Building on her previous work, Time to Think, which came out in 1984, Nancy Kline asks us a question: “I ponder what it will take to produce a planet of people thinking for themselves.” And she postulates the answer: “Turning our organizations and governments and religions and schools and families into thinking environments.” This is...
In a workshop for a global company, a group of senior executives have just watched a short video clip of the Oscars where Warren Beatty opens the envelope for the award he is to announce with Faye Dunaway – pauses, does a double check for another card, pauses again, and eventually shows the card to...
When delegating the complete decision to someone else (level 6 on the ladder of leadership) the temptation is to just say “You go make the decision” because we want to get the issue off our plate as soon as possible. It seems like this shows confidence in the other person’s ability to make the decision....
Industrial Age leadership programmed leaders who would know the answers, tell the team what to do and get them to do it. We would say about these people that they can “make things happen.” The structure was biased toward doing. The idea is that knowing and telling are linked. The person who knows the right...
Most of us have been programmed to run meetings based on an Industrial Age model that encourages consensus and conformity rather than a free exchange of ideas. Because of this, decision opportunities are missed, and when decisions are made, they are more likely to be a continuation of the current activities, or tacit support of...
Love the idea of the new playbook for leaders but having trouble remembering the new plays and how to implement them? Here’s a set of 8 one-page summary sheets for many of the key concepts in Leadership is Language as well as the plays. The 8 one-pagers cover: The new playbook for leaders (the 6...
Wouldn’t it be great if we did all the things we were supposed to do, every day. Well, at some point or another, each of us runs into our own habits — habits and patterns in our lives that we’ve created that move us toward or away, from our goals. Your habits determine who you...
The joy of an industrial age organization is that we separated the doers from the deciders. If you were a decider (also known as a boss, leader, white-collar, salaried person) then you made decisions for what the doers (also know as followers, blue-collar, hourly person) ought to do. Since the workforce was not involved in...
From Boeing (737MAX, 787 rollout) to NASA (Columbia, Challenger), we’ve seen disastrous examples of how bad news from people low in the hierarchy gets distorted as it moves to the top of the organization. The distortion is consistently in one direction: it mitigates the bad news, making it sound less severe and less likely than...
Q: What are some ways for people to tell if they have some invisible hierarchy? In terms of language, too. What are some of the cues, like if you were to go back and read somebody’s email, what are the phrases you look for? A: It’s in the ways that we enforce hierarchy. There...
