November 19th List

Healthy chaos, Winston Churchill, storytellers, and the friendship of Archbishop Tutu and His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Here are a handful of the readings, viewings, and listenings that have recently caught my attention and left a mark on my thinking.

1

Needing More Than Just Purpose

Daniel Goleman, Korn Ferry

Perhaps, like me, you are wary of business or leadership development approaches that use language like “burning desire to win” or stories about one-on-one internal interviews where “96% of employees say they felt welcome when they joined the company, and 95% say they feel good about the ways their company contributes to the community.” I’m not by nature a cynical person, but even I was like “seriously, one-on-one internal interviews?”.

But I do appreciate the article’s emphasis on leadership needing to inspire everyone in the organization to rally around the mission and the purpose of their work. For me, this is particularly exciting when the purpose, whether it is for a public, not-for-profit, or for profit organization, is for the betterment of the communities served and the world we all live in.

According to the article, this inspirational leadership requires:

1. Focusing on the group/organization and its larger mission, not just personal success
2. Walking the talk
3. Being trustworthy
4. Being able to think outside the box

Good stuff and some other time I’ll poke at why thinking “outside the box” is a meaningless phrase.

Despite my criticisms, this short piece, as is often the case at Korn Ferry, is worth a read and a think.

2

Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company

This 2022 HBR publication by Whitney Johnson caught my attention as I was writing Done with Learning: A Frank Discussion Among Leaders. I have taken a deeper dive into the book and I have some unease about the idea of a linear approach to adult work-based learning as laid out in Johnson’s “S Curve of Learning”. In this “S Curve of Learning” there are three distinct phases, the Launch Point, the Sweet Spot, and Mastery, that explain and direct learning needs and solutions.

My unease comes not so much from Johnson’s model, it is after all just a model for understanding a bigger picture, but from what may happen when our best intentions to value and support the success of people get trapped into the efficiency factory of some of our internal organizational development. An efficiency factory that doesn’t take time to fully understand the problem or need and doesn’t take time to build trust, and a shared understanding of the organization’s purpose, priorities, and values (see above from Korn Ferry).

While I don’t believe that it is Johnson’s intention, there is a very real risk that in a too common state of inattention and urgency, we may mistake the model for the solution.

3

Your Mind Needs Chaos

Oshan Jarrow, Vox, October 12, 2024

I appreciate that very few of us get up in the morning and say “bring on the chaos”. Yet Mark Miller’s research on human wellbeing and our ability to predict suggests that we need ways, such as through experiencing art, creativity, and meditation, to explore the edge of chaos. It is at this edge, the “healthy boundary between order and chaos” or what he calls the “Goldilocks zone”, that we start to create new and better ideas, systems, and ways of thinking.

The big question I’m left with is, next time I’m at the art gallery or on a meditation retreat, do I let them know that I’m there for the edge of chaos?

4

Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Morgan Housel, 2023

I’d like to think that I’m ready to get up in the morning and embrace the safe and healthy edge of chaos (emphasis on safe, healthy, and edge). I have touched on this with my thoughts on Brian Klaas’s Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters and Mervyn King and John Kay’s Radical Uncertainty (mentioned here).

Then this New York Times bestseller arrived on my desk with a promotion that read:

Through a sequence of engaging stories and pithy examples, he shows how we can use our newfound grasp of the unchanging to see around corners, not by squinting harder through the uncertain landscape of the future, but by looking backwards, being more broad-sighted, and focusing instead on what is permanently true.   

What a mood killer while dancing on the edge of chaos.

But life isn’t all on the edge of chaos; that isn’t desirable or sustainable. So I opened the book and here is what I think:

• Housel is a good enough storyteller, but his anecdotes of life lessons, enduring values, business success, and world happenings are without breadth or depth. That is the risk of a popular quick read based on blog posts – things can get kind of chicken-soupy.
• Interestingly, the stories are often founded in chaos, the chance encounters and choices, the flukes, and the messiness of it all.
• Not so interesting is how Housel takes those stories and draws a simplistic line of cause and effect (for example experiencing the Great Depression and having an aversion to debt).
• None the less, there is something of value here as we learn from our past, both the individual and shared, to understand how and what endures – what stays the same – as we navigate the uncertainty around us.

Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Winston Churchill, 1948

5

LinkedIn Goodness

Social media for all its pitfalls (see Fear of Missing Out Professionally) can still be a great place to meet and learn from people. Over the past week or so these folks have expanded and delighted my thinking. (links are to LI profiles and LI posts)

1. Lily Zheng, the author of DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right. This post from November 12th is a call to the work we need to do in shifting and strengthening our organizational cultures. Zheng ends the post with,

Our charge is to put everything we have into enforcing healthy norms. To quash norm violations by making them socially and professionally painful. To use our status and power to reward the behavior we want to see. To organize as a collective, rather than individuals, for the benefit of all of us.

2. Daniel Sagona, a friend and a brilliant film maker and storyteller whose work at Keepers of the Story reflects on and elevates our shared humanity. Check out this post from November 7th and his film Together With Families | Just Help | A Child Welfare Documentary (film link in the post comments).
3. Elaine Alec, the Chief Empowerment Officer at Naqsmist Storytellers. I started learning with Elaine a few years ago and consider her an exemplar in leading with vulnerability and integrity. After nearly 30 years of coach training and different certifications, what I have learned from Elaine has strengthened and expanded the experience that I build with clients. This post from November 14th captures the strength needed, and modelled by Elaine, to challenge and to do better than the usual and expected.
4. Eric Partaker, a CEO Coach. His November 14th post is an antidote to the random readings and viewings that hit my radar about kindness, compassion, emotional intelligence, and even ethics being all about good strategy. The post begins with “Great leaders practice kindness as a genuine act – not as a calculated strategy.”
5. Tom Geraghty, creator of psychsafety.com and useful tip sheets and practices for psychological safety*. This post from November 19th sent me on a Deming treasure hunt where I found out more about the misattributed quote, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, at the The Deming Institute. Deming actually said, as Tom posted, “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.”. Yes!!! I love now knowing that.

6

Mission Joy: Finding Happiness in Troubled Times

This film explores the warm friendship between Archbishop Tutu and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It is a friendship of respect, teasing, truth, and joy that is born out of their leadership principles and values. There is a moment where a young girl cries while sharing her story of fleeing Tibet to study at the Children’s Village. Archbishop Tutu’s eyes fill with tears. His Holiness the Dalai Lama responds with a rather chipper call for her to seize the opportunities that are now before her and for her to be courageous.

Compassion and courage – the bedrock of meaningful and ethical leadership.

You can find out more about the Courageous Leaders Project and my work as a coach at courageousleaders.ca.

*I know, yet again with the psychological safety. I just can’t seem to let it go. It is so important that this year I received a Master Certificate in Mental Health and Psychological Safety at Work so that I can better support you with this work.

Photo by Arno Senoner on Unsplash