Good afternoon, and I hope the school year has begun with excitement and  nervousness, and for those of you in BC, that the learning for all of us continues in earnest while the government and the Teachers Federation work towards a settlement.
I had the great pleasure of seeing Douglas Coupland’s exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery on the weekend; it was amazing. One of the ideas behind the exhibition was how Coupland, born in the 20th Century, saw a 21st Century mind. For example, a very powerful part of the exhibition included large prints of what appeared to be black dots standing vertically up and down a large white canvass with a couple of smudges on them. If, however you looked through the lens of a camera in a phone the images became one of the  World Trade Centre towers, and the smudges became bodies falling. Much of the 21st Century mind receives it’s visual messages via a screen of some sort; it’s how sense is made of the world.
Now from a leadership perspective, there are any number of implications of this 21st Century mind. Do our management styles change? How do we engage people not just now in 2014, but looking forward, towards the next decades. What will the implications be for leadership and management in the next 20 years? Of course, some things will not change; we are still deep down small groups of people huddled around a campfire hungry for a good story. But how that story gets told, who is involved with the authoring of it, and how it gets disseminated will likely be very different. And if Marshall MacLuhan was right and the medium is the message, then we’re in for a rather adventurous time.
One word that keeps coming up for me as I reflect with a 20th century brain on the 21st century is ‘options’. Options in how I get my stories, options in how I tell my story, options in audience for my story, options in who I see as authority. As leaders and managers then, I see us working away from the one “right” way; towards options in our workplaces. Command and control will work for short periods, for emergencies and for some teaching, but largely, we are called to explore options with each other. This one shift, I believe will have a profound effect on our efficiency models, dependent as they are on command and control and one right way. ‘Options’ based leadership will lead to more collaboration, more cooperation and more creativity.
So may this week be a week of discovering the options available to you and your team, and finding not the right way, but the best way forward for the time being.