I’ve always been a bit of a “personal growth junkie.” It’s what draws me to the work of coaching. And of course, I have a coach. He constantly invites me into a larger, more powerful version of myself. He challenges the ways I limit myself. Coaching helps me live more fully into my potential. All great, right?
That’s the light side of personal growth, the pretty part of the journey. It’s what makes coaching or workshops worth the investment of our time and money.
If you’ve been following my blog for the past year or so, you know that complexity and what it asks of us as leaders has been on my mind a lot. There is no arguing with the fact that these are complex times. It can be challenging to see clearly what is needed. Doug Silsbee has just released his new book, Presence-Based Leadership. It’s an incredible resource for today’s leaders.
As leaders, we often identify our role in terms of the results we are responsible for. And yet there is a second aspect of your role in complex situations that is just as important to focus on – creating the conditions that foster the emergence of your desired outcomes. Yeah, that’s a lot harder to get your arms around than the results. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
Complexity is messy. When we encounter a messy problem, most of us tend to pay attention first to “the problem” as something separate from us. For example, if the quality of public education in my town has declined, I look at things like school financing, teacher preparation, curriculum, etc. I implicitly define the problem as “out there.” While those things surely deserve attention, I’ll be more effective in making changes if I also consider myself as part of the system and thus something that might be changed to shift the system.
Don’t make false choices (part 2)
In my last post , I talked about shifting from OR to AND with respect to two of the key paradoxes that are key to leading in complexity:
Complex situations are full of places where we have to make tough choices. Expand the current market or enter a new one? Let an aging product die or re-energize it with new features. Some of these may truly need to be either/or choices. And there are lots of places where we need to move from OR to AND.
The story of the 5 blind men exploring an elephant reminds us that what we see depends entirely on our perspective. This suggest two things we want to consider when working with complexity.