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Creative Competence for Navigating Complex
Challenges
Creative Competence for Navigating Complex
ChallengesCenter Connection
Washington DC August 2004
David Magellan Horth
Underlying Research
• CCL® research commissioned to discover next generation of leadership development by working directly with practicing leaders (co-inquiry).
• Eight years with more than 600 managers, leaders, executives:
– What are the new leadership challenges?
– How are they being creatively solved?
– What new leadership competencies are required?
Defining Complex Challenges
Complex challenges are situations or contexts that do not have prescribed approaches or solutions. They are central in importance and demand quick and decisive action. Yet because the organization, team, or individual does not know how to act, there is also a need to slow down and reflect.Typically Complex Challenges:a) Sprawl across boundaries — function, expertise, geography, groups, and roleb) Critical to long-term success and evolution across those boundariesc) Shared frameworks have not yet emerged for sufficient understanding
What Complex Challenge are you Wrestling with
that:• Defies existing solutions, resources,
and approaches?• Challenges individual/organizational
assumptions and mental models?• Demands individual and organizational
creativity and learning?• Requires a reframing of the leadership
perspective?
GREEN RED BLUEBLUE YELLOWRED BLACK BLUEGREEN RED BLUEORANGE GREENBLACK YELLOWBLUE RED GREENORANGE BLUEGREEN YELLOW
Reframing LeadershipFrom Control Meaning Making
Involves a Dance Between:
Individual ConnectedWithin BetweenCreating Perceiving
L-mode R-modeConscious Pre-consciousTools CompetenciesExtrinsic Intrinsic Motivation
Creative Competencies for Navigating Complex
ChallengesFrom: Complexity and Chaos
To: Shared Understanding and Committed Action
Creative Competencies for Navigating Complex
ChallengesFrom: Complexity and Chaos
To: Shared Understanding and Committed Action
“The real voyage of discovery consists not of seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
“Every way of seeing is a way of not seeing.”
Gareth Morgan
“The tragedy of responding to complexity only with velocity is that after a while you can’t see anybody or anything that is moving slower than you.” Conversation with poet David Whyte, October 2001
“The tragedy of responding to complexity only with velocity is that after a while you can’t see anybody or anything that is moving slower than you.” Conversation with poet David Whyte, October 2001
Paying AttentionWe now live in an age of what a Microsoft researcher, Linda Stone,
called continuous partial attention. I love that phrase. It means that while
you are answering your e-mail and talking to your kid, your cell phone
rings and you have a conversation. You are now involved in a continuous
flow of interactions in which you can only partially concentrate on each.
“If being fulfilled is about committing yourself to someone else, or some
experience, that requires a level of sustained attention,” said Ms. Stone.
“And that is what we are losing the skills for, because we are constantly
scanning the world for opportunities and we are constantly in fear of
missing something better. That has become incredibly spiritually
depleting.”
New York Times, January 30, 2001, Thomas L. Friedman
Creative Competencies for Navigating Complex
ChallengesFrom: Complexity and Chaos
To: Shared Understanding and Committed Action
Paying Attention
Personalizing
ImagingSerious Play
Co-inquiry
Crafting
“... business leaders have much more in common with artists ... and other creative thinkers ...”
Zaleznik 1992
“In order to arrive there,To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.In order to arrive at what you do not knowYou must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.In order to possess what you do not possessYou must go by the way of dispossession.In order to arrive at what you are notYou must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.”
T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets