In this video piano soloist Maria Joao Pires is confronted with a nasty situation. As the conductor begins the piece of music they are to play, she discovers that it is not the piece she prepared. She has left her music at home Imagine that.
Undaunted, she engages in a short conversation with the conductor who encourages her to play it any way – she played it last season, she knows the piece well.
Pires digs ddep – you can see it in her face – and conjures up Mozart’s D minor concerto form the depths of her mastery.
There have been times when I am working with a group, when a similar feeling has overcome me. For whatever reason – the invitation was wrong, the situaion had changed, people were expecting something different – everything I had prepared was wrong for the moment. In such moments the only thing that saves you is an ability to improvise, to draw on your experience and to attend to the present needs of the group. This is what I strive to be able to do. This is why practice is so important.
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Still playing with the Cynefin framework and thinking about how it helps us to understand the processes for decision making and action in the domains of simple, complicated, complex, chaotic and disordered domains.
Today talking with clients and friends we were discussing the “spaces inbetween,” especially with respect to cultures. In British Columbia, services are increasingly being separated between indigenous and non-indigenous service providers which isn’t a bad thing on the face of it, but the enterprise is being undertaken from a scarcity mindset. in other words, resources are being moved from one part of the sector to the other in a zero sum approach leaving people resentful and frightened of the spaces in between, which is the space that clients live in.
One of the results of this fear of space is a collapsing of leadership into a certainty based mindset. We look for the failsafe solutions and then implement, externalizing all that is unknown and unknowable. Increasingly however, there is a growing appetite among some leaders for the potential of the space of “not-knowing.” One can approach that space from the perspective of reductionist analysis, or one can embrace the possibility there. Working with emergence is not always a secure thing however, as you never know what you are going to get in this space. What is required there is principles and practices that help one to navigate and make good decisions in the complex, chaotic and disordered domains. In the simple and complicated domains, where analysis is an excellent approach, rules and tools are very useful. Previous experience, case studies and best practices are useful for simple problem solving.
Things become dangerous when we seek security in the rules and tools and try to apply them in the complex and chaotic and disordered domains. Often people will come to learning events with me and ask for a definitive list of situations in which a particular methodology will work. If I find myself saying “it depends” then I know I am dealing with that unknowable “space inbetween.” In that case I point to principles and practices. It sometimes leaves people frustrated, especially if they have come seeking rules and tools.
The goal here is to provide support for leaders who are prepared to enter the spaces of not-knowing and dwell there, sitting in the uncertainty and attentive to all the emotional difficulty that crops up. It also means taking a disciplined approach to working with safe fail experiments that allow for emergence that then gives you some indications of what is useful and what is not.
In a world besotted with analysis, this is a tough sell, and yet increasingly I meet decision makers who suspect that something is up with the way they have been taught to reason out every situations. Rules and tools are increasingly failing us as we become more aware of how difficult it is to manage in complex and chaotic domains. Principles and practices are much more useful.
As to what those practices and principles are, well, it depends. And that is an invitation to a jumping off point for diving in and learning together.
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Very interesting link here. Tipu Ake ki te Ora means “growing from within, ever upwards towards wellbeing.”
We share the Tipu Ake ki te Ora Lifecycle – an easily applied, and action focused leadership model that exploits Kiwi style teamwork. It provides new tools for organisations that wish to grow into dynamic living entities, rather than just behaving like machines.
via The Tipu Ake Lifecycle – An organic Leadership Model for Innovative Organisations.
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Such a nice treat to come across this chronicle of friends: From Hero to Host: A story of Citizenship in Columbus OH. This an excerpt from Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze’s new book “Walk Out, Walk On“, due out soon.
The excerpt tells the story of how a small group of people – many of them dear friends of mine – awakened a new form of citizen leadership in Columbus Ohio using the Art of Hosting as an operating system. You will hear stories of Phil Cass, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Matt Habash and others in that city who have been changing the way people think about health, education, food and citizenship since 2002.
Have a read and get inspired.
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[18] NO, THERE IS NO PRECEDENT for what we are struggling to create. We have to make it up ourselves.
A great set of theses which ends with this one. And therefore the capacities to create what is unprecedented are also unprecedented. Best practices for what will be needed in the future are not available at any scale in the precedent. The call in the world now is to move to discover new ways of being at every scale. Some of this new ways will draw on old ways, some of it will draw on contemporary ways and some of it will draw on ways we haven’t yet discovered. But it will depend on “ways.”
Ways are roads. We travel some of these lineages now and we start new ones all the time. While I was in Los Angeles, I was struck by the evolution of the road system. Some of it is based on very old paths, such as Wilshire Boulevard, which began life as a path cleared through a barley field and gave rise to a fundamental archetype of automobile based commercial space, the Miracle Mile. Henry Wilshire had no idea that his cut through a field would create such a pattern. His pathway far pre-dated the technology that would find its highest expression there.
In creating the unprecedented ways of our future, we need to be attentive to what we are doing but not assume that any great stroke will create the roadway of the future. If a path through a field is needed, cut the path. And see what happens. Many paths die away, but the odd one or two becomes a powerful way when the time is right.