Where to Now?

Next week I will be presenting a keynote speech focusing on the interrelationship of resilience, transformation, and leadership. If we simply define resilience as the ability to adapt to both gradual and abrupt change, we might also suspect that the major challenge we are dealing with is the acceptance of a different reality--or a transformation in mind-set.

For example, when the levees broke in New Orleans, precipitated by Hurricane Katrina, the resulting flooding and disappearance of New Orleans as I knew it growing up was a very difficult reality to accept. Even the television pictures were not powerful enough to transform my thinking. I had to actually go there and experience the devastation to move through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' model of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. This process was a test of my resilience to change. But most of all, the acceptance that New Orleans would never be the same again! Period!

The process of working as a facilitator with the Hurricane Katrina Utah Support Group helped measurably in my moving through the five-step process. The mutual, support, sharing, and self-organizing we did to survive and adapt to Utah, I define as "collective leadership." Where I define leadership as the ability to influence the thinking (acceptance of the new reality), commitment (the commitment to reinvent their lives), and the performance (through empowered behaviors) of others.

During the very early stages, a more individualistic leadership was necessary to inspire others with hope and desire to ask the question: "Where to now?" Getting to that place was different for each individual, because it required the the five-step journey of Kubler-Ross. At the culmination of this journey, an extremely high level of resiliency is acquired--in addition to whatever existed before by virtue of their race, sex, or other "isms" prevalent in our society requiring adaptive behaviors.

The point is resiliency is a measure of our unique abilities to adapt to change. The change that is required for adaptation is transformation of of our mind-set with respect to accepting a different reality. The process of getting to that place is usually assisted by the influence of others--either individually or as a group.


P.S. Phil and I will be announcing our new blockbuster book very soon! I will also be announcing a date and time for a free webinar on Leadership.