Learning cultures have the capacity to agree to everything – that does not mean they must agree with everything. Change flows and when everything is seen. Once difficult perspectives are aired and respected they lose their grip on the agenda and learning grows.
This requires patient work where dialogue skills are key. Emergent facilitation is an especially useful technique for surfacing meaning. It involves creating “practice fields” where identity can connect with new pictures of the future.
Craft goals in the language and worldview of the prevailing culture while enabling people to make sense of those goals in their own terms. This is the work of the bi-culturalist.
In times of crisis you need to be able to make decisions based on what it right and not on what is most comfortable. When you are really scared – what have you got to hang on to? The only thing is to hang on to is – what is the right thing to do? Because nothing else can be trusted as real.
Leaders who feel they must come up with the perfect plan endure huge pressure. In playing the role of the heroic leader they become the organisational bottle neck. In telling everyone that they know the way forward; they disempower everyone around them. This mind set is the main obstacle to agility.
In addition to our ability to analyse and predict we need to learn to engage directly with what is happening now so that we can learn faster from what just happened. Organisational strategy becomes “just-in-time” and “just-in-case” supported by more investment in general knowledge, diversity, the ability to do a quick study and the capacity to respond to intuition.