Without reflection, we go blindly on our way...
We need to move from the leader as hero, to the leader as host.
Who you are depends on who you meet.
For us, someone who is willing to step forward and help is much more courageous than someone who is merely fulfilling the role.
I believe that the capacity that any organization needs is for leadership to appear anywhere it is needed, when it is needed.
In this present culture, we need to find the means to work and live together with less aggression if we are to resolve the serious problems that afflict and impede us.
In virtually every organization, regardless of mission and function, people are frustrated by problems that seem unsolvable.
Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.
We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity.
Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone’s commitment and intelligence.
For example, I was discussing the use of email and how impersonal it can be, how people will now email someone across the room rather than go and talk to them. But I don’t think this is laziness, I think it is a conscious decision people are making to save time.
Aggression is the most common behavior used by many organizations, a nearly invisible medium that influences all decisions and actions.
In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We’ve chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.
When error holds so much power, play disappears. Creativity ceases.
Circles create soothing space...
Surrendering to life offers some wonderful realizations. We learn we’re capable of being in this dance, of working with whatever happens. We learn to trust ourselves and then others and, gradually, we learn that life itself can be trusted.
The future cannot be determined. It can only be experienced as it occurring. Life doesn’t know what it will be until it notices what it has become.
One of the easiest human acts is also the most healing. Listening to someone. Simply listening. Not advising or coaching, but silently and fully listening.
We’ve taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations – soft-spoken, even whispered at first – that we need to encourage.
Life doesn’t move in straight lines, and neither does a good conversation.