Tag: Meg Wheatley

Thinking Leadership with Dee Hock and Meg Wheatley

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“True leaders are those who epitomise the general sense of the community – who symbolise, legitimise and strengthen behaviour in accordance with the sense of the community – who enable its conscious, shared values and beliefs to emerge, expand and be transmitted from generation to generation.”

Dee Hock in Birth of the Chaordic Age

Meg Wheatley, from a perspective of “new science” (quantum rather than Newtonian) sums up what leaders are for:

“People need a lot from their leaders. They need information, access, resources, trust and follow-through. Leaders are necessary to foster experimentation, to help create connections across the organisation, to feed the system with rich information from multiple sources.”

Generation chasm

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You can tell a culture is in trouble when its elders walk across the street to avoid meeting its youth.

Quoted by Meg Wheatley in Finding our Way and attributed to Malidoma Some from Burkino Fasso and Parker Palmer. Meg Wheatley’s has written a very appreciative and moving essay Maybe you will be the ones: to my sons and their friends.

In chaotic times

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TU ES PETRUS!!!

I know that leaders today are faced with enormous challenges, most of them not of their own doing. As times grow more chaotic, as people question the meaning (and meaninglessness) of this life, people are clamouring for their leaders to save and rescue them…. People press their leaders to do anything to end the uncertainty, to make things better, to create stability. Even leaders who would never want to become dictators, those devoted to servant leadership, walk into this trap. They want to help, so they exert more control over the disorder. They try to create safety, to insulate people from the realities of change. They try to give answers to dilemnas that have no answers.

Today is the inauguration of Pope Francis’s papacy. We pray for him. This quote on the temptations and spirituality of leadership in times of chaos (all times) is from Meg Wheatley’s Finding our Way. It struck me as helpful on a day when many will be thinking through issues of leadership.

The Monday morning question

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The whole globe is shook up, so what are you going to do when things are falling apart?

You’re either going to become more fundamentalist and try to hold things together, or you’re going to forsake the old ambitions and goals and live life as an experiment, making it up as you go along.

Perma Chödrön as quoted by Meg Wheatley in Finding our Way

a most inspiring award

David Herbert3 Comments

Well, blow me down. I’ve received a nomination for  a Very Inspiring Blogger Award from Ivon from his Teacher as Transformer blog.

Isn’t that lovely? And isn’t the award a great way of building community? Now, I’ve got to nominate 15 other blogs and their authors as “Very Inspiring”, by which I mean that their blogs are inspirational to me. I know it’s not going to change their life, but it’s proof to them that they are making sense – to me, at least. (And it is reassuring to know that we are making sense to others).

And it’s going to get their oxytocin levels going! Dr Love – aka Paul Zak (can I change my name?) has researched the “moral molecule”, the chemical in the blood called oxytocin. It turns out that “being treated decently causes people’s oxytocin levels to go up, which in turn prompts them to behave more decently, while experimental subjects given an artificial oxytocin boost – by means of an inhaler – behave more generously and trustingly. And it’s not solely because of its effects on humans that oxytocin is known as “the cuddle hormone”: for example, male meadow voles, normally roguishly promiscuous in their interactions with female meadow voles, become passionately monogamous when their oxytocin levels are raised in the lab”.

So, let’s hear it for the male voles, and for social networking. Zak recommends, according to Oliver Burkeman writing in the Guardian

we should all be doing more to boost oxytocin in benign ways. He recommends a minimum of eight hugs a day (pets count, too); massage and even soppy movies seem to work: he has done the blood tests. Interactions on Twitter and Facebook seem to lead to oxytocin spikes, offering a powerful retort to the argument that social media is killing real human interaction: in hormonal terms, it appears, the body processes it as an entirely real kind of interaction

Get pressing that like button! William James claimed that “the deepest craving of human nature is the need to be appreciated”, and a Harvard psychologist speaks of the importance of having a praise-criticism ratio of at least 5:1. Does anyone ever complain that they are praised too much?

Award ceremonies contain suspense, appreciation and thanks. Awards are prized and hard to come by – when we think of the Oscars, Olympics and such like. But there are everyday awards that are not so hard to come by, but are equally prized and create community. I had my own New Year ceremony which you can read about here. But there are awards to be made in our everyday world. These awards are not made with fanfares or fine words, but may consist of a “thank you” or simply a smile.

I’m not going to think too hard about the awards I am going to make today, but among them are my nominations for a Very Inspiring Blogger Award. (I am only including blogs which have recent posts).

And the nominations are (in no particular order and chosen from those who post regularly):

  1. Spirit 21 – Shelina Zahra Janmohamed
  2. Inspired Beeing – Cat Jaffee
  3. The Painted Prayerbook – jan Richardson
  4. Growing up with God – Rachael Elizabeth
  5. Simon Marsh
  6. shinystuff – Jan Dean
  7. Beyond the Edge – Viv McWaters
  8. Another Angle – Stephen Cherry
  9. Lost in the North – Dave Mock
  10. Plaza – Oliver Herbert
  11. People Reading
  12. Do not dance UK – Jose Campos
  13.  On the plus side – Lynn Walsh
  14. Christopher Burkett
  15. The Six Doyles – Katherine Doyle

The rules for accepting the nominations are:

  1. Link back to the person who nominated you
  2. Post the award image to your page
  3. Tell seven facts about yourself
  4. Nominate 15 other blogs
  5. Let them know they are nominated

So here’s the award

And here are seven facts about myself:

  1. I’m part of a lovely family – Jeanette, Adam, Oliver and Leo and their loved ones
  2. I was ordained in Sheffield in 1974
  3. I am still listening to Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon after all these years
  4. I love the beach – Patara and the beaches of Wirral and North Wales
  5. I’m intrigued by ideas of leadership and ministry (nominating here Dee Hock and Meg Wheatley for Very Inspiring Author awards).
  6. I follow the ups and downs of the Foxes – Leicester City – my home town team
  7. I recommended a book by Jay Griffiths to someone yesterday – A Sideways Look at Time

Thank you Ivon for nominating me and for inspiring me to today’s awards and community building. You would have been on that list.

Leaders in the new story

David Herbert4 Comments

Leaders who live in the new story help us understand ourselves differently by the way they lead. They trust our humanness, they welcome the surprises we bring to them; they are curious about our differences; they delight in our inventiveness; they nurture us; they connect us. They trust that we can create wisely and well, that we seek the best interests of our organisation and our community, that we want to bring more good into the world.

… What we ask of the tellers of the new story is their voice and their courage. We do not need them to create a massive training programme, a global approach, a dramatic style. We only need them to speak to us when we are with them. we need them to break their silence and share their ideas of the world as they have come to know it.

Meg Wheatley in Finding our Way (p.30)

Thank you to friend Helen Scarisbrick for drawing this to my attention.

Results, relegation and relationships

David Herbert10 Comments

The football season is virtually over, relegation issues are settled and just a few teams have any further stake in the rest of the season as they fight for promotion through the play-offs. This wool gathering of a northern dean has some useful insights into the mind of the footballing world, particularly exploring the feelings of players who have failed to perform to expectation and feel the responsibility for relegation.

At the same time, our Year 6 children are sitting their tests and are expected to produce the results that, as they say, won’t let themselves down , their parents down, their teachers down, their schools down and everything else down. Are “results” an  obsession of our age? Is the fascination for measurement and standardisation something that has grown through the industrial revolution and our increasing capacity for measurement?

Results measure success and failure. Kenny Dalglish has discovered that not getting enough of them (wins) while managing Liverpool FC is fatal. Results are the stuff of competition, with the result that they set team against team and performer against performer. In battle there is only one winner and many losers, and, therefore, it is best to avoid that result by finding peace. Some are driven by results, but most of us, most of the time work without seeing results for our effort. How do we keep going?

Thanks to Meg Wheatley (Finding our Way: leadership for an Uncertain Time) I have these thoughts to challenge our results culture: the first is from Vaclav Havel, and the other is from a letter written by Thomas Merton to peace activist Jim Forest.

Hope is a dimension of the soul … an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons … It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

Do not depend on the hope of results … You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness,the truth of the work itself … You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people … In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

Wheatley’s own comment is that hope and fear are inescapable partners. “Any time we hope for a certain outcome, and work hard to make it happen, then we also introduce fear – fear of failing, fear of loss.” She says that we can live beyond hope and fear, and that all we need is each other.

I couldn’t resist including the photo I found here. I have asked for permission to use it.

Leadership lessons

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Photo by LHG Creative

For Dave Soleil, in this blogpost, leadership is a community action rather than a person. Soleil, like so many others, is critical of the traditional model of leadership which consists of a single heroic person that large groups of people follow.  Soleil describes this as the “find a parade and walk in front of it” model of leadership.

If leadership is identified with a particular person we are often left in a position of waiting on that leader (who we can also conveniently scapegoat). Soleil suggests that “if we see the visionary … as one of many pieces of a community-based leadership movement, we empower everyone in the community to contribute their gifts as a critical piece of the collective effort we call leadership.” Those gifts will include vision, co-ordination (of the collective effort), encouragement etc etc.

Leadership models forged in the heat of battle and industrial process have looked for control, but Meg Wheatley asks:

What if we stopped looking for control, and began, in earnest, to look for order? Order we will find in places we never thought to look before – all around us in nature’s living, dynamic systems. In fact, once we begin to look into nature with new eyes, the teachers are everywhere. (Leadership and the New Science, 1999, p25).

The flight of geese is one of nature’s stock supply teachers when it comes to leadership programmes. I have never heard the translation of Goosehonk, but my guess is that the question they are asking is not “who is the leader?” but “who is leading next?”.  Leadership is not something they leave to the next bird. There isn’t a goose who ducks the responsibility it shares with its whole community. Leadership is a community inter-action.