As I write this The Age reports that overnight the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell below 9000 points for the first time since 2003. Maybe by the time you read this it will have fallen below 8000. Maybe it will have recovered to be over 10,000. As I heard Craig James say at a business breakfast this morning, “No one knows.”

In all my experience as a consultant, the question I am most often asked is “How do we know what we should do?” This question comes in many forms. Sometimes my client acts as though I know exactly the solution to their problem – after all that’s what they pay me for isn’t it. Sometimes I feel like telling them not only do I have no idea of the solution, I’m not even sure what the problem is. Unfortunately I more often fall into the trap of believing the client’s trust in my omniscience is well placed. I believe that I should know the answer or at least, if I don’t. I should act as though I do. I justify this by convincing myself that if I work hard enough, study the client’s situation in enough detail and read enough of what ‘the experts’ say, both THE PROBLEM and THE ANSWER will become clear to me.

It is at times like this that I forget the greatest service I can give to my client is to not know. My client knows their business and their organisation better than I ever can. When I feel like I have to know, or have to look like I know I can’t ask the dumb questions that everyone wants to ask but no one dares. With grateful acknowledgment to a dear colleague, I call this the Colombo model of consulting.

The same is true for leadership. It takes courage to admit you don’t know what to do yet perhaps the greatest failures of leadership throughout history have been made by those who acted out of this fear. In the current economic situation, doing nothing is not an option. Global treasury officials and financial chiefs must act in the full knowledge that there is no higher authority to which they can turn who can provide them with just the right settings to avert a catastrophe, History will judge them harshly if they get it wrong.

This belief arises from the triumph of the industrial age where we have come to think of organisations as machines.

As Danah Zohar puts it:

Classical physics transmuted the living cosmos of Greek and medieval times, a cosmos filled with purpose and intelligence and driven by the love of God for the benefit of humans, into a dead, clockwork machine ... Things moved because they were fixed and determined; cold silence pervaded the once-teeming heavens. Human beings and their struggles, the whole of consciousness, and life itself were irrelevant to the workings of the vast universal machine” The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics, 1990

It seems like more than a lifetime ago that I completed my first degree which was in Physics. An area of knowledge that I spent 10 years teaching and which still excites me. In the last act of my last lecture in my undergraduate degree, my lecturer wrote in letters filling the whole board:

This was a reference to Einstein’s disagreement with Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg over the validity of Quantum Mechanics at the fifth Solvay Conference in 1927. By this time, Einstein’s theory of General Relativity was well known in the Physics world. On the other hand Bohr and Heisenberg’s Quantum Mechanics was very new. Central to Quantum Mechanics is the probabilistic nature of the universe. That is that objects behave according to a well defined probability but their individual actions are completely unpredictable. An electron, for example, could spend most of its time close to an atom on the page on which you are reading this. However, there is a small, but not zero, probability that in one moment it will be on the other side of the universe without ever having been anywhere in between here and there. We cannot predict when an electron might choose to jump such a great distance just that there is a chance it will.

In 1927 Einstein could not bring himself to believe this disorderly behaviour and made his famous statement “I cannot believe that God plays dice.” Although he appears to have eventually come to an accommodation with Quantum Mechanics, many commentators believe he wasted the second half of his life attempting to develop a theory that unified Relativity and Quantum Physics. Today there are about as many physicists who reject quantum theory as the number who believe in a flat earth.

You may or may not find this interesting. The point I want to make though is the implications this has for management and leadership. When we lead and manage, is it possible, at least in theory, to analyse every problem or are we, like God, merely playing dice.

Many people I talk to find this concept quite discomfiting. We have, most of us, been brought up with the notion of Scientific Management. That is, with appropriate analytical tools and a sufficient level of application, we can design the optimum organisation with the best possible processes to meet the challenges that face us. We can design instruments that measure our performance, measure potential employees skill sets, aptitude and psychological suitability for the tasks we know need doing. Finally we can determine the market requirements and design products and services that perfectly dovetail with them. That we don’t is due to our own failings rather than the failure of theory.

This view of the world has served us well for several centuries – as classical physics did up to the nuclear age. But in the same way that classical physics is inadequate to describe and predict the complex interactions of sub-atomic particles that have led to a revolution in technology, management and leadership based on that same classical science is inadequate to deal with a world where information and capital can travel at the speed of light.

The failures of traditional (think bureaucratic) organisations didn’t matter when the pace of change was so much slower. But, as Margaret Wheatley points out:

Our seventeenth century organisations are crumbling. We have prided ourselves , in all these centuries since Newton and Descartes, on the triumph of reason, on the absence of magic. Yet we, like the best magicians of old, have been hooked on manipulation. For three centuries, we’ve been planning, predicting, and analyzing the world. We’ve held on to an intense belief in cause and effect. We’ve raised planning to highest of priestcrafts and imbued numbers with absolute power. We look to numbers to describe our economic health, our productivity, our physical well-being. We’ve developed graphs and charts and plans to take us into the future, revering them as ancient mariners did their chart books. Without them, we’d be lost, adrift among the dragons. We have been, after all, no more than sorcerers, the master magicians of our time.” Leadership and the New Science 1999.

Similarly Clegg and Hardy observe:

David Silverman’s (1971) The Theory of Organizations ... interpretative emphasis countered the functionalist view. It opened a Pandora’s box, releasing actors as opposed to systems, social construction as opposed to social determinism; interpretative understanding as opposed to a logic of causal explanation; plural definitions of situations rather than the singular definition articulated around organizational goals. Studying Organization 1999

In the same way the Quantum Physics has required scientists to learn and adopt a whole raft of new thinking, so must leaders, managers and participants in organisations.

We can no longer think of our organisations as machines reducible to their component parts. We must think of them as networks of relationships. No longer is it adequate to dream that, like the great Watchmaker, we can control all the levers a dials and set the precise course our organisation will take. Rather, like a gardener, we can cultivate, water and fertilize.

Perhaps more importantly, we can no longer believe that one person determines the destiny of an organisation. Perhaps this is the remaining, yet most enduring vestige of the industrial age. A belief rather than dying out as its usefulness diminishes has paradoxically become the supreme article of faith of modern commerce.

The central lessons from modern science though are:

• not only do we not know how our plans will turn out, we cannot know
• the greatest untapped creative ability in our organisations is their ability to self-organise - if only we have the courage to let them, and
• it is far more important to look at a problem as a whole rather as a series of separately solvable parts.

I have moved the blog to a much more robust server. Some of you have reported some problems with links to the site. That should pretty much be a thing of the past.

The elves are still working away at tweaking everything and getting the site working absolutely perfectly. You will see the sidebar doesn't include everything it used to. I am working on rebuilding this with updated links and information. Please come back and check it over the next couple of weeks.

You will also soon see a new look and feel I completely revamp the site to match my chriscurnow.com site.

I am sure you will like the changes.

Thanks for your patience while I and my elves are working on the update.

I'd like to hear what you think.

In this newsletter, I refer to the concepts of Quantum Leadership® and The Spiral Path™. You can find out more about these concepts on my website.

Over the last half a year I have given a lot of thought to what I might write about in this the premiere edition of The Spiral Path. I’ve written myself notes and possible titles have come and gone in my mind. In the end though, I have come back to my very first thought – the concept of our Blind Spot. I am heavily indebted to C. Otto Scharmer* for the central insight of this article as well as many of his words that I will quote directly.

When we think about our blind spot, we think about something that is in front of us but we can’t see it. A colleague I was discussing this with recently observed “it’s something we don’t want to see.” There are certainly many of those, but I want to talk about a different view of the blind spot. Something that is within the range of our perception but is, in fact, invisible.

• We have created a thriving global economy that yet leaves 850 million people suffering from hunger and 3 billion people living in poverty (on less than two dollars per day). The poor of the world -- about 80 percent of mankind -- live on 15 percent of the world's total GNP.
• We invest significant resources on our agriculture and food systems only to create nonsustainable mass production of low-quality junk food that pollutes both our bodies and our environment, resulting in topsoil degradation of a territory as large as India (the equivalent of 21 percent of the present arable land in the world.)
• We spend enormous resources on health care systems that merely tinker with symptoms and are unable to address the root causes of health and sickness in our society. Our health outcomes aren't any better than in many societies that spend far less.
• We also pour considerable amounts of money into our educational systems, but we haven't been able to create schools and institutions of higher education that develop people's innate capacity to sense and shape their future, which I view as the single most important core capability for this century's knowledge and co-creation economy.
• In spite of alarming scientific and experimental evidence for an accelerating climate change, we, as a global system, continue to operate the old way -- as if nothing much has happened. More than half of the world's children today suffer conditions of depravation such as poverty, war, and HIV/AIDS. As a result, 40,000 children die of preventable diseases every day. (Theory U, pp 2-3)

This situation represents a serious threat to most organisations. It certainly makes it difficult to plan with any semblance of certainty. These issues are central to many organisations (eg governments, NGOs, aid organisations and environmental groups) but none are exempt. Business is increasingly required to respond to environmental and social concerns. Many would argue that regardless of government regulation, it is good business to do so. At a deeper level, most of us are concerned about the kind of world we will leave to our children. We can’t divorce what we do from 9 - 5 (if anyone still works from 9 to 5) from the kind of world we are creating. So the challenge is to do good work and do good business in an environment in which we feel very little sense of individual control.

This is where the blind spot comes in.

Since it’s his idea, I will let Scharmer provide a definition:

"...the place within or around us where our attention originates. It's the place from where we operate when we do something. The reason it's blind, is that it is an invisible dimension of our social field, of our everday experience in social interactions."

You might want to go back and read that again.

It is the place where our attention originates. You and I may give a great deal of thought to what we give attention to but do we think much about where that attention originates? That is, what is it within us or around us that leads us to pay attention to one thing and not another?

I find it a very difficult question to answer but at the same time I have a sense that it is a very important question. There are times when my awareness of this spot is acute. I can’t describe it but I am aware of it and when I am aware of it my decision making process is different. I become aware of possibilities that I had never thought of. I am sure you have had similar experiences. There are times when time, at one and the same time, both speeds up and slows down. Things are happening quickly but I seem to have the ability to act in slow motion. (cf the work of Csikszentmihalyi)

I think this is what Otto Scharmer is talking about with his concept of the blind spot. This awareness.

So what has this to do with responding to the global issues I quoted before? I believe that as groups of us become aware of our blind spot - the place where our attention originates – we will become far more creative within our sphere of influence and generate possibilities that weren’t there before.

Our sphere of influence may be, by our own account, quite limited but as we become aware of our blind spot we influence others, both within our organisation and outside it. The first impact we will see is that our own organisation, or our part of our organisation, becomes more creative and what I like to call generative. Scharmer suggests that we begin to create the future, or more accurately “we bring into being the future that is seeking to emerge.” This is a challenging concept but at the same time I find it quite exciting.

Regardless, this creativity and generativity both makes our organisation (or our part of it) more effective and that very effectiveness addresses in some way the global challenges that face us. For example we may find a more cost effective way to produce our product that at the same time reduces greenhouse emissions. Or we may develop a pricing structure that makes our product more widely accessible and at the same time yields a higher margin.

This is a simplistic representation of complex interactions that become possible when we intentionally operate from our blind spot but I hope it serves to illustrate potential scenarios.

At the heart of all this is the very foundation of leadership. Whether you are in a formal leadership position or not you have the potential to influence

As Scharmer puts it:

“The essence of leadership is to shift the inner place from which we operate both individually and collectively.”

His challenge then, to each of us is to make this shift, to find our blind spot and operate intentionally from it. From this we will become more creative and generative in our work and our organisations and we may just be surprised how much capacity we have to influence others.

How we do this is an article all by itself.

I leave you with this closing thought from a completely different source:

The outward work
will never be puny
if the inner work
is great.
And the outward work
can never be great or even good
if the inward one is puny and of little worth.(M. Fox, Original Blessing: a primer in creation spirituality 1983)

If you would like to follow any of the thoughts in this article further you might like to check out these links and further reading.

* I will refer to many authors and commentators in these articles. I do so with the usual disclaimer that their views are their own and don't necessarily represent mine. I include these references because I think the author's work is interesting and thought provoking. In this particular case, while I find Scharmer's work fascinating, stimulating and challenging, it concerns me that his work results in the establishment of another "institute." There are many schools of thought that relate or overlap Scharmer's. These schools don't revolve around the ideas of a single person rather the development of a whole way of thinking resulting from the contribution of hundreds or thousands of people over time.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-ee), C.S. and D.J. Davidson Professor of Psychology and Management at The Drucker School, Claremont Graduate University, is mainly known for his work in flow in creativity. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as:

being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.

According to The Monitor on Pschology

[Martin] Seligman describes Csikszentmihalyi as the world's leading researcher on a subject that is near and dear to his heart — positive psychology. He says Csikszentmihalyi's work on improving lives has been important in his own effort to encourage psychologists to focus on building human strengths. “He is the brains behind positive psychology, and I am the voice,” says Seligman. Csikszentmihalyi is working with Seligman to engage young leading psychologists to focus on prevention and building human strength.

Probably his most well know work is Flow the psychology of optimal experience

Firstly, in their book, Why Should Anyone be Led by You?, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones talk about the implications of Weber's thinking for Leadership in business. I hope to write a piece on this book in the near future.

However, the catalyst for this post is this thought provoking piece, by Lorin Loverde. Loverde discusses Weber’s book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I am fascinated by Loverde’s analysis which is that the development of capitalism only became possible with the widespread influence of the ‘Protestant Ethic’.

According to Loverde, there is a vast contradiction inherent in capitalism — we seek to gain wealth but when we do we are immediately tempted to spend it on ourselves. So previous societies over millennia created great edifices to themselves or lived in debauchery, but there was nothing left to invest in future investment for wealth creation. So the civilisation collapsed only to start the process over again.

But then came the Reformation and the Protestant Age. The capitalist contradiction was held by a ‘transcendent purpose.’ Our wordly life was but a preparation for a future life. In this life our purpose was to serve God and deny ourselves. Loverde puts it this way:

“...we demonstrated on earth by our economic success that we were predestined to go to heaven after death; thus, our success was a sign of goodness, but we still had to avoid being extremely selfish with extravagant spending and conspicuous consumption to typical of non-Protestant cultures.”

Having a "Reformed Baptist” background myself, I would contest Loverde’s theological interpretation but the end result is the same. The Protestant ethic was one of self discipline (as opposed to the self-denial of the pre-reformation Christian Church.) This involved enjoyment but avoidance of the wordly pleasures or ‘sins of the flesh’. In Wesley's Methodism, this developed into avoiding anything that was thought to be worldly — including dancing, drinking alcohol, anything that had a sexual association, the theatre and even reading ‘wordly’ (ie non-religious) books.

Most “Protestant” christians today would regard this methodism as extreme but would still aspire to some notion of avoiding ‘wordliness’ – that is that their ultimate purpose in this life is in preparation for the next.

The point Loverde is making is that this live view — that of having a transcendent purpose — made, and to some extent continues to make, capitalism possible. Without it, previous generations would have spent all the wealth they created and we would not now be enjoying the benefits of the ‘great industrial west.’ There would be no infrastructure, no large industrialised capacity.

The problem now is we have capitalism but have lost the Protestant Ethic.

It reminds of the RAF's Bomber Command during World War II. It was formed during the darkest days of the Battle of Britain in an attempt to strike at the German war machine at its source. From it’s origins as a cobbled together unit with hopelessly inadequate and out of date machinery, it became itself an efficient and ruthless machine that could ‘take out’ any city in Germany on any night it chose. And, in the end, it did for no other reason than because it could. It had been set up in the dire need to defend Great Britain but when the hour of desperation had passed it continued to bomb cities because that’s what it did – with devastating impact and little military gain as we say in Dresden.

Perhaps that’s the point we have reached in capitalism. We make wealth because we can. We’ve forgotten why. We just do it. For ourselves we could say this is no problem, except that our continuing to make wealth threatens our very ability to make wealth.

We have become so efficient at extracting and using the Earth’s resources that we can, for the first time in our history, envision the day when we have used all there is to use. Again our efficiency at using resources has created daunting problems of waste and impact on the world’s environment. It has gone well past the stage where the West can live without regard to the pollution we create in the Third World. The world is now just too small.

Finally, continuing to create and concentrate wealth while at the same time making communications technology easily available to almost every square millimetre of our planet, we have allowed the world’s poorest peoples to know about our affluence and, many would say, decadence. There can be little doubt that this is a major driving force towards global terrorism. This has perhaps always been the case, as long as there has been a divide between rich and poor. What is driving, and makes so threatening, the extremism in the terrorism of the “fundamentalists” is the juxtaposition of this divide with what they see as the purposelessness of the West.

Loverde’s response is to propose the need for a transcendent purpose.

For better or worse we have left behind the Protestant Ethic and now, like Bomber Harris, we build bigger businesses because we can. We have forgotten why. The catch cry is that business exists to make a profit. If we believe this, we are sounding the death knell of capitalism as we know it for there will be nothing left to invest. That is if the earth’s resources don’t run out first or fundamentalist extremist terrorism doesn’t make it impossible to continue to operate business on a global scale.

So what might a viable transcendent purpose be? How about you tell me?

As I was growing up and developing an interest in science and electronics, Dad seemed to be able to answer any question I put to him. He knew how a radio worked and helped me build my first crystal set. When I got to high school and started learning algebra, calculus and trigonometry he seemed to be able to explain every question I had at least as well as my teachers. Dad often had his own particular way of explaining a topic that made it come alive in my mind. I didn’t think about this much until later in my adult years. This seemed to me just what a Dad should be able to do. But as I became a science and maths teacher myself, I started to realise he would be what we would now classify as a gifted student. We would regard him as having the potential to go a long way. Had he been born in the fifties like I was, he would almost certainly have gone to university and had the opportunity to do post graduate studies.

Dad was also a gifted and advanced pianist. As we were growing up we realised that not everyone’s dad played the piano and certainly not everyone’s dad played what we later learned was called classical music. But although we loved his music and loved hearing him play pretty well every night we didn’t realise until late in our teens how advanced he was. He played Chopin, Paganini, Liszt and many other composers' works from memory. Even then it was only well into my adult years that I started to realise how amazing it was that a fitter and turner son of a blacksmith from Kalgoorlie was such an advanced musician. He was certainly talented enough that had the opportunity arisen, he could have made a career from his music.

Yet Dad never had the opportunity to go to university or had the opportunity to make a career from his music. My dad was a teenager (although the term wasn’t used then) during the depression and had to leave school to go to work as soon as work was available. He worked as a Diesel Mechanic in the Kalgoorlie mines and the power station there. Each week he would bring his pay packet home and give it to my grandmother who would then give him whatever she thought was a reasonable allowance to live on. He wasn’t destitute. Dad was able to buy a number of old motorbikes and eventually a brand new Francis Barnett in the late 30s. He even bought a piano as far as I know with my grandmother’s blessing. Who knows, if things had continued as they were he may have had the opportunity to advance his education and eventually make it to university or have opportunity to play music as a career.

But this was not to be. The war came and Dad joined the RAAF as a Fitter. Even there he excelled. I recently applied for and received his air force records. The results of his examinations for his group of trainees is included. The names are listed in order of merit and at the top of the list, alone in the category “Pass with Special Distinction” is dad’s name. While he was training in Melbourne, my auntie contributed to the war effort by inviting some of these young men home to replace some of family comforts they were missing. I still have a photo from those days of my dad in his RAAF dark blue uniform sitting at the piano at my auntie’s house. That’s how he met my mum (my auntie’s sister). The were married on December 6th 1941. Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7th 1941. All leave was cancelled and within days of becoming a married man, he found himself at the receiving end of Japanese bombs in the Northern Territory. Although mum and dad were able to correspond, all mum was allowed to know was that he was somewhere in Australia and was left to guess that he was in the Northern Territory.

Just a few months later she received a telegram from the Air Force:

REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR HUSBAND, AIRCRAFTSMAN CLASS I STANFORD HARVEY CURNOW, IS REPORTED TO BE SERIOUSLY ILL AND HAS BEEN ADMITTED TO A MILITARY HOSPITAL AT BATCHELOR SUFFERING FROM A PROBABLE FRACTURE OF BASE OF SKULL AS THE RESULT OF ACCIDENTALLY FALLING FROM MOVING TRANSPORT ON 18TH JUNE 1942 STOP

YOUR HUSBAND’S CONDITION IS CONSIDERED TO BE SERIOUS STOP

ANY FURTHER INFORMATION RECEIVED WILL BE IMMEDIATELY CONVEYED TO YOU STOP

SIGNED ETC

Thanks to the surgeons at an American Military Hospital, Dad did recover although he was left with permanent paralysis of one side of his face and for a long time was very embarrassed about this. I don’t know all the details of his recovery but he was not discharged until 1944 without taking any further active part in the war. (One of his brothers was killed in the Battle for Singapore and the other spent 11 days drifting in a dinghy in the Mediterranean after being shot down.)

On medical grounds, Dad was advised not to return to Kalgoorlie where work was being offered to him and was forced to compete in a much tougher employment market in Melbourne. Eventually he was able to get a position as an apprentice fitter and turner as part of a scheme to retrain returned servicemen. He remained with the same employer for the next forty years. However, despite his proven intellect and ability Dad remained a blue collar worker all his working life. One of the high points of those early days was the young husband and wife, with my then infant eldest brother being able to move into a War Service home in Highett which remained the family home for the rest of Dad’s life and until Mum was no longer able to live by herself.

Interspersed with periods of great happiness, perhaps the greatest of them the birth of their four children, Dad experienced periods of deep melancholy. It wasn’t easy feeding, clothing and schooling four children on a fitter and turner’s wage even though he worked long hours of overtime when it was available and took on a second job as a waiter at a golf club on weekends.

Things probably got to their lowest point at the death of my brother after a long and difficult illness, but then things started to look up as Dad neared retirement age. After years of working amongst heavy machinery he had suffered significant hearing loss and was successful in receiving a small but useful compensation payout. Then again, after years of hearings, letters and appointments with government bodies (mainly the Repatration Department) he was finally awarded a compensation payment and pension for his war injuries. Although the compensation payment did not cover the pension he would have received if the government had originally admitted liability for his injuries, it was enough to allow Mum and Dad to live comfortably for their twenty years of retirement.

I wrote this piece for another purpose. But as I was writing it, it made me think again about the concept of "potential." Given my Dad's ability and talent, many would say he had the potential to acheive much more than he did.

When I think about that, my first reaction is to wonder who has the right to judge the worth of one life's achievements and whether something "better" could have been achieved.

Leaving that aside though, did my Dad have that potential, or when you think about potential do you have to take circumstances into account? I guess we can never really now.

What we can now is how we respond to what we believe is our own potential. What do we do with the gifts we have? This is not about beating ourselves up and telling ourselves we should be doing more than we are. It is about taking an honest assessment of ourselves and asking ourselves what do we really want to do and what can we do about that.

I leave this with you.

I started out enthusiastically, but then other things overtook me. For one thing I noticed I was spending a lot of time blogging and not enough time earning money.

Well I am going to have another go at starting this blog.

I do love writing here – even if no-one reads it. But I know for sure you won't read it unless I write it.

So let's see how we go.

In the meantime, my colleague has risen to a senior management position.

During the course of our lunch she surprised me with the question "Do you like yourself as much as you used to?" When I look back on my decision to leave education, I am left wondering if it was the right decision or was it just based on chasing personal financial gain. I miss teaching. But as soon as I think about it long enough, I know I don't miss schools and neither do I miss the bureaucracy that surrounds them. Regardless of how my decision will weigh in the balance of my future, it has given me the opportunity to do things I never would have if I had stayed in teaching.

Surprising as it may seem, running my own business has given me the opportunity to know myself more fully. To be truthful, given my personality, I think I would have learnt more about myself whatever I did. Indeed, as I will come to shortly, I think my colleague's question was prompted by her reflection on her own actions in the positions she has held and the personal dilemmas that go hand in hand with increased responsibility.

Staying in the moment however, my immediate response was I thought I liked myself even more than I used to. As I have pursued my business interests I have had to reflect on the decisions I've made. On occasion I have trusted people I ought not to have trusted. There are times when I have invested time and money in ventures that were unlikely to, and in fact did not, succeed. As I reflect on those actions I have looked deep into myself to understand what attracts me to trust untrustworthy people and what attracts me to invest in unsound investments. In this deep reflection I have discovered a lot about myself. I have a tendency to avoid the difficult decisions – so it is easier to trust someone than probe their integrity. I believe in myself but I am afraid to really present myself because you may not share that belief – so it is easier to hope that the unsound investment might come off rather than confront what I am not putting into it.

Regardless of all this and more, I have had the opportunity to look into and have a glimpse of my deepest self. When I speak of this to some people their reaction is to regard me as self obsessed, that I think I'm better than other people. One associate in a potential business venture, with undisguised disdain once said to me "You think you're so special." That hit me hard and forced me to think. After a moment or two's thought I told him I did think I was special, but equally I thought he was special and indeed every single one of us is special. No one of us is more special than an other but we, each of us, are very special.

This all led to me to reflect on my colleague's question and pose it back to her. "You wouldn't like some of the things I do." She replied, emphasising the "you" meaning, I thought, me in particular. I took this to mean that after the idealism we had previously shared, I would think she had sold out on some of the principles we once shared.

It made me think of two young revolutionaries who met many years later. If I enter this analogy, my colleague's original question seems on the surface to be the wrong way around. In this scenario, I am the one who sold out. I left the revolutionary army to join the bourgeoisie, while she remained true to the revolution and, in this play, is indeed now a senior member of the new government.

However she went on to speak of the decisions she now makes. I thought she was going to fall into the jargon of saying "decisions she has to make" but either she corrected herself before the words came out and said instead, or always intended to say, "the decisions I choose to make."

Oh, the dilemmas of leadership. As young revolutionaries we could criticise our incumbent self serving and incompetent masters. When we find ourselves in their position however, things become so much more complicated. There is never, as it once seemed, one single obvious solution to a problem. No matter what we do, someone will be hurt, we will under-resource, or cut a program that should not be cut, we will never have a complete command of the whole picture and, being human, from time to time we will simply make bad decisions.

So do I like myself as much as I used to. Once I find it within me to forgive myself for my mistakes I truly can say I like myself more than I used to. A teacher in one of my postgraduate programs once made the comment "We miss out on so much in our organisations because we can't bring ourselves to forgive." In my personal journey, I have found it necessary to learn, and to continue to learn, to forgive myself as well as to forgive others. Indeed to forgive myself before I can forgive others. I am human. I make mistakes. I often don't care as much for those close to me as I want to. I get bound up in my own selfishness when others around me offer me so much. Yes, all of that is true. If, however, I can accept that as my human frailty find forgiveness I can move on to generosity.

As the Zondervan synopsis puts it

Pain is not something that most of us would count as a blessing; however, what it is and why we need it if we're to live life fully is brought to light in this book.

I was caused to think about this because I have recently had the experience of being unwell.

Normally, I would think of this as being an unfortunate experience. I don’t like being unwell. I’m not a good patient.

However, this time, even though the experience was very unpleasant, I felt, even when I was still unwell that something significant (perhaps even profound) was happening for me.

My illness was depression expressing itself mainly in the form of severe anxiety. I am not particularly prone to depression although I have experienced a significant episode once in the past. It has been a long time since I have experienced anything that you could call more than mild.

Last winter, I can remember getting out of my car on a cold and gray day. I felt dull. I had mild to low anxiety about my prospects for work. I just felt unhappy. I knew if it had been a sunny day I would have felt happy. From time to time I wake up and feel that familiar feeling of the beginnings of depression. I fight it. I get up and do something and the feeling goes away.

Having once experienced a prolonged period of depression, I felt strongly that I didn’t want to return to that place. I made sure that I made myself active. I knew that physical exercise was a good antidote for depression. So I make sure I swim at least four mornings a week. It wasn't a mania trying to hide depression, it was just some techniques I had learnt that were good for managing it.

It all seemed to work. I knew depression could return, but I thought (and pretty much still do think) I was managing it OK.

Then, one day about two months ago, pretty much out of the blue it pounced on me. I had experienced waking with that familiar dull feeling a couple of times in the days preceding but after my morning exercise, it went away. It's a bit like a cold. You get a sore throat and wonder if it is going to develop into anything further. Often it just goes away. It's the same with depression. I get those first feelings and wonder if it is going to develop. Later I'm relieved that it hasn't.

There is always somethig to get depressed about if I let it. Work prospects. Whether I like the work I'm doing. Whether I will ever get to do the work I really want, and feel called, to do. What other people think of me. The list goes on and on. Most times, it is a reminder that I need to do something. There is something on my mind (often only semi consciously) that I feel I should do. Really something I want to do in order to achieve a goal - something like developing a proposal to a client or, harder still, making that first contact with a prospective client. I am avoiding the hard thing and depression is my reminder. Most times I respond with some action and the black dog is sent away again for the time being.

This time seemed no different. I had been through a difficult experience which made me quite angry but at the same time left feeling quite helpless and impotent. The experience involved my life partner being portrayed in the media (probably the first time in her life anything she did had been the subject of media attention) in what I thought was a very unfair and very inacurate. However, I thought I was handling it OK.

At the same time, I am currently in the process of establishing a new business which is an important gamble for me. This business is about doing what I feel called to do – if it doesn't work, I will feel I have failed in my life's mission.

So it was one day I woke up feeling deeply depressed. I knew the feeling but had no idea how long it would last. Would it be a couple of hours, a couple of days or would it really set in? This time, it did set in. Over the next several weeks I was on a roller coaster ride, many times experiencing overwhelmening anxiety and helplessness.

I ended up taking almost two weeks off work – something I would have told myself I couldn't afford to do. Often just having to sit in a chair for an hour at a time telling myself over and over again that it was OK to stop and rest. I was no use to myself or to anyone else if I did not get well. Other times I just had to go for a long walk just to manage these overwhelming feelings which often came on as suddenly as being hit by a truck. One night I had to get up before we had finished our family meal and go for a walk.

Over this time, with the help of medication and the support of those around me the highs and lows of the roller coaster have levelled out.

Looking at myself now, I would say I was well again.

So, why is this a gift?

It is a gift on many levels.

At one level, it forced me to stop for a while and look at my lifestyle and what was really important to me. What did I really want to achieve in setting up this new business? What did I want to achieve for myself in my personal life? Included in this level was the opportunity for my partner and I to spend many lovely hours together doing things we would normally think we were too busy to do. Things like visiting nurseries and buying plants for the garden.

On another lever, this experience has given me a stronger empathy for others. It has deepened my committment to the work I do – guiding others to find their deepest purpose. It has reminded me this is my purpose. It enabled me to reconnect with my strong as steel commitment to this personal purpose.

At yet another level it has enabled me to experience connectedness with others on a plane we often do not get a chance to do. I decided early on that I would be honest with others about my illness. I wouldn't say I had the flu, I would say I have been suffering depression. I was a little afraid of doing this initially. How would people react? I need not have been. Every time I have discussed it with someone it has led to a deepening of the conversation. Often, very quickly it leads to us discussing life's greatest issues as the concern us personally. Have we achieved what we wanted to achieve? Is our current path leading us in the direction of achieving what we want? What do we think about the work we are currently doing? How do we think about ourselves in our work? Do we like ourselves?

None of these conversations would have occured at the level they did if I had not had the experience of being unwell.

I didn't like it at the time. It was awful – and I have only experienced it for a few weeks. Yet, without doubt, it was gift.

It made me wonder what we mean by "rich" and why it matters to us so much?

My current book is Phillip Yancey's volume Soul Survivor (How my faith survived the Church.). A book I highly recommend – even if you are not interested in the concept of faith. Yancey writes about his journey of faith by reviewing the lessons he learned from the lives of people he has either met or he experienced through what they wrote or what was written about them. Chapters cover people such as Martin Luther King Jnr., Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mahatma Gandhi and C. Everett Koop.

In each case, Yancey both praises the contribution each made and clearly portrays each person's failures, complexities and personal dilemmas.

While I have been rivetted by each chapter, the BRW Rich 200 made me think of Gandhi. Here was a man who held no formal office, wore only a rough hand woven loin cloth and possessed only what he carried with him. Yet Gandhi almost certainly procurred the independence of the world's second most populous nation and profoundly influenced not only India, but the United States (through his influence on King) and other parts of the world. Could any of us imagine how different the world would be today if Gandhi had never lived? In one hundred years will Kerry or James Packer even be remembered? Probably by some. Will anyone regard their legacy as profoundly good for the world?

Gandhi's life challenges almost all of what we stand for in the West. When we compare our wealth with others we fret not that we are not wealthy, but that we are not as wealthy as someone else.

Like Yancey, I found Gandhi's life challenging. I like my gadgets. I write this on an Apple MacBook Pro 17 which goes with me everywhere and an iPod. I have a mobile phone, a NextG modem which enables me to connect to the internet anywhere I am. I live a 200m2 home and drive a new car. There a five computers in my house. I haven't even begun to describe the extent of my posessions. Am I happier than Gandhi? Do I feel more fulfilled? I can't imagine doing what Gandhi did giving up posession after posession and living more and more simply. Living simply itself appeals to me, but I can't imagine myself taking even one hundreth of the steps Gandhi took to this end.

This challenges me and I don't know the answer to this as a personal dilemma. However reading about Gandhi has brought home to me that acquiring more and more wealth is not going to make me happier. It has caused me to re-examine my personal and business goals. It has led me to think once more about how I set my fees. I don't know where this will lead me. This could sound trite and self serving but I hope it doesn't – "all I can say is that I am on my own Spiral Path."

I hesitate to mention that Rein is married to Australian opposition leader Kevin Rudd because if you google "Therese Rein Ingeus", you will scroll a long way before finding a link that does not mention this fact. This despite the observation that Rein is a successful business person in her own right.

It's hard to find details about Rein on the internet because there is so much comment on her latest decision and the events leading up to it.

My angle in this story is the clash of purposes rather than the conflict of interests. Before making her decision, Rein passionately spoke of how her work was much more than a business but was her life support. She passionately believes in what she does – helping disadvantaged people find work – and no-one seems to suggest that she doesn't do it well.

But what happens when two people are tied together and their purposes clash? I am often asked this question in terms of leadership teams. What happens when the members of the team have different purposes (this is often expressed as 'agendas')?

This is a difficult question. I don't have an easy answer because there is no easy answer. However, somewhere, I believe the answer lies in the higher purpose that ties the people together. In the case of Rudd and Rein, him becoming Prime Minister does not directly affect her business. But her remaining in her (at least Australian) business does affect Rudd's ability to do his job if he becomes PM. What is the higher purpose? Only the people involved can answer that. In politics, it is often the politician who wins out and the politician is usually a man. I wonder how it would have been if it was a woman running for PM and her husband was running a successful business?

Regardless, it is the difficult task of those involved to find their higher purpose. In many cases, this leads to each individual finding their deeper purpose.

If you do want to comment you will find you now have to log in via Typekey.

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I will try to change this in the future, but for the moment, this is the way it will have to be.

As with many of us, when we started blogging we spent lots of time setting up our blogs. Now the reality of the amount of time maintenance takes has set in. I don't spend nearly as much time as I would like blogging, I don't want to be spending large amounts of the time I do have on maintenance.

]]> 2007-05-19T08:40:57Z 2007-05-19T08:40:02Z tag:www.chriscurnow.com,2007:/spiralpath/1.545 2007-05-19T08:40:02Z

The trouble with meetings is not meetings themselves but the people who attend them. None of us say what we really think.

Although how we create an environment in which it is OK to say what we think is another matter. Now that sounds like something I would like to write about.

I am currently a student at the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship. It won't suprise you to know that we spent one semester studying Entrepreneurship and Innovation. One of the big questions of the seminar subject was the one I posed at the beginning of this post, as well as the related question "How can we tell if an entrepreneurial venture will be successful?"

I value the research that has been carried out in this area, but I wonder about the questions. How do you define success anyway? Even if we agree on what success is, can we really tell what made a venture successful and what characteristics of the entrepreneur made it so? In the popular press, we look at "successful" entrepreneurs like Richard Branson. How do we know that for every Richard Branson, there are a thousand people out there with exactly the same mindset, the same life experience, the same outloook on risk taking and venture formation who have eitther tried and failed or never tried at all.

All of that is to assume that you can take two people and say on these range of measures they are the same. Who is to know that the single most important measure is the one you left out. Of course just like no two people have the same fingerprint, no two people are exactly alike. So what's the point of trying to find what makes and entrepreneur?

I seriously considerr the possibility that it is all a mattter of luck. The right person in the right place at the right time with the right idea and with the right lucky breaks.

I was prompted to write by this piece [sorry can't login to afr.com to provide a link — It was the main Leadership piece in the May 3-9, 2007 issue] in BRW.

Kevin Hindle is commenting on the 2006 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor which, according to the article, found that

Australia is still very much a 'milk-bar economy': a nation of small business owners whose ambitions are limited.

James Womack goes on to say

You've got one guy, and the product concept is between his or her ears — no marketing system, no no supply base, no media, no apparatus, nothing. It is esier to do it right when you begin with than it is to rework it into right once you are a way along."

The article then suggests:

A common failing is neglecting to define the business's purpose. Womack says most managers say the purpose of the business is to make money, which is not an observation that leads to action.

The Spiral Path is dedicated to guiding people to think not so much what the purpose of the business is, but what their own purpose is in starting and running the business. These two are related but not the same.