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 […]

First Principles Based Leadership – Improving our Contextual 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 and cultural awareness. In this post, we will explore the importance of context and contextual awareness and how can we become more aware of the contexts that we operate in. We live in a White Water World (as defined by John Seely Brown and Ann Pendleton-Jullian) where our environments tend to change pretty rapidly. Becoming aware of these changes in context is easy as they stare you in your face. Sometimes, we see small shifts over […]

Leading in a White Water World

Premise John Seely Brown and Ann-Pendleton Jullian call the world we currently live in a white water world, constantly changing, evolving and emerging. In this two part series they share their insights from their book – Design Unbound. They talk about how do you design your systems for emergence rather than stability (large corporate) or growth (startup). I would highly recommend watching these two talks (each about an hour long) to understand what it would take to lead in such a white water world and how to design your systems for emergence. Part 1 In this part, they discuss the […]