We’ve discovered that a head-on, ‘business leader meets business expert’ encounter works less well as an approach for sophisticated, senior groups. Over time we have had much more lasting success and impact using a more oblique approach.
So, ‘By indirections find directions out’.(Hamlet).
Methodologies, models and specialist language from adjacent – or completely different - expertise and practice can provide a conversational pathway for leaders back at work - and with each other. Experience has shown that working sideways like this seems to be enlivening for executivesweary of the dull thud of business language and Powerpoint norms. People say they feel younger and appear more unguarded around, say, a classics professor talking with them about the ancient Greeks’ attitude to innovation. The student part of the brain appears to be a more agile place to tap than the mature, evaluative, expert part. The very fact that no one in the room knows all the answers creates valuable territory for bridging back into new questions about the executives’ own attitudes to innovation –(and there’s nothing like listening to a bit of Ancient Greek poetry beautifully read aloud, in Greek). The ensuing conversation provides a third thinking space of collective intelligence for those shuttling back and forth between the binary pressures of office and virtual worlds.
Coming at questions from a different angle seems to boost the courage in the room to jettison what is obsolescent in their own practice and to be more radical as they deliberate the future.
See more details in this blog on how we used this oblique approach in the Building Belonging workshop we did in partnership with the V & A.
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