Open Heart: Open Mind

OPEN HEART – OPEN MIND

Awakening to the Five Literacies

of Global Leadership

Richard David Hames

Copyright 2012 by The Hames Group

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Richard David Hames. All Rights Reserved.

First Published by The Hames Group. 128/9 Moo Baan Golden Nakara. On Nut Soi 65. Bangkok 10250. Thailand.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted legally, without the prior written permission of the author at [email protected].

Disclaimer: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. If in doubt you should consult with a professional before implementing any specific suggestions printed herein. Neither the publisher nor the author will be responsible for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

ISBN: 9781301692828

By the Same Author:

The Management Myth: Exploring the essence of future organisations

Burying the 20th Century: New paths to new futures

The Five Literacies of Global Leadership: What authentic leaders know and you need to find out

Dedicated with my love to Suna

and to our son Dominique Oliver

Don't walk behind me, I may not lead.

Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow.

Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Albert Camus

Contents

Foreword: Open Heart – Open Mind

Manifesto: On Being a Five Literacies Leader

What Brings Us Here?

Masters Of Reality

A Whole New World

Work Of Art

The List

Make Up Your Mind

From Charisma To Consensus

What Is It About Words?

Weaker Signals

Intelligent Business

Two Thais

Deep Design

Meaning-Making

Reframing Strategy

How Leadership Development Fails

Open Heart – Open Mind

Awakening to the Five Literacies

My book The Five Literacies of Global Leadership: What Authentic Leaders Know and You Need to Find Out was the result of over ten years of intensive action-research from myself and my team. During that time we worked alongside some of the most inspirational people around - young and old, men and women - from all cultures and diverse walks of life.

Altogether we studied closely (through working with) 152 people ranging from Presidents and Heads of State to business leaders, entrepreneurs and community elders. You would recognise the names of many who are celebrities in their field. Others will be noticed only by those whose lives they have enriched. Unknown and unheralded, self-aggrandisement is not important to them.

These are all ordinary individuals doing extraordinary things. But they share an uncommon trait; an ethos allowing them to transcend personal ego and to move beyond obsession with mere materiality. This ethos is all about inspiring others to create better futures.

Additionally these people embody an evolutionary consciousness in the way they perceive possibilities and enact change.

During our inquiry we discovered amazing things about these people. How they think. What matters to them. How they respond to evidence on the one hand and intuition on the other. How it is they often occur to us as being intensely charismatic. Why they behave the way they do. And how it is they can become as loved in their private lives as they are celebrated in their work.

This ethos is present and observable in all Five Literacies leaders - regardless of age, rank, expertise, character, talents, circumstances, gender, culture or status. We discovered a multitude of ways individuals innately understood and applied this ethos of Open Heart – Open Mind to all ventures in their life’s journey.

This Open Heart – Open Mind ethos turns on its head much of what we previously understood leadership to be about. Far more than just a new take on old definitions of leadership, Open Heart – Open Mind is an epistemology; a way of perceiving and responding to stimuli that integrates an elevated sense of inner self with an openness to continuously scanning for relevant exterior signals in what can only be thought of as an expanded now.

Applied to business leadership the spirit of Open Heart – Open Mind is based on a set of viewpoints that are relatively uncommon, in comparison with more orthodox leadership beliefs and tenets. However they do explain why Five Literacies leaders think and act differently than most of us:

1. We coevolve with the environment

The global environment for both business and government is changing more rapidly than at any time in our history. Yet the classic control and command approach to management, and its similarly unsophisticated leadership credo, that still persist in many enterprises, are bogged down within an irrelevant faith comprising crass metaphors, inane clichés and habitual practices that were common in 18th century factories, classrooms and prisons!

Many leaders are acutely uncomfortable with the volatility of today’s environment; with uncertainty and ambiguity. They act either as victims (in which case they are powerless to do anything to counter or adapt to the shock of the new) or as control freaks, trying in vain like some latter-day King Canute, to turn back the tide. In both instances they invariably opt for short-term strategies and ignore future value and societal relevance.

The same cannot be said about Five Literacies leaders. Five Literacies leaders know how to adapt, design a viable enterprise, anticipating and navigating the most hostile of conditions with supreme confidence. They use the Open Heart – Open Mind philosophy to tune into what must be done and to find the best ways of doing it.

2. Our enterprise is a living system

In a globalised world, the greatest danger to any sovereign economy arises from mediocre performance being accepted as the norm but being labelled exceptional by its architects. This is a delusion from which many businesses and government institutions suffer. Most organisations could be perhaps 100 times more effective were they not still designed primarily for efficiency, control and order, rather than for speed, adaptiveness and empathy.

But innovation only occurs where leaders liberate people and ideas by changing the language around what is possible, imagination, creativity and passion - rather than the ability to comply with outmoded rules and to obediently follow demoralising practices - is celebrated, and vitality is endemic within the enterprise.

Five Literacies leaders use the Open Heart – Open Mind ethos to know how living systems work. This is why their organisations are not bureaucratic. They look and feel different. They are learning networks and creative communities, not hierarchical compartments carrying out the orders of a detached and deluded elite.

3. Performance arises from systemic design

Almost all of the thinking, models, mechanisms, processes and tools being used in contemporary organisations conform to an obsolete model of how things actually work. As a consequence, more and more operational practices are becoming increasingly irrelevant, or need more and more effort to remain less and less effective.

Trapped within the constraints of past assumptions, performance becomes a fraction of what it could be – even in the hands of a supposedly brilliant CEO. By adhering to an obsolete paradigm we fail to challenge those orthodoxies that could liberate an entirely new era of performance and viability. Five Literacies leaders know that organic ecosystems are more viable and resilient than fabricated machines ever can be. They also understand that human systems can only ever produce what they have been designed to produce. So they apply ecological design principles to work, ensuring that the business functions in terms of information flows and relationships rather than artificial structures, intrusive rules and imposed pecking orders intended to generate compliance.

4. Purposeful change requires forensic analysis

We have been led to believe that change of any kind is difficult, takes time and effort, and will always be resisted in some quarters. This is pure myth. Change is easy and natural. It is the single greatest constant in all our lives. We are only likely to become discomforted or aggravated by change when it is imposed in a manner that is unnecessarily disruptive or does not result in healthier outcomes.

What is difficult about change is understanding which factors, out of so many possible variables, are causing the system to manifest in the way it does. If that present state is no longer desirable then we need to examine those constraints to find out why. Once unwanted constraints have been identified it becomes a matter of altering (or removing) these in order to gently nudge the system in a manner that allows our preferred state to evolve.

Five Literacies leaders know that intended change is simple if you can grasp what factors are causing current outcomes. If we genuinely understand an issue it is simple. If it is not simple then we do not understand it. Five Literacies leaders use the Open Heart – Open Mind code, together with their profound knowledge of the ecosystem, to ensure that change is simple, instant, non-invasive and affordable.

5. Our stories liberate new possibilities

When Jack Welch, the famed CEO of GE, was asked what had made him so successful, he replied that he was Irish and therefore knew how to tell a good yarn.

In a world weighed down with rules, regulations and data, authentic leaders know that telling powerful stories is the key to comprehending contextual dynamics, finding compelling ideas, gaining the confidence of markets and investors, engaging people in what is possible, communicating confidence for wise actions, and liberating imagination, creativity and passion.

Five Literacies leaders know that leadership is an art, a craft and a science: they embrace change by deliberately communicating compelling ideas through the telling of inspiring stories. They are master storytellers.

6. Profits are the applause we get for liberating people

Without a doubt, human enterprise conducted through business, trade and commerce has become society’s most effective change agent. Because of that, no business afford merely to mind its own business. We demand much more from corporations these days. Business has to create shared value. In many respects business is both a driver and a trendsetter for change.

Today’s global community demands a new worldcentric awareness and culture from governments and businesses alike. Consumers want organisations to demonstrate ethical principles and responsibility while delivering the best value in products and services. Activists want them to avoid damaging the environment. Leaders want their employees to feel fulfilled and not distressed. We all look to buy brands that resonate with our own identity, values and higher purpose. And all of us want all of this now – not next week or next year.

Five Literacies leaders know they can only change the world in cooperation with others. They use systemic intelligence to their advantage, aiming to align and satisfy all stakeholders, not just their investors and shareholders.

The six belief frames outlined above encapsulate an underlying philosophy that reveals a great deal about the mindset and values of Five Literacies leaders. They help explain how and why they make the decisions they do. As individuals, and as members of society, organizations and families, we are continually making decisions about how we live, what we are learning and how we should lead. The ways we think and speak about our world and our situation have vitally important consequences for our actions, values and ways of being in the world.

So it is with human enterprise. In this context we can think about business leadership in one of two ways. Both ways (metamodels) are related to how organizations move into their futures - particularly where they place their emphasis and focus their energies, and what they consider to be important, and not.

In one there is a clear-cut, undeviating mission. Let’s call this the corporate metamodel. The success of this model was assembled on the back of capitalism; for the primary driver of the corporate model is growth and efficiency. Indeed anything else, with the exception of value (interpreted in numerous ways, many of them conflicting) is considered to be a distraction to the real task in hand. Strategy is painstakingly put together by the CEO and the Board – occasionally with input from a few trusted senior executives. Efforts are taken to sustain the mission assisted by the leader whose role is to communicate the strategy clearly, with sufficient impact, to shareholders, market analysts and employees.

In this model it is quite common for even the most outrageously successful of business enterprises to feel indifferent to (even irritated by) any hint of a broader moral obligation in the way it chooses to operate. The purpose of the business is just that - to further its own business and to endure by remaining profitable for its investors. Responding to shifting values in society are considered to be distractions, and consequently outside of their scope, interest and capabilities, unless these directly impact customer sales.

Although many businesses adhering to these conventions have attempted to incorporate social and ethical obligations into the corporate culture, typically as a result of pressures from customers, staff and a concerned PR machine, this is mostly a pretence that can jeopardise performance and put the entire economic model under considerable stress.

Over the past century, aided by the financial leverage provided by company law to protect investors, this model has enjoyed considerable success. Indeed it has become so powerful a voice that for a while it foooled us into believing no alternative models were possible. Or if they were possible then they could not possibly be as effective. We forgot that effectiveness is an outcome of intentions. And these are shifting dramatically as we enter an era exposing the best and the worst of human intervention. Enter new prototypes...

In the alternative metamodel, which has gained significant credence over the past decade, the organization is considered an organic system, empathising and engaging with other living systems including society. Lets call this the shared value metamodel. Here the role of the leader is in facilitating emergence while