Rewilding Leadership – London

What to expect

From a naturalising sense-making lens, how can we frame situations in ways that respect the ecological nature of our existence and co-dependencies and shift us away from the dominance of an engineering paradigm?

Expect some disruptive thinking, such as:

• No more “mental models” and “mindset engineering” – leaders need to take accountability for the starting conditions and stop individualising the problem. Interactions matter more in a complex system than individual pre-dispositions.
• Stop blaming individuals for the failure of change initiatives –it is more likely that the initiative was too idealistic, too far away from the realities of here and now and often, seen by staff as hypocritical.
• Post-therapeutic techniques have no ethical or approrpoaite place in leadership, OD/change or coaching practices
• Drop the 5-year strategic planning process, or acknowledge it for the gaming process that it is. Start journeys with a sense of direction rather than a fixed goal, and then do the next right thing.
• Asking what sort of mindset we want is the type of question which leads to platitudes and culturally specific value statements based on one perspective on how things should be.

As an alternative we suggest that we should look, pragmatically and realistically, at:

1. what levels of agency should be given (ideally distributed not delegated);
2. what changes are needed to the affordances provided by the system; and
3. when, if at all, we can change the assemblages (by which we mean the patterns of narrative and experience which determine how people see the world including path and context dependencies).

Asking these three questions focuses on what we can change in the here and now, and focuses the initiative into understanding the system as much as individual responses.