Archive for Creativity

Leaping off the hamster wheel of fear

June 15, 2008 / / No comments

For many of us, the “wheel of fear” (see: http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/30/getting-off-your-wheel-fear/ ) is like a hamster wheel.  The path is well defined; we put one foot in front of the other and … find ourselves somehow back where we started.  So, how do we get off?

As Anthony Robbins observes, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” And we behave in habitual ways because it makes sense and feels natural to us. Therefore, getting off the wheel involves doing something counter-intuitive and learning to see things differently.

The process is more than intellectual; it’s not about learning a new model. It literally involves a shift in perspective and experience, that involves our intellectual, bodily, emotional and spiritual selves.

This process can be mind-bending, but the payoff is big — you experience a new sense of freedom and possibility: playing with perspective brings us to a highly creative space.

To jump off the “wheel of fear” and onto our “wheel of freedom” (Britten 2001), we can begin either with shifting our perspective or shifting our behavior. We can see why this is so, by considering the “wheel of being” below.

Wheel of Being 

Where you might begin depends on your orientation. If you prefer to understand something before experimenting with it,  you would likely choose to begin with Perspective. If you are more empirical, you might experiment with a new behavior, and see where that leads…

We’ll continue in my next post!

Britten, Rhonda. (2001). Fearless Living. NY: Penguin.

Category: All Posts, Change, Coaching, Creativity, Leadership /

How does your “wheel of fear” shape your leadership strategies in times of stress?

June 6, 2008 / / No comments

In my last post, we talked about our personal “wheel of fear” – how it works, and how to develop awareness of our wheel of fear as a first step in getting off of it.  Organizations, too, have their “Wheels of Fear.” One might be: We are experiencing intense competition that threatens our survival. Therefore, everyone needs to work harder and longer. People who aren’t enrolled should not be in this organization. Sound familiar?

But suppose this reaction actually represses the changes that are needed in order to successfully adapt to the new conditions? For example, what if successful adaptation actually required people to become more thoughtful and creative?

For this reason, it can be very useful to develop an awareness of you own reaction or response to stress, and how this shapes your leadership strategies in difficult times. I invite you to the following experiment:

  1. If you have not already identified your wheel of fear, I invite you to do so. The series of questions that coach Rhonda Britten uses can be found in the post: http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/30/getting-off-your-wheel-fear/   (If you are interested in learning more about this model, you can find more information on Britten’s book, Fearless Living: Live Without Excuses and Love Without Regret, in Recommended Reading).
  2. After you become aware of your own patterns, it might be interesting to consider: how does your personal wheel of fear affect your leadership strategies in times of stress? 

I invite you to share your experience!

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Creativity, Leadership /

What is your organizational “wheel of fear”?

May 23, 2008 / / No comments

In my last post, http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/05/16/trust-as-an-enabler-of-change/ we talked about how fear can both prompt and frustrate change. Presently, macro forces, prominently including global competition and outsourcing, are increasing fear and insecurity, while requiring organizations to become more creative, collaborative and adaptable.  However, it seems the actions we take from a perspective of fear are often maladaptive.

For example, one common response to fear is to become more controlling. It might be useful to notice two things about control that can undermine our effectiveness: First, when we attempt to “control” others, we take away some of their free will and dignity. And, second, when we are controlling, is there an implied threat of force? For example, what if people don’t comply –what action will we take then? And how does the threat of force tend to effect the quality of your relationships?

As a result, the people we would control are likely to both feel threatened and the need to re-exert some control of their own. As Hargrove (1995) points out, this tends to show up as a lack of enrollment, a lack of trust, and other subtle and not-so-subtle forms of rebellion. Although control can indeed get results, we pay a price for them. And as people become less enrolled, do we not then see the need for more control, more force? We find our selves on a “wheel of fear” (Britton, 2001) — a non-virtuous cycle that can lead to plummeting morale and, to the degree that we rely on organizational member enrollment, diminished organizational effectiveness.     

Biologically, fear invokes our “reptilian brain” which is concerned with survival, but which isn’t very smart, which helps explain why our reactions to fear tend not to be very intelligent.

In our next post, we will begin to explore some strategies for moving off our “wheel of fear” and onto our “wheel of freedom.”

References

Britton, Rhonda. (2001). Fearless Living. NY: Penguin.

Hargrove, Robert. Masterful Coaching: Extraordinary Results by Impacting People & the Way They Think & Work Together. SF: Pfeiffer, 1995.

Category: All Posts, Collaboration, Creativity, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Science, Trust /

Why do people not create or innovate?

April 11, 2008 / / No comments

The key quesiton isn’t “what fosters creativity?”  But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? but why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything. — Abraham Maslow

Maslow observes that creativity and innovation are natural endowments — we only need to watch young children and remember our own childhoods to know that this is so.  So, why do we, as adults, commonly think of creativity and innovation as qualities that primarily describe the relatively small group of professional creatives? And, why do organizations struggle with the question of how to become more innovative?

Almost 40 years ago, futurist Alvin Toffler observed that our education system was designed to develop citizens who could take up their positions in the industrializing world, as cogs in the great machine (Future Shock, 1970).  Beyond the content of the coursework itself,  schools teach children how to show up on time, follow directions, work within an incentive system that emphasizes external rewards and punishments and to conform to a social program.  Creativity and innovation are generally channeled into art (where classes in art are still offered).  “Play” is considered childish.  Speaking personally, it wasn’t until graduate school that I felt encouraged to think for myself and to create new ideas and knowledge …

Then, as Alfonoso Montuori describes, our organizations are still dominated by bureaucratic forms of leadership and organization designed for the industrial age, which values conformance, compliance, industry, and relies primarily on external reward systems.  Although, as leaders, we intellectually know that our organizations need to become substantially more innovative to survive and thrive, at an emotional level, most of us in this culture, have come to value control and compliance even more…

Maslow’s good news is to remind us that we are all naturally creative. Just as we learned how to suppress and narrowly channel our creativity, we can also begin to unlock our creative potential by removing  those learned barriers (both institutional and internal). 

In order to do this, we will need to circle around to a discussion of the concept of control or power-over, which seems to be creativity’s chief antagonist…

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Culture, Education, Innovation, Leadership, Organization, Rewards /

Experience of Right and Left Hemispheres of the Brain

March 22, 2008 / / One comment

Below is a link to an awesome video, in which neuroanatomist Jill Bolte describes alternating experiences of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. 

This is important because in the West, we have extensively developed the left brain, associated with rational sequential thought, and modern organizations and approaches to leadership reflect this orientation.  However, it is the right side of the brain which sees larger patterns and is the source of our creativity, including creative leaps.  Therefore, learning how to integrate these diverse facilities — to draw on our inner diversity — can help us to see new opportunities and solutions to old problems.  

Coaching does just this, and therefore it is increasingly being recognized as a core leadership competency in contemporary organizations. And, there are many more interesting and exciting implications of this insight that we will discuss in this blog…

http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/jill_bolte_tayl.php

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Creativity, Diversity, Innovation, Leadership, Organization, Science /

Riane Eisler and Alfonso Montuori on Women’s Radio!

March 19, 2008 / / No comments

This is a great opportunity to hear Dr. Riane Eisler interview Professor Alfonso Montuori about the new Transformative Leadership program at the California Insitute of Integral Stuides. 

http://www.womensradio.com/content/templates/?a=2229&z=11

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Education, Leadership, Partnership /

Innovation & the Machine

March 17, 2008 / / No comments

 The juxtaposition of these two words sounds unlikely doesn’t it?  We really don’t think of machines as being innovative — they do pre-programmed things (one hopes well).  For certain, the operator of the machine can innovate, but not the machine itself.  Similarly, traditional bureaucratic organizations, specialization and organizational lines of communication and control usually substantially limit innovation from within.  

As we discussed earlier, the bureaucratic organization structure is based on the principle of rational control, which enables a small number of people to exercise control over a large number of people. Because security, privileges and economic rewards tend to be commensurate with the scope of authority and power, managers tend to guard and seek to enlarge their scope of conrol.  This and other factors tend to lead both to internal competition and a resistance to changes that may decrease a manager’s scope of control, or put him/her in a less advantageous position.  

Although this blog promotes a Partnership paradigm of leadership and organization, which is distinctly un-Machiavellian, there are few as insightful or eloquent with respect to the dynamics of authoritarian leadership than Machiavelli, who confirms one reason that innovation and change tends to be so difficult for modern organizations:  

“It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success and more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes. The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old order and receives only lukewarm support from those would prosper under the new.” (Niccolo Machiavelli 1512)

This tendency to pursue one’s own self interest can be counterbalanced by an inspiring vision — which is one of the key functions of good leadership. However, it is interesting and potentially instructive to observe that the burueaucratic organization form we take for granted today was not designed or intended to be innovative. This is not to say that such organizations cannot be innovative, but in order to do so, they have to overcome some problems of their own making.

In upcoming posts, we will continue to explore the dynamics of traditional organizations, and also begin to explore emerging paradigms of organization and leadership, and how coaching is both a means and an end to more empowered, collaborative and innovative organizations ….

Category: All Posts, Coaching, Creativity, Design, Innovation, Leadership, Organization /

Leadership & the Machine

March 1, 2008 / / No comments

Theories of leadership are informed by our understanding of the world, including our understanding of others.  This post will consider the worldview out of which the bureaucratic organization arose, including its understanding of creativity and intelligence, and then examine the nature and role of leadership in light of that understanding.  This is valuable to us because it builds towards an understanding that organizational realities are substantially shaped by leadership perspectives — which is a key insight of transformative leadership and a potential source of power for us as we seek to overcome the challenges we are facing both within and without our organizations. 

The concept of the organization as machine evolved from a worldview in which the world itself was seen as an unintelligent mechanism.  In this worldview, the apparent intelligence (and indeed, according to some philosophers, causation itself) arose wholly from God. One prominant scientist later dropped “that hypothesis,” leaving us to imagine the world to be, for the most part, to be a “heap” of unintelligent atoms.  Intelligence (or the appearance thereof) was primarily attributed to human beings.

Further, in this worldview, the idea of intelligence came to be especially equated with rational thought. Some philosophers proposed that rational thought, sealed off from the “corrupting” influence of the body and emotions, participated, in a sense, in the divine.

According to philosopher Charlene Spretnak, “Plato intensified dualistic thought […] by perceiving not only a divine order […] but a sense that the order created by divine, or ideal, forms was radically other than the material world we inhabit.  He established a dualism of universal and particular, of noumenon and phenomenon, of mind and body, and of spirit and matter that shaped all subsequent philosophy and religion in the European tradition [italics added for emphasis] (Resurgence of the Real, 47).

Although, according to this view, the realm of divine order, truth and beauty existed in a realm outside the material universe, Plato held that it could be approached by man through his rational facilities: “[R]ational thought could be experienced only if sealed off from “corrupting” influences  of the body (sensations, emotions, desires) and properly isolated from “lowly” nature. Plato felt that we, that is, our minds, are imprisoned in the dumb matter of our bodies. Although he considered the cosmos to be sacred in its orderliness, he shared with his teacher Socrates, a belief that nature is irrelevant….” (45).

However, not all human beings were considered equally capable of such thought. The relationship between knowledge and power becomes clear in Aristotle’s rendering of gendered reality: “[M]ale rules over the female, or the man over the child; although the parts of the soul are present in all of them, they are present in different degrees.  For the slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority, and the child has, but it is immature (“Politics” 1260b; Code, What Can She Know?, 9 n. 5).

Therefore, some men (who per chance :-/ happened already to be in power and serve as the gatekeepers of knowledge…), were, by virtue of their asserted superiority of mind, considered to be closer to the divine order of things and thus “better suited” for leadership. (There is a historical parallel in the claim that wealth is a sign of divine favor). 

So, coming back to the topic of leadership and “the machine,” in the industrial-age organization, relatively well-educated managers sought to maximize economic outputs (roles requiring some intelligence and creativity), and “workers” were considered interchangeable “cogs in the machine.” Work was routine and boring, and working conditions were often unsafe.

Metaphorically, leaders were the operator of the machine; the workers were part of the machine itself.

 The leadership style associated with this philosophy and approach to organization has been called, “Theory X,” or what Robert Hargrove calls the “command, control, and coercion model” (Masterful Coaching p.7) and Riane Eisler calls the “dominator model.” 

In such a model, vision, communications and control flow from the top down; management ensures the efficiency and predictability of the machine, through planning, organizing and controlling.

Such highly structured and controlled organizations allow control by a centralized group and support a high degree of efficiency and predictabiliy. The flip side of that coin is that they are also exceptionally good at suppressing creativity and resisting innovation … 

In this post, we might begin to notice how leadership assumptions and values substantially shape organizational realities.  In upcoming posts, we will consider this core insight of transformative leadership in much greater depth, to demonstrate how and why this is so, and how we can use this insight to overcome some of our most previously intractable problems…  

Category: All Posts, Communication, Creativity, Innovation, Leadership, Organization, Partnership, Philosophy, Values, Vision /

The Organization as Machine:Industrial-Age Strategies of Rational Control

February 23, 2008 / / No comments

I must say that it is a challenge to write about industrial-age models of leadership and organization, as I am so eager to move on to talk about emerging models, which are much more interesting and useful to those of us in the knowledge economy – which is practically everyone… 

Still, this philosophical, psychological and sociological review of the current situation is useful because it helps to show why modern organizations have the challenges they do, and why, emerging models can be so much more helpful to us in dealing with a very dynamic environment.

In my last post, I discussed the hierarchal organization as a control strategy, in that it allows one or a small number of people to control a broad scope of resources and activities. It’s also very rational in that rational (vs. creative) thought involves breaking the whole into different parts for individual study (and control).

The hierarchal organization was therefore a natural choice of 19th century industrial-age capitalists, seeking the market power and economies of mass production:

1)      It provided owners of capital with the necessary means of control;

2)      The specialization implied by rational forms of organization supported the operational efficiencies of mass production.

3)      The workforce at this time was largely uneducated; relevant knowledge and control were concentrated at the supervisory level.

4)      Culturally, it fit well with an orientation to hierarchy based on economic class and modern rational strategies of control.

This form of organization, as factory, was compared to a perfect machine, rational and efficient. In the next post, we’ll talk about the leadership styles appropriate to managing “the machine.”

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Culture, Leadership, Organization, Philosophy /

Leadership & Vision

December 30, 2007 / / 2 comments

In the spirit of the New Year, this week’s post relates to our visions for a better future. Vision is central to leadership. As leaders, we perceive possible desirable futures and take actions to co-create them. A great vision can both suggest the actions needed to achieve it, and unify and inspire organization members to take intelligent, collaborative action towards the achievement of that future.

In its fullest sense, vision involves a dialogue between our rational-sequential “left-brains” and our holistic/visionary “right brains.” (It’s probably no coincidence that our capacity for sight is associated with the “right brain”). 

Because Western culture is built on rationalism, we Westerners (especially engineers, accountants, MBAs, academics, etc.) tend to excel in rational, sequential, incremental logic. Analysis and logic are the big tools in our tool bag and we tend to reach for them whenever we have a job to do. (Guilty!)

Therefore, it is not surprising that we sometimes take this approach to vision. For example, on several occasions, I have seen corporate leaders express vision in terms of financial targets. While financial targets are important, rational-conceptual goals, the limitations of financial target as vision are 1) it doesn’t include much information on how the vision is to be achieved; and 2) as studies have shown, for most organizational members, money has real practical limitations as a motivator. 

However, when we also engage our right brains, we can not only imagine possible futures, but we can gain insights as to how these futures were achieved. Such is the power of our right brains, which can invent entire worlds for us in our dreams. Video game/virtual reality designers are still trying to approximate and imitate that kind of computing power.

As is the case with many of our dreams, not all of our visions are reliable and achievable. Here is where our rational facilities shine. What parts can be used?  Does your imagination suggest any areas for additional research? What good ideas can we take away from this exercise? 

And, because this is dialogue, we can also ask additional questions that draw on the creative resourcefulness of our right brains, such as, “What would be needed to really make this work?”  Or: “What’s missing, that if added, would solve this problem?” 

In sum, to really delve into vision, we play in the educated imagination, and develop some constructive dialogue between our rational and non-rational cognitive capacities.

A whole related topic is to achieve this in groups (done correctly, we can achieve creativity “on steroids” 😉  To gain the benefits of creative synergy, we must be able to “play well together” and then be rigorous in challenging ideas to see what can work, while maintaining constructive, collaborative relationships. More on this another time…

A New Year’s Practice

1. Pick one area of your life, or organization, and instead of focusing on its present limitations, imagine how you would like it to be. Do this just for fun, in the spirit of play.  Think about what it would look like, feel like. … By engaging all of your senses in your vision, you help facilitate the shift.

Tip: If the answer comes to you automatically in a way that you have thought of it many times before, you have not yet tapped into your imagination. Think: constructive daydreaming. If this doesn’t come easily, you can warm up to the process by first remembering a past success in as much detail as possible, and then imagining a positive scene that may be happening somewhere in the present.   

What do you see? Are there any elements of your vision that surprise you? 

Feel free to ask questions of your vision. As we will discuss in future posts, questions are one of the most powerful ways you can get your imagination to work for you. 

At the end of the process, consider what useful new insights or ideas you might take away from the exercise. How might you put these new ideas or insights into action?

Category: All Posts, Creativity, Leadership, Vision /
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