The On Think Tanks Fellowship Programme is moving forward with very promising personal and group developments. We (the mentors), like the fellows, are learning along the way.
The Fellowship has convened a group of 11 young think tank leaders who are trying to bring on fresh and imaginative perspectives to age-old problems. We want to help Fellows become real agents of change and transform their organisations to make them healthier, more aligned with global possibilities and challenges and with a larger and deeper contribution to their people and communities.
How are we doing this?
First, each fellow has prepared a leadership development plan and they are receiving the help of mentors to learn, implement, reflect and act.
Second, many of them are taking courses from the OTT School, where the Evolving Think Tanks series covers a wide array of critical issues for think tanks to become better at what they do. Gradually, they will share lessons learned and findings with their peers through our monthly meetings.
Third, we meet online once a month using Zoom. During these meetings, we discuss common challenges and Fellows also share their personal development plans with each other. This common space is critical for our fourth step: the co-design of actionable methods and ideas to inform the development of a new leadership paradigm for think tanks.
The power of this group to enable the emergence of a new paradigm is undeniable. What is this new paradigm about? It´s related to what we have called Integral leadership.
Integral leadership is an evolving movement visible in different spots of the world, where leaders are daring to abandon their comfort zones and traditional approaches to leadership to embrace volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (sometimes referred to as VUCA). These leaders need courage to connect to their inner truths, to speak about the intangible but powerful forces that underlie our behaviours, to make visible their own vulnerability and not know what the right solution is.
We are working on three critical entry points developed by intuit/liderazgo integral to let this integral leadership emerge:
- Uniting the internal with the external world: individuals are increasingly aware that the issues outside are a mirror of the issues inside ourselves . However, as Alan Watkins (co-founder of Complete Coherence Subscribe to our newsletter Become a contributor