Ann Badillo Coaching

Trust the Experience Before You...

As our world encounters difficult times, on personal and collective levels, here is a good story from Joseph Campbell to remember:

A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation:

"As you go the way of life,
you will see a great chasm.
Jump.
It is not as wide as you think."

My friend and fellow coach, Edward Santana, dedicated this blog post to my daughter today.

Thank you, dear Edward.

Scenario Planning

 

Scenario planning is a discipline for rediscovering the original entrepreneurial power of creative foresight in contexts of accelerated change, greater complexity, and genuine uncertainty.

-- Pierre Wack

Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?

Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?

By JANET RAE-DUPREE

New York Times Published: May 4, 2008

Brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can encourage a way to innovation.

"...three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress. Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs."

Pema Chodron

"We are always at a crossroads, moment by moment. We can choose to open the wound further, creating more suffering for ourselves and others, or we can choose to heal the wound.”

Pema Chodron

Pema is one of my favorite Buddhist teachers.   I highly recommend any of her books.  She has written six books: The Wisdom of No Escape, Start Where You Are, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, The Places That Scare You, No Time to Lose and Practicing. The best selection of her articles and teachings  can be found on the Shambhala Sun site

Leadership Skill #6: Emerging

Emerging, and understanding the patterns of emergence and the zone of emergence, is the
sixth leadership skill. This is what happens when we come together as a system and see
patterns and interconnections. This is about feedback and self-organization and adaptive
learning.

It's important, as leaders, to create a time and place for your team, for your people, and
for your organization, where they might have a zone of emergence. Where do you have a
place for your patterns to unfold, to make connections, to connect the dots? This is really
the place for innovation and creativity to occur. I think blogs are a particularly interesting
zone of emergence. The whole blogging phenomenon is an online zone of emergence. In
teams that still have the ability to sit together, there'll be somebody's cube wall or hallway
where stuff will start to get posted—diagrams, drawing, comments, reports and
pictures—and you're able to visually map what it is that you're trying to figure out, be it a
new market, a new industry, a new product introduction, or a new service.

These zones of emergence happen in lots of different systems, from biology to geography
to societies, all the time. As leaders, I’d encourage you to be really aware of emergence.
Again, how do you create a zone of emergence for your team?

Spiral Dynamics--Integral Theory

My artist colleague and graphic facilitation friend, Brandy Agerbeck developed this illustration of Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory.