Appendix A
Application Exercises
The exercises that follow are designed to apply concepts from the three parts and the conclusion of this book to your leadership practice. They provide a disciplined method for strategic analysis around specific situations you may be facing. In every case, begin with a specific situation and answer the questions in relationship to it. When you have gone through these exercises once, remember that you can return to them to help you think through other issues you may encounter in a contemporary, transformational way.
If you have difficulty completing any of these analyses, you can refer back to the relevant essay (capacity numbers correspond to chapter numbers), to Appendix B, or to the reference lists at the end of each chapter.
It may be helpful to keep a notebook or journal to record your reflections over time and/or share them with a partner, coach, or peer support group. If you are a leadership coach, mentor, or advisor, you may also want to use this strategic analysis model with leaders you are developing.
A: Applications for Thinking through What to Do
Step One: Describe a Challenging Situation
Choose a situation that provides an adaptive challenge, not just a technical one. Ideally, it should be a situation that requires some changes in structures, attitudes, and relationships, not just a problem that can easily be solved by applying standard procedures or otherwise operating in habitual ways. Then describe, ideally in narrative form, how you view this situation, including what you are now doing and what results you are getting.
Step Two: Develop Transformational Thinking as a Leadership Capacity
Explore the six major capacities in the categories below, addressing the numbered ways of thinking that inform each. Of course, feel free to omit those that do not seem relevant to the situation you have described, but be sure to consider all six capacities, as it is a human tendency to discount approaches that do not yet come naturally to us.
As you respond to the questions and analytical strategies listed below, your first task is to apply your answers to the particular situation you have described and then to your leadership challenges more broadly.
CAPACITY 1: TRUST THAT TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP WORKS IN PRACTICE
1. Identify where you have witnessed leadership that inspires with a win-win vision, initiates a process that brings out the best in the people involved (including yourself), and produces results that are genuinely transformational in impact.
2. Describe where, in any part of your life, you have been involved in such a successful transformation effort. What did you take away from that experience?
3. Imagine what a transformational process might look like in situations you face, working on this until you have some sense of confidence that it just might succeed.
CAPACITY 2: HAVE A CLEAR IMAGE OF WHAT TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP LOOKS LIKE
1. Now flesh out your vision of a win-win, positive outcome to this situation, one that can be shared with others. Work on describing this vision in a compelling way as a big dream that can release energy for change.
2. Determine who needs to be involved with you in creating a transformational outcome. Consider how you might inspire enthusiasm in a transformational team or network, enlist outside supporters, defuse resistance, and use transactional means to buy off adversaries if you cannot engage their cooperation in a transformational way.
3. Clarify how the process of working together will elevate you and all those involved by connecting your efforts with shared values and dreams.
CAPACITY 3: KNOW HOW TO INFLUENCE SOCIAL NETWORKS
1. Moving away from hierarchical networks, analyze the social networks within your group and/or organization. Explore how these social networks interconnect with people in other groups, organizations, communities of practice, movements, and so on.
2. Identify individuals within these networks who are in a position to influence others. This can, of course, include people with positional power, but also those with great popularity, prestige, or facilitation or brokerage capabilities.
3. Identify what kind of power you have to influence the larger networks (positional power, popularity, prestige, facilitation or brokerage skills, etc.) and determine how you can use this power for transformational effect.
CAPACITY 4: REINFORCE THE POSITIVE TO BUILD CONFIDENCE AND HOPE
1. Using an appreciative approach, identify the positive strengths, qualities, and values you possess that can help you be a transforming leader.
2. Identify the positive strengths, qualities, and values you see in other individuals who can assist in your efforts. Help them recognize what is positive and strong in them and how those qualities can aid you in addressing your situation. Use this knowledge of distributed talents to build strong teams and networked approaches to utilizing the combined capacity of multiple strengths.
3. Explore what is positive, past and present, in the group or groups (or the entire organization) involved and how these qualities can contribute to the realization of a consensual positive future vision.
CAPACITY 5: APPLY CONTEMPORARY SCIENTIFIC WAYS OF THINKING TO YOUR LEADERSHIP
1. Build on your analysis of how to influence individuals and release their energy by exploring how you can free up energy in the systems involved by fostering relationships between key individuals or groups.
2. Listen closely to what appears to be resistance from others to gain important information about issues that need to be addressed (such as human fears, possible unanticipated side effects of the change effort, ways these efforts may be disempowering for some involved, serious values conflicts that need to be resolved, etc.). Explore how to refine your strategy as necessary to integrate solutions to such legitimate concerns respectfully.
3. Build a plan for influencing the larger field (considering fields as complex, dynamic, and constantly shaped by self-organizing activities). In doing so, begin by observing what problems may be in the process of being solved, and visions realized, in what is already happening. Then determine where you need to assist or redirect energies and where you can help most by getting out of the way.
CAPACITY 6: ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR MAKING A DIFFERENCE
1. Instead of viewing conflict or change as problems, cultivate an attitude that recognizes turbulence as normal (like weather) and how it destabilizes and promotes self-organization in human systems. See yourself as a fractal, an attractor that influences what happens by what you embody, say, and do. Consider how this mode of thinking might affect your attitude toward the situation you described.
2. Brainstorm ways to bring out the genius in others and in systems. (As a metaphor for this, imagine a butterfly when you see a cocoon.) To further transitions already in process, provide as much transparency as possible; share information so that everyone knows what they need to know to see the big picture; and be sure that people have the resources they need to do their part to achieve a collective vision.
3. Make time to read literature and to view movies, plays, and good television dramas to develop your capacity for vicariously experiencing the realities of people who seem different from you. Doing so develops your capacity for empathy.
Step Three: Create Strategic Narratives and Plans
Now look back at how you originally described the situation you want to transform. Applying the analysis above, describe any new insights about your situation and what it might require of you.
You also might find it helpful and enjoyable to write a new story, or narrative, about the situation you described, or your leadership more generally, that begins in the present and concludes with a happy and transformational ending. Good stories always have character development. Let your story show your development and that of other major players, and how that development allows you together to realize a happy ending.
B: Applications for Becoming the Change You Wish to See
Step One: Define the Situation
You can describe a new situation or keep working with the situation you described in the Part One application section. It is best to choose a situation for this exercise that evokes a sense of anxiety, fear, sadness, being overwhelmed, or other difficult feelings, and that, on reflection, you think might require you to develop a new capacity or enhance an existing one (staying calmer under stress, being more open to change, letting go of control in a context of interdependence, dealing more effectively with a difficult person, engendering more respect or confidence in others, etc.). In this case, describe not only the situation, but also the feelings it induces in you and anything you know about the inner capacity you need or want to develop to meet this challenge.
Step Two: Engage in the Journey of Inner Development to Acquire New Capacities
In addressing these questions and practices, it is desirable to apply them first to the situation you described and second to your leadership more generally.
CAPACITY 7: RESPONDING TO THE WORLD’S NEED AS THE CALL TO LEAD
1. Define the need in your group, organization, or community, or the world in general, that calls you to leadership. How do you feel this need in your body’s response to it?
2. To what degree do you have access to what is required to address this need (for example, ease in working with change, addressing conflict, letting go of control, or speaking the truth when it feels dangerous to do so)?
3. Consider other places in your life where you have risen to similar challenges and how you might translate those abilities to new ones; role models you might emulate to do so; and people who might provide support for faking it until you develop a needed capacity in yourself to respond in the way that is necessary now.
4. Reflect on whether your current call requires you to make conscious shadow elements in your psyche. (For example, if you find yourself obsessively judging someone, you might work on finding what in you is like them or where you might be repressing qualities that might be helpful to you if you did not disdain them.) Determine how to get the help you need to do so.
5. Unless your struggle is clearly yours alone, recognize that others in the system likely feel similar things. Provide assistance and support in the larger system for promoting the resilience and flexibility needed to develop underdeveloped and perhaps even unwanted abilities that are required by the situation you have described.
CAPACITY 8: BECOMING ACQUAINTED WITH YOUR INNER TOOLBOX
1. If you believe your leadership in the situation you described to be a spiritual practice, what might this suggest you do? (If you are religious, you might apply the beliefs and precepts of your religion. If you are not religious, think about how leadership is a path of service for you.)
2. Identify elements of your inner toolbox and their gifts to you, especially your ego, soul, and spirit; your mind, heart, and body; and your conscious and unconscious minds. Consider how each might assist you in the situation you described.
3. Consider how you might engage in presencing by identifying the highest future possibility and committing to bringing it into the now. Describe what this would look and feel like for you.
4. Hone your leadership efficacy by acting on the freedom to choose your own attitude toward leadership challenges, even though you cannot control what you will encounter.
5. Notice whether making decisions from your heart opens up possibilities, and how this might aid you in making choices. Notice also how doing so helps you empathize with others and respect their points of view.
CAPACITY 9: LEADING WITH MINDFULNESS AND EQUANIMITY
1. Notice whether you are hindered in addressing the situation you have described by the ego’s need to look good, to maintain control, to be right, to worry constantly about how to avoid anticipated problems, and so on. If this is the case, describe how the ego may be getting in the way of leadership success.
2. To calm anxiety or any of the ego’s obsessive concerns, practice bringing your attention to your physical body, to sensing the world around you and the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. You may do this as a sitting meditation or as you go through the activities of your day. When the mind is stilled, make note of any insight that trickles up into awareness without so much effort.
3. Cultivate an observing mind that recognizes all the events around you without getting into their drama. Work to accept reality as reality while not fighting it. (A friend once told me to just regard it as weather; sometimes the sun shines, sometimes it rains, and sometimes there are storms. They all come and go.) Notice how you know better what to do in any situation if you are not in resistance to whatever occurs.
CAPACITY 10: HARVESTING WISDOM FROM EXPERIENCE
1. Describe what it would, or does, mean for you to think of your leadership as a vocation. How does it differ from thinking about it as a career?
2. Remember when in your life so far you have experienced Via Positiva, Negativa, Creativa, and/or Transformativa. How has living these paths developed your character and capacities and made you a more transformational leader?
3. Describe how you might use awareness of these archetypal paths in your leadership by helping yourself and others identify what path they are on and what it asks of them in the context of challenging situations you and they face.
CAPACITY 11: HEALING YOURSELF, OTHERS, AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS
1. Who in your life can listen empathically and mirror back to you both your deeper, wiser self and where you might be caught in a complex (our psychological issues), unaware of the impact you are having on others and yourself? Where might you, or do you, provide this support for others?
2. How have your learnings from painful experiences deepened your consciousness in ways that can help you lead others through similar circumstances? Are there any ways that unresolved issues of loss and pain might be limiting your leadership effectiveness? If so, how might you resolve them?
3. Have you been scapegoated or do you fear being scapegoated in the situation you have described? How might you protect yourself from this fate? How can facing such fears develop in you a deeper level of courage and commitment than you have experienced before?
4. Whose suffering calls to you at present? What is required of you to address, ease, or heal that suffering?
CAPACITY 12: LEADING CONTINUOUS CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION
1. Grounded in your self-knowledge of your gifts, values, and uniqueness, think of how you can respond to challenging events in ways that are authentic and that meet the needs before you.
2. Think about how you may have to shapeshift in your leadership. Begin this practice by noting how qualities and capacities you demonstrate in other parts of your life, or ones that show up in your fantasy life, could be useful in your leadership, and then experiment with bringing them into play in how you actually lead.
3. Brainstorm playfully with others multiple innovative ways to address new challenges, including some that may seem very far out. Then choose some options to consider trying.
4. Imagine yourself modeling an attitude of curiosity, enjoying the wild ride of change, viewing the task of reinventing anything and everything as fun, and reveling in the uncertainty of liminal space as the womb of rebirth. Then work to live into this vision in real time.
5. Foster an environment that supports innovation and experimentation not only in creating new products or services but also in how things are run.
Step Three: Conclusion: Create a Leadership Development Narrative and Plan
Apply what you have learned to how you ideally would be in order to address the situation you have described with confidence and ease. Also, identify any capacities you might want to continue to develop in doing so.
You also may want to write a narrative about this situation or about your broader leadership journey that identifies through character development the capacities that journey has fostered and how you wish to continue to deepen and mature to gain the transformational mastery you aspire to embody. (To create a future narrative, it may be helpful to read a biography or autobiography of a role model who exemplifies the qualities that you want to embody. Such a narrative can give you ideas for thinking through the process of becoming your own unique, more mature, and developed you—not another them.)
You also can create a personal development plan, based on your responses to the questions and experiences with the practices, identifying which capacities you have mastered, which require more attention, and what you want to do to further mature and develop as a person and a leader.
C: Applications for the Art of Transforming Groups
Step One: Identify Your Transformational Aspirations for a Specific Group
1. Determine what team, group, organization, community, or network you want to influence to become more transformational.
2. Describe this group, how it functions, and how the members relate.
3. Imagine how you would like the group to function and relate.
4. Sketch out some ideas about what you might do to achieve this goal.
After completing these exercises, tell a brief story about how this group reached the goal and experienced a happy ending.
Step Two: Lead Groups from a Connected and Relational Stance
While our collective challenge requires transformation at large system levels, change begins in smaller groups and organizations. The following exercises therefore are focused on relating within such groups. However, the same principles apply to large-group transformation, using somewhat different, analogous strategies.
CAPACITY 13: LEAD FROM INNER GUIDANCE AND SOUND ANALYSIS
1. Reflect on the dreams and visions that inspire you to do the hard work of leadership. Engage with others involved in your enterprise by sharing such dreams and seeking out theirs as well, moving to weave them together into a collective dream.
2. When you wake up, recall the images and situations in your dreams. These can provide messages from your unconscious that can be understood metaphorically and can contribute compensatory information to balance your waking analysis of any given situation or the inner workings of a group.
3. Create space and time to open to intuitive understandings and make it safe for those around you to share their dreams, intuitive insights, hunches, and gut feelings as important information from the unconscious that can be considered along with rational analysis. Notice synchronistic events that tell you to go for it or stop and reconsider. Encourage discussion of observations, integrating such awareness with a businesslike strategic analysis.
4. Take time to listen to anima mundi, the soul of the world; consider the good of the planet in making decisions.
CAPACITY 14: USE DIALOGUE TO HARVEST GROUP WISDOM
In a group context, sit in a circle with the goal of moving to a deeper collective understanding or vision. Model and encourage the following practices:
1. Practice deep listening, which requires suspending what you want to say, to hear with your mind and heart what a person is saying and the emotion and experiences behind what is said. Remember that your goal is to harvest group wisdom, not sell your ideas.
2. Suspend certainty in order to be open enough to hear and take in what others are sharing. When you are unclear about what they are saying, or if you initially disagree, ask questions to help yourself stay receptive to new perspectives and information.
3. Engage your objective, observing mind to notice the systemic and interactional patterns before you, tracking the whole, not just the parts. Encourage an attitude of seeking the good of the whole enterprise, not just getting one’s way.
4. Make showing respect for the discernment of individuals and groups a discipline; practice it even when you do not feel like it. To do this, it is necessary to practice emotional intelligence in working with your transference issues and use mindfulness practice to quiet your mind (see Part Two).
5. Understanding synchronicity and trusting the transcendent at work can help you welcome whatever happens, assuming that even if it is annoying or painful, if addressed well it will provide the new insights and growth the group needs.
CAPACITY 15: BE OPEN TO RECEIVING COLLECTIVE INTUITIVE GUIDANCE
1. Enhance the ability of group members to practice deep listening by literally closing off other stimuli.
2. Foster the practice of close attunement, in which two or more people connect so deeply that a sense of safety and intimacy is established. This enables a profound level of sharing, so much so that new insights are discovered, leading to transformational shifts in individuals, the dyads, or the larger group’s sense of things.
3. Weave together such transformational insights into new narratives by answering these questions: What’s cooking? What is the germ of the new understanding? Who is drawn to it?
4. Tell and retell the new narratives to encourage a collective vision, a stronger sense of the meaning of the shared enterprise, and a capacity for healthy collaboration.
CAPACITY 16: WITHDRAW PROJECTIONS TO ENHANCE CLARITY AND COOPERATION
1. Notice when individuals or groups are blaming others rather than taking responsibility for what they need to be doing and are making it difficult to work with those so judged. Explore the projection that is occurring and look for where the mirror image of the judged person or group is in the judger. Breaking down the us/them dichotomy in this way can empower people and groups and restore the ability to collaborate with others who initially may seem alien and threatening.
2. Be alert to prejudice and stereotyping within a group or in a group’s relationship with others. Foster education and experiences that work to dispel harmful forms of projection and work to protect the victims of such attitudes. Also, ensure that it is okay for people to have made a mistake based on such projections if they are open and willing to treat everyone with respect as they work to let go of their preconceptions.
3. Find ways to help group members recognize that we are always projecting our mental frameworks and narratives onto others and events. Have members separately respond to an inkblot or to pictures that can be seen in at least two ways. Thinking individually about a workplace situation, sharing their analysis, and then teasing out the different assumptions behind that analysis can have a similar effect, except when the group is afflicted with groupthink.
4. Sharing dreams in a group can help its members both open to intuitive awareness (as in Capability 1) and recognize the power of projection as they see how differently each person interprets the dream based on his or her own experience and ways of making meaning of life.
5. Be sure to do your own work to recognize and withdraw projection, since you cannot take others where you have not gone or are not willing to go.
CAPACITY 17: FOSTER EMOTIONAL CONNECTION TO ENHANCE PERFORMANCE
1. Imagine your leadership as being similar to a conductor leading an orchestra. Think of the task people are engaged with as being like a particular piece of music they are playing. Then note what feelings are evoked by the various notes, phrases, and timing and the emotions engendered by their interaction with one another. How might you lead by actions as subtle as small movements of a baton to indicate more of this, less of that, and to enhance some emotions and dampen others?
2. Notice the rhythm of a group you want to influence by watching their body movements and how they are, or are not, synchronized. Match your body movements to the group if they are synchronized or, if not, move in a way that could connect with the speed and tempo of all or most of the group, helping through your movements to synchronize theirs. If the group rhythm is synchronized in a pattern that is not conducive to the task, model movements and use language that rev them up or calm them down, as needed.
3. As musicians evoke feelings, think about how you might promote feelings in a group to optimize its functioning—feelings such as enthusiasm, a sense of safety and contentment, or the intense passion of engaging in a full-court press to achieve a desired goal. Make it clear that it is appropriate for group members to acknowledge feelings and receive appropriate sympathy, congratulations, or other feeling responses without unduly distracting from the work at hand.
4. When groups have experienced hardship, trauma, or defeat, mirror back to them what has been positive in their efforts, with the goal of restoring dignity, self-esteem, and hope. The goal is to heal through artistic reframing, compassion, and seeing the beauty within a deeply human and soulful situation.
CAPACITY 18: CONNECT WITH THE BIGGER PICTURE, THE ECOLOGY OF THE WHOLE
1. Notice the various components of your sense of identity, such as one or more ethnic, national, or regional identities, your identification with various groups (such as sports teams, schools, political parties, etc.), your gender and sexual orientation, and the ways you may think and feel. Describe how all these various parts come together to provide a sense of you as a whole being. Are there any important parts that you exile, so that they are split off from the rest? If so, can you find a way to integrate such a part into the whole?
2. Identify any relationship that is difficult for you. Consider the relationship between you and the other person as a third space where possibilities lie for transforming what happens between you. Experiment with how thinking this way can open possibilities for relating with greater ease. Help others in difficult relationships find this generative space where change can happen.
3. Work with groups in conflict to recognize the story they each tell about the other. Then explore the third space in the relationship between the groups that allows for a new collective story to emerge. Practicing dialogue in ways that involve representatives from various groups can foster this practice, as can recognizing and withdrawing projections.
5. Find the third space in your relationship with groups or individuals that you lead, recognizing that your work entails building better relationships at every level of a community or organization.
6. Recognize that all groups function within larger Third Space fields, that members are intertwined with family, community, religious, political, social, and other groups. Such traditional networks now are augmented by social media that provide access to people and ideas from all around the world, which means that a leader’s influence is only one of many in a person’s life. However, this larger field also provides a fertile ground to seed new, innovative ideas, so it is wise to harvest the wisdom and new ideas generated from this larger Third Space.
Conclusion: Creating a Connected Leadership Narrative and Plan
Decide what from the previous exercises is helpful in building healthy and transformational teams in touch with unconscious as well as conscious insights. Revise the story you wrote in Step One to reflect these new options for developing a transformational group.
Create a plan or checklist for what you might want to do differently in your relationships with groups you lead or influence as well as with other groups that affect your ability to implement a transformational vision.
Step One: Sum Up Where You Are and Where You Want to Go
Take responsibility for leading from where you are and where you want to go by integrating what you have learned. In the application sections for Parts One, Two, and Three, you were encouraged to write narratives that reflect how you want to think, what you want to embody, and how you want to relate to others. Look back at your answers to these exercises and sum up what you have learned.
Step Two: Revisit the Narratives
Revisit the narratives you have written to identify the themes and plot progressions that would make sense for you to share with others in formal and informal communications. You also may want to contemplate how to encourage others to rethink their communication in similar ways, perhaps helping them to develop the capacities outlined in this book and to reflect these in how they communicate (not only in what they say, but in what they measure, reward, and reinforce by other means). Make notes of what you want to say to whom, in what forms and settings, highlighting what themes you want to address.
Step Three: Write about Your Success
Craft one final narrative about your success as a great communicator and how you have transformed the communication patterns of those you influence in ways that reinforce new leadership thinking, being, and relating. Although you are writing about what you hope to achieve, write it as if it had already happened and you were looking back on it.