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9 questions for leadership in life and work



9 questions for leadership in life and work Copyright© 2017 Scott Downs & Gerald Doyle



Introduction We are passionately curious about how people discover what inspires them, and about how they bring those inspirations to life. We care about this question for ourselves and for others we can support on the journey -  especially for young people launching out into life and career. The learning and the experience of our lives have drawn us to nine questions as foundations for this inquiry.

Our hypothesis is that there are answers to these questions for every person and for every community - and that the answers and their relationships are unique to every case. This little book sets out those questions, and some resources we have found for delving into them

We invite you to come with us, and share with us, on this journey of exploration.



1 How might we discover a sense of inspiration - individual and/or collective - and bring it to life? Within inspiration, we would include such diverse sources as vision, mission, purpose, identity, and intention. How do we discover these things, as the foundations of personal and organizational leadership journeys? How do we ground inspiration in history, create a vision of the future, and apply it in the contexts and containers of our current reality?

There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost … It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. ~ Martha Graham dancer and choreographer If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise. ~ Robert Fritz

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. ~ Robert Frost When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. - Paolo Coelho You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot - it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive. ~ Maya Angelou

Sources and references for Question 1 • Sirajuddin and Willeke, Temenos, A Reliable Vehicle for Organisa- tional Transformation • Temenos+Agility, An Introduction to Influence Maps • Lewitz and Neidhardt, Showing Up • Udall, Riding the Creative Roller Coaster • Udall and Turner, The Way of nowhere • Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future • Ray, The Highest Goal • Vision quests: e.g. http://sacredpassage.com/ • Williams, The Work You Were Born to Do • Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By • Agile planning - section from A Career Creative Curriculum • Sinek, Start with Why



2 How might we be better at relation- ship and dialogue, one-to-one and in larger groups? Career awakening and leadership seems to require relationship and dialogue. How might we create the spaces where personal and collective relationships flourish? Where differences are welcomed and collective intelligence sparks creativity, innovation and individual and collective learning?

Great leadership is movement from taking up space to beautifully holding space, spaces that use collective intelligence, creative tension and flow to significantly in- crease productivity and creativity, and there- by the capacity to out-innovate the competition. ~ Nick Udall

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing. - ~ John Dewey I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace. ~ Ken Wilber

Sources and references for Question 2 • Udall, Riding the Creative Roller Coaster • Bohm, On Dialogue • Isaacs, Dialogue and The Art of Thinking Together • Scharmer, Theory U • Kofman, Conscious Business • Patterson and Grenny, Crucial Conversations • Stone, Patton and Heen, Difficult Conversations • Hill, Collective Genius • Sawyer, Group Genius, the Creative Power of Collaboration • Lipmanowicz and McCandless, The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures • Peck, A Different Drum • Rees and Sullivan, Clean Language • Rosenberg, Non-Violent Communication • Roland and Rozenthuler, Leading Systemic Dialogue • Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection • Doyle, Downs, Littrell Senior, and Skala, Conversations of Inquiry



3 How might we become more skillful learners, courageously exploring the unknown? Individuals and teams need to learn and grow: journeys of inquiry are the means be which deep learning takes place. How might we understand the dynamics of these journeys, and help our colleagues, teams andorganizations travel them, to emerge with breakthrough insights that lead to important changes?

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the an- swers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Sources and references for Question 3 • Udall, Riding the Creative Roller Coaster • Scharmer, Theory U • Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces • Vision quest material, e.g. http://sacredpassage.com/ • Mayer, The People’s Scrum



4 How might we learn to discover and step into a range of healthy leader- ship stances and attitudes? Many leadership practices focus on the lead- er’s qualities and capabilities. How are we to understand the range of these stances, states and qualities of mind, whether favorable or destructive, and how they relate to each other? What is the leader’s frame of reference for these qualities?

Walking through the world creatively requires multiple perspectives because it’s in the weave that innovation happens. This quality of consciousness recognises that we do not understand what we see; rather we see what we understand. The world can only therefore be subjective. Mastery requires us to enquire consciously into this subjectivity, to realise that we have been conditioned to look through our consciousness and not at it. ~ Nick Udall

Sources and references for Question 4 • Udall, Riding the Creative Roller Coaster • Udall and Turner, The Way of nowhere • Barry, Shadow Work • Siegel, MindSight • Moore and Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover



5 As we consider our careers going forward, how might we develop greater maturity and self-awareness? Recent writing about leadership has often focused on different levels of leadership or cultural) awareness, maturity and/or consciousness. Although definitions of the various frame- works of maturity levels seem to provoke great debate, how are we as leaders to understand the progression of awareness: are there more and less mature ways for leaders to view their challenges, their opportunities, their mental models, their own developmental paths and those of their organizations?

Where all the previous stages [of leadership maturity] had operated out of a sense of lack, scarcity, and deficiency, this new level—which various researchers began calling “integrated,” “integral,” “autonomous,” “second tier,” “inclusive,” “systemic”—acted out of a sense of radical abundance, as if it were overflowing with goodness, truth,and beauty. It was as if somebody put a billion dollars in its psychological account, and all it wanted to do was share it, so full it was. ~ Frederic Laloux

Sources and references for Question 5 • Laloux, Reinventing Organisations • Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future • Udall, Riding the Creative Roller Coaster • Torbert, Action Inquiry • Kegan and Lahey, Immunity to Change



6 How might we, as emerging leaders, learn to understand and work with the complexity of human systems? Much conventional leadership thinking implicitly treats leadership challenges as processes that can be optimized, and organizations as if they were machines that can be tuned. More advanced leadership thinking tends to see organizations through the metaphors of living organisms and complex adaptive systems, where leadership interventions have complex, unpredictable results. What meaning do leadership perspectives make of these insights and how are they incorporated in leadership development?

Systems thinking is “contextual,” which is the opposite of analytical thinking. Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole. ~ Fritjof Capra

Sources and references for Question 6 • Senge, The Fifth Discipline • Capra and Luisi, The Systems View of Life • Roland and Rozenthuler, Leading Systemic Dialogue • Whittington, Coaching and Systemic Constellations • Cohen, I Carry Your Heart in My Heart



7 How might we learn to understand and work with the full range of human capacity? Conventional leadership approaches usually focus on the rational and the cognitive, helping leaders think and reason their way to their leadership strategies. A more holistic approach recognizes that human beings are integrated wholes, where the distinction of body and mind becomes illusory. How can leaders learn to recognize and liberate the emotional, intuitive, and embodied intelligence in themselves, their colleagues and their organizations?

A few centuries of listening to the head and more or less ignoring the wisdom of the body have produced a world that makes sense to the head but bewilders the noble physical being that’s hiding beneath our business suits. ~ David Pearl People with high levels of personal mastery...cannot afford to choose between reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye. ~ Peter M. Senge

Sources and references for Question 7 • Kofman, Conscious Business • Goleman, Emotional Intelligence • Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score • Gendlin, Focusing • Abram, the Spell of the Sensuous • Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh • Strozzi-Heckler, The Art of Somatic Coaching • Servan-Schreiber, The Instinct to Heal • McLaren, The Language of Emotions



8 How might we become “makers” - people who regularly create beautiful and useful things and experiences? How can leaders step into becoming “makers” - creators of beautiful, elegant objects, systems, products, services, experiences - works of “art.” How can we step into life and work as a form of creative expression and service, inspired by an ethos of design - and support and encour- age others to do the same?

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art. ~ Toni Morrison, quoted by Maria Popova Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. Andgreat art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator. An artist is someone who uses bravery, in- sight, creativity, and boldness to challengethe status quo. And an artist takes it personally. ~ Seth Godin

Sources and references for Question 8 • May, In Search of Elegance • Martin, Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Com- petitive Advantage • Udall, Riding the Creative Rollercoaster • Godin, What To Do When It’s Your Turn • Brown, Change by Design • Burnett and Evans, Designing Your Life: Build a Life That Works for You



9 How might we hold and encourage journeys of personal and systemic transformation? There’s a lot of talk about transformation in leadership work, but transformation from what? to what? And following what path? How do leaders inspire, design, enable and support these transformations, and help to hold the containers that (might) make them possible?

If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery Sources and references for Question 9 • Sirajuddin and Willeke, Temenos, A Reliable Vehicle for Organisational Transformation • Udall, Riding the Creative Rollercoaster • Scharmer, Leading from the Emerging Future

Epilogue We would love to engage with you to help you discover your own unique answeres to these questions on your own. we do this work with young people moving out into new chapters in life and work... ... with people of all ages moving to new stages... ... and with organisations and communities seeking to discover collective inspiration and bring it to life. we’d love to co-create with you. if you agree, please get in touch. [email protected] [email protected]

From Scott I have had the privilege of spending the last ten years working with some of the most progressive thinkers and coaches in the modern leadership space. From this experience, I have seen that the leadership programs I most admire offer a range of approaches, practices and techniques for advancing the leadership journey. It’s an intriguing challenge to think about how di- verse streams of insight can be connected and brought into relationship. My own reflections, based on my contact with great leadership teachers and cata- lysts and on my reading and study in the space more generally, are that the best leadership work gravitates around these nine important questions. [email protected]

From Jerry I have spent the last ten years at Illinois Tech working with an amazing set of col- leagues - faculty, staff, students, and alum- ni - to participate in and launch initiatives with the Chicago Public Schools, The City Colleges of Chicago, the Caribbean Student Initiative, the IIT Jusoor Syrian student initiative and the llinois Tech Global Lead- ers Program (formerly the IIT Boeing Schol- ars Academy). Over the years, my thinking has been altered and shifted by community organizers and activists who have thought deeply about capacity building, developing human capabilities, and issues related to inclusion, diversity and community.. [email protected]

We sometimes hear people speak about “being world-class” and “winning.” Usually these ideas turn out to be about individual achievement and being better than others. Instead, we invite you to be the creative genius you were meant to be, to create projects, teams and communities - including organizations and companies - that allow you and others to realize their creative potential. If you do that, we believe the ‘success’ will be there for everyone. We invite you to help many others to be the creative geniuses they were meant to be. It’s not about comparison, being better than someone else, or winning in that sense. It’s about being the best you can be and helping many others do the same. That’s what “winning’ really means to us. Our hope is that, in a small way, these 9 Questions of A Creative Career Curriculum will help us all as we undertake those journeys of discovery. Scott Downs, a former banker, management consultant and entrepre- neur now works to call forward great leaders and great organizations on the basis of great cultures. He is an Associate of the TrustTemenos Leadership Academy. Jerry Doyle is Vice Provost for Student Access, Success and Diversity initiatives at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He leads teams that create ideas, relationships, and collaborative partnerships to strengthen long-term sustainable enrollment pathways to higher education, and to support students and alumni in their career paths through and beyond graduation.