The Law of the Loaf

One of the responsibilities of leaders is to organise our people and create contexts within which they operate. This context has a significant impact on the results that the teams can achieve. One way we put in place these contexts is through the culture we operate under (intentionally or unintentionally). And this decides how we interact with each other – as one entity moving toward the goal or as individuals working on each our own goals. It is fairly evident that we are much more effective when we are all working towards a common shared goal. So, the question is […]

Streets, Roads, Stroads and Leadership Effectiveness

I was listening to a podcast episode on 99% Invisible hosted by the inimitable Roman Mars and they were talking about Stroads, which piqued my curiousity. So, today, we will explore this topic but from a leadership lens. Before we go ahead, I think it makes sense for us to define each one of these terms and what it means. Roads: A road is defined as a medium to move vehicles (cars, trucks, etc) from one point to another as quickly as possible. By this definition, all your highways and express ways are all roads. Streets: Street is a medium […]

Leaders, Futures and Foresight

As leaders, we are expected to have a vision of the future that we are leading our teams towards. To build this vision, we need to be able to think of the potential and probable futures, to decide and pick the one that we want to move towards. So, we need to learn to think about futures and learn the skill of foresight. Here is a conversation in which futurist Sohail Inayatullah (from MetaFutures) shares his perspectives with examples about thinking of transformational futures. Here are some lessons I learnt from listening in to this conversation. As leaders, we live […]

Overcoming Resistance to Change

We live in a world with accelerating pace of change. For all us leaders, this accelerating change comes with the necessity to respond to these changes in a coherent, strategic and urgent ways. This translates into starting and leading change initiatives within our teams. So much so that there is change fatigue that has started to set in. This fatigue often leads to resistance to change. There are many other reasons for the resistance to change. Tired leaders who forget to involve the teams in their thinking about the “Why”, “What” and the “How” of the change initiatives. Tired communications […]