Cultivating Curious Leaders
L+D’s 8th Fellowship cohort, recently launched in Denver, is an opportunity for leaders to go deeper with L+D core concepts and to test out new frameworks that we as a facilitation team are excited to play with. We thought it would be valuable to share a few of the ways of thinking as well as activities we are exploring with the Fellows this year.
First, leadership was a mechanism to inspire others to act (towards a goal, a decision, a project, a change, etc.). However, inspiring someone to act is often rudderless and ineffective if leaders are not connecting action to a "why” or a vision, and then using storytelling to articulate the vision. Kaitlin B. Curtice (via Facebook) put it very concisely by stating that to inspire someone to transform and change you need storytelling, rootedness or connection, and vision.
These three areas can be understood as tools, skills and/or behaviors that leaders can use to become more effective Reflective Changemakers, Optimistic Futurists, and Human-Centered Design Thinkers, the outcomes for leaders that the Fellowship is built upon. This year we will explore the interplay between these outcomes and storytelling, connection, and vision.
Storytelling:
Borrowed from 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, we often ask leaders to think about the “stories we tell ourselves” and then explore whether these stories are true (Commitment 10). These stories can be about our signature presence, our superpowers, the assumptions we make about the people and projects we lead, and the change we see as possible.
By exploring leaders stories of self and change, we connect more deeply to ourself, others, and bring our vision into focus. Below are a few methods we use with our fellows:
Creating a personal manifesto: A method inspired by the Stanford d.school book, You Need a Manifesto by Charlotte Burgess-Auburn. The backdrop of creating a personal manifesto allows us to explore how identity, values, signature presence, and moments of inspiration craft a personal story past, present, and future.
Fellows identify a project where they lead school change to practice and build new leadership skills and dispositions. They choose projects to practice reflection, futurist thinking, and human-centered design. To help with the project, we use an Eco-Cycle planning tool. The tool is a metaphor based on an ecosystem with stages of birth, germination, growth, maturity, death and rebirth. It can be used to categorize projects, initiatives, challenges, institutional priorities, or leadership skills and behaviors as not having enough resources (scarcity trap), or caught in too much stagnation (rigidity trap). What follows is a phase of exploratory thinking:
Is the story of where the project lives on the ecocycle true? How do you know?
Then, what is your vision for change?
Take it to your school:
You Need a Manifesto is a beautiful book with clear and resonant messaging. If leaders want to learn and grow in life, we need to know our personal “why” - why we make the decisions we make and why we show up as we do. Start with the book and see where it takes you.
Check out the eco-cycle tool. Choose where to start: skills, behaviors, relationships, tasks, initiatives, projects, leadership roles, etc. and think about what needs more or fewer resources. Reflect individually and then share with others in your school.
Connection:
Connection and the lack thereof keeps coming up across sectors. Whether it’s the refocus on the need for social capital, the advisories on loneliness and social isolation, or design thinking’s requirement to authenticity listen before solving. Story telling, sharing, and catching are ways to connect.
David Brooks, in How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, describes how storytelling and being a question-asker enables social connection. Building social connections will result in a more healthy society. Here are two conversations for connection you can have to become a better question asker.
Conversation 1: This is primarily about creating space to actually see and be curious about another person. The topic can vary, but success is measured by getting to a place of insight and understanding of the other person’s experiences and perspectives and to give time and space for authentic human connection.
Conversation 2: In an increasingly polarized world, difficult conversations in personal, work, and community life are often avoided. Entering into conversation with someone who you know you disagree with, is both difficult yet essential. Brooks, in a Fast Company article, recommends some tips to have these conversations:
Instead of "Tell me about your point of view”, ask them “How do you see this?”
“Find the disagreement under the disagreement,” and that “instead of just arguing with each other, we seek to probe down together and have an exploration of why we’re disagreeing, it’s more fun and productive. You learn something.”
1 Object: 30 Perspectives
What we choose to see and how curious we are about our focus matters. In the book Experiments in Reflection by Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, we borrowed an activity aimed at helping leaders shift their thinking. The basic premise is that we go through life often on auto pilot and don’t slow down to truly look and be curious about something, someone, or the systems that dictate our lives. The activity instructs us to find one object and take 30 different pictures of the same object. The learning comes during the photo taking (how it feels) and in the reflection (how often do we look for alternative perspectives).
Take it to your school:
Have conversations, and then have some more. A little goes a long way and a lot goes even further when it comes to connection, the antidote for isolation and polarization.
Do the 30 picture activity. Complete it alone or invite a colleague or friend to do it with you. In the debrief ask where you can broaden your perspectives and challenge the stories being told about what you or others “see.”
Vision:
Have you wondered:
Where are you going in leadership, professional positions (they are different), parenting, friendships or on social issues?
Where is your institution, group, team or initiative going?
Why are you going and how will you know when you arrive?
These questions can either drive us to wake up in the morning and get to “work”, or leave us feeling like we are bobbing around lost at sea or anchored to a boat being sailed into the abyss. To know ourselves and to lead others we need to build a vision or believe in a vision. Storytelling is the way the vision becomes real and connects to those involved, whether they be parents, students, or faculty/staff.
Many of our vision provocations related to increasing our futurist thinking. Optimistic Futurists have the ability to look for signals and trends, explore the possible and the probable, and then using a vision, design for the preferable.
Take it to your school:
Refer to the above Eco-Cycle Tool. Explore all of the activities or initiatives your school offers through the lens of its connection to the vision.
Are there things that you have going on that are no longer in line with the vision, but feel like they “have always been done this way”? This may be an opportunity for a conversation about the Rigidity Trap.
Are you doing so many things that you can no longer commit to your vision being realized? This may mean there are too many things in the Scarcity Trap.
Explore your vision or the vision of the organization by having either Conversation 1 or 2 referenced above. This can be done with peers, those you manage, or those you are managed by.
I guess there was a lot to share when it came down to it, and yet this is still only a sampling of the great work and curiosities the L+D’s Fellowship intends to facilitate. Along the way if you try any of the above, share with us how it went. We believe in collaborative learning and want to know how you are doing.
