Jim McNeish has given two amazing talks on "Leading in Chaos" and "Coaching Leaders", perhaps the most high-powered business talks we will have heard at OASIS lunchtimes.

The Report and Feedback on his first talk on "Leading in Chaos" last October is reproduced below (click here).

His second talk last month on "Coaching Leaders" provided a fascinating introduction to his seminar for senior executives on this very topic to be held in Edinburgh's City Centre later this year from 14 - 17 October. A Report on this talk is also set out below (click here) and further details can be found on Jim's website http://www.cantle.net.

We are indebted to Peter Neilson of OASIS and St Cuthbert's, who, clever man, took notes at both talks.

First, a bio of Jim McNeish, a returning Scot originally from Bo'ness who studied Psychology at Edinburgh University, but now as a polymath and management consultant inhabits the stratosphere somewhere above New York and London:

Jim is 35 years old and now lives near Edinburgh. He runs his own Consultancy called Cantle (Old Scots colloquial for reviving the spirits). He specialises in coaching and training leaders. Jim's email address is jmcn@cantle.net and his postal address is:Little Sand Haven, Back Street, Culross, Fife KY12 8HP, Telephone 01383 880119.

His educational background is psychology, and his experience is predominantly in leadership and organisational development. He has worked in the oil industry, retailing, entertainment, charities, academia and manufacturing. His clients include Anita Roddick (The Body Shop) and Geoff Mulcahy (Woolworths) - two of the biggest names in international business. Latterly, he has co-consulted with Margaret Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science) and run personal development retreats. In August of last year, he rounded off an 18 months contract with Kingfisher plc as Head of Executive Development to start his own venture. In the 12 years that he has worked in this field, he has helped to develop leaders from the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

In addition, he is a visiting professor at Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, and a guest speaker at Templeton College, Oxford. He is currently trying to create space to write a book with Professor David Wheeler, author of "The Stakeholder Corporation", on sustainable and moral business.

His work has been described in the media as spiritual development for executives because of the depth of its impact. He would prefer to describe his contribution as helping the leader discover what he or she is leading for and giving him or her tools to make it happen.

Coaching Leaders

Peter Neilson's Report on Jim's Introduction to How to Coach a Leader

Leaders now have an impossible task. Metrics that they are expected to manage are contingent on factors outside of their control. In the complex, ultra-networked, stakeholder-driven, heavily legislated, paradoxical world of today's business, the title "Director" has become a misnomer. Yet even more is expected from such a person, as shareholders squeeze more tightly yet for that little bit more value from their diminishing investments.

Leadership's currency is the public conversation that is generated about leadership. Reputation is everything and performance plays a large part. Leaders need places to go and people to talk to who will grant them safety from evaluation as they clear their minds. They need confidants who will challenge their thinking, encourage and re-energise them and make sense of the unsolvable "double-binds" that affect every individual - so that they can then go out and lead with clarity and purpose. The role of the coach is now in great demand in the City: few directors are without them, and coaches are being leaned on more and more.

It is now though no longer enough for the coach to be a good ear. The days are past when the coach could sit back and listen to the executive cast about trying to make sense of his/her situation. Coaches now need to come to the meeting with an opinion of their own. They need up-to-date knowledge of organisations, the human condition and more importantly themselves - so that they can share responsibility for the direction of the conversation. The thoughts of the leader are no longer enough: the coach needs to be fully present with another perspective so that his/her client feels related to and supported by another human being rather than by just a set of interpersonal skills.

In summary: as the expectations on the leader are increasing, so too are those on the coach.

Peter Neilson

Leading in Chaos

(Subtitled: Chaos: the new business agenda. How we work with chaos - a fact of life - rather than attempting to plan it away. How we can lead our people well in chaos.)
Next, a few comments heard a day after his talk:

"That was so refreshing and entertaining. You hardly noticed the man's multi-disciplinary erudition, and he was so funny with it."

"What impressed me was the way he showed us that we all flourish when we are all able to make our unique contribution to the group we are working with and for. We seem to have been designed to work in groups, not on our own."

"I have never heard a management consultant talk about humility"

"Wasn't he deft about addressing what is frankly just being opionated?"

"I hope we'll see more of him. When are you going to get him back?"

Now, Peter Neilson's Report

How do you bottle a tornado? More easily than I can summarise the energy of the intellectual storm that moved around the offices of Turcan Connell as Jim McNeish swept us from cultural change to quantum physics through depth psychology to leadership styles for 21st century business. To change the metaphor: I'm sorry you missed the ride. He made a lunchtime talk feel like an extreme sport!

"Don't try to take it all on board," he said. "Instead, ask yourself what you will leave behind." Ever heard a speaker say that?

Constant Change

The world has changed creating "CEO churn" - fast turnover, short-term planning and litigious customers. Clarity has gone. Complexity is here!

Business agendas come and go like bouncing bombs across the workforce - values, stakeholders, transparency, appreciative enquiry, strategic plans and the "triple bottom line". They are all good, but they do not work. They miss the core skill of "conversation on the issue". Talk, listen and think together. We find better mental health as a contributor rather than as a consumer!

Mission Control

Then Jim McNeish moved into the deep stuff! We all create our own realities. As we process the 3 billion items of information coming at us from people and the environment at any one moment, we delete all but 60 items and distort the rest until we create generalisations about life. These become our filters for the next experience, as we join up with others who see things the way we do - and thus we "create reality through agreement with others". Then those who don't agree with "us" become a threat. "Choose what you believe to create your reality."

From psychology we moved swiftly on to science! Our "chosen" reality for 200 years has been the scientific paradigm of cause and effect, competition, survival of the fittest, problem solving and scientific certainty. The bottom line is the belief that we can control our world.

This has affected our approach to medicine, psychology, organisation, the marketplace and education. We see our organisations as machines where we "pull levers" and "press people's buttons".

Thriving on the Chaos

However, as far back as 1927 at the Solvay Conference, all the big names of science (the only one I recognised was Einstein, but that is enough to give the flavour of the conversation they had!) - they came together representing the new sciences of relativity, quantum physics, chaos and complexity. They all admitted that they did not really know how the "machine" worked! The new, emerging sciences are marked by humility and curiosity. We need, offered Jim, to have a more modest view of our own opinions!

The new sciences give us a new view of reality, which changes our understanding of organisations and therefore our approach to leadership. That was the logic at the eye of the McNeish tornado!

Organisations are living entities. We human beings thrive on non-locality, experimentation, cooperation, participation and paradox. Competition assumes the world is hostile. Cooperation assumes there are partners waiting to be asked to dance! The Uncertainty Principle tells us that we can control only 15% of our reality. Let's enjoy the rest though.

Leading in Chaos - the Future is Fractal!

So where do we begin in the role of leadership when all the usual control mechanisms are shown to be out of synch with this chaotic relational reality? The magic word was "fractals" - the pattern of any living organism that is repeated throughout its total structure down to the smallest particle. Take a cauliflower. Take one of its florets and it has within it the basic structure of the whole. Keep breaking it down and the basic pattern will keep repeating and repeating down to the smallest "fractal".

Leadership in an organisation, when it is seen as a living organism, is based on representing the "fractal" of what its ultimate shape is to be. To change an organisation the leadership will be the first to change and model the difference.

This involves a shift in our leadership mindsets:

Take it or Leave it?

Everybody in the room would take away something different - or leave something behind!

For myself, my mind was buzzing with the importance of conversation, respecting the organic nature of our organisations, wary of predictability, challenged by the "fractal" responsibility to model change.

And I can still hear his last words for those of us who have to lead in chaos:
"You need humility, curiosity and to welcome interruptions to your way of thinking."

I left a suitcase of preconceptions under my chair! Reality is relational. Simple but scary!

Peter Neilson

[PS: For those who want a quick parable of what all this means, read "Jurassic Park" and, in the light of that, see how often we return to the futile illusion of "Control" while the "Chaos" of life rampages around in the shape of 20th century dinosaurs. Alternatively, try the story of the early church in the Book of Acts in the New Testament! Old wisdom always rings true!]

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