With growing political polarization, the housing crisis, the challenges of the pandemic, our collective burnout and the growing recognition that climate change is here, it is easy to feel like the fabric of our world is coming apart. These are growing times of distrust in democracy and leadership. What can we do about it? How can we all be leaders to make change?
To reflect on these challenges and ways that leaders in community can work to address them, Mayor Lisa Helps from the City of Victoria wrote a blog post titled The world is coming apart at the seams and what can we do about it.
Author Margaret Wheatley wrote two books, titled Who Do You Choose to Be and Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time. There were three lessons that Mayor Helps pulled from Wheatley's books:
We need to become better systems thinkers, to “see a system and its web of connections and to find less aggressive ways to work through problems."
How we approach and talk about problem-solving is aggressive. We “attack a problem,” “tackle the issue,” “get on top of it,” “wrestle it to the ground,” “take a stab at it”.
We need to listen. “We can’t be healthy if we’re not in a relationship. And whole is from the same root as holy. Listening moves us closer; it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy”.
Join Mayor Lisa Helps of Victoria, BC, as she sits down with Margaret Wheatley for a fireside chat about systems thinking and changing the way we as cities/towns think about working collectively. What kind of leader do we need to help to weave back the broken seams that are happening in our cities and towns.
For More Information:
Read The world is coming apart at the seams and what can we do about it by Mayor Lisa Helps
Order Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time by Margaret Wheatley
Watch Who Do You Choose To Be? Restoring Leadership as a Noble Profession by Margaret Wheatley
Read Supporting Pioneering Leaders as Communities of Practice by Margaret Wheatley
Register for this webinar below. All registrants will receive a full recording of the webinar, a copy of the slides, and a collection of links and resources.
Speakers
Margaret Wheatley
Since 1966, Margaret Wheatley has worked globally in many different roles: a speaker, teacher, community worker, consultant, advisor, formal leader. From these deep and varied experiences, she has developed the unshakable conviction that leaders must learn how to evoke people’s inherent generosity, creativity, and need for community. As this world tears us apart, sane leadership on behalf of the human spirit is the only way forward.
She is a best-selling author of nine books, from the classic Leadership and the New Science in 1992 and Who Do We Choose To Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity in June 2017. Her latest work is The Warrior’s Songline, a multi-sensory experience of the journey Warriors for the Human Spirit take to become the presence of insight and compassion–no matter what is going on around them. This new form melds together voice and sound creating an evocative and transcendent listening experience.
Mayor Lisa Helps
Mayor Helps works hard at City Hall in Victoria, BC, and in the community to ensure that the city is prosperous, affordable, sustainable, and ready for the future. Taking a long-term, big-picture perspective, she looks both around the city and around the world for innovative solutions to the pressing challenges facing us including climate change, lack of affordable housing, and growing social isolation and loneliness, especially among youth and seniors.
Mayor Helps believes that the best way to address complex challenges is to bring people from a diversity of backgrounds, perspectives and experiences together and to truly listen to each other. In her experience, listening deeply with empathy and generosity and taking in new information can enable us to change our minds or at least to broaden our perspectives.