Leadership Development for All! - oeb MidSummit session

This is what happened in our session 'Leadership Development for all!' at the oeb MidSummit in Reykjavik on June 8. We applied a mini and super fast innovation process around the challenge 'what does the world need leadership development to become'? With my warm thanks to everyone in the room.

Leadership Development for All from Bert De Coutere

Article leading up to the session: Follow the Leader, the Creative Guide.

What does it all mean?

We started with some polls to get a sense of the wisdom in the room around the big hairy topic of leadership development. Here are some of the results:

The classic question: is leadership development more about nature or nurture? You can see the results above. We believed that people can develop into a better leader.

Somehow over the past decades, leadership got confused with a managerial position. In our session we used CCL's definition of leadership as a social process that produces shared direction, alignment and commitment. In that sense, leadership is everyone's business, and leadership development is everyone's development.

Here's another biggie: common practice in leadership development is to focus on the individual and have what we call 'individual leadership development' trainings. But leadership itself is a collective process - so shouldn't we be developing the collective rather than the individual?

We are not entirely happy with the effectiveness of leadership development today, although it 'passed' - barely. (In Belgium you need a 50% mark to pass.)

And the above graph shows the 'volution spectrum' : should we innovate leadership development in a more evolutionary or revolutionary way? Majority said adjusting what works but to a new context of today's business and society.

Framestorming

Someone famous once said: a problem properly framed is a problem half solved. That someone was right. So we spend some time in our table groups to better frame the loosely defined wicked problem of 'leadership development for all'. What does that mean? First we went over some sources of inspiration (see slides above). Words matter. For example 'scaling' leadership development might mean doing whatever we did in the rich west and bring that to a context that needs something else. So we liked the word 'viral leadership' better Next we spend some time at our tables to frame the challenge. Below are the results:

Hackaton

Next, the tables continued with the framed challenge and went for an idea to address it. Some inspiration of what was done before was shared (eg the LeaderMOOC).
Here's what people said they tried before:

We did not use traditional brainstorming (as that tends to yield incremental ideas), but a hack-a-ton lite approach and came up with below ideas:

So this is where we ended up 

The idea was to identify experiments that we could do within a week and under 500 dollar budget. None of the prototypes stood out from the others (we did not see a clear winner), but I'll leave you with where we ended up and hope it inspires you:

• Do a contest on what leadership development should look like with 500 dollar prize money
• Send the manager away for a week and tell the team to figure it out (and give them 500 dollar)
• Broadcast a radio message on the fact that we are all leaders to increase awareness
• Flip it: swap manager roles 

Hvelreki! (Icelandic wish of good fortune: may a whole whale strand at your shore)