Creative Leadership: The Gift of my Childhood

Introduction
From my childhood a number of things stand out as being of significance.

Bullying – both victim and offender, power, attention seeking, control
Reading – fantasy, imagination, vision and on the odd occasion studious
Technical – mechanical, electrical, physical, ability to draw, read and understand technical sketches and music notation
Recklessness – loved some sports and hated others, sailing, skiing, hiking, kendo were all good sports and brought out a my determination and sometimes my reckless side, not a huge fan of team based competitive sports
Individualism – rejection of norms, troublemaker, non-conformist, manifests itself in my choice of sports and my determination not to let bullies get the better of me

After I read through my personal obituary I realised that there were a lot of matches, something I commented on in my journal before I started writing this essay. In this essay I will take a little time to focus on each one of these areas. In conclusion I will draw a quick analogy of an activity where I feel I have addressed each of these issues and try to discover any emergent behaviours or motivators.

Reading
This was one of my favourite activities, along with planning and thinking. Not that these plans turned into action all that often, but I was very good at visualising what I was going to do after I had achieved success at an activity. The weakness of this approach was that sometimes the visualisation of how I was going to get to that success end point was ignored in favour of the end result. I guess you could call this the “give it to me now without the hard work in between” or “I know what I will do when I get it, but I can’t get off my arse to get there”. On balance I think that this is an edge because visualisation is an important part of the design process for any new innovation or improvement to the existing product or service. Being able to imagine what you could do with something is the first step in changing that thing in such a way that you can achieve that goal. Another weakness to consider with vision is that it can encourage impatience as I get so keen to see the end result I can rush through some of the steps and end up having to touch up the end product later.

Technical
This is an ability I’ve always practiced and its best described as the way I come to understand how a process works or the way I build something based on a plan or set of instructions. It also covers how I go about using various tools and techniques to create a thing and involves a fair amount of visualisation when I’m in the planning phase of the build. I see this as a strength because it traqnsforms the process of realising visions into a set of concrete steps, plans or processes that need to be executed. It also acts as a safe harbour for me when things are going wrong because a bad situation can often be broken down into small problems and systematically fixed.

Bullying
This is a harder one to define because there are elements or power and attention seeking in Bullying. This implies a need for both power and affiliation which could be mutually exclusive in a leader where power is usually paired with achievement. How this manifests itself in my adult life is in the game playing that I indulge in at work, which usually consists of using governance processes for my personal advantage. Bullying I received in childhood stills haunts my memories to this day. I have drawn strength from this by driving my career forward in a determined sort of way, usually with the end goal of making more money that anyone who pissed me off in high school. The negative side of this is that it has made me remote and hard to get to know. I tend to react defensively, almost to the point of being slightly paranoid whenever I am approached by colleagues that I believe could be about to give me more work to do. It’s like the feeling where you think you see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it turns out to be someone with a torch bringing you more work.

Recklessness
I do not mean stupidity by this. I think it is more a case of feeling confident about something and just doing it, trusting in myself or my equipment to save the day. I do not mean bravery by this. That would involve having the courage to do something regardless of how confident I felt about achieving the goal, even in the face of hopeless odds. In my world this manifests itself in a love of sailing, skiing, mountain climbing, hunting, kayaking, cycling, Kendo, motorbikes and other things that most people think are implicitly dangerous. To me they are not dangerous because all you need to do is learn the skills involved and you can do them. For example, I never worry about going over the edge of a cliff when I have a climbing harness, shoes, helmet and ropes rigged up properly. It doesn’t matter how high the cliff is as long as I have enough rope to get to the bottom!

Individualism
You might have noticed that all of the sports I like doing are individualistic. If I fail it is down to my mistake or to an equipment failure. They are not team sports and do not depend on other people to pull me through challenges. Even in Kendo where competition is in a team format, it is still a one on one challenge between two humans, their equipment, their skill, stamina, balance and knowledge of their opponents fighting style. When you fight in Kendo the world ceases to exist as you go one on one with your opponent, bring mind and body together in a fight to the metaphorical death. I guess part of this stems from the bullying that seems to be a curse of team sports, in particular rugby. It’s hard to get good at something if you are the small kid who is always sitting on the bench. As a child I remember be fiercely individualistic, rejecting the social norms of my high school because I couldn’t be part of that anyway. At the time this cost me socially, but I bounced back at University where I met a lot more people who thought like me and I rarely bumped into anyone I went to school with ever again.

Conclusion
In this essay I have touched on each of the feelings or behaviours I most remember my early life and which I think are still shaping my life at present. I could summarize the whole set with a simple analogy that comes from one sport, wall climbing:

Vision – I know what the goal is, to reach the top!
Technical – I have the right equipment, I have the right skills and understand the process, the unexpected doesn’t frighten me as I have backup
Recklessness – It’s a dangerous and pointless sport with lots of injuries and pain
Individual – Me V The Wall, no need to rely on others unless I’m climbing in a pair
Bullying – I have complete control of the situation

What I have discovered through this analogy is that for me the emergent motivation is that requirement for control or power. I can conclude by saying that when I have all these factors in balance I feel that I have control over the situation and myself. When I feel that these things are being incrementally stripped away from me I can respond with anger or hopelessness. The implication of this is that I feel I am an emergent visionary leader, looking for the right situation to unleash the energy I have inside and motivated by power and achievement.