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Think of all
the great teams you have ever been on. Remember the wordless harmony
that existed between those people. Now, think of everyone you know
as a musical note.
Living leadership
comes from an individual who hears our unique notes and the space
in between our music and other’s and promotes dynamic harmony. They
are bridge builders. Their bridges are made of wonder, fused with
discipline and freedom. Great bridges inspire through their structural
harmony, trust, and movement. They join the disconnected.
Learning requires
not knowing. To not know, allows musing. Musing—a state that allows
the genie of genius to arise. Learning happens in the space between
the data, the mission, and the goal. Live leadership allows not
knowing, welcomes the vitality of the question, so that the living
greatness, the legacy of the group, can happen.
There is an unsatisfied
hunger loose in the world.
It creates a
voracity of unsatisfied needs that show up in our homes, communities,
and businesses.
We long for leadership
that grows out of individuals who love the questions we have. Who
encourage our wandering toward the perfect solution through the
passion they model.
Leadership isn’t
about any method, any organizational plan, any mission specific
operational objectives. It’s about orchestrating the desires to
be successful that we all have.
Using the talents,
the wonder of others, to create a path really allows people to experience
the love they long to express for life through all their doing.
We foster the
focusing of love and passion in others and ourselves so that we
feel good about who we are and what we’re doing.
Learning,
leading, and loving are going on all the time.
Just think of
the very last thing you made a decision about, regardless of scale.
S l o w – m o t i o n m o m e n t.
Why did you decide
to continue reading?
That decision
came out of the unconscious, ongoing action of your learning. What
we learn is applied
and turns into a direction that looks like leadership.
We lead our
selves first, then others, learning all the while.
I’ve often been
afraid to learn and lead. Especially when the stakes seem too high,
so high that I could lose some comfortable habit that made it easy
to understand the story the world wants me to understand.
Learning requires
the death of limits, the death of the habits of how I thought something
was.
Living requires
learning. Leading requires learning.
Learning requires
that I let go of what was and allow what will be. Even though learning
can occur and often does, at the neural speed of light, there is
a brief and critical moment when the question, “Will I survive?”
occurs. When survival becomes the predominant modus operandi, everything
produced is tainted with fear. Yet, this natural pause, the “Will
my beliefs survive?” moment, is built into our basic operating system.
We build our beliefs out of what we have learned. They create a
brain-friendly architecture for us to live in while we experience
our lives. Every bit of our experience can change our neural home.
S l o w – m o t i o n m o m e n t.
What are you
building right now?
Hang on: Neural
light speed slowing to the visible spectrum.
The amount of
time that something new stays in our land of survival depends on
how comfortable we are with our capacity and comfort to not know.
When we allow the new to expand into possibility, our neural home
correspondingly expands. We are natural builders; we are always
renovating our home from which we see the world. From tiny twelve-inch
windows, we create a seamless 360-degree panorama that allows us
to see all possibilities around us.
How big is
your view? How big are the views of those around you?
How does this
natural state become an aberration?
Survival based-leading
fosters a cannibalistic condition often called “an internal entrepreneurial
team” who eat each other and their young.
Understanding
the upward flow through survival of all learning and communications
is one of the keys that foster real learning.
Remember what
it’s like to put a happy face on a dead initiative? The results
of this Leader Learning style is a dead Frankenstein—all the right
stuff, no electricity. How many times as leaders were we asked to
enliven what we knew but lacked the heart and passion necessary
for success and life.
The critical
moment where possibility can become do-ability is what needs to
be understood, honored, and nurtured within others and ourselves.
What is the
necessary quotient of not knowing needed to inspire and focus the
talents of those around us?
The goal is to shift from think about
to do about.
For all the time,
enormous human resources, and money spent on promoting leadership
and learning, our ROI has been low. Learning requires of us a s
l o w-motion understanding of those light-speed steps that promote
safety, pause, and application within others and ourselves. In our
desire to understand and foster greater intellectual capital, we
have overlooked a vital phase of the learning process.
That phase is
the survival pause.
It is a moment,
perhaps like right now, where, as you have been reading this, your
curiosity, your skepticism, your wonder, your tactical mind co-creates
a question against what is being said.
Questions create
pause. Questions create space, like the space between musical notes.
Without space,
there would be no music.
Leadership is
more like conducting an orchestra than leading an army.
A visual reference
would be a prism. A prism takes white light, s l o w s it down,
and shows us the spectrum of what is there, but because it was traveling
so fast, we could not see it. While learning and leading, we s
l o w down the light-speed activity around us by applying a prism-like
filter to what is going on. Each of us has a prism to s l o w
high-speed code down.
Survival has
gotten a bad rap. This necessary primal pause that we’ve worked
diligently to step over is actually the key to our learning and
leading skills. The survival pause is the threshold opening into
the skills and tools we were born with, but sometimes we forget
to use. Each of us has a s l o w-motion filter. Dead Frankenstein
formulas get in the way of what we most naturally are.
Living formulas,
that take us into the gloriously uncharted or to the edge from which
we can leap, are the only ones worth keeping.
Because we are alive, we know the difference between alive and dead.
We edit when
we should activate all the perception tools, all the learning tools
we were born with. This is not learning about doing more. It is
about learning to trust that we already have the tools needed to
learn and lead perfectly.
Some of the
most important learning is unlearning.
Living leadership
allows the best in others to arise, be applied on-goingly so that
the needed and the unexpected genius can coexist.
Leading and learning
are joined at the hip—like knowing and not knowing.
I can’t lead
if I don’t allow learning in myself and all those around me.
Learning happens
in the empty spaces, not the full ones.
Not knowing is
an empty not a full.
How do we
create value and safety in not knowing?
Organizations
are organisms. The creativity, inventive agility, passions, majestic
complexity that makes up a company, are always in flux.
In welding, flux
is a catalytic chemical that allows a synergistic condition. Flux
is required for the joining of very different kinds of metals.
Flux is a chemical
that allows something to come together that otherwise never would
have.
Without flux’s
presence, the two very different pieces of material that need to
be joined would never come together.
Wonder is
perfect flux.
The conversations
that live within the walls of the company, the ones that happen
outside the meeting rooms, are the voices that produce the fluxing
process.
The folks that
make up a company carry the creative intention, the future, the
success, or failure of the corporation.
Cooperation between
each individual’s creative power and the company mission is the
space where flux is most needed. These passing conversations are
the life-blood of any project, indeed, any company.
Evolutionary
leadership, the kind we long for and aspire to, understands this
fluxing process. It can bring together disparate factions to inspire
the joining of talents and skills, hopes and visions, to foster
movement and evolution where just raw materials, raw talent were
latent.
Neither
weshallovercome
nor
w e s h a l l o v e r c o m e
can function without spaces in the right places.
Living leadership
knows where the spaces belong and orchestrates the pause that allows
the music of the team to flow.
Here success,
completion, or failure occur.
Why is it that
new initiatives, new products seem to stall at about the 90% point,
where there seems to be the need for an exponential dose of management
initiatives? One of the organizing principles of us—we humans—is
that we come together to learn how to be at peace while creating
the new with others. In organizations, this same principle exists.
It is the unspoken rallying call; the mundane need of some management
initiatives. We come together because we like to create—yes even
the lone wolves—as a group. We want a future we can feel connected
to, proud of, and that we know is a legacy that is alive and working.
We shall overcome.
I have been a
producer of complex photo-illustrations, trade shows, and educational
websites. I hired bright, disciplined teams to take the vision from
concept to reality. People loved their part of the process. I learned
over time to pick people whose talents and approach to creating
would be complementary. We always had a clear deadline, budget,
and communication agenda. As my projects became larger, I noticed
that we would ‘lose it’ when what we were bringing to life was almost
alive, when the story was almost told. This was a humbling and expensive
management problem. As a team, we were good at doing s l o w-motion
on our habits and the creative process we were engaged in. We learned
this because we stumbled and could catch one another and we operated
within the design principle of perfect discipline, perfect freedom.
One sunny, Thursday
afternoon, with a deadline looming, we went outside because we had
to walk away, because we were stumbling over and stepping on the
new life and the story we were creating. Why were we falling down
when we needed to be graceful? We looked at one another, quietly,
and within the flood of awareness, the clarity, one resounding connecting
nod of understanding passed between us. Even though we were professionals,
even though we knew the deadline, we suddenly understood how much
we loved not knowing and creating a solution together. We did not
want that creative process to end. We discovered that each of us
was sabotaging so that we could
continue our inventive mission together. This was the
pause between the notes, where the music we were creating was heard,
and we understood that we were afraid ‘it’ might not happen again.
There indeed would be sadness when we finished, inextricably mixed
with the joy coming from the success we produced.
As a team, we
discovered the necessary value of grieving the moment of creation.
We discovered that without this necessary pause, our next project
would begin with a limp instead of a leap. I had never understood
that grieving the moment of completion was a critical component
of having all of our resources available to us so that we could
create, allow, and promote our next great creative solutions.
Pausing,
allowing the question
promoted the solution we needed.
I was led by
the stumble. Not the grace.
Our stumbling is more graceful than we realize.
Allowing revelation requires us to be off-balance.
What is balance
anyway?
Constant adjustment
to sustain dynamic verticality.
Congratulations
and blessings for stumbling forward and enlivening our lives!
David
MacKenzie is a medical intuitive and founder of Camp Leonardo. He
has been a welder, a college design professor, and a professional
photographer. He believes in perfect
discipline-perfect freedom. Wonder has saved his life
more that once as it mends leaking dreams. Fostering wonder in others
is his mission and passion. He cares deeply about the world and
the people in this world. Question with him at davidmackenzie@earthlink.net
The author
would like to recognize the special help of Susan Cantwell and Dianne
Devenyi for making this article possible.
DD100101MC
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