When we stray from the path

I had felt things needed to change much more quickly than the hierarchy was allowing.

When I don’t walk all four interweaving paths in balance - together, consciously - things can get pretty ugly!

This is the final part of our three-part series on the Leading Through Storms’ Four Pathways To Spirited Leadership framework.

Our Four Pathways to Spirited Leadership framework provides us with interweaving pathways to attend to as we seek to transform our restless energies into spirited acts of leadership. In service of helping society glide down through the current collapse rather than crash heavily. We hope then to be in a good enough state to allow the regeneration we’ve also been working towards on this descent.

But sometimes we don’t act in the most mature ways.

Let’s come back to those restless energies I’ve mentioned in previous blogs: When I don’t walk all four paths in balance together consciously things can get pretty ugly – at one point in mid-2000s the President of a key business I was supporting ex-communicated me for six months:  

In the spirit of both deeply exploring all that matters, and formulating a creative experiment, I had commissioned a carbon and water footprint to catalyse changes to the environmental impact of our company-owned and suppliers’ operations. The results were perceived as incredibly challenging, and they weren’t welcomed. I felt we needed to engage fully with the findings, and that we had enough creative people in the business to drive the required change. I wanted to keep momentum, but others insisted we needed to slow until we had broader organisational alignment. I was impatient and excited. I mistook this for passion and in my self-righteousness shared information in a way that meant the President was caught-out and challenged on the factory-floor. He felt personally embarrassed by the production line operators who’d been briefed before him on something that impacted strategy. I had felt things needed to change much more quickly than the hierarchy was allowing. This sharing of results, out of context, in haste, did not pay enough due, enough sensitive attention to the position of a key stakeholder.

I had formulated, and enacted, a creative experiment, I had deeply explored all that matters in coming to the conclusion that experimentation was needed. That I’d attended to two of these pathways was helpful, but I’d not balanced them with similar efforts to train my body and mind, so that I could be more patient, and be able to hold the passionate energy of excitement and put it to good use, rather than discharging it quickly, raggedly and unhelpfully. I’d certainly not paid enough attention to qualities of the relationship I had with the President at the time – I’d built an orientation that since I was clearly right, my actions were justified. 

If I had been more in balance, perhaps if I had followed the wisdom in "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” – actually change would have happened. The derail delayed important work for months – probably longer than the delay the President’s diary lead-time meant!

Perhaps being alive to all four pathways would have allowed me to access the wisdom of Leo Tolstoy as written in War and Peace; “The strongest of all warriors are these two – time and patience”. 

Thanks to Katie Teague for her evocative photo.