Muddling Through

Jack Ricchiuto jack at designinglife.com
Fri Nov 5 10:54:39 PST 2004


Love the discussion on management. These are from a recent publication.

The intent of leadership is to inspire passion, identify opportunities, and engage strengths for change, creativity, and innovation. Leadership is key to any community's ability to use its capabilities adaptively in new ways. Leadership unleashes new dreams, dreams that go beyond what we've so far imagined possible. Leadership inspires people to dream beyond what they’ve ever thought possible.
 
The role of leader is to dream the impossible and inspire the improbable.
 
Management is the opposite intention - to maintain predictability through the administration of compliance. Management is the administration of compliance to policies and procedures. It is focused on making the trains run on time. When we want the consistency of no negative surprises, management is a tool to make that happen. It is the tool of the formal organization to maintain predictability.
 
Leadership is about inspiring and engaging adaptive variation, change, and creativity beyond what has already been accomplished through managed compliance. Leadership is the domain of everything in the organization that cannot be predicted or controlled. It's designed to handle things that happen unplanned. Leadership's prime value is in situations outside the box of prescribed behaviors in the organization - in the white spaces on the organization chart where things happen unplanned.
 
The prime tools of management are instructions; the prime tools of leadership are conversations. The purpose of leadership is to create conversations with an intention to create new ways of combining capabilities for new levels of performance.

peace...

jack

_/\_
jack ricchiuto
www.designinglife.com
two.one.six.three.seven.three.seven.four.seven.five


------------Original Message------------
From: EVERETT813 at aol.com
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Date: Fri, Nov-5-2004 12:26 PM
Subject: Re: Muddling Through

In a message dated 11/5/04 4:29:38 AM, hhowen at comcast.net writes:



Chris wrote: Why is management that says it wants to innovate so afraid of
mess?

I guess that is pretty simple. Most managers are trained and paid to avoid
messes. Not too long ago (and maybe still) the shorthand answer to the
question: What is good management? -- was "Make the plan, manage to the
plan, and meet the plan." In short -- always be in control and never make a
mess. Your Mother wouldn't like it and neither will your Boss.

Harrison

Chris, Harrison, et. al.,

Just a quick comment on "mess".  In the Creative Problem Solving Institute's paradigm of CPS, there is an initial state called "sorting out the Fuzzy Mess" wherein all the issues, anxieties, problems, etc., that are exercising the organization are sorted out and some chosen to continue on into the CPS sequence (Fact-Finding, Problem Finding, Idea Finding, Solution Finding, Acceptance Finding, then on to Implementation).  It's a little linear to speak of a CPS process because it is really more like a helix but it serves for learning purposes.  

At any rate, when I'm working with an organization I often will introduce the idea of "Messiness" as a positive good, an excellent beginning state, one which allows us "not to know".  (Imagine that, "I don't know" becomes OK).  Which state relieves considerable pressure and reassures the participants, especially top management, that there is a way to sort through the difficulties they are facing or experiencing without have the burden of omniscience to deal with, too.  It's just a little device to say that chaos is natural, always present, and actually needed in order for change to occur.  I'm often surprised at how "new" this fundamental idea is and how much it relaxes the situation.

Paul Everett

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