This model, which describes how human brain learns, fits perfectly with the Gestalt approach, and also is the fundamental model of adaptive leadership tasks. If any leader can attract and sustain the attention of the people that are critical for his or her agenda, there will definitely be change and progress.
In this respect the one of the first tasks of the leader is to learn how to manage her attention and how to sustain her attention on her agenda and leadership commitment. And with that, how to attract and sustain the attention of the people critical for her success, how to orchestrate and regulate joint reflection, argument, even conflict on the agenda, how to facilitate new joint insights, new collective understanding, and new agreements and commitments, and how to help design new behavioral experiments for the group she is leading.
While doing that, she also has to remember the axiom: “If you are one step ahead, you are a leader. If you are ten step ahead, you are a target”. And as Heifetz and Linsky so beautifully puts it: “Leadership is the art of disturbing people at a rate they can tolerate”. As such, the first duty of any leader is first to stay alive.
This, defines the beauty, and the challenge of the leadership.
COACHING LEADERS THROUGH COMPLEXITY AND CHANGE
So, our role as leadership coaches is:
- To support our clients to build capacity to stay present, mindful, awake, and alive in VUCA challenges, and navigate them effectively,
- To help them understand and regulate their reactivity and triggers in a complex system,
- To help them become aware and manage their tendencies to fall in the trap of the five hindrances,
- To support them upgrading their lens to see and overcome the common human error of system/context blindness,
- Thus to help them become students of systems and achieve a certain balance of humbleness and boldness when they are dealing with systemic complexity and predictable human responses.
- And using this balance and a certain sense of awake mindfulness, support them use themselves as change agents to design, initiate and lead adaptive change in a strategic way: through managing attention, orchestrating collective reflection and conflict, facilitating joint insights and agreements, and designing and carrying out behavioral experimentation.
