In the future we need to envision a new leadership story – one that involves a transformation in awareness from performance to presence, from uniformity to uniqueness, from abstraction to beauty, from efficiency to improvisation and from instrumentality to the expressive power of story and voice. Together they awaken a commons of the imagination – a collective field of possibility that transforms our mechanistic view of the world to a more sustainable and transcendent vision that is creative, organic and whole.
The primary purpose of Leading Artfully is to explore these fundamental shifts in awareness in the context of cultivating a mind that is more subtle, imaginative, and free-flowing in order to engage a complex and interconnected world.
As we struggle with new discontinuities and fragmentation, it is clear that we cannot apply the same strategies we used to create our known world to change it. Instead we will need to cultivate new disciplines of the imagination. The future will belong to those who understand the need for these new disciplines as the foundation for wisely navigating a larger unknown. They recognize that this emerging story cannot be seen or planned objectively, but may be sensed and felt with an awakened and perceptive eye.
To cultivate this awakened eye we will need to develop leaders who are capable of:
- Leading from presence and uniqueness.
- Leading from a balance of power and beauty.
- Leading without a script.
- Leading through the language of metaphor and story.
Each of the four days in this immersion experience will explore one of these four pathways to the imagination. In so doing, participants will discover a new sense of faithfulness in their own life, their own way of uniquely seeing things, their own golden thread of meaning and possibility, and trust in the deep authority of their own subjective experience. Through the weaving of improvised musical performances, time in nature, guided processes and reflection, story, poetry and generative conversation, this program will offer a candle to those seeking to cultivate new habits of mind that may awaken the potential for personal and collective transformational leadership, learning and change.
Program Objectives and Outcomes
While participants can be assured of deriving multiple learnings from this course that are both deeply personal and practical, there is a set of core objectives and intended outcomes, that will be common for all.
- To better understand the relationship between personal transformation and collective leadership and how this synergy deepens the quality of collective engagement.
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To master new and powerful habits of mind that align with the creative impulse and evoke the imagination as an active force in our lives.
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To learn to be stewards of our own uniqueness and gifts so that we may help others connect with the roots of their our own aliveness and possibility.
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To awaken our own subtle perception through cultivating a sense of belonging and the beauty of place.
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To experience the power of speaking our own story and finding our own authentic voice.
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To be sensitive for listening into the spaces between for detecting subtle meaning, emergent possibility and purposeful action.
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To develop the wisdom to ask evocative questions and the patience to hold presence in face of uncertainty and a larger unknown.
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To re-imagine our calling to be stewards of the commons as the blank canvas for connecting with fulfilling the collective possibilities in our own community or organization.
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