Leadership in Chaos Ian McClean

Normal service is resumed as I return to the Manifesto and explore how to preserve and protect the biggest asset any team has – you as the leader. Often ignoring their own needs and deprived in the service of others, the book title “Leaders Eat Last” promotes the idea of servant leadership (which I applaud by the way) ….however….Leaders Gotta Eat! How does a leader effectively balance doing the best for their people and their enterprise without doing the worst for themselves? Feast yourself!
 
Insights include:
Why Leaders suffer most burnoutThe dilemma in minding for the Golden GooseDemands Vs Resources in caring for self3 Ways to reduce DemandsCreating your own KSIs (Key Sanity Indicators) 
 
Related Episodes
Episode 52 – Zoom Out Often
Episode 49 – Happiness in 3 Parts
Episode 45 – Finding Flow in Chaos
Episode 34 – Finding Meaning in Chaos
Episode 6 – Be Your Best Self
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I am interrupting normal service for a newsflash! Such has been the demand recently out there for a succinct summary of what it means to be a leader now we are starting The Great Reset for society, work and life, that I have composed a triple-decker episode that roughly mirrors a keynote I’m delivering to address the question. Many of my previous themes are peppered throughout, along with a few new nuggets for the latest version of the New World (Dis)Order. 
 
Normal service – and a return to the Manifesto 22 – will resume next time.
 
Thank you for listening
 
Insights include:
How Leadership is the Same but DifferentHow we invest in the wrong thingsLeadership’s 2 Great UnderestimationsThe 3 Magic Ingredients for post-pandemic leadershipWhy Curiosity is the new Courage 
Related Episodes
Too many to mention!

https://flowukandireland.com/
Support the show

I am interrupting normal service for a newsflash! Such has been the demand recently out there for a succinct summary of what it means to be a leader now we are starting The Great Reset for society, work and life, that I have composed a triple-decker episode that roughly mirrors a keynote I’m delivering to address the question. Many of my previous themes are peppered throughout, along with a few new nuggets for the latest version of the New World (Dis)Order. 
 
Normal service – and a return to the Manifesto 22 – will resume next time.
 
Thank you for listening
 
Insights include:
How Leadership is the Same but DifferentHow we invest in the wrong thingsLeadership’s 2 Great UnderestimationsThe 3 Magic Ingredients for post-pandemic leadershipWhy Curiosity is the new Courage 
Related Episodes
Too many to mention!

https://flowukandireland.com/
Support the show

I am interrupting normal service for a newsflash! Such has been the demand recently out there for a succinct summary of what it means to be a leader now we are starting The Great Reset for society, work and life, that I have composed a triple-decker episode that roughly mirrors a keynote I’m delivering to address the question. Many of my previous themes are peppered throughout, along with a few new nuggets for the latest version of the New World (Dis)Order. 
 
Normal service – and a return to the Manifesto 22 – will resume next time.
 
Thank you for listening
 
Insights include:
How Leadership is the Same but DifferentHow we invest in the wrong thingsLeadership’s 2 Great UnderestimationsThe 3 Magic Ingredients for post-pandemic leadershipWhy Curiosity is the new Courage 
Related Episodes
Too many to mention!

https://flowukandireland.com/
Support the show

We often do our best thinking when we are not thinking.
From Archimedes to Newton, great breakthrough discovery examples “away from the job” are rife in science, technology and the arts. It appears that it is often through a break that we really break through
Leadership is fundamentally about setting the right direction and making the right choices. Those choices, however, are only as good as the perspectives they are based on. In this episode, I explain how our “factory setting” as a species is an up-close perspective as it aids our survival in the moment. So how do you rise above your default programming to Zoom Out and gain enough valuable perspective to truly break through?
Insights include:
-How I suddenly remembered that thing I couldn’t remember!
-Why leaders typically don’t Zoom Out
-How great thinkers thrived when not thinking
-The “Pale Blue Dot” – Carl Sagan’s timely perspective on Zooming Out

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed. it’s the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead
 
It’s almost 2 years to the day since I began this podcast and 50 episodes later, I wanted to pause and momentarily to Zoom Out and reflect.
 
It was Friday 13th (the clue was in the date?!) when I sat in the Cheltenham racecourse car park on a 1hr call with my international Flow partners from 4 continents sharing perspectives of what was unfolding as our world was disappearing from underneath our feet. Engulfed by chaos and uncertainty about the rapid spread of a virus no-one understood I remember the last question of the call. How long before things return to normal and how long do we have to wait this out? The most pessimistic view suggested September. By September, I mean September 2020. Shows what we knew. The paradox of life is that we understand it far better looking back, but we can only ever live it looking forward. Unless you’re Benjamin Button.
 
I moved into precautionary self-isolation on return to Dublin and wondered over what to do. There was no paid client work to do, so I wondered how could I add value. So I started a podcast about the thing I knew most, where there was the most need. The irony is I had intended starting a podcast for over 3 years – but never ever found the time for being always too busy.
 
Asking about the title, a colleague was doubtful “What will you do when the Chaos is over?”
 
The question, of course, missed the point. There is, was, and will always be Chaos.
 
Our very existence and Life itself was born out of Chaos. Sometimes chaos comes with a small “c”; other times with a large “C”.
 
The question is not if there will BE Chaos. The question is How to BE in Chaos?
 
For that we need to reset our expectations of what our default position is; and revise our original mental “factory settings” about how life is and the leadership that follows to support that.
 
Now that we are apparently lurching from one life-afflicting Chaos into another (Ukraine invasion) we need to lead differently and more vigilantly than ever.
 
If you have been, thank you for supporting the podcast.
Support the show (http://flowukandireland.com/)