Day #12

Shadow Walls

This week we are exploring different perspectives on the ecosystem of our leadership: looking around us to question which walls are real, and which are delusions or prisons of our own making.

Certainty is something that serves us well: as we learn, we tend to move from disturbance, through the rapid construction of schemas and frameworks that hold our understanding, into comforting certainty.

And once we have that certainty, we tend to guard it: we may become resistant to new ideas or perspectives not because we have analysed them in a dispassionate way and found them to be lacking, but rather precisely because they erode our current certainty.

The whole debate about remote work in the current context of the Pandemic reflects this: we are ‘certain’ of models of leadership and oversight, power and control that work in the office, but we are less certain of how far we can go down a self determined path that gives greater individual agency to employees, so we tend to react with control.

But our certainty goes beyond that: i am reasonably certain that i need to own a car, that i should save in a pension, and that the best place to work is at my desk. But is that all true?

Use your 60 seconds today to identify something you are certain about: maybe it’s a task you do every day or each week, or a project you are collectively working on, or a belief or strategy that you follow.

Ask yourself if it’s still fresh, still current, or if perhaps it’s approaching it’s sell by date. 

A good place to start is with regular meetings: often they start with good intentions, but persist because nobody has power or authority, or even the insight, to question why.

So today, ask a question of yourself - what are you certain about.

And then look at that certainty and question it.