Here is a small collection of stuff I’ve found on the internet in the last month or so.
Software that embodies that Quality is less like a screen and input device and more like a working library. Information you need, in the form of books and videos, line the walls. Where there are no books, there are whiteboards for brainstorming, sharing ideas, and keeping track of things. In the center of the room are wide, spacious desks; you can sit down to focus on working something through or stand and shuffle papers around to try and organize a problem such that an insight reveals itself. You don’t work at the computer, you work amongst the information.
Since you aren’t listening, this team starts talking to each other and other teams. They are trying to self-correct and perhaps they might, but this is the Death Spiral, so they don’t. They fail. This is unfortunate because they had all the data to be successful and just needed a leadership nudge, but since it was clear you didn’t want to hear it they didn’t share, and the project failed.
Everyone is demoralized, everyone feels like they failed, but since no one is truly communicating all sorts of opinion starts to become facts. You tell yourself the story that you might not have the right people on the team and perhaps if shuffling people around you’ll get a better outcome. They think they failed because you didn’t get them context because you were busy withholding information, being proud, and not listening.
They continue to judge, and they create their versions of the truth and you and your leadership style. Again, there’s far more of them than you, which means that their version of the truth spread at a faster rate than yours. Eventually, a piece of that twisted truth regarding your leadership ability arrives on your plate from someone you listen to and you’re shocked.
The evidence is clear: the more creative a person is the more he reveals an openness to his own feelings and emotions, a sensitive intellect and understanding, self-awareness, and wide-ranging interests, including many which in the American culture are thought to be feminine.
Many subjects indicated that as children they had enjoyed a marked degree of autonomy from their parents. They were entrusted with independent judgment and allowed to develop curiosity at their own pace without overt supervision or interference. MacKinnon noted of these parents, “They did not hesitate to grant him rather unusual freedom in exploring his universe and in making decisions for himself — and this early as well as late. The expectation of the parent that the child would act independently but reasonably and responsibly appears to have contributed immensely to the latter’s sense of personal autonomy which was to develop to such a marked degree.”
Most persons live a sort of half-life, giving expression to only a very limited part of themselves and realizing only a few of their many potentialities. The creative person has the courage to experience opposites of his nature and to attempt some reconciliation of them in an individuated expression of himself.