The Lean-Agile Leader: My Vision, Your Vision, Our Vision
Scott Downs – VP Enterprise Agility Advisory
Traditional leadership called senior leaders to have a vision and then to get the organisation to execute it
"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly
drive it to completion."
- Jack Welch
Lean-Agile perspectives call us instead to look to everyone in an organisation as contributors to vision
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
- Principles of the Agile manifesto
“Make people awesome? Please don't. Just let people alone. They'll be awesome if they want to be.”
- Tobias Mayer
This does not mean that a leader or aspiring leader is not still called to have a personal vision
“Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple, and it is also that
difficult.”
- Warren Bennis
All of this may be challenging both for traditional “leaders” and for traditional “followers”
“I had been conducting for nearly twenty years when it suddenly dawned on me that the conductor of an orchestra does not make
a sound.”
“Leading from Any Chair - chapter title in The Art of Possibility”
- Benjamin Zander, orchestra conductor, and Rosamund Stone Zander
An important job for leaders - at every level - is to help create a container where everyone contributes to vision
“The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared “pictures of the future” that foster genuine commitment
and enrollment rather than compliance. In mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counterproductiveness of trying to
dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt.”
- Peter Senge
“To lead people, walk beside them ...As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence.
… When the best leader's work is done, the people say,We did it ourselves!”
- Lao-Tzu - 600 BC
The Temenos Effect Gathering, 06-09 Apr 2017, Bengaluru
https://www.visiontemenos.com/gatherings
We invite you to join us in the dance of discovering personal and shared vision together.