inspire: empower: get results
These mindsets are a model for how we think, and as a model they help us to explain/understand our reality. But, like all models they are not your reality – they are useful representations but are always incomplete.
Look at the following common models of thinking
Holding organisations together when all is going well is not an easy task. When all is going well you can inadvertently wander away from core business. Success bring a certain amount of freedom to explore, and can lead to complacency and slowness to respond to circumstances. Success is not often something for which we prepare.
It is in that context that we can ask:
Why have so many seemingly successful companies failed in recent years? Why is there widespread anxiety over company/organisational leadership? Why are so many countries questioning the quality and effectiveness of their political leadership?
Is it a lack of preparedness? Is it an inability to cope with success? Have we even thought about what success is?
Continue reading “Success is harder to handle than failure – why we need to be reflective in all we do”“School trains us never to admit that we do not know the answer, and most corporations reinforce that lesson by rewarding the people who excel in advocating their views, not inquiring into complex issues. (When was the last time someone was rewarded in your organisation for raising difficult questions about the company’s current policies rather than solving the urgent problems?” Even if we feel uncertain or ignorant, we learn to protect ourselves from the pain of appearing uncertain or ignorant. That very process blocks out any new understandings which might threaten us. The consequence is what Argyris call “skilled incompetence” – teams full of peoples who are incredibly proficient at keeping themselves from learning. Senge 1990:25
There is something I don’t know
that I am supposed to know.
I don’t know what it is I don’t know
and yet am supposed to know,
and I feel I look stupid
if I seem both not to know it
and not know what it is I don’t know.
Therefore I pretend to know it.
This is nerve-racking
since I don’t know what I must pretend to know.
Therefore I pretend to know everything.
Laing (1970:56)
In the quiet, before dawn’s light,
I sit, pen in hand, alone with my thoughts.
The world is silent, expectations yet unborn,
A canvas blank, vast, unmarked by the day’s toil.
Why must I write every day?
To capture the whispers of the morning,
The echoes of dreams not quite forgotten,
To give voice to the silence that envelops me.
Each word a step on a path unseen,
A journey through the mists of my own making.
Writing, a quest not for the end, but for the act itself,
A search for meaning in the mundane, the profound.
The discipline of daily words, a forge,
Tempering thoughts, ideas, into clarity, into form.
A mirror reflecting the depths within,
Revealing truths, fears, desires, hidden from the light.
It is in this daily ritual, this sacred act,
I find myself, lose myself, and am reborn.
The pen, mightier than the sword,
Carves out a space for peace, for understanding, within the chaos.
Why must I write every day?
Because in the writing, I am.
In the quiet, in the struggle, in the triumph,
I exist, I resist, I persist.
Myriad words woven into the fabric of this quest,
A tapestry of thoughts, a testament to the soul’s yearning.
Not for fame, nor fortune, but for the simple act
Of putting pen to paper, and letting the words flow.