You can participate in this Masterclass with the GOLD, FULL ACCESS ticket.
A deep-dive into the themes outlined in The Tri-Dextrous Organisation keynote.
1: Neuroscience - revitalising the right hemisphere of the brain
We once thought that the left hemisphere of the brain was rational, logical and analytical; and the right hemisphere was artistic, creative and musical. We believed one side was dominant, and that the dominant side determined somebody’s personality.
We now know this is wrong. Very wrong. Both sides do both, but in different ways.
The left side deals with the known, analysing, breaking down, and dividing complex wholes into simple to understand and manage parts. It reacts with deep anxiety, fear and rigidity when faced with novelty, uncertainty and the unexpected. The right side deals with the unknown, embraces the novel, unusual and even the downright weird, and is curious to take exploratory steps into strange, new worlds.
For more than a century, we’ve habitually thought of and designed organisations as if they were left-hemisphere-only brains. As a result, they are ill-equipped to deal with novelty, strangeness or paradox. Faced with such conditions, they react with deep anxiety and dysfunctional fear. That’s a potentially fatal response in today’s increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous markets.
The first half of the masterclass explores how to start taking different stances towards novelty, strangeness and paradox in order to enable the right-hemisphere thinking and deliver effective practices of re-exploration. We will look at:
- Western and Asian philosophies of thought - two different cultural approaches to dealing with ‘reality’ that, when combined, can be extraordinarily powerful
- The paradoxical power of mental models - the mental models or maps that the left brain creates to describe ‘reality’ can trap us in one-sided perspectives that lead to dysfunctional relationships and the stifling, smothering and strangling of the vital capacity to generate innovative and creative solutions to complex situations
2: Adaptive Emergence - new ways of thinking about leadership, culture and teamwork
Drawing from themes discussed in part one, the second half of the masterclass will take a deep dive into leadership, culture and teamwork, and examine how current “best practices” need to shift for organisations to become future-ready. We will explore:
- The Paradox of Leadership - how it’s vital to ‘know thyself’ but avoid the kind of ‘heroic’ leadership that can lead to monstrous outcomes
- The Paradox of Culture - how a powerful culture is essential to enabling sense making, decision making & action taking to become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation but avoiding the strong-value monocultures that actively inhibit the very creativity, critical thinking, and cognitive flexibility that’s at the heart of future work
- The Paradox of Teamwork - how you must cultivate collaborative, socially engaged and actively learning teams as the basic unit of intelligent, purposeful action in the organisation but avoid strong teams degenerating into factional groupthink, anxiety and conformity