One of the clearest indicators of engagement in any context is the degree to which peer to peer interaction occurs. This means people talking with one another, connecting and sharing stories and resources together, taking initiative together. The people we call leaders can invite, provoke and facilitate this. When they do, unmandated peer to peer interaction becomes a valid and compelling leadership effectiveness metric.
Quantum Leadership
When I did "Accidental Conversations" in 2002 I did a ton of research on the applications of quantum physics in the understanding of organizations. What I learned was that when we get down to the essence of "matter" all we find are information, relationships and change. If leaders love to make things "matter" these are their focus: information, relationships and change. Everything else flows from these essential qualities of life.
Leadership is not about managing people. It's about engaging information, relationships and change. Leaders who get this tend to be trusted, effective and powerful.
Business Friendly Communities
One of the more obvious indicators that communities are not business friendly is hearing complaints about the barriers to starting, locating and growing businesses in communities. Outdated policies and practices get in the way of thriving businesses and as a result hurt the growth of communities. It's a call for reinventing public approaches to businesses. The possibilities of supporting thriving businesses are endless. It just takes will and skill, mostly will.
Rethinking Authentic Accountability
I know many leaders who pay lip service to accountability. They talk about it, sometimes equating it with blame. In any case, it's associated with taking responsibility. Authentic accountability means people feel they, not their leaders or others, are responsible for making things happen. It only happens when people feel empowered to take initiative without permission. From this perspective, it cannot be commanded. It cannot be a matter of policy or top down mandate. It can only be invited. It has to be a free choice meaning people feel as free to embrace as to reject the opportunity.
When they embrace the invitation, they become authentically accountable.
3 Things To Spark A Group's Creativity
Most groups have more creative capacity than they demonstrate. It is a mistake to assume that a group that doesn't seem to generating a lot of creative ideas can't. Here are three things I do to evoke and stimulate creative capacity in groups.
- Invite them to consider what they think would be "impossible."
- Invite them to grow their list of possibilities beyond the obvious.
- Invite them to take a walk with a new question they're unprepared to answer.
Each strategy kick starts different ideas. Each gives people permission to go beyond the known, the reasonable and expected.
Leader Centric & Group Centric Meetings
In leader centric meetings, the leader invites individuals to interact one-on-one with the leader. If this pattern becomes established enough, people can grow to feel that peer dialogue is a violation of the hub-and-spoke centrality of leader. Leader centric meetings have the power to keep groups weak and less likely to grow. Some leaders strongly prefer this because it effectively maintains their unilateral dominant power over others. In group centric meetings, the leader does everything she or he can to stimulate and foster peer to peer interactions. These leaders work instead from the principles that people are smarter together and that strong groups are the highest performing groups.
Defining Alignment For Engagement
I can't count the diverse definitions of alignment I've heard over the years. It's always appeared not to far off the highway of buzzwords. Alignment has been used to denote obedience and compliance to top down decision makers, the aquiesence of minority voices to majority voices and the force-fit consistency of common standards.
Alignment can also be people working from the same page in ways that honor and engage diverse perspectives and talents. It can have everything to do with trustworthiness, collaboration and embracing contrasts and contradictions. It can emerge as much from peer agreements as imposed dictates.
How Important Is Leader Vision?
It's an often undiscussed reality that people are more inspired by their vision than the vision issued to them by their leaders, in spite of the fact that many leaders believe their vision has special powers. This said, it is always important leaders sustain vibrant vision about the possible future and communicate it. It's not to colonize or preempt other people's own vision but to inspire and evoke their vision. So their communication of their vision is, "So what's yours?"
Rethinking Quality Of Life
It's not surprising that in a society where consumption is treated as the ultimate human opportunity, we define quality of life in terms of how many things people have. We talk about the need for people to have housing, jobs, health care, mobility, education, technology and entertainment. This has been the Industrial Age conversation, the age that celebrated identity as consumption. The conversation shifts in the Information Age in ways that elevate information and connections as core to quality of life and identity. These don't negate the Industrial Age essentials, they reframe how we think about them. We think about how housing, jobs, health care, mobility, education, technology and entertainment can be catalysts and intersections for information and connections rather than simply objects of utility or symbols of success.
This shift has interesting and important implications for how we think about building and transforming communities. It's already shifting our emphasis to the smartification of just about anything you can imagine. We're also thinking about how anything related to quality of life can also be animated by quality of connections.
Standardized Learning
It's perhaps an obvious yet critical observation that standardized testing in schools leads to standardized learning. The importance of conversation is the question of what basics schools give students in their first dozen years of school. The answer depends on what they want to be able to do after that. Reality is that there will be no standardization in what students want to be able to do after their foundational education.
They will want to do amazing science, urban farming, tech coding, all kinds of medicine, teaching, unskilled labor, specialized manufacturing, arts and design, social and commercial entrepreneurship, stay at home parenting, home schooling and a large array of jobs that don't even exist today. There are many non-standardized things students will want to do in their multiple career adult lives.
They will do best across these contexts when they have a few basics like: reading, writing, communicating, researching, self-care, cooking and knowing how to organize their own learning. Side note: I don't include math and science explicitly as separate competencies because all math and science basics can be automatically learned in cooking which is core to health and social social well-being.
Any serious conversation about standardized learning must include attention to the fact that today's students will increasingly have all available knowledge and answers to any kinds of questions in their phones, and in the near future, embedded in their wearables.
So the question of what about learning needs to be standardized needs to also include the questions of what kinds of learning doesn't need to be and in fact cannot be standardized. It also needs to pay very careful attention to the fact that the future to which we prepare students today has little in common with the future to which we prepared students of their grandparents' era.
What Makes Good Leaders?
I think the key to answering this question is who we ask. I would suggest multiple perspectives from people considered by others a good leaders, people who assess others as good leaders, and people like academics who research good leaders. Then there is the whole issue of definition. I can read a dozen articles and studies on "good" leaders each of which define goodness in subtly or significantly different ways. I still meet as many people who believe good leaders are good parent figures as I do people who believe that parent figure leaders are the worst.
The question of what makes good leaders can only be addressed in the initial context of definition.
When The Dominant Voice Is Wrong
Dominant voices come in three forms: dictators, majorities and cores. In each case, they feel entitled to power over others by virtue of their positions of authority, their numbers or the density of their connections. In each case, they define success as self-serving gains. They live to dominate and fear any loss of domination. The opposite of dominant voices are voices in dialogue. These are voices explicitly after mutual gains.
When it comes to the complexity of what we call social, political and economic problems, dominant voices can be wrong. They can believe and do exactly what sustains or worsens these problems, no matter how much lip service they deliver to making thighs better.
What makes them wrong are a few dynamics. They work from certainty rather than curiosity. They define the problem as other people rather than their own process. They don't see the relationship between their actions and the problem.
Communities where we see significant increases in social, economic and political gains always come about because voices in dialogue take collective action without being distracted by the dominant voices. Instead leaders and facilitators acknowledge the dominant wrong opinions and invite the willing into dialogues for mutual gain that focus on curiosity, process and shared accountability.
More Leads To Better
One fundamental truth of creative generativity is that new questions and new ideas lead to breakthroughs. The most important principle to remember about both is that quality follows quantity: more questions and ideas lead to better questions and ideas. That's why we need to give groups time to generate as many options, variations and alternatives as possible. This kind of non-attachment to first offerings opens the possibility space and allows ideas and questions to incubate other and better possibilities.
Not Innovation
I attended an Innovation awards event tonight where "innovations" included efficiency improvements, scaling sales of existing products and purchasing more companies for portfolios. Defining innovation as wow factors, these are not innovations. They are more along the business as usual ends of the continuum.
It's a call for changing standards leaning more in the direction of the definition I prefer: That which surprises the imagination of the market. At the higher end of the spectrum are always things markets do not imagine, do not demand, do not anticipate. They actually create new markets.
Let's provoke companies in these directions and celebrate these kinds of innovations.
The Trust Factor
It's obvious to most of us who facilitate group engagement in any context that trust factors fundamentally in group performance. Groups imagine at the depth of trust and move at the speed of trust. Two kinds of trust shape the texture of group potentials: transactional and narrative trust.
In transactional trust, people trust those who fulfill their expectations. In narrative trust people trust those with whom they share the same stories. As you can sense, narrative trust is more durable. That's why I prefer to give people time to intentionally share stories that build the resonance of narrative trust.
Trust moves people from suspicion to appreciation, risk-aversion to action and competition to collaboration. It is the invisible hand that helps realize new possibilities.
The People Who Show Up Are The Right People (To Start With)
Because uncertainty and creativity are often expected in any collaboration, we can't exactly predict the kind of people we will want at the table as we progress. We stay open to drawing from our resource and idea networks throughout, some people popping in for single conversations or assignments, and others joining and continuing through the effort. We stay attentive to who we might want to include and engage people just in time.
Listening
When we facilitate conversations in groups of any size, it is a basic miscalculation to assume that people hear what anyone says. Listening is always filtered though each person's experiences, biases and agendas. We don't know what people hear until they voice what they hear or until we ask about it. Getting people explicitly heard makes everything good happen from trust to creativity.
Agreements
I've done more than a couple blog posts on this question and today calls for yet one more spin: How many distinctions do we need for "that which we intend to achieve?" We have: Strategies, objectives, goals, tactics, targets, milestones, metrics and I have yet to see any group of professionals have the same distinct definitions for each. The confusion wastes millions of hours of corporate time annually around the world, maybe more.
My suggestion today is simple. Agreements. I like calling any of them agreements. Of course we put target dates on any of them which takes care of the sequential relationships between and among them. Simple is an asset.
Stop Focusing On Problems
According to the old deficiency-based mythology, the only way to make progress in an organization or community is to focus on problems. Problems span the variety of what's wrong, who's to blame, how we're victims, what we can't control, what we're lacking and how we're failing. The problem conversation typically only has the power to maintain the status quo, even with all the emotion and motion it generates.
Things move forward more quickly and easily when we instead get inspired by conversations about assets and possibilities. This radical divergence attracts resistance from people too attached to inertia and cynicism.
Things move forward when those interested in assets and possibilities engage what they have to do what they can to realize what they wish. It's that profoundly simple and powerful.
IDEO's 3 KeysTo Creativity
The preeminent design firm IDEO works from three key strategies for creativity: diversity, empathy and prototyping. Diversity of perspectives enriches the possibilities to consider. Empathetic undertanding of users drives practicality of approaches. Prototyping accelerates experimenting and learning that's critical to any new efforts.
These are the opposites of endless discussing, speculation and assumptions. They should be core to any innovation process in business, education and community transformation.