Do women make better leaders?

All specious gender generalizations aside, those who have lost faith in masculine versions of leadership gravitate with hope toward more feminine models. As gender mythologies go, feminine leadership models feature more empathy, nurturing and inclusivity. Growing evidence associates these with higher engagement organizations and communities.

In my 3 decades working with leaders worldwide across dozens of industries, I’ve seen evidence of men and women in leadership positions capable of the whole range of masculine to feminine styles of leadership. I continue to see nurturing emotional men and decisive rational women.

I would argue that agile leaders transcend self or socially imposed gender constraints. They adapt to what works regardless of gender associations. They score bilaterally on personality and leadership assessment tools.

All of this has everything to do with how we develop leaders. Where feminine styles of leadership create higher capacity for agility, women with these capacities will make better leaders than their more constrained male peers. The good news from the neurosciences is that any gendered brain is capable of growing capacity for agility.

Better Designed Meetings

I continue to be amazed in meetings where when people speak, few others actually give the presence of eye contact to them. In some groups this has become normatively acceptable practice exacerbated by the distractions of slides and things with screens. The phenomenon often grows in proportion to the size of the group. Most conversational meetings are not designed for authentic interaction. They are instead designed for speeches and other unilateral pronouncements and parries. Making matters worse, the non-renewable and expensive resource of time gets wasted on information that should otherwise be virtually available in real time for real action.

All of this is prevented with better designed meetings, regardless of the group size, diversity, scope of work or level of ambiguity and complexity the group encounters.

Groups Grow Or Kill New Ideas

With all the lip service we give to creativity in groups, people tend toward habits that grow or kill new ideas. What’s clear is that creativity is not a function of extrinsic incentives or pressure to come up with new ideas. New ideas grow when people know how to grow them together.

Four rubrics grow ideas: like, so, and and else.

Like is what we like about an idea. These are the functions and features that we think will work. So are the practical questions we can raise about any idea’s structure and implications. And is the addition of other elements that make them even stronger in transcending inherent problems that inevitably emerge with anything different from the norm. Else are the alternative ways to achieve similar purposes.

These simple and powerful strategies take groups from ambiguity to action. Action means prototyping the minimal viable products that can be field tested, improved and hopefully demonstrating success.

The process gets bogged down and even the potentially best ideas struggle and die when groups instead criticize, debate, defend and speculate on the merits of ideas in progress.

Ultimately, it matters less how individually creative and persuasive people are. What matters is how people together grow seedlings into thriving possibilities.

Making Way For New Leadership

It’s a new day for leadership. We now have more than enough science to support a transformation in the conversations we have about what it means to be a leader in this age of unprecedented connectivity and complexity.

When there are no limits to how we can be connected and how unpredictable the world is, leadership requires a complete makeover.

Everything we thought about leadership no longer holds relevance or power. Now we’re thinking about leadership as empowering people to find their own way. Now it’s all about creating space for people leveraging their strengths. No more conversations about weaknesses and deficiencies, fear and cynicism.

This is a shift in leadership metrics. It’s no longer about how much leaders take power. It’s about how they empower. It’s a call for developing leaders in whole new ways.

When it comes to leadership in this era, humility is power. Inspiration replaces perspiration as the new currency of intelligence. Fast is the new smart.

Thanks, Jack

Potential

I’m kicking off this year 2014 with dedication to growing the potential of groups. The group is the fundamental narrative of connection and transformation. Every amazing hope known to the human experience in every era began with the magic of small groups making the impossible more possible.

A group’s potential is its unpredictable capacity for learning, relationships and significance. This is true whether we’re talking about informal and formal groups in education, organizations or communities.

Groups flourish to the extent they realize their potential.

The good news is that we now have the science to animate any group’s potential. The more groups learn the science of flourishing, the smarter and better they become together. They learn to claim authorship of their present in ways that creates the future they want to see.

Everything we wish for will happen because groups flourish. This is our most important opportunity on the planet.

Thanks, Jack

Magic At Semco

The almost automatic response to Ricardo Semler’s wonderfully subversive new book, The Seven Day Weekend (Century, £16.99), is: ‘Well, that’s all very well in Sao Paulo, but we couldn’t do it here.’ Semler is, or was - more of this later - president of Semco, Brazil’s most famous company, which has made its name by standing the conventional corporate rulebook on its head.

Semco doesn’t have a mission statement, its own rulebook or any written policies. It doesn’t have an organisation chart, a human resources department or even, these days, a headquarters.

Subordinates choose their managers, decide how much they are paid and when they work. Meetings are voluntary, and two seats at board meetings are open to the first employees who turn up. Salaries are made public, and so is all the company’s financial information.

Six months is the farthest ahead the group ever looks. Its units each half-year decide how many people they require for the next period. Naturally it doesn’t plan which businesses to enter. Instead it ‘rambles’ into new areas by trial, error and argument. Its current portfolio is an odd mixture of machinery, property, professional services and fledgling hi-tech spin-offs. That’s right, Semco is the epitome of managerial incorrectness, a conglomerate.

Sounds like a recipe for chaos, eh? Yet Semco has surfed Brazil’s rough economic and political currents with panache, often growing at between 30 and 40 per cent a year. It turns over $160 million, up from $4m when Semler joined the family business two decades ago, and it employs 3,000. $100,000 invested in this barmy firm 20 years ago would now be worth $5m.

via Who’s in charge here? No one

The Power Of An Internal Locus Of Control

Laurence Gonzales, author of Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience in an article writes:

“Julian Rotter, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, developed the concept of what he calls ‘locus of control.’ Some people, he says, view themselves as essentially in control of the good and bad things they experience—i.e., they have an internal locus of control. Others believe that things are done to them by outside forces or happen by chance: an external locus. These worldviews are not absolutes. Most people combine the two.

“But research shows that those with a strong internal locus are better off. In general, they’re less likely to find everyday activities distressing. They don’t often complain, whine, or blame. And they take compliments and criticism in stride.”

This internal locus allows us to create options and scenarios based on instinct, the situation, and foresight. It allows us to create alternative plans in anticipation or in the midst of adversity. It is your personal exit strategy. Fostering your internal locus takes an enormous amount of devoted practice of self-leadership and a certain mindfulness.

via The Paradoxical Traits Of Resilient People

Finland's Education Edge

Along with the fact that Finland features more play than memorization in its curriculum design, education is essentially free at any level.

Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

via What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success

Cites that smell well, do well

One of the more imaginative yet basic design sensibilities features appeals to all the senses including the olfactory. What if neighborhoods became more intentional about things like plantings and ventillations that fill the air with rich tapestries of smells and scents of herbs, flowers, fireplaces and the preparations of cuisine? Could a new design principle center around the idea: cities that smell well, do well?

Whole cities can be defined by their scent. Streetscapes fill with the aroma of roasting coffee spilling from Seattle’s cafes, or the bouquet of fruit and flowers at Amsterdam’s markets, or the sugar and cinnamon wafting out of Viennese pastry shops. The Spanish city of San Sebastián, set in a deep cove ringed by cliffs, is one of the most visually arresting places I know, but its most unforgettable feature has to be the distinctive scent of sea and sand lingering on the old fishing village at its heart.

These olfactory identities don’t exist entirely by accident. Scent marketing–like when a popcorn shop lures customers in by pumping the buttery, salty smell onto the sidewalk–plays to our most basic instincts in an effort to procure a sale. But if businesses can use scents to target customers, or even just develop brand loyalty, why can’t urban planners and designers do the same to improve our experience of urban environments? Writes Hosey:

Designers are trained to focus mostly on the visual, but the science of design could significantly expand designers’ sensory palette. Call it medicinal urbanism.

via Can We Use Smells To Design Better Cities?

Thanks, Jack

A Small World After All

Researchers studying connectedness on social networks have now proposed that “the average number of acquaintances separating any two people no matter who they are … is not six but 3.9.” Eman Yasser Daraghmi and Shyan-Ming Yuan, of the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, created a database on Facebook that included 950 million people, The Pacific Standard reports. After eliminating duplicate and fake accounts as well as celebrities, the researchers used advanced statistical methods to calculate how far everyone was spread out on the network.

via You Are Connected To Everyone On Earth By Just 4 Degrees Now

What should we expect in a world where more people feel connected to more people? Would we expect fewer boundaries of prejudices and hostilities and decreased tolerance for injustices and inequalities? Would we see new levels of compassion, ethics and empathy?

This is a new narrative for human societies, bound to impact the way we view the world and accordingly, the way we live.

Wikipedia empowering the rest of the world

In an attempt to increase the number of people who can use Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation has announced the pilot for Wikipedia Zero, a technology that lets basic feature phone (or “dumbphone”) owners look up and consume Wikipedia content via text message. The Wikimedia Foundation says the three-month pilot, in partnership with the telecoms company Airtel and the South African mobile technologies nonprofit Praekelt Foundation, will open Wikipedia up to at least 70 million new users in sub-Saharan Africa, beginning in Kenya.

via Wikipedia Will Start Texting Info To Users In Kenya Who Lack Internet

It’s a brilliant way to extend the ever-growing world wide knowledge space to the billions of people with phones that lack internet connectivity. I suspect the effort will also provoke Wikipedia to rethink its content model and delivery.

It will also attract a new wave of revenue generation businesses who will range from empowering to exploitative in these markets. Let’s hopefully for empowering models.

The Lessons Of The Unmerited Cannabis Concerns

But at a time when polls show widening public support for legalization — recreational marijuana is about to become legal in Colorado and Washington, and voter initiatives are in the pipeline in at least three other states — California’s 17-year experience as the first state to legalize medical marijuana offers surprising lessons, experts say.

Warnings voiced against partial legalization — of civic disorder, increased lawlessness and a drastic rise in other drug use — have proved unfounded.

via Few Problems With Cannabis for California

When we were growing up in the 1960s and 70s marijuana was defined as a plague on society, supposedly powerful enough to launch all manner of social degradations.

The shift has occurred thanks to two factors: state rather than national approaches and decisions based on data rather than ideology. The lesson here points to the question of what other social issues would progress through strategies of data based localization.

This is a profound shift from national level hierarchical mandates to peer learning among states, from mass assumptions to collective intelligence brought about more by heuristics than hysterics.

Do we need more artists?

I know people inside and outside the arts who would argue that a world of 7 billion people should have at least a billion artists of every media and genre. I would suggest that an equally important question explores how we can better connect whatever people in the arts we have.

  • What would higher quality connections between artists, businesses, schools and communities look, sound and feel like? 
  • What improbable collaborations could we provoke and cultivate? 
  • What would it mean to transform the arts from its place as consumer entertainment and adornment to authentic inspiration for the building of flourishing local cultures?
  • How could businesses, schools and communities feature artists across disciplines in their everyday business of marketing, innovation, branding, teaching, learning, place making, celebrations, and everyday life?

These questions just skim the surface of the enormous and important ocean of possibilities.

Artists bring more than aesthetics and the disruption of perspectives. They bring unique provocations to any table. How we connect them in our efforts will make a difference in our collective capacity for intelligence and creativity deeply needed in every context of our ever-complex world.

The new conversation moves from talking about artists quantity and density to artists connectivity with local and global contexts where they will find a rewarding place in value networks. In this conversation, we value artists at least as much for who they can be with us as what they produce for us.

Planning our way into an unknown future

It's a bit of an oxymoron to talk about planning in a world where the future remains fairly unknowable. Yet, the practical reality urges us to plan anyway. The conundrum calls for a reinvention of planning as a continuous process of learning and agile actions. This directly contrasts with the old idea of planning as a continuous process of assuming and fixed actions.

Agile planning doesn't mean chaos. The process can remained committed to an agreed upon set of principles and success stories. This provides the best-of-both-worlds flexible structure.

Driving Miss Saudi

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Hackers defaced their Web site. Delegations of clerics appealed to the king to block their movement. And men claiming to be security agents called their cellphones to leave a clear message:

O, women of the kingdom, do not get behind the wheel!

But they did anyway. On Saturday, a few dozen women insisted on violating one of the most stubborn social codes in staunchly conservative Saudi society, getting into their cars and driving, activists said. Many posted videos of themselves doing so to spread the word.

“We are looking for a normal way of life,” Madiha al-Ajroush, 60, a psychologist, said in an interview in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, “for me to get into my car and do something as small as get myself a cappuccino or something as grand as taking my child to the emergency room.”

The public call for women nationwide to drive on Saturday was the latest push in a decades-old effort by a small group of activists to exercise what they see as a fundamental human right. Saudi Arabia, a hereditary monarchy, is the only country in the world where women are not allowed to drive.

via A Mostly Quiet Effort to Put Saudi Women in Driver’s Seats

The women and their supports insist on this not becoming a noisy and aggressive revolution against the male domination of the culture.

The whole effort raises an interesting question about the nature of the dialogue between men who support tradition and those who now support tradition disruptive gender equality.

The Future Of Mining Safety

The winning team of this year’s Intel Global Challenge, a business plan competition that asks students to take on the world’s biggest issues through the use of technology, has come up with a way to possibly avoid the silicosis plague. Developed by a team of students from Chile, the Mobile Monitoring Station is a sensor-filled jacket that keeps track of vital signs like heart rate along with levels of particulate matter, which can contribute to lung disease.

The station lets workers monitor themselves via a smartphone app, while safety managers can access all of the workers' data on a website. If a worker’s signals go above certain thresholds–perhaps by inhaling more particulate matter over a long period of time than is safe–alerts will go off. The jacket will vibrate and the system will send emails to safety managers.

via A Jacket That Prevents Miners From Getting Lung Disease–Built By Genius Students

Another great example of how empathy can drive innovation at any age. The idea becomes more interesting as a possible inspiration for other environmentally related respiratory risks the likes of which we’re seeing in China.

Ideation Nation

Code for America and Mindmixer have been running Ideation Nation–an online brainstorm to find tech fixes for cities–since the beginning of the month. People have posted 300 ideas so far.

“We’re going to make the [best] 25 available to Code for America’s 3,000 volunteer designers and hackers,” says Nick Bowden, Mindmixer’s CEO. “They want to build stuff for communities.” You can submit your own idea till October 31. The overall winner gets prize money, and support to develop the idea.

via 7 Brilliantly Simple Technology Ideas To Improve Cities–Time To Get Hacking

Among their favorites so far: traffic ticket instant payment through Square, user-generated real time maps of best bike routes, restaurant food clearinghouses for non-profits and voting apps for any kind of civic decision.

5000 PhD Janitors

So now we know how many Ph.D.’s it takes to change a light bulb. Around 5,000 in the US alone. According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report:

“Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.”

via 5,000 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.s–Bureau of Labor Statistics

The whole business raises interesting questions.

In a world where the half-life of information in many fields decreases every year, should doctoral degrees deserve high marks for return on investment?

Should college and graduate degrees get redesigned for more productive career pathways?

Should we require for graduation from college the demonstration of career architecture competencies?

Book 15

So, I gave myself a week to focus on the next book due out next year. I will work with the title, “An Amazing Hope.” It will address questions including:

  • How does hope come about and why does it matter to how we live?
  • How does hope come about serendipitously?
  • How can we differentiate hope from faith?
  • How does hope factor into a world of unprecedented change, complexity and connectivity?

Stay tuned, and certainly email me with any thoughts or suggestions.

The History Of The Future

I would argue that we live in an era of unprecedented sensibility when it comes to thinking about the future. More schools, organizations and communities now seriously rethink how they want their future to look and feel. More people doubt the adequacy of our historical sense of the future. While some people cling tirelessly and defensively to past versions of the future, more seem called to reinvent it.

This calls for new sets of questions, narratives and skillsets. Learning in this context becomes the prime competency for striving and thriving.