Harbinger Consultants
Culture + Complexity + ChangeArchive for leadership
2017 | How can we help?
New Year greetings. We’re looking forward to another year of socially and culturally engaged projects and consultancies that support community and regional prosperity and wellbeing. We start the year with the question, how can we help you achieve your goals this year?
What about mentoring and facilitation?
Harbinger’s John Armstrong has been regularly involved in organisational and individual mentoring to work with people in developing capacity and capability. Mentoring in this way involves facilitating networks and enterprise insight, as well as building a sense of purpose. John has long participated in mentoring programs, including in his previous roles in higher education, and continues to mentor cultural, Indigenous and social enterprises and entrepreneurs.
Harbinger also designs and facilitates many community engagement processes and workshops to enhance community, economic and regional development. In 2017, John will be hitting the road with Flying Arts to deliver workshops in regional Queensland addressing how to communicate about artwork, tendering for and managing public art and establishing an arts organisation.
Both mentoring and facilitation are intended to support leadership development and build ‘leaderful’ organisations and communities. That is, they focus on sharing knowledge, creating learning environments and enhancing purpose.
SERVICES | Skilled Facilitation
Harbinger Consultants are highly skilled facilitators, and we work with diverse organisations and groups in diverse and complex situations to achieve high-quality results. We are especially attuned to complex issues and processes that require nimble handling and problem solving.
Our experience, which includes government, strategic planning and design, community and cultural organisations, higher education and non-profit boards, also means we have a strong commitment to social leadership and effective participation to achieve organisational learning and development. Every meeting and decision-making point is an opportunity for an organisation or a community to grow. As members of IAP2 and Australian Facilitators Network, we have a professional approach and draw on a wealth of experience to achieve highly engaging and creative facilitation.
Our achievements include:
- facilitating board and committee meetings to reach programming decisions and develop strategic and business planning
- facilitating stakeholder engagement and multi-stakeholder workshops in regional and urban contexts to identify and rank community development priorities and needs
- facilitating charettes and co-design processes to explore options for future planning and development paths including social and economic infrastructure, social innovation and enterprise and urban development options
- facilitating regional development workshops that identify place-based strengths and opportunities for innovation
- facilitating intercultural, creative and cultural processes
- facilitating learning, dialogue and deliberation, including the use of Theory U
We are always keen to discuss and understand your needs. Please contact us for a chat.
LEAD | Honey bee & locust
This week a colleague reminded us about honeybee and locust leadership approaches. We’d like to think of Harbinger, even as a small organisation, as a honey bee style organisation – with a mindset and approach that is values-driven, that recognises the enterprise cannot be sustainable unless the context in which it operates is sustainble. It is in keeping with learnings from the Adaptive Leadership program Linda recently completed with the Benevolent Society. Wong and Avery have developed the sustainability leadership model using the honey bee and locust as powerful metaphors. These metaphors help us to understand what is needed to promote sustainability in organisations and communities that is based on principles and values. Wong and Avery state that “sustainability in organisation is created when … three components – leadership, corporate strategies and culture – reinforce each other for the long term benefit of multiple stakeholders”.
As people involved in various organisations – providing professional services and governance – we know how difficult it can be to try to align those three components, especially when there is much focus on short term interests and self-interest. Wong and Avery propose that “sustainability should be the intent of an entire existence of an enterprise”. As a corporate strategy, sustainability means adopting a systems or holistic methodology and understanding impact and value. For Wong and Avery, such attention to value and impact sets a virtuous circle in motion. Drawing on the work of Peter Senge, they also present ideas for sustainable leadership and leading through creative tension. Culture is integral – enabling innovation, building trust, cultivating learning and capturing value. This requires work across a whole organisation and a deep understanding of networks and systems.
Avery and Bergsteiner have progressed this thinking about sustainability and organisations to develop a model of sustainable leadership that is based on recognising the differences between honey bees and locusts. The difference between them is described as: “Honey bees build community and ecosystems. Locusts swarm together and eat greenfields bare.” They are enmeshed in our cultural and mythic imaginary: the locusts in plague proportions decimate life and the honey bees as productive pollinators enrich ecologies. The point is to create value for all stakeholders rather than just a limited number of stakeholders. Obviously has significant bearing on governance and requires an ethical stance from both CEOs and Chairs:
In the development of the “honey bee” approach to sustainability leadership, the traditional model of the hierarchical leader with strong authority is replaced by the leader who works in a participatory team environment where goals are created through a collaborative and shared decision-making process. Such an approach is essential to leading in times of uncertainty and flux and where the science and evidence upon which decisions can be made are ambiguous.
This is why stakeholder engagement and public participation are essential dimensions of policy and plan making for sustainability.
For an excellent summary of honey bee and locust leadership, please read Peter Laburn’s blog.
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