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One of the most important lessons I learned about the traps was how simple it can be to regain balance when we’ve lost the flow. Consider the act of walking–a wonderful and powerful metaphor for thinking about this issue. When we’re walking or running, we’re always in the process of literally falling down. When we move our body forward, we are actually “falling.” But we have learned to move quickly and deftly, and so we are “falling” into our next step. If we don’t move instantly and with great dexterity, we will fall on our face. As children, we learned our lesson well about the phenomenon of walking and running so that when we’re off balance, we can almost effortlessly correct ourselves, regain our balance, and continue on our way. In ordinary life it’s the same way. We lose our balance, as I did for months on end, because we don’t understand enough–we don’t see we have simple ways to regain it.
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one … the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. –George Bernard Shaw
We are more certain of the direction than the goal, and each day we ask for guidance to take the next step. … We never see the whole landscape, so we take the next tiny step and improvise on what we’ve learned.
All matter and the universe are continually in motion. At a level we cannot see, there is an unbroken wholeness, an “implicate order” out of which seemingly discrete events arise. All human beings are part of that unbroken whole, which is continually unfolding. Two of our responsibilities in life are to be open and to learn, thereby becoming more capable of sensing and actualizing emerging new realities.
…the domain of generative leadership–how we can operate day by day to participate in creating new circumstances, new realities.
…cognition is not a representation of the world “out there” but rather a “bringing forth of the world through the process of living itself.” In particular, as humans, the only world we can have is the one we also create together through our language and interactions. Even more important, … this very knowledge compels us to see that our world, our communities, our organizations will change only if we change.
I had always thought that we used language to describe the world–now I was seeing that this is not the case. To the contrary, it is through language that we create the world, because it’s nothing until we describe it. And when we describe it, we create distinctions that govern our actions. To put it another way, we do not describe the world we see, but we see the world we describe.
…if individuals and organizations operate from the generative orientation, from possibility rather than resignation, we can create the future into which we are living, as opposed to merely reacting to it when we get there.
There is a creative Source of infinite potential enfolded in the universe. Connection to this Source leads to the emergence of new realities–discovery, creation, renewal, and transformation. We are partners in the unfolding of the universe.
Greenleaf called foresight “the central ethic of leadership,” adding that “to see the unforeseeable” and “to know the unknowable” is the mark of a leader.