"If you're in a bad situation, don't worry, it'll change. If you're in a good situation, don't worry, it'll change."
-- John A. Simone Jr.
Evolving Sustainable Leadership-Engaging the Core
In my previous post on Evolving Sustainable Leadership we looked at some of the technologies through which leaders can deepen their practice to become more fully engaged with their selves and the people and world around them.
The question I frequently get, though, is what can we do deepen our practice on a daily basis?
The following process I consider to be the core means through which leaders can sharpen, deepen and expand their capacity to live, work and lead sustainably:
Presence: Presence in the form of awareness and perspective forms the foundation for action. The greater your presence, the deeper your capacity for action.
Pattern Yields Practice: From the application of Presence comes an understanding of the patterns or dynamics of a particular field or area of endeavor. The more refined, expansive and deep your Presence, the greater the capacity to perceive pattern. From the understanding of pattern action arises to fit coherently with systemic needs.
Generate Value: Generation of Value is the gathering together of necessary elements and resources for a particular project or endeavor. The “shopping list” is generated from the Key Success Factors for a particular practice in a particular field. Resources take many forms including tangibles like materials for technology creation to intangibles like know-how, networks & relationships.
No Waste: No Waste means what it says and says what it does. On a tangible level it could mean looking for and implementing lifecycle oriented solutions that incorporate technology into the eco-systems into which it will be introduced. Intangibly it is about integrity: matching action with words and espoused values: being the change we want to see in the world.
Innovate & Implement: Implementation of plan. Marketing of concept, service, product. Do-ing, execution. Walking the talk. Digging into the earth, planting seeds, getting technology to market in sustainably, eco-centric ways.
Resilience & Responsiveness: Stewardship, support, service, maintenance & improvement. Building and maintaining flexibility. Everything changes. At the core of eco-centric, sustainable action is the heart of flexibility and the perceptive wisdom to respond with change.
Tags: capacity building, sustainability, sustainable leadership
Capacity Evolution?
To give you a sense of what I do, let me explain what we do at Interkannections
We are a consultancy dedicated to evolution of human and human system capacity to engage the world. It is not just what we do that matters but how we are as well. We explain this as the relationship between “Be-Do-Get.” How we are-how we see, understand and make meaning-in the world determines what we do. The results of our worldview and our actions are the results we get.
There is a lot of energy being directed toward and focus on helping people do better. Skill development, competency improvement and technology all help us do better. There are times, though, when what we need is not a new way to do the same thing differently. At times, we need to evolve a new way of seeing that allows us to overcome the limitations of our current ways of doing. The development of this new way of seeing is a result of deepening our capacity to see. This is what we do. We help people and human systems deepen their sense of their selves and deepen the way they interact-are interconnected-with the world around them.
Recently, we have realized that one valuable way we can be of service is to turn our practice and technologies to the development of sustainable ways of Be-ing and Do-ing. We-the greater human community-need to evolve the capacity to engage the world from a deep systemic understanding. This is not environmentalism, a focus of climate change, green business or LOHAS. It is the capacity to integrate the linear with the non-linear, to see the forest and the trees and come up with a way for the loggers, environmentalists, paper business, bird-watchers, bears, flowers, fish, toads and people living downstream to all benefit from their relationship to that forest. This requires a new way of seeing and thinking and doing. What enables this new way is our capacity to see, think and do.
Are you ready to change?