Creative Leadership Coaching

Carman, Thank you for another exceptional post. Yes, all the thinkers you mention shape the lens through which we perceive our environment and the implicit assumptions we have about leadership and organizations. I  look forward to continuing this invigorating conversation, as our time allows. Have a great day! – Lisa

Hi Lisa, Proceeding on the assumption that a sub-theme of the cave allegory is the search for the ideal leader I would like to explore two dimensions of the cave allegory:

• The prisoners: who are bound to the floor and unable to turn their heads to see what goes on behind them.

• The puppeteers: who above and behind them are casting the shadows on the wall in which the prisoners are perceiving “reality”

The cave is diagrammed at the following site:

http://normanrschultz.org/Courses/graphics/Platocave.JPG

Your blog’s Mission Statement says:

“According to Montuori, the bureaucratic structure and the modern management style, still used by many organizations, is an historical creation, developed and adapted by men for a particular purpose and environment. As a historical creation, it reflects the assumptions its creators held about about the nature of the world, and us as human beings.” Too true!

 I see both leaders and led chained to the floor of the cave. Behind them are pupeteers Democritus and Leucippus, and Aristotle  who posited that –the Natural world can be understood as mechanical interaction, Rene Descartes—the separation of mind and body, Isaac Newton—who understood the universe as a celestial machine, and more recently, Adam Smith (mass production) Charles Babbage (line of authority) and Frederick Taylor (Management).
 
 I believe Taylor’s Scientific Management has been most influential in shaping our conception of “leadership” (which is, in itself a metaphor).
 
 As we know, Taylor posited:

• Separation of task conception and execution
• shifting responsibility for organization of work to management
• scientific methods for efficiency and precision
• training
• matching job and person

Perhaps we can discuss the above when we find some time Lisa.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we’ve been discussing tools or principles for creating our “wheel of creative freedom,” a virtuous cycle to replace the vicious cycle that master coach Rhonda Britten calls the “wheel of fear.”

So far, our review of experiments — the brown-eyed and blue-eyed children experiment, and the Stanford Prison experiment — illustrate the power of perception: 1) How perception gives rise to interpersonal dynamics; 2) How these dynamics tend to become even more stable over time once translated into rules/processes, roles and environments; and 3) How these dynamics (especially as they become increasingly structured) powerfully shape our perception of ourselves and others, and give rise to realities which seem to support the original perception.

In the first experiment, the learned perception that brown-eyed children were superior to blue-eyed children created conditions in which the academic performance of the brown-eyed children improved and the performance of the blue-eyed children declined. In the second experiment, the more the guards tried to control the prisoners, the more prisoners rebelled; this in turn justified the guards position that the prisoners needed to be controlled at all costs and the prisoner’s perceptions that conditions were deplorable, justifying rebellion…

The dynamic by which our perceptions creates reality is neither postive or negative in itself — it’s simply how we select and create (really, negotiate) one reality out of the many possibilities available to us.

In general, we might notice that negative perceptions tend to invoke negative realities and positive perceptions tend to invoke positive realities. In fact, we might observe that negative perceptions tend to fuel our wheels of fear and positive perceptions tend to power our wheel of creative freedom.

It may be useful to note that we are not talking about solipsism — the theory that the self is the only existent thing — which would imply that we are the omnipotent creators of our own realities. Rather, in each experiment, we can see how the resulting realities were shaped by the interaction (or dance) of the participants. Because participants have the power to change their perceptions and behavior, they have the power to shift the system (the sum total of the interrelationships) to a greater or lesser extent; however, they don’t have direct power over the perceptions and choices of the other participants. The power we are discussing is not absolute, but as both experiments illustrate, it is considerable.

In upcoming posts, we will consider in more depth, how our perceptions of ourselves, as leaders, shapes our possibilities, including the possibilities of our organizations. We’ll be going deep with this one, so if you want to come along, wear your miner’s hat! 😉