Conor with the Holy Grail — a Rainbow Bagel from Brooklyn.  With cream cheese, it tasted like a cheesecake!   February 2017.

In order to expand my media offerings, I’ve been making podcasts.  This one has material that’s been covered on the blog, but now you can listen to my sonorous tones as you make the larger connection between Design Thinking, social structure, empathy, and leadership.

There are a couple of key concepts that I write about in my scholarly work that I lay out in this podcast.  Largest of these is the idea of a meta-linear and a meta-nonlinear social system, and how it aggregates information.  A typical hierarchy behaves like a meta-linear system, in that knowledge aggregation, is essentially additive (nothing much changes except putting stuff together) and happens above the knowledge producers.  The node

above the leaves is responsible for combining the information.  Since statistically, the person at the node can’t have the consummate knowledge of both the leaves, what happens is knowledge is added together, and passed up.  No opportunities for synergy.

Contrast this to a more empathy-driven, real-time social network.  See below:

Connections are dependent on agency of the individuals, and their level of empathetic development.  These kinds of relationships take more time (connection is only partially driven by titles, and more by data-driven exploration) but are based on more realistic trust, and because they’re predicated on exchange, produce far more meta-nonlinear synergies and divergent design thinking.

And THAT leads to the need for Servant Leadership 2.0, which takes Jim Collins’ version of leadership, and couples that to an enhanced ability to connect with all sorts of different constituencies.  Which in turn, enriches the idea AND the information pool for better designs, with much greater potential for breakthroughs.

Here’s the podcast:

I do understand that this is hard stuff.  But it’s pretty cool.  Here are some links below for folks who just want to read the text.

Servant Leadership 2.0
Servant Leadership 2.0 — A Starting Point
Servant Leadership 2.0 — It’s coming, whether you like it or not
Servant Leadership 2.0 — some Semi-Final Thoughts
Servant Leadership 2.0 Continued — the Evolved Global Holistic Team
Design Thinking and Servant Leadership — the First in a Series
Design Thinking and Servant Leadership — Part II — Understanding the Legalistic Transition
Design Thinking and Servant Leadership — Part III — Trust-Based Relationships and Leadership Acceleration
Combining Servant Leadership 2.0, Empathy, and Design Heuristics in High Performance Teams