One of my favourite people on the planet for fresh thinking is Seth Godin. If you haven’t looked at this stuff you really should. His performances on TED are a good introduction.
I first became aware of him when he wrote an article in Fast Company Magazine in April 2003 “A Brief History of Hard Work, Adjusted for Risk”. The gist of the article is that when we existed in an economy based on manual labour hard work was exactly that - hours of hard physical labour. In our knowledge economy, today’s hard work is about taking apparent risk, making difficult emotional decisions - making choices where our lizard brain kicks in with a fight or flight response, where we need to override our unconscious responses.
When Ken Robinson had his latest speech animated by the RSA it really resonated. He makes the point that our education system originally came into existence to service the needs of the industrial revolution to produced skilled workers, or rather, workers with manual and intellectual skills. He is calling for a paradigm shift in primary, secondary and even tertiary education.
We need to consider the same for our businesses and organisations if we want the leadership that’s needed for us to survive and thrive. An alarmingly large amount of our existing learning and development paradigm around leadership still involves people ‘going on courses’ to learn skills.
Developing leaders to better handle modern ‘hard work’ means not sending them on that 'executive' course. In these hard times, that’s a waste of valuable resources. It’s time to be a lot more creative, and more courageous, in leadership development.
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