By building bridges across the different disciplines
of creative artistry, authentic leadership, generative dialogue and
collective wisdom, Michael Jones offers a vision, and sets a tone,
for a new leadership story. It is a story that speaks to a renaissance
in human awareness and illuminates the vital importance of the aesthetic
dimensions of leadership; presence, uniqueness, beauty, grace, voice
and wholeness. Together they represent a commons of the imagination
- a public space for realizing the full potential for whole - person
learning and the renewal of our collective life together.
Artful Leadership;
Awakening the Commons of the Imagination features a compelling
series of conversations with John Huss, a successful business leader.
In their walks and talks in a lakeside park near Michael’s home,
they weave together personal stories and deep insights into the creative
process as they explore the emerging role and challenges of leading
in time of complexity and sudden change. They agree that these changes
will require the emergence of a more adaptive and subtle intelligence,
one in which we will need to awaken to our inner artistry and an organic
centre of being in order to find our way.
Michael traces the interior journey of the leader from one of personal
artistry to an emerging public role as generator of collective wisdom
through serving as convener and social architect. This leads to us
to ask, “Who am I really?” “What are my gifts and
hidden strengths?” “ How can I let go?” “
What is already trying to happen naturally?” And “How
would my experience change, if I were leading by feeling and grace
rather than by force of will?”
To travel this road as a leader is to be guided by a different illumination.
The glare of the flashlight is replaced with the flickering light
of the candle. As we adjust our sight downward, a once ancient form
of meeting space comes more clearly into view. Michael describes it
as the commons. In his final chapter, The
Social Architecture of Leadership, Michael maps the leader’s
emerging role as the social architect of the commons. It is only by
bringing the fullness of our individuality into the collective that
it, and we, may be further enlarged. It is the possibility of growing
into a dimension of Self larger than our personal identities, beliefs
and assumptions that is the promise of the commons. Now is the time
for us to explore this promise.
