Last week a friend told me a story of a colleague she’s been encouraging to spread his wings and take on a bigger role. As a chap suffused with a healthy self-awareness he was doubting his ‘fit’ as he’d ‘never done half the things the role demanded’. He lamented that he was nowhere near as accomplished as she was. My friend burst out laughing and let him into the secret – half the time she’s
Read MoreSpace Monsters! Ever been sitting with your pals, cracking happily on about whatever however, when whoooomph, the Space Monster lands. Chomp, chomp, chomp the Space Monster is just eating through your words, your air, your very presence seems to disappear under their almighty, all consuming Self! They somehow manage to state the bleeding obvious, reiterate the mundane and the everyday, the headlines skimmed off the Twitterverse as if no one else has ever thought about
Read MoreThis is not a blog about navigating uncertainty, languishing, disconnection, pivots and any of the other buzz words flooding the leadership chatter. It’s not about the flattened panopticon of the Zoomiverse and it’s absolutely not mansplaining how you, as a leader, must be feeling. This is a blog about using big data to reveal what’s really happening. It’s about recognising and following leads. It’s about fully embracing your leadership, especially, the Very Difficult Bits. It’s
Read More“Jo – oh -oh!” oh good lord here we go my inner voices mutters as I hear the client graft a couple of extra and unnecessary syllables, Scooby Doo style, onto my sufficiently syllabled name. “Can you just…….?” I feel her metaphorical teeth sink in as the energy-care-attention suck begins once more. This is an emotional vampire at work: crossing boundaries, coercive, manipulating, neediness slathered in niceness. She’s twisting the power dynamic of me-as-trip leader
Read MoreThe children huddled closer together, skin touching skin, seeking shelter from the curious eyes of the onlookers. They shuffled and bent their slender bodies into one another melding into a seamless bundle of body and cloth, sweat and limbs entwining forming a oneness against the many that had come to watch. Small heads tucking into soft hollows of the older, stronger ones, arms enveloping them, closing the gaps in a well-practiced compaction. Eyes and ears
Read Moreleaving and not leaving at all Sunday: The packing up and preparing to leave was a proper ass-kicking today. Again! How is that? I move so often. Yet I’m still confounded by the disproportionate angst and unravelling that suffocates at these transition times. I figured it was just the fraying of the anchor lines to the current world: the struggle to exhale the here and now and suck in new air. I figured this is
Read MoreSeduction A few months back I realised that I had been seduced by the glamour of the leadership and unwittingly bought in to a competitive, mass myth creation process: what is leadership? find the ‘answer’ to leadership, find the ‘answer’ to … life? Despite knowing the extent of its cultural bias (Nesbitt, 2003) had I also become a victim of the Fundamental/ Leadership Attribution Error (Hackman, 2002), mistakenly placing leaders at cause for life’s highs
Read MoreA shudder of sand dusts the tent walls as he flips over for the umpteenth time, sleeping bag mangling in the decision-burdened wakefulness of the long night. Backwards and forwards, body echoing mind – get on the river, or get out. Ke garne? The sleepfree mangler: Pat O’Keeffe: white-water adventurer; charismatic guide and pioneer of big river journeys in the world’s wilder places. A man with a fearsome reputation and, tonight, a head full of
Read MoreThere’s nothing new about VUCA. And nothing bad about it either Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous “The world is changing too fast!” “I don’t understand it – scary!” “Crikey –it’s all so vague” ‘Doomed!’ ‘Everybody panic!’ This is what I’m hearing and reading in leadership conferences, papers, coffee time chats and with continuous splatter across social and mainstream media. Really? Is it really any different to what has gone before? Is the world really wobbling and
Read MoreVision is dead (long live visioning) It’s time to stop focusing on vision – on peering forward into the mystical never-never prescribing an ideal state And expecting leaders to have a magical ability to predict, present and make possible the future Let’s let go of confining ourselves to a potentially unrealistic and inherently limiting end-point, to a ‘vision’. Because whilst vision may be a “compelling picture of the future that inspires commitment” (Manasse 1986[i]), it
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