Four Assumptions....Six Literacies.....Appreciative Practices

In years of looking at and considering the ton of literature on and approaches to leadership, I found myself overwhelmed by which model to choose, especially when most of the work being offered pointed to one way of being or one focus:

§  Adaptive leadership

§  Servant leadership

§  Creative leadership

§  Resonant leadership

§  Values-based leadership

§  Strengths-based leadership

§  Transformative leadership

§  Collaborative leadership

§  Compassionate leadership

§  Heart-based leadership

I’m sure you can fill in more models and examples.  They’re all good.  All the models seem to have legitimacy but without enough scope or practicality to encompass the complexity of our challenges right now.  

I began reflecting on and studying the lists of important literacies and competencies for the 21^st Century—there are lots of lists—and what is important for leaders began to surface: four assumptions that create a platform for six broad literacies: skills that every leader should have some competency and literacy in, resting on a platform of four assumptions about humans.

The more I played with these, the more I saw that the work I had done for fifteen years with the principles of Appreciative Inquiry fit very well with them in terms of turning literacies into daily practice.

That’s the basis for the studio workshop above.  

I will also be offering a half-day overview of this work at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill on May 21^st for their Center for Faculty Excellence.

Stay tuned for an unfolding of the six literacies over the next weeks.

                  

Leadership Literacies: Platformation Assumption #4

Sorry for being away and taking such a long time to get these four platformation assumptions up--it's been a busy time, and then of course, like you, I am always rethinking things.

Assumption 4: Information Eaters. The rate of available data will continue to increase exponentially and we want to take it all in.

But no one can learn it all, track it all, decide what’s reliable or integrate it all on his or her own. We have to network and partner more and more with one another and with technology to augment and extend our brain capacities and to find ways to make sense of it all. We are learning to selectively tap, mine and map the global stream of data and turn it into useful information, knowledge, and perhaps even wisdom.  We’re having to rethink how and where we place our attention.  We’re learning to do it together, how to tap one another, how to depend on one another to co-hold the world of information in ways that haven’t been required before.

The age we live in presents us with unique challenges to our attention. It requires a new form of attention and a different style of focus that necessitates both a new approach to learning and a redesign of the classroom and the workplace. Cathy N. Davidson. Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn, 2011, p. 10.

In the new information economy, expertise is less about having a stockpile of information or facts at one’s disposal and increasingly about knowing how to find and evaluate information on a given topic.    Thomas, Douglas and John Seeley Brown, New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, 2011.

The continued proliferation of available information will drive and be driven by further digital developments, creating opportunities and challenges we may not yet be well prepared for.

…knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is, like it or not, an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century.  Just as learning to drive an automobile [or at least learning how to survive as a pedestrian] was crucial for citizens of the early twentieth century, learning how to deploy attention in relation to available media is key today for success in education, business and social life. Howard Rheingold, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, 2012, p. 2.

What information are you eating for breakfast today?