Master the New Way of Leadership

Embrace the Mind of Blue Leaders

Embrace The Way (道) of Blue Leaders

Blue Leaders exist to various degrees before I began to write about them. Their eventual discovery is the result of a personal journey which spans nearly 40 years beginning from a student leader through universities, management practice and intensive Doctoral research, and as a former University Professor who concurrently engages in consulting, networking as well as leading and empowering business enterprises as an entrepreneur.

The discovery of Blue Leaders emerged from the mountain of literature on leadership, strategy, human capital management, social responsibility and business excellence. Sightings of Blue Leaders since are seen regularly in the news, during numerous consulting assignments, in clients and people met during networking meetings resulting from knowing the evidence indicative of Blue Leaders. The inevitable conclusion is that Blue leaders are ubiquitous. You just need to know what to look for to identify them.

The Way (道) of Blue Leaders

Blue Leadership is nurtured and cultivated by perfecting the skills necessary to materialize its 4 driving passions of Strategy, Service, People and Performance through conscious, deliberate and continuous experiential learning towards the attainment of self-mastery. Blue Leaders are not genetically born since everyone is already a leader of sorts at birth. The leadership journey of Blue Leaders is one of learning rather than training and education. The essential skills of Blue Leadership are learnt rather than taught.

The Dao (道) represents the flowing life energy精 (chi) in the Blue Leader. To the extent Blue Leadership blends, integrates and harmonizes the knowledge domains of its Passions, the first step to achieve self-mastery in the Art of Blue Leadership begins from invoking the Dao essence of the Blue Leader in you.

The essential Dao elements of Blue Leaders are Timeless, Formless and Intelligent. Together, they describe its existential philosophy, values, beliefs, attitudes and practices devoted to the main purpose of leading people and society to greater physical satisfaction and better access to the opportunities of happiness. The Dao does not try to rationalize or resolve the inherent conflicts and contradictions found in life. It instead generates workable solutions to engage whatever human and social conditions one encounters along life’s journey through the inevitable Terrain of Opportunity.

The Key to Unlock The Dao is Mindfulness.

Mindfulness is the key that unlocks the Dao 道 or Way of Blue Leadership through its 4 passions. Blue leadership is the emergent leadership that is better aligned and aptly conducive to this era of uncertainty and permanent turbulent change.

Mindfulness is the Capacility (capacity+capability) to capture holistically the authentic pattern(s) of changing social realities.

Mindfulness self-mastery in Blue Leaders imbues in them the consciousness of action through the sense-making process. It empowers exceptional courage for profoundly insightful reflection to inform fearless engagement and innovative decision-making. The sharpened self-awareness awakening in Blue Leaders strengthens their grasp on the relevant patterns of social reality amidst turbulent change to visualize meaningful coherence of the emergent trends operating in their terrain(s) of opportunity as they weigh the long-term risks of possible robust solutions among available decision options.

The absence of The Dao, or Blue Leadership mindfulness, explains why many organisations failed to navigate through the permanent turbulence in their terrain(s) of opportunity. Their failure to survive is often due to the inability to escape the past, and/or the inability to invent their future(s). The Dao provides the disciplined Way of Blue Leadership for effective and successful navigation through the uncertainty of permanent turbulence change.

Timelessness

The Dao acknowledges the absence of consensus as to a definitive concept of time and space. Time exists before people invented devices and clocks to measure its apparent motion. Early mankind pretends to understand time by measuring the motion of the sun and moon across their section of the sky, which is also in motion itself! Even distance or space is first measured by the frequency of moon sightings. Time in fact does not move, we do and so do the sun, moon and everything else. The future is not what will happen; the future is what is happening.

In The Dao, Time is permanent and eternal; meaning it has no beginning or ending. Yesterday, today and tomorrow are just markers on a time horizon which is common to everyone. If yesterday were a different day, and tomorrow yet another, is the future therefore in front or behind us? The “passage” of time is a misnomer; it is actually a space metaphor like the “distance” of space.

Blue Leaders do not use themselves as the static standard reference to the Time element wrongly conceived to be in motion. To Blue Leaders, the past, present and future are concurrent and this awakening leads them to self-awareness in their change management action. They consciously leave “behind” all and every past baggage as they engage the ever-present in the future without them.

Change happens. It has nothing to do with Time. Time did not cause or initiate them nor is Time a part of the solutions in change management. Change is the natural environmental characteristic in the terrain(s) of opportunity. Absent the immaterial and irrelevant Time element, change can therefore be captured in any of its permanent forms to be readily grasped and managed. In today’s era of uncertainty, change manifests and mutates rapidly to produce the permanent turbulence encountered by Blue Leaders and other leaders alike.

Formlessness

Each day repeats itself with different happening of events representing the myriad permutations of change. Nothing is permanent except permanent change itself. The conventional management wisdom is to race ahead of change and be ready for it. This approach is both illogical and stupid. It is like waiting at the next or a few stations ahead in order to catch the next train, even though one knows (unconsciously, perhaps) that the train is in perpetual and increasing motion! The only solution to catch and board a train in perpetual motion is to match its speed like the Red Queen in “Alice in Wonderland” who has to “keep running fast just to stand still”. This is also consistent with Einstein’s postulations in his theory of relativity.

Self-mastery in The Dao develops a profound sense of Formlessness in Blue Leaders. Blue Leaders do not mistake motion for action, nor substitute resources for creativity. They derive no lasting contentment with current performance since change continually re-opens and widens the gaps between expectations and performance. Change produces wide fluctuations and unacceptable dissonance in the expectation-performance gap like a runaway yin-yang pendulum where no-action would surrender to the chaos of oblivion whilst conventional action would definitely accentuate the gap.

The Dao in Blue Leaders injects Formlessness into their Blue Strategy. The Blue Strategy playbook is different from prescribed strategies in the literature. Blue strategies are at once and forever formless, like water over terrains. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, the master strategist: “Just as water retains no constant shape, so Blue Strategies also have no constant forms or conditions”.

Water can be “weaponized” into countless forms as in Formless Strategies, but remains basically itself; this quality characterizes the agility and flexibility traits in Blue leaders seen in their execution of Blue Strategy.

The playbook of Blue Strategies does not target change itself but the configuration and dynamism of capricious environmental characteristics in the terrain of opportunity. They reflect and locate the genesis of change to certain elements in the terrain of opportunity. The only and most appropriate decisive response to opportunistic turbulent change is to reinvent its Blue Leadership continuously so as to reimagine, reconfigure, recalibrate and reframe its strategic moves without adherence or conformance to any particular management ideology, known models and successful legacy solutions.

The synthesis of timelessness and formlessness in The Dao unleashes creative consequences and possibilities from the trending captured as they happen in the terrain of opportunity. Reflective and reflexive learning emboldens, excites and accelerates the creative energy flow in Blue Leaders to generate the necessary innovative, unusual, unfamiliar and uncommon intelligent change management response.

Intelligent

Guided by The Dao, the Blue Leader as a continuous experiential learner constantly reflects on his experience of the timeless world to construct and re-construct new patterns of social reality in harmony with his consummate passions. For the Blue Leader, what is most important about any event or phenomenon is not what has happened, but what it means. The Blue Leader is therefore interested in everything and anything in his terrain(s) of opportunity. The Blue Leader reads, listens and feels every intelligence and applies comprehension, reasoning, judgement, intuition, anticipation to draw his own conclusions for the right creative and innovative action.

The Dao derives actionable meaning for the Blue Leader by using his passions and their orientations to provide a consistent, authentic and harmonious sense-making worldview. The Intelligent element in The Dao empowers conscious reality-learning in Blue Leaders through “knowing what I think when I see what I say”.

As a Blue Leader awakens to the self-awareness of the timeless, formless and intelligent elements along The Way [Dao], he opens the door to his own Blue Leadership potential to grasp the holistic learning that enables him to achieve eventual self-mastery when the Art of Blue Leadership becomes him. Blue Leadership is the impact of learning, not training and education.

Learning enhances mindfulness in the Blue Leader. It expands his self-awareness along The Dao [Way]. It infects Change upon him as he imagines the many futures made possible by the permanent turbulent mutations in the terrain of opportunity.

To the Blue Leader, the future is what is happening and not what will happen. And the “long-term” is not something that will happen one day. The “long-term” refers to the patterns of possible futures that he plans strategically to achieve by dealing with the hazards and obstacles in the terrain of opportunity that block the outcomes of harmony and happiness in personal, social and community life.

LOOK AROUND YOU.

Have you encountered any Blue Leaders?

The Blue Leader can be spotted by the following behaviors:

· He/she constantly demonstrates all 4 passions in his decisions and actions.

· He/she is conscious of the ideology and personal values driving his passions.

· He/she is a continuous learner and encourages his people to be one.

· He/she is dedicated to decisions and actions across all 9 pathways.

· He/she promotes and executes the Blue Strategy to be “Different from the Rest”.

· He/she develops everyone to become a Blue Leader.

Future Articles shall elaborate further on the emergent Blue Leadership for this era of uncertainty and permanent turbulent change. Follow me. Join the Blue Leadership Group now.