may even be a band aid (and… ethics, isn’t that everybody’s business? Doesn’t developing ethical leaders has the risk of creating of superiority..?). My view: invest in developing good, collectively autonomous acting, purpose driven followers. There are more than enough leadershipdevelopmentmodels/perspectives etc.
• Leaders will have to submit (and be humble) to the process. The future will always take its own shape no matter how much we overly control the process. Reminds me of what Nora Bateson so beautifully said. “Whatever leadership used to be — it used to be. Now, it has to be something different. Now, we all have to be more than we were. The kind of leadership that I want to explore may not be identifiable as leadership at all. I am interested in a kind of mutually alert care and attention to the well-being of all people and ecological systems. This kind of leadership cannot be found in individuals, but rather BETWEEN them. It cannot be found in organizations, nations, religions or institutions, but rather between them. I have called it Liminal Leadership to highlight the relational characteristics.”
• Relational (liminal) characteristics — that’s what should be developed. In leaders and ‘followers’. Relational is not static nor single-perspective and that’s what’s lacking in most leadership programs, they still have only an or-or-approach/perspective instead of an and-and. That’s a different kind of view, attitude and competences. I also believe that an amount of submissiveness is needed (without losing oneself).
• I love the rethinking of orgs and leadership structures but isn’t this approach a bit backwards? I was just talking about this on a podcast yesterday. The way towards creating new organizations cannot be led by the same principle that created the old matrix, that is here’s the new system and we will implement it. No. It has to be a dialogue, a conversation, an ongoing evolution where employees’ views the same as leadership and stakeholders are reflected. I’d doubt if any progress can be achieved in the short frame of 5–6 months. Also, I wouldn’t worry about specific problems or capabilities to focus on right now. What I would focus on instead is: Where is the value? What goals are we trying to achieve? What is the purpose of this capability/unit, and therefore what is the best possible outcome? Then we can worry about how to optimise performance and what type of leadership we need to envision and implement to achieve those goals. Businesses are here to create value. Fullstop. Leadership is an instrument: means to an end.
• Perhaps it is not a case of overhauling the old model but running new models in parallel? You might say that that the business of being in business in this post-industrial age is being in the business of creating new business models.
• I definitely would be more experimental. We are in turbulent times right now. The foundation hasn’t been settled yet. So we cannot see what sticks in a situation where everything moves and reshuffles. I’d use this very opportune time to brainstorm new ideas and run several new approaches in parallel. Those that create the best results, engage people, bring enthusiasm, and create a more collaborative culture would be the winners. And when everything settles down in say 3 years, we can start building again. But now is not the time to build and get solid. Now is the time to ideate, reimagine and experiment so let’s take full advantage of it! Let’s be creative! We need to reimagine how business operates, how it creates value, what value it creates and for whom, and what it’s trying to achieve through that value in the world. This is something I wrote an in-depth study on last year entitled Reimagining Consumerism As A Force For Good which is charting the way for the future of commerce in the human age. You can download it here if you like: https://www.meaning.global/reimagining-consumerism I am also writing a new book on the subject of realigning business and humanity that will come out sometime in 2023/24. I know you’re envisioning better leadership for a world full of disruption in your think tank. Maybe we could have a chat about this?
• I agree — in particular with testing of ideas in numerous spaces / environments to find out what works, i.e. what people want. An ongoing evolution with employees co-creating utilising true Dialogue (Bohms model) scaffolding in an organic way. Leaders as enablers. Information available.
• Right on! Has to be done via collective emerging learning and re-connecting the DOTS to “Higher Value (s) more inspiring not tell or carrots like, here is what to do and we will make you love it! Old change management. The problem is the future of change management is past! The biggest challenge is with : Where is the value? How do you bring a methodology designed to bring people together, not people hugging and kissing erasing differences, but building a stronger whole with the differences leading to a higher consciousness, understanding and seeing enabling people to go above and beyond. Organizations are simply flying blind. The navigational and operating systems are fit for the past century, not a changing society. Old school linear thinking not non linear learning. Any intervention not aiming at transforming the underpinning and overarching operating and navigational systems will only be lip service. It won’t stuck. People are conscious of the whole, but organizations are a bunch of holes, silos, dysfunctional, not fit. I lived it a few times as a senior financial officer in public companies. There is no epiphany, will not be any, unless and until you clearly bridge the old mental $ traps.
• But two things to add to this: 1. the context for this morality (although it might be the absolute moral good for humanity in the universal sense) is always relative. The metric for success of “good” isn’t Is this right? but Does this work? That goes back again to my point that businesses are here to create value. If the good approach fails to engage people and move them forward on a path that they themselves want to go, it will fail. So it cannot be absolute, it always has to be relative. 2. I get the normative view but now is not the time to norm. We are not at a stage yet where we can converge to the new normal. Now we are supposed to breathe. Now we are supposed to let go of the old normal and start the process of a deep social, political, business, organisational, cultural, economic and environmental transformation. When we start seeing the first results and see what actually makes real change in the world, as opposed to the old org matrix that was fear-based and thus prevented change, we can norm things. Because by then we will positively and objectively know what works for the common good. The key point in this is that “GOOD” isn’t how the process works. The GOOD is the OUTCOME. It’s the COMMON GOOD.
• It’s a noble goal. It will always be difficult to do anything other than a rough approximation to that when the model is underpinned by Taylorism. Thus we are awash with more employee wellness apps, 4 day week / hybrid working initiatives. My primary concern is that many people will not want to be broken out of this sleep working model. Because the price of freedom is responsibility and that will not be to everyone’s taste.
• Insight training (mindfulness training in the insight tradition not concentration).
• Otti, how are you defining leadership against which you will weave all the you mention? Perhaps my way of saying what is missing for me is the simplification. I’d also place the team leadership role at the centre. How do leaders build, launch and sustain their teams utilising all the you mention.
• So most of the integrations you are adding are hashtagged, meaning they are pulled from popular business trends. Nothing wrong with this, most of these trends exist because they work, however, there is a lot of understanding missing from what makes the core of alot of this work. What you are essentially doing is using narrative business psychology, meaning your best examples aren’t gonna be in some fancy complex business book that costs $59.99 and makes a millionair out of some CEO, it’s gonna be found in classic films….which also made a company exec a millionair. Individual development is known via the narrative structure: trust, agency, play, validation, identity, intimacy, generativity. Virtue ethics: Human Flourishing, Character Traits, Knowledge. This sounds like World, Character, and Story to me, the three pillars of narrative. Psychology is a mirror to narrative structure which is the practice of taking a negative emotion and moving it to a positive end. Critical Theory is just the Elixir. So yeah, it’s not that complex. All this I just pushed my book out on just labeled under a different category. This is just labeled as the hip thing when narrative has been doing this since the dawn of time. And to elaborate more, a brand follows the same system, the same structure. Beginning, middle, and end: past, present, future. A brands identity begins with the founder and where they had issues and how they sought to fix it. It continues with the company set up and how the company is making improvements and change, as well as giving out to the community. Finally it’s how is the company giving back, and how are they working on permanent solutions to make themselves obsolete as they grow and evolve. Trust and Agency for the founder, Play, Validation, and identity for the company, and intimacy and generativity for the community around the company. And there is nothing wrong with hashtags at all. I wish I was better at them to be honest. I just know they can be buzzwords. This is really where I bring narrative forward. The combination of the themes above don’t currently seem to synergize. You have a variety of different approaches, which, while fine, will be lesser due to a lack of synergy. This is where my translation of them into narrative which has these natural synergies comes in handy. Your idea of narratives leading into social constructivism makes sense, but isn’t entirely correct. After all, the narrative ends with the hero obtaining an elixir designed to change the world for the better. There is a structure that, despite some viewpoints, doesn’t create formulaic systems, but does use a base psychology to create relatability through immersion, empathy, and engagement, allowing for a familiar aspect to bring people in, while an unfamiliar aspect allows them to grow, the basis of narrative structure. I am not railing against this at all. I think what you have is interesting, but will also fail to synergize without the proper ways to connect each of these aspects. You bring in Marxism, Feminism, and post structure systems, all things that rage against what is already established, and this is kinda where I have an issue. So in narrative the hero’s actions can cause either a balance or a reversal of the world. This means they create a slow but lasting progression forward that still needs work, or a reversal where they trash an entire system which is fast, but tends to drop the aspects that worked as well. When developing anything you have an idea, something simple, the complexity that makes it work, and simplicity on top of that working as a clean UI. People have a tendency to dump everything, even the good, in exchange for an untested system. This is ok, like using all new pieces in a game to massively test a ton of new systems at once, but it does mean that there will be a ton of synergistic issues down the road. I am all for change and the new 100%, but without recognizing what did and didn’t work and why, without going beyond the archetypes and genres to just use the tropes instead of understanding the relatability of the emotions that created them, it can often lead to a botched system because no one stopped to ask why.
• Powerful work Otti, message me and we could hop on a call, happy to share my experience and views
• Depends on the company, it’s industry and many more variables that I need to know in advance before I’m able to give you a “good enough for now” answer Otti….