The purposeful leadership challenge. Part 3: Looking at a selfie of our assumptions.

If we’re saying that the way business works today needs to change, we need to do a sense-check on the assumptions we currently hold. Because, on closer inspection, they may not be true.

In order to interrogate our assumptions and test them out, it’s useful to write them down, have a conversation about them or record them in some way. There is something unexpectedly useful about this process of taking a snapshot of what we think is obvious: we might notice things that were hiding in plain sight.

Self-observation is a skill that can be developed over time and our ability to do it will get better, just as visiting the gym can make our muscles stronger.

The muscle that helps us to see how we are thinking, making that thinking ‘object’ to us, instead of us being ‘subject’ to it. Tools like ‘Immunity to change’ from Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey are very helpful at strengthening this capacity (The real reason people won’t change).

Only through this type of development work can we explore new world views and expand our capacity to create different ways of thinking and therefore different ways of doing business.

So, what experiments could we run that would give us some useful data, for or against our current list of assumptions? And what are we going to do if we conclude our assumptions were wrong?

“No Problem Can Be Solved From The Same Level Of Consciousness That Created It.” So said Albert Einstein, whose expertise in knowing how to create energy is beyond doubt.

Interested in how ready you and your organisation are to get into purpose? The readiness indicator from ‘otherkind’ is here to help.