Live In Your Potential

Recently we hosted a Google hangout with the wonderful Katharine McLennan, who called in all the way from North Carolina, USA to discuss with us the challenges, triumphs and opportunities facing the world of leadership today, and ultimately the relevance she finds in the accessibility of this in regards to both personal & professional leadership.

As a sort of tradition, McLennan likes to start any presentation she makes with a proverb, and whilst virtual, this time was no different. As a team, we all feel a personal connection to this proverb, and so we’d like to share her adapted Japanese Proverb with you, which she believes defines both the i4 Model and her career thus far.

Strategy without implementation, is a daydream.
And implementation without strategy, is a nightmare.
Either without collaboration, is unsustainable. And all without a kind and curious awareness of self, is meaningless.

From life as a Corporate and Olympic Strategist, turned Leadership Development Artist, McLennan has had exposure to an endless array of leadership models over the years and believes we’re all looking for the same thing, “the holy grail – what is the answer to what works in leadership development?”

Philosophy vs Leadership

Exploring the relationship that can be perceived between age-old philosophy and that of the current imagination age, McLennan believes that somewhere along the way we simply labeled it leadership, and that both have always been defined by two questions:

Who am I? How do I relate to what and whom is beyond me?

As the leadership industry expands and evolves, it is important to note the differences between the leadership tools and models that are available to us, and McLennan advocates that the holistic training and approach of the  enables accessibility to its benefits from both trained leadership professionals and individuals looking to improve their personal leadership skills.

Taking us on a journey through the past of the industrial and information ages, which have lead to the emergence of the new age – the imagination age, McLennan delves into the benefits offered by this new Brain Focused period.

Explaining that the brain, referred to in this creative age, is the ‘expanded brain’, meaning that it encompasses the three brains of head, heart and gut; and she believes that we must focus on integrating and nourishing all three brains so they play together like an orchestra would.

Leadership development in the current age is increasingly agile in nature, as it must adapt and remain relevant to the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world we live in.

Looking to Australia as an example, McLennan highlights the rise of engagement, 360 assessments and coaching companies that are emerging, alongside a growing participation from board members who are becoming interested in learning to look for potential in candidates over a long-term period by understanding “what it means to be an amazing leader, to recognise these qualities and how to develop them.”

This rise in engagement and interest has also lead to an increase in conferences, workshops and events alike that are presenting the growing audience with a variety of options, from “The Happiness & it’s causes” conference and “Mindful Leadership” workshop, to Google’s “Search Inside Yourself”.

Aiding this increasing interest is the emergence of new technologies, namely the Diffusion Tension Imaging (or DTI), which improves upon the existing functional MRI by mapping the communication pathways between the activity occurring in the brain, rather than just the active areas.

This is allowing us to “use neuroscience to help understand the brain and understand how to change the brain, so that we can understand how to change leadership behaviors to make it more effective for an environment that is increasingly more complex.”

Following this, McLennan turns to book, , articulating that she “found a real sense of pragmatism for the everyday world of work, which is hard to find…The years Silvia has spent really shows up in an incredibly easy to understand set of qualities (call competencies) and pillars underneath them, that just resonated with me.”

Positive Psychology

In a world where leaderships assessments all too often highlight the negatives and make it hard for an individual to find light in their feedback, what McLennan really “loves about Silvia’s model, is that it gets us to live in our potential in a pragmatic way through an exploration of how the brain works.”

Silvia joins the conversation and brings to life the ‘aha’ moment that gave rise to the creation of the , and how the four ‘i’s – integration, inspiration, imagination and intuition – are relevant to both today’s society and the field of neuroscience and leadership development.

She expresses that it’s about neuroscience that we can access and it focuses on the whole person, rather than an individual asset, by recognising the presence of the three brains in the gut, heart and head; and equipping the individual to nurture, grow and develop all three.