Mobius Executive Leadership

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the April newsletter, our curated listing of emerging thought leadership in the field of transformational leadership and organizational change. This month we recommend recent articles and recorded talks from across the Mobius community, including pieces from Mobius Senior Experts and Harvard Professors Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey; Mobius Friend and McKinsey Partner and Leadership Expert, Johanne Lavoie; and Mobius Senior Expert and innovation specialist, Priya Parker.  

This month’s recommendations include fresh ideas on how to make work more purpose-driven and developmental; a selection of creative coaching and facilitation practices; and an examination of the habits and mindsets that support transformational leadership.

In addition, we include our latest release from the Next Practice Institute Keynote Series: an inspiring talk from leading systems thinker and Mobius Friend Adam Kahane on how to collaborate with people we may not trust or like.

Finally, if you’re hoping to join us at the Next Practice Institute, more information about this year’s week-long program is available here, including details of the nine different learning intensives to select from.  In addition to the wealth of workshops, keynotes, and opportunities for personal healing work, this is a wonderful opportunity to join a rich community of practice.

Chief Executive Officer,  Mobius Executive Leadership 

 IDEAS WORTH SHARING

Let employees be people

It’s “ridiculous yet ubiquitous” how “un-developmental” most workplaces are

How much more effective would people and entire organizations become if we no longer put so much energy into trying to hide what we’re not good at? Imagine a work meeting where one of your colleagues says, “Before we get started I just need to let you know that I lean towards arrogance.” – prompting someone else to volunteer that they lean toward “insecure”. At a company called Next Jump they’ve concluded that they lean toward one tendency or the other, and that there’s real value in being transparent about individual development needs e.g., those tending toward insecure get their ideas on the table early, arrogant-leaners are asked to hold back. This is just one example Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey – both Mobius Senior Experts, Harvard Professors and pioneers in the field of adult development, share in this twenty-minute podcast introducing the case for An Everyone Culture: Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs). Join us at this year’s Next Practice Institute to learn more from Professor Bob Kegan on the value of treating work as a place for practice and mastery, rather than the maintenance of an exhausting performance. Listen to the podcast here.

Leading with inner agility

When faced with continual complexity, our survival instincts kick in and in a mental panic to regain control, we fight, flee, or freeze: we act before thinking. 

Why is it that exactly when we are in most need of visionary, empathetic, and creative leadership we fall into our most conservative and rigid habits. This excellent piece co-authored by Mobius Friend and McKinsey partner, Johanne Lavoie, sets out five practices to hone our “inner agility” (pause to move faster; embrace your ignorance; radically reframe questions; set direction not destination; and test your solutions), what these look like across real-life organizational examples, and offers a fantastic set of cognitive and centering “micro-practices” that help break our defensive habits. Click here to read and share.

Seven creative coaching and facilitations exercises to surface our life’s work and purpose

What is the biggest need in the world that I might have the passion and the capacity to address?

In this extract from her TED talk, Mobius Senior Expert and innovation specialist, Priya Parker, shares seven tools to answer this question. These include exercises to help us develop our tolerance for change – or our “discomfort muscles” as Priya calls them, so essential for anyone attempting to head in a new direction; the dwindling cash experiment to make explicit some of the implicit beliefs driving our aversion to career moves; and other creative coaching and facilitation exercises to surface fresh perspectives on our life’s work and purpose. To celebrate the publication of her forthcoming book, The Art of Gathering, we look forward to Priya Parker’s keynote at this year’s Next Practice Institute. Click here to watch Priya’s TED talk.

Next Practice Special Feature: Collaborating with the Enemy

The way we demonize others, whose views challenge our own, is leading to increased stuck-ness, increased frustration, and increased violence.

We’re delighted to share this half-hour video captured during last year’s Next Practice Institute where we had the honor to learn from one of the world’s most distinguished systems thinkers, Adam Kahane. In this talk Adam discusses how collaborating with others is both increasingly necessary and increasingly difficult. He then answers the question how might we work with this tension? Dispelling important myths about why we collaborate at all, Adam outlines the three basic moves we must make to progress from stalemate to solution. This is an excellent and inspiring talk from one of the world’s leading thinkers on how to get “unstuck” within seemingly impossible situations. Alongside his most recent book, Adam is the author of several other ground-breaking works including Solving Tough Problems; Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change; and Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future. To watch the other videos in Next Practice Keynote series, click here.

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

Please visit our website for the calendar of upcoming learning events and other professional development opportunities. To register for the Next Practice Institute Annual Gathering and to learn more about it, visit 2018 Annual Gathering. 

Please contact our editor, Nathalie Hourihan, if you’d like to suggest a topic or materials for future editions of the newsletter.