Organizational life can be a confusing muddle, especially if you are trying to get better at playing the game. Take the leadership genre for example. You might come across books that cover any of the following: power, building better teams, culture, emotional intelligence, war and strategy, psychology, authentic leadership, biographies| Leading Sapiens
The ladder of inference is a powerful tool to make better decisions by uncovering hidden mental models and understanding how we reach conclusions.| Leading Sapiens
Context is a powerful tool in leadership but goes underutilized and misunderstood - a deep dive into why mastering context is essential to effective leadership.| Leading Sapiens
Framing is a key skill to create psychological safety and improve performance. But most leaders are unaware or don't know how to get better at it.| Leading Sapiens
Self-doubt is not an impediment to be eliminated as is commonly thought of. It's a condition of the game and can even be a positive indicator.| Leading Sapiens
Leadership reflection is a critical mechanism to accelerate self-development of effective leaders.But it gets ignored due to stereotypes.| Leading Sapiens
For leaders and managers, the art and practice of doing regular reflection is essential to functioning at peak levels. The challenge is that the environment surrounding them enables anything but reflection. It's designed to do the exact opposite. Are there basic guidelines that can help to reflect more often and| Leading Sapiens
The "if...then" way of thinking about cause and effect is common in business. Circular causality is often missed in the decision making process.| Leading Sapiens
Our actions, and by extension performance, stem from thinking that is based on a set of hidden mental models. How do you uncover these mental models and change them? One way is to understand and practice the concepts of single-loop and double-loop learning. Professional sports teams use postgame films and| Leading Sapiens
Most common discourse on mental models takes an additive approach. But this tends to be half-baked, often useless in practice. There is equal value, even more so, in a subtractive approach to mental models. The key is in understanding the difference between hard and soft mental models. How is the| Leading Sapiens
Leaders are paid to think clearly. And a big impediment to clear thinking is what CBT/REBT calls Cognitive Distortions: errors in thinking or thinking traps we commonly fall for. Most high-performers are not pathological, but instead fall for them when upset or in high-stress situations. In this post, I| Leading Sapiens
Johari Window is a 2x2 matrix that captures how we communicate based on self-knowledge and how others see us. It’s a disclosure-feedback model of awareness based on principles of feedback and learning. It can be used for increasing levels of openness, self-awareness, and self-understanding. This makes the Johari Window a particularly relevant tool for leaders and managers.| Leading Sapiens
Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor and the founder of Logotherapy, is most known for his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning. The construct of meaning forms the core of his philosophy. He identified an important framework that’s not as widely known — his laws of dimensional ontology. Although| Leading Sapiens
Almost everyone has the term “problem-solving” featured prominently in their resumes. Conversely, barely anyone uses the term “problem-setting”. Except in complex domains like leadership, problem-setting is often more critical than problem-solving. What is problem-setting, how is it different from good old problem-solving, and why is it critical to effective leadership?| Leading Sapiens