Session Type: Workshop Accepted by MIG(s): Development Time Allotted: 75 Description: This workshop positions leadership development as "mindset work," and will draw from theory and research to suggest that shedding mindsets is work that requires high intentionality, skill, risk taking, and reflexivity. Presenters will share activities created and tested for mindset work, offer reframing language, and create a space for professionals in leadership development to explore their own boundaries, including those that are unseen and that shape taken-for-granted worldviews (and many leadership programmes!). Abstract:
This workshop takes up the conference theme: ‘Leadership 2: Time for action. ’We focus on the conference proposal that it is time to “shed mindsets that may not be useful to the next generation of leaders”. We position leadership development as ‘mindset work.’ That is we argue that leadership development is not about developing skills or competencies or introducing particular models for leadership but about developing the capacity to think and act beyond existing boundaries, including those that are unseen and that shape and confirm taken for granted views of the world. We argue that mindsets cannot be shed either ‘seamlessly or ‘naturally’ (the way an animal’s fur or an insect’s chrysalis is shed). We draw from theory and research to suggest that shedding mindsets is work that requires high intentionality, skill, risk taking, and reflexivity. Indeed, we argue that ‘mindsets’ are habitual and hard–wired(Caroll & Levy, 2008), involving patterns in thinking that are inclined to continue on despite us, ‘behind our own backs’(Bourdieu, 1977).
This workshop focuses on the issue of ‘shedding mindsets’ using Karl Weick’s notions of ‘conceptual boxes’ and ‘stirring the cognitive pot.’(Weick, 2006) While Weick does not use the language of mindset, he argues that shifts in sense-making involve interruptions to routine so that cues that were invisible moments before become noticeable. He suggests that when “past experience no longer serves as a firm guide ... the resulting disruption ‘stirs the cognitive pot’” (p. 1727). We find the metaphor of ‘stirring cognitive pots’ useful for thinking about mindset-work. We argue that the process of stirring can help bring visibility to the ingredients (including the differences) in our respective pots. In Weick’s language we can begin to “register finer distinctions and see how much is missed and distorted...” (Ibid). We argue that the work of seeing our ingredients and stirring our pots can help us to see ourselves, and our choices more clearly.
This workshop is approached in the spirit of reflexivity, drawing on our experience as facilitators and researchers who are working in the terrain of mindset work and who are committed to stirring our own pots. Indeed it is probably fair to say that for us stirring has helped us find much greater clarity and purpose but it has also involved ‘shedding’ some of what we ‘had’ and fighting with the residue at the bottom of our ‘pots.’
Workshop Activities
As discussed, this workshop will attempt to open up and reframe the whole concept of shedding mindsets and introduce a series of development-like activities that would facilitate the ‘stirring of cognitive pots’. These are activities that we have created and tested in order to do mindset work with those in leadership development. We invite workshop participants to engage in these activities, join with us in conversation, and help build this dimension of practice. Our hope, additionally, is that we as leadership researchers and development professionals gain visibility with respect to some of own taken for granted ways of seeing that are present in our collective cognitive pots.
Workshop activities will firstly unpack the ‘ingredients’ of cognitive pots. We will do this through a number of distinctive conversation technologies. We will introduce ways of paying attention that enable participants to notice the ‘ingredients’ that they use and how those constitute mindset. Then participants will work with specific questions that are designed to ‘stir’ cognitive pot(s). Finally we will ask: ‘What purposes are served by our basic ingredients?’ Through questions such as this participants will also consider what else might be possible and will identify new trajectories of interest.
Insights
The questions and activities in this workshop contribute to the conference theme of ‘shedding mindsets’. However we position ‘shedding mindsets’ as a highly intentional, activity that is ongoing and that involves going against the grain of established and automatic ways of making sense of things. We propose stirring cognitive pots as a useful metaphor for working in this area. The interactive component of this workshop involves bringing visibility to some of the taken-for-granted ingredients in participants’ pots, identifying what is left out, and ‘stirring the pot’ by playing with the ingredients that are ‘in’ and those that are ‘out’. We introduce activities that can contribute to this process and that might be used by others who are working in the field of leadership development. Finally, we work reflexively, suggesting that if we are to be involved in loosening the mindsets of others, then the taken for granted ‘ingredients’ of our own pots must also be grist for the mill.
The workshop would interest those who facilitate leadership development; those who link people in their own organizations with leadership development programmes, and those who are researching and teaching in the area of leadership development. Participants will be exposed to concepts, activities and language that bring leadership development firmly into the frame of mindset work. They will have the opportunity to engage in a learning space where the dialogue around mind set work is made visible.
Time allocations:
1. Introduction of key concepts and orientation to the topic: 20 minutes
2. Experiential activities:
- Conversation and critical mindset questions 35 minutes
3. Debrief activities, linking activities back to concepts and workshop wrap up: 20 minutes.
Bibliography
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Caroll, B., & Levy, L. (2008). Aspiring to lead; Hardwired to manage. University of Auckland, Business Review, 10(2), 17-21.
Weick, K. (2006). Faith, Evidence, and Action: Better Guesses in an Unknowable World. Organization Studies, 27(11), 1723-1736.
Fiona Kennedy, New Zealand Leadership Institute
Brad Jackson, University of Auckland Business School
Bio: Professor Jackson is responsible for leading the academic development and integration of research and educational programmes in leadership. Within the Business School he works most closely with The New Zealand Leadership Institute, the Department of Management and International Business and the Graduate School of Business.
Prior to joining the University of Auckland in 2006 Brad was the Director of the Centre for the Study of Leadership and Head of School of the Management School at Victoria University of Wellington. He has been a Visiting Professor with the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, Doshisa University in Japan, The University of Pretoria in South Africa, Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the United States and an Associate Professor of Continuing Education at the University of Calgary in Canada. Return to complete program |
