New Lenses on Leadership: Discovering the Power of Leadership Metaphors for Development and Action

SARAH SCHAEFFER:

New Lenses on Leadership: Discovering the Power of Leadership Metaphors for Development and Action, hosted by HRDQU and presented by David Horth and Chuck Palus. Today’s webinar will last around one hour. If you have any questions, note you can always submit them in the chat box located on your dashboard. We will answer questions as they come in live at the end of the presentation or as a follow-up by email. My name is Sarah Schaeffer and I will moderate today’s webinar. David Horth is an accomplished designer, facilitator and executive coach. David is a senior fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership and the Design and Evaluation Center. He’s considered a worldwide expert on organizational creativity. David is the co-author The Leader’s Edge: Six Creative Competencies for Navigating Complex Challenge. Chuck Palus is also a senior fellow at Center for Creative Leadership. He’s the author of Making Common Sense: Leadership as Meaning Making in a Community of Practice as well as The Leader’s Edge. Welcome and thank you for joining us today.

DAVID:

Thank you, Sarah, that’s a nice introduction for us. Welcome to the webinar everybody, wherever you are in the world, good morning, good evening, good afternoon, good day. Chuck and I are going to get right into this work. You’ll hear a bit about our history that led up to this work as we’re doing this webinar. You want to say good morning, Chuck, as I get you moving into this webinar?

CHUCK:

Good morning everyone and welcome. So, let me pick it right up. We’re going to introduce you to this tool called Leadership Metaphor Explorer as well the background of using metaphors and visual imagery for leadership and leadership development. And the tool is the best way for us to illustrate this, and we’re going to give you two experiences of using the tool today one as an individual leader or working with individual leaders and another example where we work in an organizational leadership context around strategy. So, you’ll get plenty of hands- on experience here. And just a couple of things about the tool. It actually does work best face to face, no surprise, it’s great for engaging conversations and dialogue and of course it also works online. Like other things online, the presence of people being virtual can feel like there’s a distance, but this changes when you’re face to face, so just allow for that. And the other thing I’d like to say is that this is a very flexible tool. There’s just no one right way to use it and in fact our users are very creative in the ways they adapt this. As you see this being used, feel free to think of different ways you can apply this to your situation. So, let’s get right into it. On your screen is an instruction of something to consider, a reflection question. So, if you have a notebook handy or you can just jot down a few of your thoughts. Think about the way you are when you are at your best as a leader. And just make a few notes about that. When are you at your best as a leader and what are you like? Now, we’re going to go through some Leadership Metaphor Explorer cards, not the whole deck, but a subset of those. And as they go past you on the screen, I’d like you to look at each one in turn, and find one that helps you think about or describe yourself or answer this question. And that’s the metaphoric lead. When you pick a card that helps you answer this question that you’re looking at and you’ll notice there’s a letter in the upper corner of the screen, and for example here’s the first one, so as you see the card you like, just choose the letter, and then write down your response in the chat box, and we’ll talk about INAUDIBLE the responses. So, I’m just going to be quiet a bit and these will all be shown together on one slide at the end, so if you missed one and feel the need to go back to it you’ll see these all together at the end. So, let’s just advance these. Think about the question and when you find one make some notes in the chat box.

DAVID:

And write the letter of the card. You don’t have to write the whole metaphor alongside your comments or why you chose that card. I see some answers coming in already, Chuck. I see several people have chosen the circle of inclusion. And a couple of people have chosen a couple of other ones. I’ve just seen somebody choosing this one. Now we get to see all of them again, so you’ve got a burst block. The letter of the card and then why you chose that. You at your best as a leader. And say, Chuck, circle of inclusion has come up several times, people are talking about having a strong value around inclusion of others. That they work with coworkers, people who work for them, so on, and indeed working in other parts of the organization tends to be something that they find valuable and works well for them. It’s got several comments that indicate that. I see that a couple of people have chosen my favorite one there which is the co- creating musicians. Some of you may have recognized the Beatles there. When they’ve chosen that then they see work as a harmonious activity. I think that was one of the comments made.

CHUCK:

INAUDIBLE

DAVID:

Co-creating musicians, yeah.

CHUCK:

Weren’t you a Beatle once?

DAVID:

(Laughing) Many years ago, right. And I see a couple of supportive teachers. They see themselves as coaches. And that’s when they’re at best as coaches. Nice comments coming in. Just keep them coming in for a little while longer and we’ll capture those.

CHUCK:

Great. And while you’re doing that, let me just say a few more things as people finish up here. So, I think you could see how this could be helpful to a conversation and that’s the main idea. And, in this case of looking at people as individual leaders, you can apply this in a one-on- one coaching situation so we have lots of people that will walk into a coaching situation one on one and have this deck of cards at the ready and do this process and lay the cards out. There’s 83 cards, 83 metaphors and usually people have a lot of fun doing the assignments, looking at the cards, of course people choose more than one card often and that leads to very rich conversations. People start sifting and sorting them and saying, Ah, I like this one, but sometimes I’m like this, and so there’s a lot of options depending on how much time you have to apply this. And then that same focus on the individual leader also applies then to leadership- development programs. OK, so you might have a lot of individuals in a program and the focus is in on each person and their leadership and their leadership style. So you can think of this a bit as leadership style, and you can think of this often as how am I when I’m at my best, and you know you can even go into how am I when I’m not doing my best, or how would I like to be, INAUDIBLE my vision, where am I going in my leadership development. So again, that could be an exercise in leadership-development program where you have individuals who are reflecting on their leadership and leadership developments. So I see we’ve pretty much finished getting input.

DAVID:

Chuck, one more thing I’ve noticed is a balance of very serious reflections, I mean they’re all serious, but there’s some humor coming in as well, for example, somebody has chosen card number D. and said I guess that myself and others I work with are out there. I guess they’re referring to the flying object in the sky. There’s some nice humor coming in as well as some serious comments. Of course they’re all important in this dialogue.

CHUCK:

In our book, we call that serious play. Actually we find that important in dialogue. There’s a very serious part of this obviously, then there’s a playful part and it’s actually quite helpful to have this lighter aspect. Playful, humorous, it just, really helps get some depth in the topic. Neil Spore once said this topic is so serious we can only joke about it. I think you get the point there, that there’s some things that just require a bit of levity. And that actually gets us into the question what are metaphors? So we’ve done a lot of thinking about metaphors and leadership development and you can find them in our book, The Leader’s Edge. Metaphors are not just a part of speech. A lot of people, when they first hear the word metaphor, they think that’s something from English class. And really it’s a fundamental way that people think. So there’s even some theories that metaphors are the basis by which we think. Metaphors are an analogy, they’re really cut from the same cloth. There’s some great books on this out there you may have encountered. Two of the most famous and best are Lakeoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By and there’s a newer one by Douglas Hofstadter, Analogy is the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, I love that. It’s a great title and it basically says, you know, it’s all analogy, it’s all metaphor, we’re always creating categories, we’re always putting things in buckets, we’re always comparing things. And the more you can encourage that, the more creative thinking, the more fundamental thinking you can get when you work with people. And just some examples of that, and these are actually from Lakeoff and Johnson. They point out that our speech is just full of metaphors and we can’t really talk about metaphors, for example, life is a journey, time is a river. Love is all kinds of things. Love is war, love is a journey, love is a rose. Sports metaphors are common, and you’ll find these in leadership metaphors, and then we get into the topic of leadership and organizations and you can start talking about social organizations as organisms or plants; managers are coaches; leadership as an art; leaders can be described as pilots as generals, as parents. Leadership itself could be a journey, and on and on and on. It’s just really endless, so that brings us to the question of well, what are leadership metaphors? And so the idea is leadership is a really diverse category. Even as we speak, and we look into the world and see people exercising leadership, it’s just getting bigger every day. There’s more ways that people are exercising leadership. People are finding different leverage points. This is important. In our work in leadership development we find it’s very important to talk about and engage this variety because otherwise people get stuck in INAUDIBLE metaphors. They just think of leadership as making people do things or some sort of being in charge of something. And it’s much broader. So, really when you’re in a classroom, I know many of you are facilitators, there’s really two ways to talk about leadership. There’s theories, of course we all have theories, that we work from, what leadership is, and there’s also the metaphors and we think you need both. One helpful frame that you might consider is what we call the DAC framework. We use this a lot INAUDIBLE for creative leadership and it defines leadership as anything that produces the outcomes of direction, alignment, and commitments, anything. And so if it’s really anything, then you need to think broadly. After all, what does produce direction or vision in a group? What does align people? And where does commitment come from? It’s really vast. And we get our heads around a lot of different kinds of ways to do that. And that’s what Leadership Metaphor Explorer does. So, as we were looking for metaphors based on direction, alignment and commitments, there’s just a couple of dimensions to keep in mind. First is that there is a singular way to look at leadership and that’s the leaders themselves as individuals. And there’s also a collective version of understanding leadership, and that’s how leaders work together in the process of creating direction, alignment and commitment, and that’s really the people working together. So in the first type we have the leader as coach, the leader as guide, tyrant, king, and queen and on and on. And in the second version we have collectives that form the metaphors for how to produce DAC and that’s also a big set of categories, the squadrons and flocks and bands and mobs and gangs and teams and on and on and on. And the cards are built to address both the individual and the collectives. So, for example we have the ones you’ve seen already: Supportive teachers, world-class athletes, Silicon Valley of innovation, self-catalyzing Renaissance, and on and on.

DAVID:

So, we’re often asked where this tool came from and what body of work led to it. Chuck and myself were engaged in some research and in the late ˜90s-early 2000s, and one of our working metaphors, if you will, and one of the ways or definition of leadership was around making shared sense of complexity, and one of the ways of getting this across to people was in the form of some kind of visual representation. We had a wonderful colleague who was a cartoonist here at the Center for Creative Leadership, David Hills, and we asked him to actually come up with a response to this very words near leadership INAUDIBLE making shared sense of complexity and he chose this as a way of showing not only the turbulence but in some ways the chaotic sense making that happens when we try to create shared direction, alignment, and commitment as Chuck has talked about the outcomes of leadership. So, one of things that we talk about in terms of trying to talk about complexity and turbulence and so on was the word or part of the stem of the word rupt. Which you’ll see that word in disrupt, interrupt, abrupt. There’s something discontinuous about complexity. If we take the way we use this define complexity, rapid, unpredictable, paradoxical, tangled. We can get from the rapid nature of change and so on, and this complexity, yielding to a new reality and the way that happens is through metaphoric reasoning. Using things like Leadership Metaphor Explorer, metaphors in general, visual imagery, some of you are experienced for example, Visual Explorer which we gave a webinar a few months ago. And the second thing about unpredictable nature of complexity yields to understanding, and how do we do that? That’s through shared sense making, and this tool and other tools that we’ve produced are about trying to get a dialogue around a shared complex challenge, if you will, so that we can collectively make sense of it. So the notion of using things like this as a mechanism for the stimulating deep dialogue if you will, and the notion of paradoxical, things aren’t just what they seem. The notion of that in fact sometimes problems are just there to be solved, but they’re actually polarities. And they will never be solved if they’re treated as problems to be solved, and so we don’t go into that in any depth here, but the notion of a rich, achieving new possibilities by the creativity that comes out of leveraging polarities. Both and thinking if you will. Finally, the notion that everything is connected to everything else and we somehow or another need to understand how that happens, through transparency and a way of doing that is about recognizing patterns, and one of the things that we talk about going back to that metaphor of white water we showed before. In white water, one of the important skills is about reading the patterns in the water at every moment, because at every moment they change. So in leadership, we need to be able to recognize patterns, again visual thinking and metaphorical thinking helps us with recognizing patterns. So what we’re going to do now, is we’re going to move from that individual look at the use of these cards to one where focusing not on us as individual leaders but we’re looking at ourselves as an organization or a community or indeed a team. When are you doing your best work together? How are the outcomes of shared direction, alignment, and commitment created? What we want you to do is we’re going to show you some more cards and again there will be a letter associated with each card and we’ll show the block of them at the end and we want you to choose one of these and speak to how that actually is helping with the creation of leadership. Creating the outcomes of shared direction, alignment, and commitment. So choose a card to describe what that’s like in your organization, your community, your team. So here are the nine metaphors that we’ve got for you: Community of practice; confluence of agendas; network of peers; visionary landscapes, uncoordinated limbs; high-performance engines; by-the-book commanders; resigned prisoners; and finally conflict smoother or smoothers, we’re putting it into an organizational sense. So choose one of those. Type the letter, and in the chat area, type the letter and why you chose that as how you go about creating leadership ” creating the shared outcomes of direction, alignment, and commitment.

CHUCK:

You going step through those, David?

DAVID:

So here’s the first one:

CHUCK:

So, some answers are coming in already. I see there’s a few people picking visionary landscapers. And some of the comments have to do with when we’re at our best, we’re thinking about the future. We’re actually looking at the lay of the land. Someone says we are paying attention to the way things are and the way things could be. All very good insights. There’s another one or two coming up that have chosen network of peers. So the metaphor is of a network of people and people are mentioning how when we’re at our best, we’re at different locations, we’re around the world, and we also are connected, and there’s some web that’s connecting us. And somebody pointed out how strong that web looks in that image there and how strong the connections are and it’s just clear that they’re sitting in different places, so that’s a good one there.

DAVID:

One of the things I wanted to comment on here, Chuck, is you’ll notice there are some metaphors here that may, you may feel they’ve got a negative spin on them if you will. And one of the things that we’ve done in this tool is to very deliberately choose one that may not feel so positive. In fact some of the ones that we may feel as positive, other people might think of being not so positive for example, but we’ve done that for a reason and one of the reasons is when we’re using this, we ask people to think of not only how things are at their best, but how things were in the past or how or what things we need to avoid if we are actually to make leadership work effectively in our organization. Hence, we show a few things where leadership is not playing out as well as we’d like to in some ways. So that’s one of the reasons why we’ve thrown in a few metaphors which may not be seen as so positive.

CHUCK:

And of course that’s a difficult conversation, isn’t it? What are we like at our worst? We don’t usually ask it that way, but the tool allows people to say, hey, we’re not always great. Sometimes we’re not at our best in our leadership. And, oh, for example, we feel like resigned prisoners. There’s a lot of people that select prisoner in this organization. Well, you know that’s a tough thing to say in public with your peers. When you’re just using language and when you’re totally serious, like Neil Spore said, sometimes you can only joke about things, and it’s not a joke, but it’s something you can kind of hold at a distance and talk about without feeling like it has a sharp point on it. And that’s very helpful. OK, so why don’t we move along and let’s talk about business strategy and leadership strategy. So you all know what business strategy is. You all do it in your organizations, but what is leadership strategy? Leadership strategy is the collectively held beliefs and behaviors that you need to drive the business strategy and in fact there’s a lot of organizations that don’t have what we call the leadership culture that they need to support their business strategy. So let’s talk about the kinds of leadership culture that can be addressed using this tool, leadership metaphors, or actually there are, they’re built into the tool, and the first kind of leadership culture we talk about is called dependent leadership, and that’s just simply the beliefs and behaviors associated with the idea that people in authority are responsible for leadership, that’s dependent leadership. And then, the next stage or development beyond the dependent stage is what we call independent leadership and that’s when leadership emerges out of individual knowledge, expertise and ambition. And then finally there’s a third stage, called interdependent leadership and that’s when people understand leadership as a collective activity that’s just beyond the beliefs and behaviors of one person, something that we should share together. So, as I said, the cards are correlated with these three stages. Here’s three cards: By-the-book commanders, resigned prisoners and conflict smoother. Those are all associated with the dependent action logic another way to say it is action logic and then the independent ones are illustrated here by visionary landscapers, uncoordinated limbs and high-performance engines. Notice each of these kind of stages is neither good nor bad, it just is, and you could have more negative-looking metaphors or more positive-looking ones. And then finally there’s interdependent and the community of practice, confluence of agendas, network of peers they all speak to the collective aspect of leadership. Now notice there’s a code hidden in the cards, and you might have noticed it already. And it’s contained in the color of the text labeling the cards. You if you notice the ones at the bottom they have red text. The ones in the middle have green text and the ones at the top have blue. And that’s a kind of rough correlation with the three stages and typically we actually don’t talk about this color coding or the stages represented. That’s something the facilitators can kind of keep in mind or keep in their back pocket as people talk. Usually the more desirable forms of leadership are interdependent or independent and usually the ones people are trying to avoid are the dependents and so, it’s just a way kind of marking the difference and when we talk about leadership strategy and driving business strategy this is the direction that typically people talk about. We’re going from a more dependent organization which is INAUDIBLE in the past a lot of organizations have been like this. A lot of cultures around the world are very dependent and they recognize the value of becoming more independent in their thinking and more interdependent in their thinking. And so this all points to new cultural capabilities, and this is actually what we use in organizations when we’re talking about leadership development and leadership strategy so this flows right in to leadership development or organization development. And here’s an example we used at one large organization: This was actually the instruction slide that we used. So we gave people this task. And this is the illustration we used for the Metaphor Explorer cards this is an exercise essentially. So we asked them when they’ve been talking about their business strategy, OK, what are the beliefs and behaviors that will help you drive the business strategy? And so in this particular organization, there were three boundaries, three social boundaries that they were talking about, so, you see those on the left, on the row. So one was the across clusters that they had in their organization; and another was with a partner that we’ll call Partner A, and another that was Partner B. So they recognize that maybe they needed different kinds of leadership or different kinds of beliefs and behaviors that were appropriate in each of these boundaries they were trying to stand. And we asked them to think about their relationships now and how those relationships needed to be in the future so that they could execute their strategy. So here’s the instructions we gave them. We said OK each of your small groups ” we split them into small groups ” each one create one chart. Pick your cards and debate and decide one card for each cell so that’s an interesting task. Everybody chose different cards but they need to debate and decide on one card per cell, so that’s an interesting exercise, and then we asked them to capture a few words to go along with the card. So that’s helping them make sense of things. So, this is a picture of the results. You can see that they got into it the past and what they did was create a matrix of where they were and where they were going. And pretty cool, these charts stayed up in the room for the whole rest of their retreat where we were working with them. So, the result of this exercise stayed up and was able to inform subsequent decisions they made so OK how are we going to put this into action? How will do this? So they had visual, verbal records of their discussions, very powerful, valuable tool. And so here’s another picture that I want to draw your attention to the picture on the left side there. That’s people actually choosing the cards. And that illustrates what I said earlier about a face-to-face situation being really powerful using this tool and you can see here first of all people are working without a table in the middle. That’s often a very good thing because it connects people better. You can see body language. You see people leaning in and that’s very helpful. See the card each other is choosing. Kind of lean in and get close to them. All this is very helpful to a productive conversation. And here is one of the outputs that one of our colleagues used using a mind-mapping piece of software. So taking digital pictures of these cards, which by the way you’re completely authorized and allowed to take photos of the cards, and they go nicely into a digital mapping tool. So this person actually recorded parts of the dialogue and mapped metaphors according to the strategy and so they had a record of that they used for the subsequent retreat. They took the output of one retreat and used it for the input of other retreats. And here’s yet another example. This is by the artist and graphic facilitator Bruce Flye and I mentioned his name because he is the artist that produced the images that are on the cards, our colleague. And he also uses the images in his consulting and leadership development work, so here he created this very beautiful graphic facilitation image of where this organization is going and it’s kind of illustrated as a river. And you can even see here the Visual Explorer cards are also used on some of these images here, people in the boats and others, the zipper, they were also working with a visual tool called Visual Explorer. And in fact a lot of people combine Visual Explorer and Metaphor Explorer. They’re two complimentary ways of using images and metaphors to make sense of things. And often people find it very compelling. Here’s another illustration of the tool in use and if you look at this picture you’ll get a couple of clues as to where this is taken. And you might not have guessed this is in Baghdad, and the tool was used in facilitating dialogue between the Department of Defense and the Department of State in Iraq as the U.S. was transitioning out of the role that they had played there for years. And the highest level leaders in both of those groups were discussing how they would coordinate their work together. And that’s a difficult conversation. Those groups don’t always work together really well and we were working at the very highest level, and that gets to another question people have, people ask us, I love the tool but, it seems a little bit frivolous to me. You know these drawings, they’re a little cartoonish. And you know, maybe they’re perceived as not so serious. What do you think? And we say, Well, we wondered about that, too. But, every time we’ve used it with a group of senior leaders they actually appreciate what the cards are doing. It’s not about the cartoons or the pictures. It’s really about the conversation they’re having. This is true of any group. And this is true of Visual Explorer as well. Once these folks experience the conversation, they like it because it’s not asking them to focus on the drawings, it’s asking them to focus on what they think about the beliefs and behaviors around leadership and so there was just a very positive reception from the military and the State Department so, I think that says a lot. And we’ve also vetted these cards around the world. Here’s a young woman using the cards in a youth development group, very handy with youth development. And here’s a monk in Thailand who’s using one of our prototype versions, and this person probably does not speak English as a first language and what we found is it actually works pretty well when people don’t speak English very well or sometimes not at all. And if they don’t speak English at all that they ignore the labels and just focus on the pictures and everybody can do that and even if they don’t quite understand the metaphors and the picture they are able to talk about it. We even have a French version if people are interested. Another thing you can do is you can actually use white sticky tape and cover the label and if you want to translate it into the local language, people have done that. So what is Leadership Metaphor Explorer? Been talking about it’s 83 cards, such as you’ve been seeing. 83 cards different ones with illustrated metaphors around shared work and leadership and it’s used all kinds of ways and people are very creative in using it in different ways. It’s sometimes used personally. Just one person gets the deck and they use it for personal reflection. It’s often used in coaching. Obviously leadership-development events. It’s a great workshop or leadership-development program kind of tool. You can develop modules around it. Those are often very successful. It’s helping people see the future, their potential; where they’re going and as we mentioned it’s a great part of doing leadership strategy ” people across the organizations.

DAVID:

One of the things I should say, Chuck, is the how is it used is covered by a manual and we also have a blog that we continue to update and put examples of people using pictures, video, stories, of people using this tool for doing good leadership and leadership-development work.

CHUCK:

Very good. And finally here’s a photo of some young women who are using Visual Explorer and we’ll just take this opportunity to remind you that the two tools are really connected. We talk about creative dialogue and we have a number of tools for creative dialogue. The fact that they’re based in cards is very helpful ” different-sized cards. You see these people, again they’re leaning in; they’re rubbing shoulder to shoulder; there’s kind of an energy and excitement in the group. They’re getting up. They’re walking around. You know how important that is after lunch and just to get the energy going. There’s the links to our two blogs that talk about those two tools and the first one Metaphor Explorer blog on our leading effectively site which is associated with CCL and then there’s the second one which is connected to that blog about Visual Explorer. So if you’re wondering how to use these tools, we invite you to go to the blog. And we just posted lots and lots of stories and examples of how people are using these for all kinds of audiences around the world and if you get a chance to use the tool we invite you to send us your stories too and we can post those on our blog and even have you as a guest author if you’d like.

SARAH:

OK, well thank you so much. That was really great. And we actually do have some time to answer some of your questions. So attendees if you could please send us your questions now. And while we wait for those questions to come in, let me tell you a little bit more about the program that is the foundation of today’s session and that would be the Leadership Metaphor. It’s a dynamic training tool designed to stimulate wisdom and understanding, about how leadership plays out in organizations. Designed for the Center for Creative Leadership, this hands-on game uses metaphorical images and captions to open a dialogue about the three stages of dependent, interdependent and independent leadership culture. OK, perfect and looks like we actually do have a number of questions coming in so why don’t we go ahead and get that started? Our first question comes from Jane and she wants to know does CCL use your other set of cards, the ones in the photos, drawings, etc. for similar types of exercises?

DAVID:

You want to take that one, Chuck?

CHUCK:

Yes. All these tools are related. And we’ve learned the power of what we call putting something in the middle. That’s a phrase actually that people we work with tend to remember and tend to like. So you can create dialogue, it turns out, by putting something in the middle and what do we mean by something? We mean something you can hold, something you can look at, visual imagery are great, drawings are great that’s why we INAUDIBLE works well that’s why we think using photographs works well. So we put these on cards because cards are portable, they can go through airport security very well. They’re light, they’re portable. A lot of people that use our tools including Metaphor Explorer or Visual Explorer have a collection of these card decks in their back pockets so to speak. Either they’re part of a planned design, but often they’re impromptu. And so when people get stuck or you’re working with a group and they just need something to get them out of their stuck places, putting a deck of images on the table and asking them some of these questions is a very powerful way to get them unstuck.

DAVID:

Chuck I was just reminded not in a group setting but I was working with a CEO of a company here in North Carolina a couple of years ago, and I pulled out the deck and put it in front of him and said tell me what was leadership like in this organization before you came to this organization? And then where is now? Where would you like to see it in the future? He ended up by pulling out 5 cards. He wanted to talk about the distant past, the more recent past, the current and then a step on the road to what he saw being the ideal of what he picked out 5 different cards and told the story of that and it became quite a powerful story of his own contribution as well as what he picked up and inherited. And his own desires for shifting the culture of the organization and in this particular case he was looking for the organization to become a more innovative organization in the midst of some of the turbulence the industry was experiencing.

SARAH:

OK, perfect and the next one coming in, this one is from Bill. This is an interesting one. He says some of the cards evoke quite negative feelings. Do people actually choose these if they are in a group with their leaders who might be offended to be described in such negative terms?

DAVID:

Yeah, we mentioned that briefly during the session here. Often what we’ll do, and I’ve done this with about a thousand people at one point where I had obviously several of these decks, I wanted them to think about us as an organization in the past or at our worst. And then picking another card of us at our best. And often that’s when the negative cards come out. It’s something that’s hard to describe sometimes and you’ll notice there are some that will very much feel like they got a negative spin to them. You saw some of them in the webinar here. And often that’s talking about place that they used to be and want to move away from that or have moved away from that and want to work to a more desirable place. So there’s this notion of using this card deck as a way of kind of seeing a gap between where we are or where we were and where we would like to be and what the work is. The conversation then comes, how do we get from where we were, where we are now and into that more desirable future place. That past can often have a negative spin. In fact, some of the cards that you would think of as having a positive spin, we’ve seen people actually give those, interpret those, as a way of leadership not working all that effectively. Nice question, Bill.

SARAH:

OK, the next one coming in. This one is from Mike and he asks does the LME tool work in different cultures around the globe?

CHUCK:

Yeah it does pretty well. Obviously you have to be a little bit mindful of where you are. And we recommend people test this a little bit. If you arrive in a country you’ve not been to before, just try it out with some people informally and test it a little bit. What we found is that it works pretty well. As I mentioned before if people speak English then the labels are accessible to them. If they don’t speak English or it’s their second language then they rely on the pictures and truthfully we found Visual Explorer to be a really wonderful bridge of cultures. Actually that works quite well to bridge cultures. So if I was actually in a situation in which I was worried about that, I would actually use Visual Explorer. And recognizing that the labels are in English in Metaphor Explorer and there’s not much you can do about that except you can get creative and put a piece of tape over the labels and actually write in in the language that you’re encountering what the translation would be.

DAVID:

And one of the things, Chuck, about this as well is when we were doing our initial testing of these metaphors, we went looking. We went internationally asked people how they might be, give us some positive, negative, whatever, metaphors for talking about leadership in your part of the world and for example, I don’t INAUDIBLE a couple of slides there and there’s one well diggers, you’ll see that as one of the cards that actually came from Africa. We dropped cards that may not translate although there may be archetypes with a different name. We had one of our cards was the Lone Ranger and people said well that’s American metaphor. Actually there’s probably a metaphor, there’s a meta- metaphor you’ll find the Lone Ranger exists in one form or another in many, many cultures in the world and we are aware that some metaphors just don’t translate. I know when we created the French version of this deck, there were some metaphors that just didn’t translate, and so they were either changed or reinterpreted for our French-speaking audience. But you’ve also got this device, as Chuck said, of actually not relying on the words or just relying on the images or creating new metaphors by blanking out the metaphor statements.

SARAH:

OK Wonderful, it looks like our fourth question coming in, this one is from Ted, and he asks how much facilitation is required?

DAVID:

I’ll have a crack at that, because the reason we’re silent is actually very little. It’s one of these things we’ve found obviously people are coaches and facilitators in general will probably very easily get this. The manual helps of course, but we’ve had people who are in leadership roles, management roles who have been able to use this in conversation with their folks. It’s something very captivating about metaphors that are quite accessible to people. And there’s very little fear factor that we’ve come across for people who aren’t even trained facilitators to just pick these up and try a few things And one of the things that we always say to people if you are one of those people who decides to get yourself a copy of Leadership Metaphor Explorer, Chuck and I have amazing after-sale service. If you’re actually getting in touch with us we always like to help you talk you through your first use of this, exchange emails with us, but the facilitators’ guide usually is enough. You get to do the first couple of pages and you get it basically. Even if you just watch this session as a recording it will give you enough tips for you to be able to go out and use it in various ways and then grow how you use it over time.

SARAH:

OK, great, thank you. And it looks like we do have time for just one more question and this one comes from Maria, and I’m actually intrigued about this one, too. She wants to know how did you create or choose the metaphors and images?

CHUCK:

I’ll take that David, and you can elaborate. It’s been a process over time, actually, we’d been thinking about metaphors and leadership for a long time, and, as David pointed out, leadership and INAUDIBLE white water was one that we were considering early on and got us thinking about different uses of this. And we were actually in a program where we were using a tool in which we had metaphors for leadership, but without the illustrations and it was very helpful for people as we said to think of different metaphors for leadership to get them kind of unstuck and yet it seemed like something was missing and we said. Ah-ha, what if we illustrate the metaphors? And our experiments said that that worked very well. And then we began a more deliberate process of saying OK what are the range of metaphors out there in use and so we used a variety of sources and looked at different ways people talked about leadership and got some feedback and talked to people in different cultures and through this kind of round robin approach developed this set. And then a key step was actually using this model of dependence, independence, and interdependence. So we said OK if we realize that leadership has these three forms, do we have metaphors that really represent the three and yeah we had to do a little bit of adjustment and make sure we had enough dependent metaphors and enough interdependent metaphors because actually the predominant way of viewing leadership is as independence. As David said from the point of view of the Lone Ranger or the hero as leadership as leader and so we had to stretch a little bit to make sure we were covering the less intuitive version of interdependence, and dependence is pretty common, but we had to make sure we represented that because people do see dependent as often negative. And that’s not actually the case. Dependent is a very useful action logic for leadership. And so rather than leave it aside as something that people aren’t so interested in we decided to really make sure it was developed this tool so people can talk about it because talking about it is one of the steps required to develop it.

SARAH:

OK, well I would like to thank David and Chuck for sharing your expertise with us today.

CHUCK:

Thank you, Sarah.

DAVID:

You’re very welcome, enjoyed doing this with you Sarah.

SARAH:

Yeah , that was great and unfortunately that is all the time we have, so we appreciate your time and we hope you have found today’s webinar informative.