Tag Archive: leadership

August 26, 2010

The Power of What Isn't

empty

|Photo by brew ha ha|http://www.flickr.com/photos/redfishid/3164273464|

“The Uses of Not”

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.
Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.

So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.

-Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

It was the afternoon of the second day of the three day training and I noticed that the coffee cake still looked pretty much as it had on the morning of day one.

“Sure does look good,” said one of the participants, now standing beside me.

“Not good enough to eat, apparently. ” I responded.

“Oh, I think everyone likes having it here,” she said with a grin.

“To look at?” I asked.

“To resist!” she replied, with a distinct tone of satisfaction. Read More

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August 26, 2010

The Power of What Isn’t

empty

|Photo by brew ha ha|http://www.flickr.com/photos/redfishid/3164273464|

“The Uses of Not”

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where it’s useful.
Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s useful.
Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn’t,
there’s room for you.

So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn’t.

-Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

It was the afternoon of the second day of the three day training and I noticed that the coffee cake still looked pretty much as it had on the morning of day one.

“Sure does look good,” said one of the participants, now standing beside me.

“Not good enough to eat, apparently. ” I responded.

“Oh, I think everyone likes having it here,” she said with a grin.

“To look at?” I asked.

“To resist!” she replied, with a distinct tone of satisfaction. Read More

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August 6, 2010

Attitude is Everything

permattitude

|Photo by sarniebill1|http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarniebill/4723746702|

Picking up from where I left off yesterday, I want to share some additional insights gleaned from my tour of Lauren Chase-Rowell’s permaculture garden and land.  Something else that struck me was when Lauren said that beyond her training and intuition as a master gardener, “attitude is everything.”  Illustrating this statement with stories it became clear that while she is incredibly skilled in her craft, Lauren’s psychological and emotional approach take it all to another level.  In essence, permaculture starts with your self.

Channeling Lauren, I offer these three attitudinal guidelines for your consideration and application to your social change/leadership efforts, especially those geared towards leveraging the potential of systems and collective intelligence: Read More

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August 5, 2010

Bio-Mastery

Lauren's Garden

Last week I was in the presence of a master.  For more than 25 years, Lauren Chase-Rowell has skillfully and intuitively cultivated the land around her house in Nottingham, NH to the point that it exists in great harmony with the beautiful farm house, people and fauna occupying that space.  Lauren is an ecological landscaper, organic farmer, and permaculture design teacher.  Her home, Dalton’s Pasture Farm (not pictured above), is a vibrant classroom and testament to the possibility of practicing earth-centered living.

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August 2, 2010

Transcend Organizational Constraints

Collective Leadership

This is a very exciting time for those of us who are working to apply the logic of networks to the work of social change.  Our ideas are gaining traction as more and more experiments start to point towards success.  Life online, the viral nature of meaningful stories and our human desire for deeper connection all serve to confirm our intuitive understanding of life in a network.  However, as we step into this paradigm shift, as we start to approve of these ideas, we still have to contend with the constraints of the organizational and funding structures within which we currently work. Read More

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July 23, 2010

Keeping the Spark

Creativity

|Photo by popculturegeek.com|http://www.flickr.com/photos/popculturegeek/4775844727|

“The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike.”

“The Creativity Crisis” by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman

Blogging on a weekly basis and trying to stay on my social change game generally speaking, requires a steady flow of inspiration and creativity.  Of course, there are times when both can feel in short supply, and so I’ve been interested in how to keep this vital stream clear and moving.  Bronson and Merryman’s recent Newsweek article highlights both the importance and possibility of ratcheting up generative capacity.  Turning to a few sources, including my artistic brother, creativity guru Michael Michalko, Venessa Miemis, and The Innovator’s Toolkit, here are a few of my favorite ways for keeping the old noodle limber: Read More

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July 16, 2010

The Biology of Social Change

I was alerted to this slide show by the Leadership Learning Community, for which I am most grateful.  I appreciate how it brings together considerations of complexity and living systems for organizational leaders.

By way of summary, here are the 11 “enabling rules” that the presentation highlights for leadership to work in better alignment (and sustainably) with dynamic systems: Read More

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July 15, 2010

There Are Many Ways

Adaptability

Last week, Melinda and I had the honor of working with this year’s cohort of aspiring urban school principals participating in the New Leaders for New Schools program.  It was awe inspiring and heart warming to meet these accomplished educators who are now putting their classroom successes to the test by striving to take on instructional leadership of a challenging urban public school and raise student academic achievement across the board.

Our work was to help the New Leaders develop and strengthen skills that would serve them in putting together and managing their leadership teams.    While focusing on meeting design, we talked about how important it is to avoid simply inheriting old practices and meeting culture that may be dysfunctional or deadening.  To honor people’s time and energy, it behooves leaders to be thoughtful and strategic with respect to when and how they convene them and to what end.  As we discussed the myriad options for creating a group experience, one participant stood up and said, “We really have to get ourselves out of the box to do this work!”  Indeed.

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June 28, 2010

Trust on the Rise

Trust

|Photo by joi|http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2941559903|

Our colleagues at Interaction Associates have done some wonderful work on the importance of trust in the workplace and what leaders can do to cultivate this, especially under uncertain circumstances the likes of which seem to be omnipresent these days.  More recently, former IBMer Irving Wladawsky-Berger has taken this conversation to a new level in a post that looks at trust as “the most important operational resource in our society.”  In our increasingly complex, interconnected, and distributed world, he says, one’s reputation as an individual or institution is foundational to what we might call success.  This observation contributes to his sense that we are in the midst of a values-based generational transition as potentially profound as the sixties.

Without rehashing the entire post here (I encourage you to read it in its entirety by going to this link), I want to point out some of the more interesting parts and ask what folk engaged in the social sectors and social change work think Read More

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June 9, 2010

The Learner’s Plea

freedom

|Photo by Scarleth White|http://www.flickr.com/photos/iloveblue/3302032125|

Thanks to Ginny McGinn of the Center for Whole Communities for introducing me to this poem by the Chilean biologist/philosopher Humberto Maturana.  We used it to launch this week’s The Masterful Trainer workshop, and it generated some wonderful reflections on the role of teaching, training, facilitation, and leadership in this day and age.  Enjoy . . .

The Student’s Prayer

Don’t impose on me what you know,
I want to explore the unknown
and be the source of my own discoveries.
Let the known be my liberation, not my slavery.
The world of your truth can be my limitation;
your wisdom my negation.
Don’t instruct me; let’s walk together.
Let my riches begin where yours end.
Show me so that I can stand
on your shoulders.
Reveal yourself so that I can be
something different.
You believe that every human being
can love and create.
I understand, then, your fear
when I ask you to live according to your wisdom.
You will not know who I am
by listening to yourself.
Don’t instruct me; let me be.

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June 9, 2010

The Learner's Plea

freedom

|Photo by Scarleth White|http://www.flickr.com/photos/iloveblue/3302032125|

Thanks to Ginny McGinn of the Center for Whole Communities for introducing me to this poem by the Chilean biologist/philosopher Humberto Maturana.  We used it to launch this week’s The Masterful Trainer workshop, and it generated some wonderful reflections on the role of teaching, training, facilitation, and leadership in this day and age.  Enjoy . . .

The Student’s Prayer

Don’t impose on me what you know,
I want to explore the unknown
and be the source of my own discoveries.
Let the known be my liberation, not my slavery.
The world of your truth can be my limitation;
your wisdom my negation.
Don’t instruct me; let’s walk together.
Let my riches begin where yours end.
Show me so that I can stand
on your shoulders.
Reveal yourself so that I can be
something different.
You believe that every human being
can love and create.
I understand, then, your fear
when I ask you to live according to your wisdom.
You will not know who I am
by listening to yourself.
Don’t instruct me; let me be.

2 Comments
June 3, 2010

Whose Problem Is It?

Problems

|Photo by DonnaGrayson|http://www.flickr.com/photos/donnagrayson/195244498|

I have been struck by how much guidance an enlightened parenting concept I recently learned offers to the work of leadership and facilitation.  The concept comes from a book that a neighbor lent to my wife and me as we were beginning to think more about how best to address some our 4 year old daughter’s testing of limits.

Read More

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