Food for Thought Blog > Leaders as gardeners
I love this! We are all just waiting now for the soil to warm enough for germination and then I imagine the growth will be flourishing and exuberant.
Annie
Being an avid gardener, I love this analogy. I take great delight especially this time of year watching my new plants emerge and grow. I had the wonderful opportunity to do the same thing with people in a large organization when I ran the Latin America Region for a big Pharma company. Henri is right on the mark...until you actually play with approaches that liberate the thinking, imagination, and talent that lives in any organization, it is virtually impossible to appreciate what can happen. Permission and support need to come from the top, but the best results come when the actual work starts at the bottom and moves up.
Grey
“Liberate the thinking, imagination and talent that lives in the …” What a wonderful job description Grey! I don’t know why but as I write this I am reminded of my art classes in secondary school in France. Clearly my art teacher wasn’t concerned about liberating my imagination and talent. Instead he insisted on “teaching” me to make drawings that bore some resemblance to the Greek statues on display at the front of the class. Both of us failed miserably and after a few classes he convinced me I had no artistic talent whatsoever. Since he was the expert I believed him, moved to the back of the class and stopped trying. My grandchildren have since proven to me that every child is in fact a naturally born artist.
Henri Lipmanowicz
This is such a fantastic debut website! Congratulations! I have been working with Keith for the last few years on the Liberating Structures here in British Columbia, Canada (in health care). They are really taking off in places I could never have known! I teach some of the more practical ones for work right at the front line in our Quality Academy (Quality Improvement for Health Care Providers) and very recently to a room full of front-line surgery providers. They LOVED the LS work and absolutely could use it. I am really working with how we can use the art of questioning to inspire creative thinking and deep thinking. There is a really cool article on it at this link: http://ow.ly/bcsnA
Thanks for this great work Keith and Henri!!!
Katie Procter
CONGRATULATIONS! Accomplishing this monumental project must be in itself a "Liberating Structure" for Henri and Keith. This is an inspiring endeavor that you guys are pursuing. We have LS all around us in nature, but we do not observe enough to discover them. I am truly excited about the prospects you have. Bon Chance!
David Velez
As always...I am a fan. Thank you for the generous gift of your insights and playfully serious, but gentle, provocations. I look forward to seeing your forthcoming book, once published. I am anxious, but excited, to try some of these LS in the classroom! Oh, the possibilities for these conventionally and highly constrained places of "learning"! I would love to connect with others who might be interested in looking at and using LS in the classroom at all levels of education.
Darren Stanley
In a recent Op Ed Thomas Friedman quotes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos "the job of the company leader now is changing fast: “You have to think of yourself not as a designer but as a gardener” — seeding, nurturing, inspiring, cultivating the ideas coming from below". I wholeheartedly agree but in my experience Including people from all levels of the organization in shaping the future, particularly people from the frontline, is not standard practice. As a consequence the vast majority of leaders haven't had the opportunity to learn how to do this practically. Most structures are still designed to operate top down, to tell and instruct rather than to listen and learn.
Wanting to do what Jeff Bezos is recommending is one thing. Knowing how to do it is another. Liberating Structures provide an easy way for leaders to act their way into this new way of thinking.