Ann Badillo Leadership

How to Balance Power and Love-- Adam Kahane

Scenario planning and social change expert Adam Kahane suggests that to master large and difficult challenges, leaders need to learn to act and empathize simultaneously.

Adam Kahane’s book Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2010) opens with a quote from one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speeches, his last presidential speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “Power without love,” said King, “is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

See strategy + business article by Art Kleiner

How to Balance Power and Love.

Mother Lode Post

Here are some links to further describe in detail some of the models, concepts and thought leaders I presented. Please feel free to post any comments as to what resonates with your work, practice and clients.

The Beginning of the (rapid) End of the Petroleum Era Change

Futurist John L. Petersen of The Arlington Institute  is a regarded scenario thinker. Read this Alert and buy a hybrid now.

Message from John L. Petersen:

For quite a number of years different analysts and observers have forecast the “peaking” of oil – reaching the point of maximum global production – which would be followed by less oil pumped and higher prices. Others, primarily those related somewhat with the oil industry or the government, argued that in the past, technology advancements have always allowed producers to find more oil where it was previously was thought either impossible or uneconomical. Well, they appear to have been quite wrong. In the last six months even mainline sources are now discussing peak oil without smirking and depreciating the idea.

The indicators have been there for some time. Some said that with the Saudi’s pumping the same amount for the last two years (and spurning President Bush’s multiple requests for increased production) it was obvious that the world had peaked. The Mexicans have peaked. The North Sea has peaked. It was only a matter of time before it became common sense.

Here, from John Mauldin’s “Out of the Box” is David Galland’s rather succinct – and galvanizing – analysis, which portends great change in the energy sector in the coming years. The jockeying and global manipulations will begin in earnest quite soon, as it becomes clear that the fuel that has given us most of everything we have is rapidly running down. And the price of oil will only increase while alternative energy breakthroughs will amaze. The disruption will be significant. The world will move rapidly toward becoming all-electric. Welcome to the new (energy) age.

The Arlington Institute  specializes in thinking about global futures and trying to influence rapid, positive change.

Don't Just Do Something, Stand There

This book is much more than a menu for how to run meetings more effectively, although yes, it is filled with strikingly simple and practical steps to make a gathering of any kind more humane and productive.

But in a deeper context, it embodies a particular theory and philosophy of leadership and planning that recognize that every person does the best they can with what they have, and that people come equipped with the capacity for extraordinary cooperation if given a chance to use their own experience and wisdom.

I contributed a case study to the book based on some work I did with HopeLink a start up in Silicon Valley in 2000. See Chapter 5 entitled Find Common Ground, page 85 of the Weisbord and Janoff book.

The technique of backcasting from the future creates an opportunity for people to tap into their deepest hopes and heartfelt dreams for the future. When a meeting calls for future scenarios you can ask people to put themsevles X years in the future and imagine their dreams as it they have been realize; describe structure, policies and relationships in the present tense; and look back to the single most important step they had to take x years earlier to get started.

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

Thirty years ago, Pierre Wack, a French oil executive with a personal affinity for Indian mystics, realized that strategy as it had been practiced -- straight-line extrapolations from the past, forecasts captured in three-ring binders -- did little to frame the choices that would define the future. The true role of strategy was to describe a future worth creating -- and then to reap the competitive advantages of preparing for it and making it happen. Strategy, in other words, was about telling stories.

Under Wack's influence, Royal Dutch/Shell learned the art of strategy as storytelling -- creating scenarios about the future. Scenarios are carefully crafted tales that link certainties and uncertainties about the future to the decisions that must be made today. Scenario planning -- or "scenario thinking," as Wack called it -- has made Shell an industry leader.

Scenario planning has spread from Shell to other corporate giants. Companies have learned how to frame the future by describing bookend scenarios, stories that offer vastly different trajectories and starkly opposing outcomes. But as the pace of change has accelerated, that textbook approach to scenarios has come to seem as antiquated as the old three-ring binders.

How do you frame choices when everything is up for grabs? Shell's answer: Go back to Wack. At the offices of Royal Dutch/ Shell in London, the scenario team has given birth to TINA -- There is no alternative -- a strategy conceit that meets uncertainty halfway by driving a stake into the ground. TINA says, Here's what we know about the future. Now let's go meet it.

The Man Who Was the Future Strategy and Business Article

Leadership Skill #5: Futuring

This is a section of an edited transcript from "Seven leadership Skills to accelerate your business results: Managing in complexity uncertainty and change" authored by me, Ann Badillo.

The fifth leadership skill is what I call futuring, or scenario thinking. This is how we bring the THERE here. Often, what we want to do is be able to anticipate the future, and scenario thinking is really about both anticipating the future and rehearsing the future by creating alternative future environments in which we can recognize warning signs, avoid surprises, adapt and act efficiently. Executives and leaders like to run scenarios; it’s a favorite module and technique that we use in our work. Run a win scenario, run a lose  scenario, run a wild card scenario at whatever level of the organization you're at, and see

where the thinking goes. This is probably one of the most active processes or modules to use to think about what it is that you’re really trying to predict or anticipate in the future.

So futuring is an important skill to have. There's a technique called back-casting, where you allow yourself to be in positive future. So pick a date in the future--go to 2010, and you're in a successful win, whatever your win is. And think back and tell your story from success about your wins and free your team from any type of negative constraints. Let them tell you how they got there in a positive environment.

What will emerge out of this process of back-casting is sequencing and order. How did you get there? What did you do right? Who came along? What connections were made? Back-casting is a really, really powerful technique when used as part of scenario thinking and futuring.

So now what happens? What’s next? What happens when we're scanning, and what happens in the creative process, and what happens when we’re engaging other voices, and when we’re iterating and futuring, is that something starts to emerge.

Processes & Thought Leadership

Here's a collection of processes and thought leaders that I use in my practice:

Open Space Technology
Open Space Technology is an approach to organizing large-scale, participative meetings in which diverse groups come together for the purposes of managing complex issues in short periods of time, with no advance agenda, and minimal facilitation. This approach to meetings, most often attributed to Harrison Owen, generally results in a report of all topics and discussions generated by participants, isolation of critical "focal issues," and identification of next step actions. Open Space is widely known for its Four Principles: 1) Whoever comes is the right people, 2) Whatever happens is the only thing that could have, 3) Whenever it starts if the right time, 4) When it’s over it’s over, and its Law of Two Feet, which allows for movement of participants from discussion to discussion, given their judgment of where they can best learn and contribute.

See www.openspaceworld.org/cgi/wiki.cgi?AboutOpenSpace