My sixteen-year-old daughter Genevieve has spent this semester of her Grade 12 year involved in an experiential business leadership program with 47 other students from across our region. One of their final assignments was to organize a charity gala in six weeks. That gala happened two nights ago. I’m still buzzing. It was a magical evening and one that I expect will be a transformative marker in the lives of many of those young people. The process was an amazing example of collaborative leadership that I trust you will find inspiring and relevant.
Continue reading “Break the Bar”Big Word
Do you have a “big word” for 2019?
You may have heard about this. Choosing a single word that acts as a “north star” for your year. Recently I’ve connected with people whose 2018 words were calm, conviction, action, pirate and steam train. The possibilities are endless, see?
I’m not very good at single words. I’m more of a “series of big categories” kind of thinker. But I did have a word to guide my work in 2018. It started out as “fearless.” Then it got either downgraded or upgraded, depending on your perspective, to “brave.” That seemed more authentic to me. I can’t control being fearful, but I can control if I behave bravely in the face of those fears.
Continue reading “Big Word”Filling in the Blanks
In the absence of information, we make assumptions.
Humans look for patterns. We love to fill in the blanks. And when we don’t know an answer, we fill in those blanks based on our own ideas, often in the absence of evidence. This works well when playing Mad Libs, less well on math tests, and really poorly when it comes to collaborative decision-making.
Conviction
When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your objective.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
In recent posts, we’ve been exploring how to decide how to make decisions. We’ll cycle back to that topic, but for now my attention has turned to something that needs to happen once a decision has been made: follow through with it.
How to Decide How to Decide
As promised in an earlier post, here I will work through the steps of a group criteria-setting exercise. This is the how-to of “deciding how to decide before deciding.”