Even though any day of the year represents a potential beginning or fresh start, for many around the world, January 1 has become a new beginning. In my own family’s tradition, we spent some time on the last day of each year looking back to reflect on what had happened that year—and what we learned from it. Then, on New Year’s Day, we took time to turn our attention to look ahead and record our intentions for the coming year.
The LDI is being offered to selected leaders in the United Nations! Two of our most experienced Facilitators, Jean Ogilvie and Ingrid Richter both from Ottawa, have created a custom version called ‘Deep Dive’ that is having profound personal and organizational impact not only on the participants in the room but via ‘ripple effect’ outward into their departments in the UN.
The following aphorisms are not so much bits of advice as things to think about when you are being a change agent, whether in your role as a manager or executive, a consultant – either internal or external – or as an organization or community development specialist. They are even likely to be useful when you are just being yourself trying to bring about something that involves other people making changes in the way they think or do something.
Creating and maintaining a high-performance high-commitment work team or organization may be the most important skill needed for successful managers and team leaders today.
Why? Because the continuous achievement of extraordinary results through people who are committed to a purpose beyond themselves is what most organizations are all about.
After writing Five Questions, a few people asked me ‘Why five questions? Why not five answers? How can an approach based around questions be of any value when what the world is seeking is answers?
This is my response…
Not long ago I was with the senior leadership team of a well-known international company in a three-day leadership development experience. They had come together to explore who they were, individually and together, and to learn how to be more effective at what they DO by becoming more fully aware of and stepping into who they ARE. Not your traditional road.
Going back to my roots again, let’s take a look at the Genesis creation story in the Biblical material. (I’ll be translating from the original language—and taking some literary license, but we have to do that to get the essence of any ancient material.)
As a change artist, whether I am working with individuals, groups or organizations, one approach is to figure out a way to get them to the point where they want something badly and don’t know how to get there, and are in fact, fed up. We need to create a situation where the client confronts the impasse which their situation represents.
Imagine two people going to work every day, side by side, having virtually the same things happening around them. One goes home, upset yet again, blaming colleagues or themselves, not having learned a thing – about who they are, about their relationships with others, or about life.