Scaling Leadership

Chapter 11 Transforming Reactive into Creative Leadership A Fundamental Shift of Mind and Heart in Three Movements

Chapter 10 showed how Reactive leadership takes its unique, core strengths off the table, introduces Competing Liabilities, cancels itself out, and consequently fails to scale. Creative leadership is a level of leadership built for scale.

In this chapter, we describe the shift of mind that boots up Creative leadership and allows it to get a multiple on its core strengths, access Complementary Competencies, and scale well.

The primary development gap leaders face is that they are leading amid a level of complexity that requires Creative leadership or higher, yet most are leading Reactively. And since Reactive leadership has built-in limits to scale, and tends to cancel itself out, Reactive leadership is outmatched by the complexities that leaders face. The resulting development gap is an adaptive challenge.¹ Its solution is not a technical one (such as learn a new capability, add some knowledge, improve a skill, add a competency). Its solution cannot be found, neither from within our known solution set nor in our current Internal Operating System.

Rather, its solution requires evolving to a higher order of thinking and being. From there, we can solve the challenges that come with complexity. As Einstein noted, “The solutions to our current problems cannot be found from within the consciousness that created them.” The development gap we face individually requires ...