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

Creative Competencies for Navigating Complex

ChallengesFrom: Complexity and Chaos

Paying Attention

“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