Welcome to my blog. I have questions about the way we work and I put my thoughts here. I hope you have a nice stay!
Creative leadership teams are important in avoiding or limiting failure through strategic and operational misalignment but are also vital in charting the path to the future.
If our organisations are spun from ongoing interactions and relationships, then the idea of creative leadership emerging from complementary pairs interacting over time in a constant cycle of learning and acting may have some merit.
Increasing specialisation in our workforce should not result in glib calls to ‘make it simpler; rather, it should focus our attention on organisational design. In particular, on how efficient organisation contributes to generating and applying knowledge.
People are led by other people. Wishing away the limitations and strengths of human cognition, behaviour and interaction in the workplace strikes me as an odd path to take toward improving individual and organisational performance.
There’s something primal and personal about the experience of leadership that we shouldn’t gloss over as we continue to systematise our knowledge of leadership. There is something deeply instinctual and emotional about the ability to a group of people to sense, breathe, move, feel and think as if they were of one mind. All leaders should take the time to reflect on the deeply satisfying privilege it is to lead.
In 1959, J. Irwin Miller providing a view from a CEO concluded, 'And his real antagonist is neither the customer, nor his bankers, nor the union. His real antagonist is the organisation'. Miller paints the picture of a CEO constantly trying to bring certainty to a situation that is inherently uncertain. It is a problem that today we would call ‘wicked’. A problem that has a ‘no stopping rule’—Miller tells us about a manager trapped in an endless present. How much has managemetn advanced in the intervening years?
Fundamentally, organisational innovation and reform involves uncertainty. Uncertainty is not simply the lack relevant pieces of information about a process or activity or event that is otherwise known. Uncertainty arises from problems of knowing where and how to start. To make progress in the face of uncertainty might involved asking more questions rather than putting forward more solutions.
Our usual conversations about leadership and management seem focused on preparing individuals for operation in a classic hierarchy. In a network organisation, marked by speed, uncertainty and operations at the boundary we might be better served on preparing leadership and management teams to act in an organisational system that has the characteristics of an ensemble rather than a collection of individuals that exercise positional authority.
How might the idea of texture help us to better understand organisational performance? What if we were to resist the need to understand our organisations through dissection? What if we tried to maintain a picture of the whole organisation and focus on the interaction between the background and foreground systems? We might try to see the texture (the fine weave) of the way people, work and organisation interact.
From a leadership and management perspective, the conductorless orchestra asks a question that is rarely voiced with in many organisations, namely: what value do leaders add to the organisational performance?
It’s hard to argue that management policy and practice should not be evidence-based, but what is a management ‘fact’? If management facts are to the backbone of evidence-base management and practice, this is a question that needs to be thought about more carefully.
n 1946 Peter Drucker observed that: “In every large organisation there is a natural tendency to discourage initiative and to put a premium on conformity” and big business was destined to suffer “from parochialism of the executive imagination”. Leadership and management need the warmth of imagination as much as bloodlessness of logic and reason.
The pressure to be pragmatic in the way we work is overwhelming. I wonder to what extent the pressure to be pragmatic crushes out opportunities to better understand what it is that we are trying to achieve.
Is critical thinking a lapsed skill in leadership and management ? In a world of speed, busyness and information overload it is all too easy to slip into the habit of accepting the claims of 'experts' rather than thinking for ourselves.
"Govern a big country as you would cook a small fish", said Lao Zi. It suggests a gentleness, attentiveness and care in exercising leadership that does not often feature in modern leadership theory and practice.
