Finding Our Way

From the balcony

I am back at the Banff Centre for the second session of the Leadership Academy. I certainly experience re-entry as I have to re-acclimatize to this retreat, to being away from work and family, to learn about leadership.

I have spent the year completing a leadership practicum as have the other participants. I completed many of the objectives to improve my leadership knowledge and skills.  Many I did not.  I had many discussions with my program mentor.  I had many with my program buddy.  And I say to everyone, that you should set your own goals, find a mentor, and find a buddy, inside or outside of a program such as this one.

As part of this practicum, I attempted to do some reading on leadership.  I would like to share with you two poignant passages that I discovered from the book Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time by Margaret Wheatley. I have chosen them as they speak to an "ancient new story" to which we need to listen and which we need to tell.  Please leave comments about what you think about these passages.

In this first passage, she describes leadership within the current "machine story", one propagated around the world by organizations from Western society:

Trying to be an effective leader in this machine story is especially exhausting.  He or she is leading a group of lifeless, empty automatons who are just waiting to be filled with vision and direction and intelligence.  The leader is responsible for providing everything:  the organizational mission and values, the organizational structure, the plans, the supervision.  The leader must also figure out, through clever use of incentives or coercives, how to pump energy into this lifeless mass.  Once the pump is primed, he must rush hither and yon to make sure that everyone is clanking along in the same direction, at the established speed, with no diversions.  It is the role of the leader to provide the organizing energy for a system that is believed to have no internal capabilities for self-creation, self-organization, or self-correction.

This view is certain juxtaposition to the "natural" beauty of Banff and the "ancient new story" which Margaret Wheatley outlines in this second passage. In this story that we have known from ancient times, "life's cycles" are inevitable and that we must embrace them.

In the new story, we discover a world where life gives birth to itself using two powerful forces: the need to be free to create one's self and the need to reach out for relationships with others.  These forces never disappear from life.  Even if we deny them, we can't ever extinguish them.  They are always active, even in the most repressive human organizations.  Life can never stop asserting its need to create itself, and life never stops searching for connections.

Upon my return, I will add the book to the instructor resource library.  I recommend you take the time to read it.