WiseGrowth

About WiseGrowth

We are in a polycrisis. But the linear approach to leadership we learned has not prepared us for our complex, dynamic reality.

A ‘polycrisis’ is a polite way of saying “we’re screwed” if we don’t do anything about it.

Our world is kind of self-destructing in a few different ways, all at the same time. Our challenges include (but are not limited to):

  • escalating dangers from the climate crisis / global warming,
  • political crises (wars and increasing conflict),
  • economic instability,
  • social injustice,
  • disparities in wealth
  • …

This messed up situation is a polycrisis. It’s basically everything, everywhere, all at once. It is a “wicked problem”. It took decades to get to this point because many things gradually got us here.

And we were not taught at school or in business what to do about this.

This means each of us must choose.

Either we keep doing what we’ve always done (which gives us the same results).

Or each of us, in our own ways, can try many different things and be willing to learn with each other, so we can make real change. Change that will not only allow us to survive, but also to thrive.

We must stop choosing the type of leadership that doesn’t work.

Leadership that doesn’t work is what we’ve been doing:

  • working independently and ignoring different perspectives;
  • recognizing problems we are comfortable with, but not actually understanding the real problems; and,
  • following ‘best practices’ the solve the ‘recognized problem’, but not actually making things better.

Too often people stick with what they know because it is predictable and comfortable (in the short-term). And it doesn’t require much thinking or personal risk (in the short-term).

It is much easier to claim that there is no other way, than it is to learn to think, to understand, and to figure out what does work.

We must start choosing the type of leadership we really need: collaborative, exploratory, and experimental.

To solve the “wicked problem” of the polycrisis, each of us must focus on the topic that matters most to us. The process requires:

  • working with other people,
  • understanding new things and new perspectives, and
  • figuring out (through experiments and learning) what does work.

The process is messy. And frustrating. And scary.

There will be lots of false starts.

But eventually promising possibilities will emerge.

To address the polycrisis, we need to create the conditions for real change

None of us individually will ‘solve the problem’. But we can solve parts of it. This includes helping other people to solve the parts they can. Leaders must focus on engaging others in an exploratory and experimental process to figure out what they can figure out.

It’s like the ecosystem for cryptocurrency (without the energy waste and annoying people selling you coins). A wicked problem requires lots of people, simultaneously and iteratively, figuring out a part of the solution.

Therefore, as a leader, you can make an impact. A large part of your influence will be creating the conditions where change is a possibility.

WiseGrowth is collaborative, exploratory, and experimental leadership. Are you ready?

WiseGrowth is quite different than the leadership being taught in business schools and rewarded at work. Developing WiseGrowth is hard because it requires thinking and acting differently. But it is also so much more fun.

If you want to be one of the leaders making change, but you don’t know where to start, this blog is for you. Sign up to receive updates of new posts.

Who am I?

My official bio:

  • I have lived and worked in 6 countries on 3 continents.
  • I worked in the financial environment (capital markets and high-tech startup/entrepreneurial environment), I teach business and critical thinking at the Masters and College level, and I coach business leaders and facilitate their teams to help them make things happen that they were not able to.
  • My projects include building one of the original high-tech accelerator programs in Toronto where our ROI was globally unprecedented (according to York University research). In my projects, I and my teams generate results that most people didn’t think were possible, often breaking records.

My unofficial bio:

Experimenting for performance improvement

  • On paper, my family is professional, international, and successful.
  • But my family also has extensive intergenerational trauma.
  • I started studying trauma healing as a teenager and continued through to academic research. My studies, experimentation, frustration and joys, I dramatically decreased the impact of the intergenerational trauma and developed a behaviour change model.
  • My experiences and research let me figure out how people actually learn, unlearn, and change their behaviour, which is why so many of the people ready to work with me improve their performance so significantly.

Making sense to understand

  • I was lucky in some ways that I have always been around exceptionally smart, international, successful people. And I also spent a lot of time in stunningly beautiful nature, and around very practical, resourceful outdoors people, farmers, and ranchers.
  • Because I lived in so many different environments, I constantly had to learn new things just to keep up. Additionally, I was usually the youngest, and an undiagnosed dyslexic. Therefore, I always felt dumb.
  • Fortunately for me, rather than accepting I was ‘dumb’, I became incredibly curious so that I could learn a lot of things very quickly, and develop some level of mastery where necessary. And I found ways of making myself useful, so I could spend time with the people I enjoyed being with. Eventually, I earned the right to tell some very powerful people what to do.
  • My ability to understand complex things quickly is a process I have used with clients and students to help them achieve results they hadn’t been able to before.

Empathy to foster collaboration

  • Through my life, I have been an ‘outsider’.
    • As a kid, I lived in places where many people didn’t like ‘our kind’. And I lived with many different families: rich and poor, agricultural and globally-ranked professionals. I skied and sailed at some of the the top resorts. And I’ve mucked out barns and assisted vets on surgeries.
    • As an adult, I lived and worked in many different cultures: blue collar to elite-designer white collars, and different languages, religions, and politics.
  • It was challenging and even scary at times. But parts of it were really fun.
  • Since I was often so dependent of strangers very different from me, I learned to connect with them, and often to figure out a way for us to work together.
  • My ability to connect with a range of people allowed me to figure out (most of the time) how to increase collaboration (not just co-operation, but collaboration where the outcome is greater than the sum of the parts).

My motivation for WiseGrowth

Throughout my childhood and early adulthood, I often was in or near pristine nature. Big mountains. Huge rivers and lakes. Majestic animals. And enough flora and fauna to keep several teams of researchers busy their whole lives.

I also had access to real food: wild strawberries on mountaintops, fresh organic vegetables from the back garden, grass-fed beef (before we needed to specify it was grass-fed), chickens that ran around the barnyard during the day and were in the coop at night as protection from coyotes.

It is breaking my heart that we have put nature in such peril. And that the current generation has not idea what life was like before global warming.

It is also incredibly frustrating to live in a world where we have such amazing technologies. But people’s ability to solve problems together has declined. We have such amazing opportunities to create thriving, yet, we are letting it slip through our fingers.

But I also believe in business and politics. Both business and political leaders can and must be part of the solution. I work with the ones who recognize their role in contributing to the solution.

We lost our way because we wanted things to be easy. Now we face the hardships caused by those decisions. But hard is not a barrier to change. It just means we have to be more creative. And we have to be more intentional about staying motivated and finding joy where we can.

By leveraging my ability to foster collaboration, to understand complex situations, and to figure out what actually creates real change, I can help you achieve more of what is possible, faster.

Are you ready to lead real change?

I would be pleased to help you become a real change leader in your business or community.

Cat vM