25 Aug 2009

For the first session I went to Developing Agile Leaders and Teams: A Developmental & Transformational Path with Gilles Brouillette, because I've recently taken on a management-heavy role and my ideas on leadership are are, shall we say, unformed.  Gilles has a PhD in Transpersonal Psycology, and the session was heavy on what I can assume psychologists think about all day: questions about our perception of reality, and the models that we use to glean meaning from the world round us.  It was all rather deep.
His spent most of the 90 minutes building up a model of levels of physcological development.  The top three levels are apparently very rarely attained, but are where you need to be if you're going to be a successful leader.  So how do you get to these high levels of physiological development?  Apparently it's about changing the underlying way that you make sense of the world, from an "OR" model to an "AND" model.  It sounded to me like being able to hold more than possibility in your mind at the same time; a bit like understanding a smooth spectrum of probability rather than jumping to single binary outcome.