Those who think of empathy as merely an emotional resonance with another may query what empathy has to do with efficiency, effectiveness, performance, conformance, innovation, sustainability, and other leadership priorities. This post examines ways in which empathy supports those priorities, and highlights the beneficial outcomes offered by use of Lucid Empathy within your Ecology of… Continue reading What’s Empathy Got To Do With It?
Tag: risk management
The Light and Shade of Reasoning
Many writers over the years have drawn our attention to the value of contrast. Contrast isn’t just a physical phenomenon – in reflective practice it’s how we process meaning, build resilience, and truly value the gifts we are given. The Shadow Deck of Distorted Reasoning Forms and Distorting Conditions introduced in this post is not… Continue reading The Light and Shade of Reasoning
Calibrating Relationship, Judgment, and Action with Lucid Empathy
Lucid Empathy was defined in my post Empathy at the Core as “an integrative form of empathy that balances emotion, cognition, ethics, boundaries, and perspective in order to act with clarity under pressure”. The balancing capacity referred to here has several expressions. The reference to calibration in the title of this post invites us to… Continue reading Calibrating Relationship, Judgment, and Action with Lucid Empathy
Stuck on Repeat? How ‘Loop Thinking’ Can Save Your Strategy
To understand where we are going, we must first look at where we have been. Loops are everywhere it seems. They appear in idiomatic speech, as in ‘close the loop‘, ‘keep me in the loop‘, ‘I’m out of the loop‘, ‘let’s loop back around on this‘, ‘they were thrown for a loop‘. (Jargon bingo cards… Continue reading Stuck on Repeat? How ‘Loop Thinking’ Can Save Your Strategy
Decision Doors
Every nonprofit — whether a charity, professional association, or community group — faces a constant flow of choices. Some are big and irreversible, others small and routine. But all of them involve ‘decision doors’: a threshold between what we know and what’s next. The Decision Doors framework helps us pause at that threshold. Instead of… Continue reading Decision Doors
Traversing the Valley of Change: States, Stages, and Lenses
Advocates of ‘continuous improvement‘ often present the associated change process as one involving a linear series of positive steps between current and desired future states. This characterisation of the change process is unfortunately not the way many experience it, especially during the period immediately after a change is introduced. One prominent example of the ‘positive… Continue reading Traversing the Valley of Change: States, Stages, and Lenses
Watch your words; they become your thoughts
The Power of Words in Organisational Life Before NLP there was Lao Tzu. His admonition to “watch your thoughts, for they become your words” forms part of a ’cause and effect’ chain which helps us to think about how present actions, and the thoughts behind them, lead to longer-term consequences. While the truth of this… Continue reading Watch your words; they become your thoughts
First Principles First
Thinking about first principles, the oft-quoted line from philosopher-comedian Groucho Marx, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like those … I have others” comes to mind. Beyond the moral ambiguity implied, might there be a hidden reference to other legitimate sets of first principles here? If so, what would this mean for nonprofit… Continue reading First Principles First
The Consequentiality of Unintended Consequences – Part 3
Mind bending, surprising, and shocking plot twists are common narrative devices, designed to intrigue and entertain audiences. Yet when a plot twist occurs in our working life, especially when it results from our own actions, none of us see this as ‘entertaining’. ‘Tales of the Unintended’ in the header image is an adaptation of Roald… Continue reading The Consequentiality of Unintended Consequences – Part 3
The Consequentiality of Unintended Consequences – Part 2
The nature of unintended consequences (types, causes, and rating levels) was broadly canvassed in Part 1 of this series. This sequel considers how the side-effects of your activities fit within your risk management system. To recap – unintended risks are those we incur as side effects of our own goals and actions (or inaction), rather… Continue reading The Consequentiality of Unintended Consequences – Part 2