February 03, 2008

Creative Leadership

"Crisis response requires both planning and improvising. Planning and preparation helps enable rapid coordinated action; at the same time plans are always insufficient. People need the capacity to read and understand a situation and improvise their approach as the reality unfolds." - Center for Creative Leadership. Crisis Leadership: When Plans Fail, Improvise.

I am amazed at both the amount of effort people put forth that others take for granted and the intangible skills that the general public fail to recognize as valuable. Especially the ability to improvise. In the context of every day work Leaders in the Arts and other disciplines are called upon to engage in situations that are not pre-planned, scenarios that have not been spelled out in a management course. They are called upon to acknowledge unfamiliar circumstances and act in the best interest of the organization or community they represent.

Leaders who see the most success are either naturally flexible and gifted in the art of unconditional support OR are those people who have been trained in the core fundamentals of improvisation.