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Opening conversations towards compassionate leadership:

Opening conversations towards compassionate leadership:

thoughts offered by Eliat Aram
CEO, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations

Tavistock Institute

November 03, 2014
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  1. Compassionate Leadership for the Lift Programme 2014 Opening conversations towards

    compassionate leadership: thoughts offered by Eliat Aram CEO, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations
  2. Compassionate Leadership for the Lift Programme 2014 Linear planning/designing •

    an organisational hierarchy where the decision making is at the top and so is the accountability (at least where ethical practice is in place) • enough certainty to assume that action-plan A will lead to result B • self belief and self confidence, even self sufficiency
  3. Compassionate Leadership for the Lift Programme 2014 Emergent design/planning: •

    an organisation which is more aware of its informal hierarchy, perhaps has a different image of itself, such as a network, although at the same time would recognise that the formal hierarchy has ultimately the accountability for the results • recognising that there is high degree of uncertainty around us which means that our planning might only be incremental, needs to be open to changes and adaptable and may even require fundamental change to it Requires: • a culture of collaboration and participation • enough self resource and trust in colleagues to know that we can work towards the plan ‘together’
  4. Compassionate Leadership for the Lift Programme 2014 “To succeed in

    a problem-continuing environment post- industrial politics must become both more informed and more participative than the politics of industrialism, more devolved and open to more rapid and continuous feedback. Post-industrial man will spend more of his time in politics than industrial man and more in the planning processes associated with it. He may be presumed to have the leisure”. From Triest & Emery, 1973, Towards a Social Ecology – contextual appreciations of the future in the present
  5. Compassionate Leadership for the Lift Programme 2014 Parameters of complexity

    mapped onto organisations: • Rate of information flow • Degree of diversity • Richness of connectivity • Level of contained anxiety • Degree of power differentials (from Stacey, R. 1996)
  6. Compassionate Leadership for the Lift Programme 2014 “ what is

    required (for Achievement- EA) is not the decrease of inhibition but a decrease of the impulse to inhibit; the impulse to inhibit is fundamentally envy of the growth-stimulating objects. What is to be sought is an activity that is both the restoration of god (the Mother) and the evolution of god (the formless, infinite, ineffable, non-existent), which can be found only in the state in which there is NO memory, desire, understanding”. Bion, W. Attention and Interpretation, p. 128-9
  7. Compassionate Leadership for the Lift Programme 2014 “ … several

    things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Keats, 1817, from ‘letetrs to George and Thomas Keats’, in Bion attention and interpretation
  8. Compassionate Leadership for the Lift Programme 2014 Reiner Maria Rilke,

    translated by Donald Marshall and Joel Weinsheimer in Gadamer , reprinted 2006, Truth and Method Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is Mere skill and little gain; But when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball Thrown by an eternal partner With accurate and measured swing Towards you, to your core, in an arch From the great bridge-building of God: Why catching then becomes a power— Not yours, a world’s.