Building leadership & organizational resilience

We define Leadership as an “act of improving the ‘status quo’ while simultaneously serving as a role-model to others for one’s behaviour.”

The visible decisions, behaviour and actions a leader takes to create the final outcome is sourced from the invisible inner leadership paradigms from which leaders operate. As such, we will call the sum of all the invisible dimensions of leadership the ‘Leadership Operating System’.

To build future resilience in a rapidly changing world, it is insufficient to simply install new ‘apps’ onto an outdated operating system. To succeed in the difficult task of leadership, the leaders today need to first upgrade their operating system.

As our civilisation’s needs and principal activities changed across the course of human history, so did our social structures and the demands on people who took the positions of leadership in each of the different time periods. Survival, Tribal, Heroic, Hierarchy, Success and Authentic leadership have sustained our world to date and have contributed to where we are today.

However, due to the unprecedented nature of the challenges facing our world today, a new leadership operating system is needed to help us build the future we want to live in.

Leaders and their development need to be approached through an integral lens, combining their inner and outer dimensions as individuals as well as within the context of the collective systems they belong to and operate in. This gives us 4 fundamental dimensions in which leaders aspiring to successfully lead today need to grow themselves.

When leaders develop or acquire new skills, techniques and knowledge within their existing leadership paradigm, we refer to it as ‘horizontal development.’ When they access new leadership paradigms and develop towards a more nuanced and skilful way to make sense of the world, we refer to it as ‘vertical development.’

To help leaders build their future resilience, we need to combine integral understanding with vertical development tools and approaches to develop a radically new and effective inner operating system enabling unheard levels of performance, radical inclusiveness and ability to re-frame and resolve difficult problems.

To develop future resilience in both leaders and their organizations, we have defined a simple framework with 6 key ‘anchors’ that provide clarity, stability and resourcefulness in a rapidly changing world while at the same time, act as a launchpad into the future.

At an individual level, leaders need to build clarity around their purpose, act from a future-oriented growth mindset, source their actions in empathy, display integrity and ethics in their decisions, develop and maintain their vitality and manage their own internal state.

At an organizational level, leaders need to ensure clarity of an overarching purpose, its translation into an effective organizational strategy and efficient operations, existence of ethical governance systems, resourceful culture and an ongoing capacity for agility, innovation and organizational learning and reinvention.

Our leadership development and innovation services are built on the above dimensions and ensure your organization can prepare itself for an uncertain future.