LEADERSHIP Its not just for leaders anymore

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LEADERSHIP Its not just for leaders anymore
Dr. Tom Keenan, I.S.P., CISSP Professor, Faculty
of Environmental Design Dept. of Computer
Science University of Calgary

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WHY Leadership?

• "We do not believe in ourselves until someone
  reveals that deep inside us something is
  valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our
  trust, sacred to our touch.
• Once we believe in ourselves we can risk
  curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any
  experience that reveals the human spirit.
• e.e. cummings (1894-1962)

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Story Cullen Jennings

• Raised on a fishing boat in Duncan, B.C.
• Had a wicked sense of humor
• Attended Shad Valley in 1986
• Went on to earn honours degrees in Math (B.Sc.,
  M.Sc.) at U of Calgary
• Started PhD program at UBC
• Dropped out of the program
• Sent us a press release in 2000

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Im not trying to take credit, but

• Cullen says what happened to him at Shad Calgary
  in 1986 had a lot to do with this
• He came back in 2004 and gave back to the Shad
  community

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Cullen at Shad
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From The Leaders Brain by Bastiaan Heembergen

• Doing it without thinking about it (Blink)
• Neuroplasticity
• Improvisation
• In business , creativity and art are most
  frequently confined to the advertising and
  marketing departments
• Leadership through Art
• Exercise Play a piece of music and write down
  the thoughts that it brings into your mind.

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An exercise

• Write down five questions that come to mind,
  things that you would love to know the answers
  to.
• Write down any common themes that come to mind.

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Characteristics of a Good Leader

• Leaders need to develop intellectual humility and
  suspend judgment
• On the surface, it sounds like a tension, because
  leaders are expected to take charge
• Journal of Cognitive Science article people
  overestimate their understanding of a problem

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Characteristics of a Good Leader

• Leaders need to increase their capacity to
  voluntarialy attend in an age of continuous
  partial attention
• Leaders need to diminish their inattentional
  blindness and over-reliance on analytical/logical
  tools and look at voluntary attention and
  unclutter their mind.

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Our lives have changed!

• Balance between business time and leisure time is
  blurred,
• Many leaders are 24/7 personalities
• Too little attention is left over to participate
  in the world on its own terms, to be surprised,
  to learn new things, to empathize.
• Giving full attention to a problem is not the
  best recipe for providing fresh perspectives and
  thoughts.
• Need to create safe external and internal
  environments that release voluntary attention.

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Mindfulness for Leaders

• Are we mindless? Sometimes
• Mindfulness is a state of alertness and lively
  awareness that is manifested in active
  information processing, characterized by the
  creation and refinement of categories, and
  distinctions and the awareness of multiple
  perspectives. Ellen Langer

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Story IDEOThe best ideas are in the cracks

• Most influential design firm in the world
• one of the largest and arguably most innovative
  product design firms in the world, with more than
  300 employees and annual revenues of over 50
  million
• "I think the really interesting things are
  happening between what we used to know as the
  conventional disciplines,"
• David M. Kelley, IDEO founder

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Moving from either/or to both/and thinking

• Almost everyone has something good to say, for
  example good intentions
• Beware of setting up either/or choices
• Try to come from abundance, not scarcity

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One summary of the IDEO method

• Gather insightful, motivated human beings,
  regardless of disciplinary background
• Put them under intense deadline pressure, yet
  pamper them in ways that reinforce a sense of
  community
• Challenge them to do great, creative work
• Stand back as they blow you away with sideways
  solutions the likes of which the world has never
  seen.

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From a review of the Art of Innovation

• A great deal of the book outlines the emphasis
  that IDEO puts on the treatment of their
  employees
• Quick and frequent prototyping as a key to
  success.
• All projects start by assigning a "hot" team and
  letting them brainstorm and prototype their way
  into some great ideas. No details are given on
  how the teams are formed or managed

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A leader is a human in a sea of VM, IVR, BOTS

• Futurist Raymond Kurzweil predicts computer power
  will surpass human brain around 2025
• The Point of Singularity
• Living proof why were not there yet

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A leader says its half full
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And remember