Creative Leadership Coaching

10/1/09  Hi Lisa, Thank you so much for your gracious comments. It’s wonderful that our minds can interplay notwithstanding our constraints and commitments-you within an intellectual orchard, and me within a psychological sarcophagus.  Lisa, you ask if I would like to see the discussion move up a little. I believe I would find it easier [...]

Carman De Voer Mais has developed a fresh and insightful PowerPoint presentation on learning organizations. He makes the important point that becoming a learning organization isn’t something that “patched on” to the existing organizational paradigm, but rather a transformation of both the paradigm and the players.  I’m going to try to share that presentation with you [...]

Hi Lisa, Two elements that strike me about the Cave allegory are: 1) Dehumanization 2) Degradation Interestingly, The Free Dictionary links dehumanization with mechanization: 1. To deprive of human qualities such as individuality, compassion, or civility: slaves who had been dehumanized by their abysmal condition. 2. To render mechanical and routine. Given the resurgence of [...]

Carman, Sorry for the long delay! My executive and career coaching practice includes working with people in career transition, and, unfortunately, many people are needing this kind of support right now. Regarding transformation, you wrote:  “It changes ‘how’ we know. Change thus appears to involve the re-perception of reality. [It...] involves the ‘deconstruction of a [...]

Carman writes: Hi Lisa,  I’ll try to paraphrase your questions: 1. Is emergent (bottom-up) organization compatible with goals and direction (top-down)? 2. When is the imposition of limits appropriate? Morgan explains that “the intelligence of the human brain is not predetermined, predesigned, or  preplanned. Indeed, it is not centrally driven in any way. It is [...]

More from Carman de voer: Great questions Lisa, Perhaps I could begin to address them through a practical illustration: I recently heard about a professional bureaucracy that is experiencing high turnover of its trainees—which, in such an organization, is surprising given the time, money and personnel allocated to training.  Furthermore, neophytes exhibit enormous enthusiasm and [...]

As a brief departure from our current discussion, I recently heard that when we are regularly interrupted by ringing telephones, email announcements, and visitors, that our IQ drops by about 10% – the same level of impairment found in people who are under the influence of marijuana. The colleague who shared this information with me joked, “All of [...]

The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted by Professor Philip G. Zimbardo in 1971 at Stanford University to explore the question of the power of situation to shape the moral behavior of participants. The role play involved simulating a prison in the basement of one of the buildings at Stanford. The study recruited male college students [...]

One famous experiment that really illustrates how perspective can draw out or diminish human potential is the experiment first conducted in the 1960s by American teacher Jane Elliott, who went on to become an anti-racism activist.  In this exercise, she praised brown-eyed children as ”hardworking” and “intelligent,” and dismissed blue-eyed children as being innately less hardworking and intelligent. In light of that [...]

 The juxtaposition of these two words sounds unlikely doesn’t it?  We really don’t think of machines as being innovative — they do pre-programmed things (one hopes well).  For certain, the operator of the machine can innovate, but not the machine itself.  Similarly, traditional bureaucratic organizations, specialization and organizational lines of communication and control usually substantially [...]