Creative Leadership Coaching

Carman, I am so enjoying our dialogue and appreciate your posts here. The small details you add about your experience paints a picture of someone who already lives the experience of Partnership.  I am looking forward to reading your post on “Organization as Theocracy.” These guiding metaphors really shape our realities, don’t they?  Have a good week! Lisa From Carman de voer: [...]

Carman, You are a prolific writer and thinker!  You make several points in your post that all deserve some reflection and response.  Yes, the Cave metaphor seems to “work” for world views/paradigms in general, and it can, therefore, certainly be applied to the worldview which shapes traditional organizations.  And, a — perhaps the — guiding [...]

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 [...]

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, regarding: your post: http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2009/01/07/metaphors-of-organization-organization-as-brain/ I completely agree. This is a good example of how our metaphors can limit our thinking. The mind-body dichotomy, in which mind is usually seen as separate from and superior to the body, has been a fundamental cultural metaphor. Related metaphors include: God-World, spirit-flesh, and the misogynist male-female dichotomy in which men [...]

Carman writes: Perhaps we could begin with “Brain.” While many are inclined to see the brain as somehow separate from and higher than the rest of the body, Morgan proposes that “intelligence” is, in fact, distributed throughout the entire body—such as the legs hands, feet. In short, there is no master, centralized intelligence. The brain, [...]

Carman in Vancouver, BC writes, ”I’m very interested in Gareth Morgan’s metaphors of organization: 1) machine 2) organism 3) brain 5) culture 6) political system 6)  psychic prison 7) instrument of domination Flux and Tranformation.  Each metaphor has enormous explanatory utility and each is worth discussing in some detail, if you like.” That sounds very interesting! Let’s [...]

In Western culture, we tend to be inclined to believe in and aim towards static and desireable future. In myths and fairy tailes, our heroes’ and heroines’ journies end in a static, experientially eternal state of bliss or pain. This is also a theme of monotheistic religions, which have shaped our worldview over the past [...]

In Cultivating Strength (see http://www.creativeleadercoach.com/2008/10/10/cultivating-strength/ ), we discussed how speaking our truth and postive thoughts and words literally make us stronger. In this post, we will talk a bit about a way of understanding the world, so that we can more easily see why this might be true. The science of psychoneuroimmunology, which studies the intimate [...]

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 [...]