Good morning from a frosty Winnipeg. I hope all is well in your world. This edition of Leadership Notes is a little late, I’m sorry to say. I’ve been teaching and facilitating all week with some wonderful credit union folks and this is the first time I’ve had to sit and write. It has been a great week!

I’ve been reminded this week about diversity. As wonderfully common we all are as a species, each and every one of us is amazingly individual. We each process the world in our own unique way. According to a podcast I was listening to in the car on my way to Winnipeg yesterday evening, each of us has our own view of reality; put succinctly, you see the tree outside your window in your own unique way because of the individual way your mind processes the information coming to into it. (Check out the podcast from the CBC radio show “Ideas” called Imagination Parts 1 & 2) 

And so, very clearly then the people with whom you work do not “get it” in quite the same way you do. There are some cultural commonalities, but what is common sense to you, may in fact not be common sense to the person in the next cubicle or office. A sometime colleague of mine was saying in a meeting late last week that she knows for example that her mind processes first about the wide range of possibilities, then about results, making a decision and getting the job done, and then thinking about the implications on the people affected a rather distant fourth. And by then, often the decision is made and she’s off and running. She then learned that her plan would fall short because of “people” issues. So she learned to put a picture of people in her office in the top right hand corner of her computer screen. It reminded her to think about the people issues earlier in her processing. That got me thinking, what is the picture I’d need in the top right hand corner? For me, it’s about details; I often decide too quickly that the idea is really neat and let’s just go for it, and then find I get bogged down and frustrated by too many details that I haven’t considered in the first place. And so I’m placing an MC Esher picture http://www.mcescher.com/ 
as the background on my computer to remind me to think about the details. What is the part of the process in your mind that is third or fourth? What image could you place in your workplace that would help you to make better decisions?

May this week find some opportunities to learn more about ourselves and the people with whom we work.