The REFLECTIVE Mindset

Today’s organizations need leaders who can take effective action in complex, rapidly changing conditions. The primary engine for developing increased agility is self-management: Being proactive in assessing your current strengths and limitations, clarifying your development goals, and using you everyday initiatives to experiment with more agile attitudes and behaviors. Essential to this process is developing our capacity for reflection and attention. Participants will jump start this process through a group of assessments completed prior to our first session.

The CURIOSITY Mindset

Conversation is the most important form of organizational communication. The quality of our conversations has direct impact on us personally and on the effectiveness of our teams/organizations. People enter almost every conversation with certain expectations and opinions/positions. Those expectations are based on the relationship between the people, their unique life experiences, and the circumstances surrounding the conversation. The key to grasping the subjective reality of others is empathic curiosity. Empathic curiosity means being curious about the thoughts and feelings of others as well as about the reasons for those thoughts and feelings. This module provides participants with unique tools to help them enhance their effectiveness in this critical domain.

The HUMBLE Mindset

More traditional forms of leadership are based on maintaining transactional and rules based “professional relationships” in which we maintain social and professional distance. As organizations face more complex, interdependent tasks, leadership must become more personal to insure open, trusting communication that will make collaborative problem solving and innovation possible. The Humble Mindset calls for a reimagined form of leadership that coincides with emerging trends of relationship building, complex group work, diverse workforces, and cultures in which everyone feels psychological safety. Today’s leaders need build higher quality, trusting relationships more characteristic of friendships and effective teams.

The TEAMING Mindset

Many leaders are taught to think of teams as carefully designed, static groups of individuals who have ample time to practice interacting successfully and efficiently. This is “team” envisioned as a noun. The Teaming Mindset sees teaming as a dynamic activity, not a bounded, static entity. Here “teaming” is a verb. It is largely determined by a mindset and practices of teamwork, not by the design and structure of effective teams. Teaming is teamwork on the fly. Teaming is the engine of organizational learning. In this module we focus on developing both affective (feeling) and cognitive (thinking) skills that are foundational to the Teaming Mindset.

The SENSEMAKING Mindset

Today’s work environment is often described as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous or VUCA. In crisis situations our traditional bureaucratic forms and disciplines break down. When this happens our meaning making processes become traps that lock us into a particular perspective and limits our actions. To counter this, we need to be open to multiple perspectives and disruption of traditional perspectives to discover truth. We need to gain a sense of descriptive self-awareness, where individuals and systems “see” themselves and their context differently, which in turn leads to actionable insight. This module explores a framework facilitating this process of discovery.

The AGILITY Mindset

Leading change in today’s world is like attempting to cross a raging river. You have a general idea of where you want to end up and you can see a few steppingstones that offer access into the currents. You have no idea about the resistance you encounter until you take your first step. With each step a path across emerges and you learn to utilize the resistance to inform your journey. This is what change is like in a world of permanent whitewater. In this module we bring together lessons from the other modules on self-management, respectful engagement, empowerment, self-organizing teams, collective sensemaking and some new concepts to equip participants with skills and competencies for change agency in this complex world.

No Learning Without Action, No Action Without Learning

Action learning is tightly integrated into our program design. The real impact of action learning is our ability to facilitate reflection. Action learning happens best when participants learn through reflection and dialog, primarily regarding their mutual experiences. To enhance these discussions, each learning module introduces conceptual ideas that learners are encouraged to put into practice – to take some action on – in their back home environment. Each of these actions creates another opportunity for structured reflection. Asking the right open-ended questions helps each learner in his or her leadership journey. The impact of these regularly schedule sessions, coupled with personal coaching, is surprising. Individuals develop specific practical actions and make incremental changes, after each session, rapidly adding up to impressive improvements for themselves, their team, and the organization.

On a larger scale the group participates in a more formal action learning process to work on a real-world problem over the course of the entire program. The emphasis is on solving problems in the real world and learning in the process. In this manner individuals develop skills in problem solving, change management and leadership while simultaneously having impact back home.