05 Nov, 2006

Daryl Ogden    Julie Androshick

Our readers might think we planned it this way, but for reasons the editors of Growth Edge are not quite sure of, all the contributions to this issue focus on the blind spots professionals experience in their respective working situations. While this fact may reveal our own editorial blind spots, our sense is that revealing blind spots to clients is what so much of executive coaching and leadership development is about

05 Nov, 2006

By Joan Wofford

When we choose to pursue a leadership position, most of us aspire to make significant improvements in an organization or an entire organizational system. Frequently, despite our best intentions and efforts, we fail to achieve significant changes. We find, often to our bewilderment, that we have not inspired the trust and credibility required for effective change. We fail to earn constituents’ trust because our actions are often discrepant with our words and we lose credibility because we do not get things done.

05 Nov, 2006

By Neil Stroul

In all our work, my Kenning Associates colleagues and I focus on a particular aspect of being human, meaning-making. Human experiences are woven together to create a sense of coherence or continuity. We live in time, in which our present experiences relate to both our past and our future by a subjective sense of sequence. We perceive that sequence as a narrative. In other words, we make sense of our experiences by representing them as stories. In its simplest form, a story is nothing more than our account of the relationship between an effect (“what happened”) and its cause. In fact, any time we hear another person use the word “because” we may as well prepare ourselves to listen to a story.

05 Nov, 2006

By Paul Atkins

Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be. - H.F. Amiel. The Private Journal of Henri Fréderic Amiel (1889)

Think of someone you know who repeats the same ineffective patterns over and over again even though they are aware of more effective ways of behaving. You might be thinking, for example, of:

•A leader who continues to fall back on a command-and-control view of the world despite publicly acknowledging the impossibility of addressing their organisation’s issues from within this mode of being

•A salesman who continues to express his anger inappropriately despite repeated examples of the ways in which it is detrimental to his experience

•An academic who continues to see herself as being in competition when she consciously proclaims the benefits of collaboration