Tag: First Principles Based Leadership

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership Requires First Order Learning

Premise I read this post by John Hunter, which was originally published in 2014 but is still very relevant. In this blog, he shares one key insight from the work of Deming – managing (or leading) can’t be taught (prescriptive) and needs to be learnt (experiential). First Order Learning Vs Second Order Learning One needs to learn to lead by leading and to manage by managing. We can learn from our own experience (first order learning) or from the experience of those who have gone before us (second order learning). When we learn from our own experience, we start to […]

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – 4 Ways to Know Anything

Premise I was introduced to John Vervaeke and his work by the inimitable Matt Church who leads the Thought Leaders Business School and is based in Australia. John is an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. He says that there are four different ways we can know things, which he calls the 4P’s of Knowing. These are about the manners in which and the mechanisms of knowing something rather than the content of the knowledge itself or how we know about something rather than what we know of. The four ways (4P’s) […]

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership: Six Perspectives That can Help us Transform from Good leaders to Great Leaders

Premise The most important act we do as a leader is our interactions with those we lead. The quality of these interactions lead to the results we achieve through them. To transform from average or good leaders to great leaders, we need to develop the ability to assess any given interaction and respond based on the need of the situation and the person we are interacting with. I believe that we can do this well, if we can learn to think and behave from six different perspectives for every interaction we have with our team and then choose which perspective […]

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – Introducing Systems Thinking for Leaders

Premise This post is relevant for you irrespective of where you are currently situated in leadership ladder (Individual contributor, team lead, leading teams, leading managers, leading lines of business or leading organisations). While systemic awareness this is a foundational skill, it gets more and more crucial as you climb the leadership ladder. So, we would be better off learning about this while we are early in our careers and build on it as we grow by adding nuances and being intentional and learning from our experiences interacting with systems. What is a system? Before we can start to understand or […]

Leadership

First Principles Based Leadership – Building our Systemic Awareness

Premise In this series of posts about First Principles Based Leadership, we have already covered the importance of and how to improve our self awareness, social awareness, cultural awareness and contextual awareness. In this post, we will explore the importance of systemic awareness and how can we continue to improve our ability to understand and be more aware of the systems within which we operate in. We live in a world where everything is inter connected. There is a system at every level of abstraction and these systems create the limits to our efficiency. Systems awareness refers to the ability to understand and identify the […]