LIFT with Louise Mowbray

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Lead Into the Future Today (LIFT) is brought to you by Louise Mowbray of Mowbray by Design, the creative Conscious Leadership Consultancy. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, you can do so here:

This week I thought I would expand on a perilous trap we’re all guilty of falling into, which is all about shutting down our natural curiosity when we think we know something.

From a leadership perspective, we’re not talking about honing a skill, technical knowledge or expertise. This type of knowledge is updated regularly in our fields and staying on top of new developments is relatively easy.

What I’m referring to is how we think, our mental models, mindsets and lenses on the world.

If we are to lead effectively today, with an understanding of how our world of work is evolving, how we think is either the stumbling block or the elixir.

There are some key leadership traits and thinking styles worth developing now. You’ve no doubt heard a lot about them and if you’ve got them, wonderful - in the words of Curtis Mayfield, Keep On Keeping On. And if you know you haven’t quite got there yet, start now. There is no time like now.

Agile Thinking and Emotional Agility
Futures Thinking, Systems Thinking and Sensemaking
Creativity and Innovative Thinking & Action
Emotional Intelligence, Self-Awareness & Empathy
Conscious Communications

“Don’t make up your mind. “Knowing” is the end of learning.” Naval Ravikant

I thought I’d share thirty, short, rather surprising minutes of my life with you, which may resonate and bring some of these leadership ‘thinking and being’ styles to life.

Last week I happened to be on LinkedIn when a notification popped up telling me about a Live session that was being held by one of my contacts. I had the time, am interested in the topic and so joined the session.

Four white men, each an expert in their field talking about the state of play in our world of work. The first thing that struck me was the lack of diversity on the panel. A few years ago, this might have been a more subtle, subconscious observation. However, in today’s world, we’re all much more aware when a panel, board or leadership team isn’t diverse and I noticed it right away.

At one point, one of the speakers - an older, well-known businessman, made a few comments about recent events being black swans. I wrote in the chat saying that we should be cautious about labelling events as ‘black swans’ just because they seemed to be improbable at the time. When the host read my comment to the panel, the older chap sniped “thanks for telling me off, mother”. I was floored. I think we all were by the looks on people’s faces.

His original comments had displayed his lack of futures thinking, sensemaking and curiosity about what’s going on in the world and the latter displayed his unconscious bias and lack of emotional intelligence, self-awareness and a whole lot more.

One of the other panellists immediately stepped in and the host then revealed that we are both members of a global action-based think tank, exploring ‘grey swans’, connecting the dots and attempting to make sense of the world. He went quiet and eventually, with no apology, muttered something along the lines of needing to explore grey swans. Why? Because his fellow male panellists said something that made him re-think his stance.

A clear case of old-school thinking meets unconscious bias, all in one wondrous package. It made me wonder about the culture of his organisation and how difficult it must be to work in that type of environment.

I also felt a deep sense of compassion. On the surface of things, until this point, he had been saying all the right stuff, however, he clearly got stuck somewhere in his emotional development and leadership thinking and the world has moved on.

And whilst this may seem to be an extreme case of outdated thinking, if you’re a woman reading this you will, no doubt, have countless stories of your own to tell. And if you’re a man reading this, you will know of colleagues, past and present, who are fast becoming irrelevant through their inability to adapt and change.

The knock-on effects of outdated thinking are vast. How are we to attract and retain the most diverse talent, foster cultures that drive agile thinking, creativity and innovation, navigate uncertain futures and be able to breathe and avoid burn-out amid relentless change? The future is definitely faster than we think and it takes no prisoners.

We can all be forgiven for believing that understanding something we hear about all the time equates to 'getting' it. And yes, the world is noisy - we’re inundated with advice and training on who we need to be and what we need to do, to thrive.

However, there is only one way of really knowing if all of the training and advice have had an impact:

When the chips are down and you're under pressure, your buttons are pushed or you’re really stressed, ask yourself: "how did I behave"? This is how we know if we’ve ‘got’ it.

When what we know aligns with who we are, growth and progress are effortless and in the right direction.

Please feel free to comment and share your insight with us and if you know of someone who would also enjoy this edition of LIFT, why not share it?

Until next time, take good care of yourself.

Best, Louise

Learn More

Future-Focused Leadership Coaching

Leadership Team Development

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit louisemowbray.substack.com

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What on earth is a Complexity Advisor?

I recently came across one of the most intriguing job titles I’ve seen in a while: Complexity Advisor. I have to confess, my first reaction wasn’t terribly enthusiastic - it was more along the lines of “not another crazy job title”. However, it stayed with me and the more I explored, the more I realised how urgently we need more people who can actually do this.

We’re all innovating and working with spaghetti junctions of complexity. What could be better than someone to help us to make sense of it all?

A wonderful example of this is Steven Hawking’s role as a member of a team of scientists on a quest to capture the first image of a black hole in the Netflix documentary Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know (well worth watching).

On face value, Hawking’s questions to the team appeared to be ones of clarification, and yet, more often than not, he provoked them to see things from a different perspective, which led to a different outcome. Watching this confirmed the awareness that we all know people like this. Mavericks and visionaries who have the ability to fill the role of Complexity Advisor (or any other crazy job title).

Complexity is not the enemy. It’s our status quo.

With every advancement in tech and science, we create more complexity. The trick is to upgrade our mental models so that we can live with ambiguity and find an elegant simplicity in the midst of it all.

Most of the execs and teams I work with are brilliant at what they do. Their gap is increasingly one of mental models; being able to step back, get the big picture, adapt to a changing context, gain clarity and move on.

None of this is new. It’s always been tough to have perspective when we’re in the middle of it all. What is different is the intensity and pace of change.

What we’re talking about here is emotional agility and agile thinking - two vital mental models well worth developing.

If I look back over the last few years - with the last twelve months being the accelerator, even my role has altered significantly. Increasingly, I’m the thought-partner, sounding board and sense maker working alongside leaders and teams to help them to cut through the noise and find better, smarter ways forward.

The aim is always to simplify without resorting to reductionist thinking, which can be deeply problematic in itself.

“Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.” Winston Churchill

Hire Someone Like This

Whilst you may not love the job title, there are nuggets in all of this. If you consider the most diverse companies are now more likely than ever to outperform less diverse peers on profitability (McKinsey), it’s pure gold. Why? Because we need the rich diversity of lived experiences, mental models, perspectives and skills to challenge the status quo, innovate and thrive.

Over the last decade, we’ve become increasingly obsessed with finding people who are a good fit in our organisations. Don’t do that. Rather, seek out the misfits. Find the people who you would never normally hire.

Unearth the people in your organisation who are deeply frustrated by the old-school constraints imposed on them. People with ‘blindingly obvious originality’ who have a different lens on the world.

Are you a maverick, visionary thinker? You might enjoy Rare Breed: A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous, and Different by Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger, Founders of Motto, the award-winning brand consultants.

Prioritise Innovation

Last, but not least, prioritise innovation! The 50 most innovative companies of 2020 (pre-pandemic) outperformed the MSCI Index by a staggering 17 percentage points over the past year. If we exclude the tech giants (Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix), top innovators’ outperformance was still 13 percentage points.

“The number of companies reporting that innovation is among their organisations’ top three priorities is up 10 percentage points in 2021 to 75%… but only about half of companies are investing behind their aspirations.” BCG - Most Innovative Companies

If innovation is top of mind, BCG’s report is definitely worth a read. You might also enjoy The CEO Innovation Agenda (part two of the same report), which digs into the need for C-Suite to own the innovation cycle.

From a behavioural perspective, which is the foundation of all of this, have a look at our team engagement on Agile Thinking & Innovation - Innovation: Mindset & Toolset. It’s a brilliant programme originally designed for the Kuwaiti Foundation for the Advancement of Science (KFAS), which we’ve re-designed for virtual.

Send me a mail if you’d like to explore this for your leadership team.

Please feel free to comment and share your insight with us and if you know of someone who would also enjoy this edition of LIFT, why not share it?

Until next time, take good care of yourself.

Best, Louise

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit louisemowbray.substack.com

Rare Breed: A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous, and Different

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The soul of great leadership has always been a little mystical. Why? Because the only way to define or measure outstanding leadership is to discover why people follow one another and to measure some sort of return on this. And the return could be in any form - political power, social impact or making a profit to name a few.

So how can we extract all that we know, become better leaders and produce a better return on our efforts?

The leadership training and development industry arose out of this age-old quest. In 2020, the global market size was valued at $357.7B, which was down on 2019 ($370.3B) due to the global pandemic (TrainingIndustry.com).

That’s a lot of money, especially when you consider that most leadership development programmes fall horribly short of their desired outcomes. You can dig into the ‘why’ of this in McKinsey’s 2020 report: Maximizing behavioural change in leadership development programs.

So let’s get into this topic…

I believe that ethics will be our greatest leadership challenge yet…

Who we need to be as leaders, today and into the future is not who we needed to be three or even five years ago. Because the greatest challenge we’re all facing as we begin to imagine a post-pandemic world is balancing the two most critical ingredients of any business endeavour, that of humanity and technology.

Let’s take a broad view of this for a moment. We know that technologies including facial recognition, iris and fingerprint scanning are already in full bloom, as is the debate on how we should use them. We also have tech embedded in our clothing and our phones, screens and cars and Apple have just launched their AirTag with an anti-stalking feature. And we know that Siri, Alexa, Google and all of our social platforms know way too much about us.

Take the next step, which is closer than you might think and imagine a world where we’re now embedding nanotech in our physical bodies. It’s not a great stretch, embedded and attached medical devices have kept us alive and improved the quality of our lives for some time.

The big shift here is the boundaries between our bodies and the devices that we will wear and/or embed - and the networks that these devices will interact with will become increasingly integrated.

If we think this through, the one leadership quality we are going to need, above all else, is a well developed ethical lens. And yes, I am focusing on us as human beings rather than the changing face of our world of work because they are wholly interconnected.

Leaders will have an increasingly tough mandate…

We know that science and technology can or will be able to achieve most things going forward. I say most things as NASA has just produced oxygen on Mars (MIT News) making living on uninhabitable planets ever more possible. On a side note, if only we applied our minds and funds to our earthly challenges in the same way… However, I digress…

As we have seen with developments in Genomics over recent years (How a Chinese Scientist Broke the Rules to Create the First Gene-Edited Babies | WSJ), the latest developments will always be ten steps ahead of regulation, ethical policies and law.

Every technological or scientific breakthrough we celebrate will present us with an ethical quandary: should we do it? And who gets to decide?

Leaders in the not too distant future will have to make increasingly difficult decisions on incremental advancements in tech and how we use it. Ultimately, science and technology will challenge our concept of what it means to be human, which we have been debating a’la Singularity (Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Stanford) for some time.

There are three Big Q’s worth asking ourselves right now are:

What are my values, what do I value and where are the lines I won’t cross?
Where do I stand on various issues - is it really a stand or could someone/thing twist my arm for the glory of discovery or profit itself?
Am I prepared to stick my neck out and risk my current livelihood or standing to be on the right side of “should we do it”? And what is the right side?

These are what I like to call research Q’s. In other words, they don’t need an immediate answer, rather we need to become deeply curious and keep these Q’s front of mind as we go about our day-to-day lives. The answers will become clear with each practical choice we are faced with over time.

The foundation of developing an ethical lens on the world, as you lead yourself, your team and your business into the future, rests firmly on your beliefs, your mindset, how you think and ultimately, how well you know yourself.

🔎 If you’d like to know yourself better, I recommend taking the award-winning Lumina Spark Profile. Unlike most personality profiling tools, Lumina measures your three persona’s, revealing who you are under different circumstances. Learn more.

Q: So back to my original question: how can we extract all that we know to become better leaders and produce a better return on our efforts?

There are loads of leadership models out there and whatever you follow, whether it’s conscious leadership, servant leadership, integral, inclusive, transformational, empathetic or any other style, they are all right and good. They all have value and are designed to take us on a journey of self-awareness, self-knowledge and self-mastery.

So whatever leadership modality floats your boat, whatever speaks to you right now, go with that. And know there will always be a “what else and what’s next?” All human development is continuous and our discoveries across neuroscience and epigenetics are doing a great job of informing the changing face of leadership methodologies.

Future Ready Leaders

Jacob Morgan, the best-selling author, keynote speaker and futurist’s latest book The Future Leader explores the makeup of future-ready leaders.

Morgan interviewed over 140 of the world's top CEOs and surveyed nearly 14,000 people. The result is that whilst we still need the foundations of creating a vision and executing on strategy, those surveyed believe there are nine critical skills and mindsets for leading into the future:

Skills:

Coach: Leaders need to appreciate employees as individuals and develop them.
Futurist: Leaders need to consider multiple scenarios and think through new possibilities (more on this below).
Technology Teenager: Just like teenagers, leaders need to be tech-savvy and digitally fluent.
Translator: Like translators, leaders need to be master listeners and communicators.
Yoda: Leaders need to be emotionally intelligent like Yoda and develop their empathy and self-awareness.

Mindsets:

Global Citizen: The mentality of the Global Citizen means thinking globally and embracing diversity.
Servant: The mindset of service means that you practice humility and you serve all of your stakeholders.
Chef: Leaders must masterfully balance the two most essential ingredients of any business: humanity and technology.
Explorer: Future leaders need to be like explorers of old and embrace the unknown.

Let’s also talk about some major shifts in the realms of leadership development over the last few years, which are gaining momentum and are in my view, here to stay.

The first is Leadership Team Coaching: we’re shifting from coaching individual leaders to coaching leadership teams. Why? Because we need the rich diversity of everyone’s thinking, skills and experience if we are to thrive. Our world of work is way too complex and changing way too fast to work in any other way.

The second is a shift from being thought-leaders to being thought-partners. If we’ve learned anything over the last year, it’s that no one has all the answers. We need to collaborate with all of our stakeholders and find better ways forward. So rather than coming up with a new solution and presenting it as a fait accompli, we need to navigate the future together.

The third is all about purpose and impact. A vision, mission and strategy used to be enough. Today and moving into the future, we need to keep refining our purpose and measuring our impact. Conscious capitalism, conscious business, B Corps, impact economics, the circular economy (and various flavours of these) serve to give us frameworks to work with. But who do we, as leaders, need to be to drive all of this? Do you have a purpose that is greater than profit? If not, you may find yourself falling behind.

The fourth is we need to think like futurists. Have you noticed that the language of strategic foresight has crept its way into mainstream business-speak over the last year? It lived on the edges, gathering momentum and suddenly populated our everyday language in 2020. If you think about it, we are all futurists. To be human is to think about the future. If you’re planning your next holiday or dinner or what you’d like to study or your next business, you’re being a futurist.

💡 I took an accreditation course in Strategic Foresight, through The Futures School (Kedge) a few years ago and it was brilliant. It really helped to refine my thinking around all of this and so much more. If you haven’t got time for a degree, this, or something similar is a great way to get started.

Conscious & Transformational Leadership

Last, but certainly not least, last week I was honoured to be interviewed by the fabulous Izabela Lundberg, Founder, Legacy Leaders Institute. We discussed all things conscious and transformational leadership and everything in between. Essentially, two leadership geeks exploring who we need to be to lead into the emergent future. I trust you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.

Connect with Izabela on LinkedIn

So that’s me for the time being. If this has in any way inspired you to develop your leadership lens on the world, book a time with me or send me a mail and we’ll arrange a time for a conversation.

And if you know of someone else who would also benefit from reading or listening to this episode, why not share it?

Until next time, take good care of yourself.

Best, Louise

louise@mowbraybydesign.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit louisemowbray.substack.com

The Future Leader: 9 Skills and Mindsets to Succeed in the Next Decade

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If you’ve been receiving my newsletters for a while now, you’ll notice a fresh new format from here on in. At least once a month, I’ll be digging more deeply into various topics to give you insight, which I trust you’ll find useful in your day-to-day business life. I’ll also be recording these deep dives for you to 🎧 listen to if you prefer. And you’ll be able to comment and have your say - I’d love to hear your views, whatever you’re up to, wherever you are in the world!

Trends and How They Help You

Introduction: Deciphering our World of Work

Right now I’m inspired by and truly grateful for, bright, smart people who can take the complexity of our world of work and make it understandable. And no, I don’t mean people who offer us reductionist thinking, which can lead to stereotyping leaving us wholly unprepared for what’s coming.

What I’m referring to is the art of taking the complex, with all its moving parts and deciphering it into something we can actively respond to and innovate for. And innovate we must!

Ernst F. Schumacher, the economic thinker, statistician and economist said it best:

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

How can keeping an eye on trends help you?

Trends help us enormously if we spend a little time on them. They enable us to make sense of what’s going on - and better prepare us for the future, which we can broadly think of as ‘sensemaking’.

Saying this, there’s a vast difference between the types of trends that come and go and megatrends or what I think of as golden threads, which are usually here to stay. Golden threads weave their way through and into all aspects of our lives and ultimately create the fabric of the future.

Do you remember Pokémon GO, the 2016 mobile augmented reality game? The game has been downloaded over 1 billion times, which means that at least a billion (mostly young) people are familiar with using augmented reality.

These are the young people who will be buying your products and services and who will be on your payroll, probably designing your next offering, in a very short period of time.

So whilst the game itself (and the many applications it has inspired) may rise in popularity or disappear into obscurity, knowing that augmented (and virtual) reality are here to stay informs how you build your new products, services, offerings or even a fresh new way of working.

Today, there are many talented people and organisations doing the hard work of collecting and distilling vast amounts of global data that point us to the megatrends, so that we don’t have to.

One of those people is Amy Webb, one of America's leading futurists and an award-winning author. She is the founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute and publisher of the annual FTI Tech Trends Report. Amy’s resume, which you can read in her LinkedIn profile is beyond impressive and I always look forward to her reports. You will find the latest one titled 2021: 14th Annual Tech Trends Report, which I advise you to read in more than one sitting! You can also 🎧 listen to Amy’s podcast version delivered via South By Southwest (SXSW).

Another person worth following is David Mattin, the business, innovation and trends journalist who has appeared everywhere from Fast Company and the Guardian to Google Think Quarterly and the World Economic Forum.

David, who you may remember from TrendWatching is the Founder of New World, Same Humans and writes a weekly newsletter, which makes sense of what’s going on. It’s really worth subscribing to: New World, Same Humans. And if you’d like to learn more about longer-term trends, he’s also the Founder of the Strategy and Futures Research Unit (SFRU).

In their inaugural report titled Five Trends for the 2020’s, David talks about five big trends that will do much to shape consumer expectations in the decade ahead.

Q: I’d really love to hear about your favourite trends, futures and foresight people and organisations. Who do you follow, who helps you to make sense of our world of work? Please share your favourites with us!

Three trends piquing my interest right now:

I thought I would share three trends that are front of mind right now and how you can use them. The first is EdTech, the second is Regenerative Business and the third is all things Agile.

1. EdTech

If you’re familiar with Coursera, Udemy or EdX from MIT to name a few, you’ll be aware of the rise of EdTech or Educational Technology. EdTech harnesses the social reach of the internet to deliver personalised learning and training.

In May last year when we were all in lockdown, I had Conversations on Camera with the Deans of two business schools to explore the future of executive education. I was interested to discover how they were adjusting to going virtual and what might happen post-pandemic. Unsurprisingly, major change was in the air and I’ve no doubt we’ll see loads more to come.

On the other end of the spectrum, if are a parent, over the last year you’ll have experienced the joys of homeschooling. Depending on the school(s) your children go to, you’ll also have waded your way through hugely varying degrees of competency in adjusting to a whole new way of learning.

In conclusion, I think we all agree that most children are better off at school, however, we can’t necessarily say the same for adults. The reason for this is yet another interconnected thread, which is all about being a ‘Lifelong Learner’.

Life-long is an extraordinarily long time if science succeeds in having us all live way longer than ever before, which is a topic I explored with the founders of Genome Advisory, which you can watch here. If we are to continue learning over the course of our careers and beyond, stepping out of our lives and being on campus for big chunks of time is not always practical or affordable.

This is where EdTech will play an increasingly vital role. On the 23rd March, TechCrunch reported that Coursera is preparing for the biggest EdTech IPO in years (Coursera set to roughly double its private valuation in impending IPO). Coursera was founded in 2012 by Stanford University computer science professors and the business understandably boomed during the pandemic. Its 77M global users (or “learners”) access online courses and degrees from top universities.

The company filed with the SEC to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "COUR.” The target price range of $30 to $33 could value it somewhere between $2.4B (its October valuation) and $5B.

Another thing to keep your eye on is Google’s recent announcement that could change some aspects of the future of work and higher education. Google Career Certificates is an online platform that delivers professional courses in high-growth fields including IT Support, Data Analytics, Project Management, UX Design and Android Development (so far). The idea is you can earn a credential in about six months online, which may well lead to immediate employment rather than spending time at college without an income.

The platform not only allows candidates to get certified - it provides access to career resources like coaching sessions, mock interviews, and a CV builder tool. It also opens up your resume to top employers through the Google Employer Consortium, which connects major companies to a Google certified talent pipeline. This is really interesting and it’s worth keeping an eye on other players in the market who may well follow.

As a leader, this is an interconnected megatrend, I’m sure you’re familiar with. It’s big and all encompassing. How we hire, onboard, measure performance, train and develop people is largely becoming ‘digitised’. Saying this, most organisations are clunky and disconnected in their delivery and AI driven systemic bias is a very real issue.

Q: How can you use EdTech and the associated available tools and technologies like AI, augmented and virtual reality, the use of neuroscience, behavioural science and our desire to be ‘lifelong learners’ to make this come alive? Becoming a living, breathing ‘learning organisation’ will make you way more attractive to the best talent out there, help you develop the talent you have and and retention will definitely improve.

2. Regenerative Business

We’ve all been talking about sustainable everything for some time. From the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) to how we go about developing people, it’s a word hot on everyone’s lips. This is more of a golden thread, weaving its way through every element of our lives, well into the foreseeable future. On a side note, if you’ve watched the Netflix documentary Seaspiracy, you may well be questioning the big business side of sustainability and how well this is regulated, if at all.

I came across a model last week, which stopped me in my tracks. It made me realise that I hadn’t actually thought deeply enough about what ‘sustainable’ means.

To sustain something means to ‘maintain things at the same level or pace’, which falls massively short of what we, as leaders, actually need to be doing.

The model that got me thinking is from Daniel Truran, Director General at ebbf, B Corp Ambassador at B Lab EU, Partner at NOW Partners and business school Professor at EOI, IE & ESADE, which he posted on LinkedIn (you can follow him here):

A Regenerative mindset looks to create more than you consume.
A Sustainable mindset looks to at least put back into the system as much as you took out.
The majority of businesses are in a Depleting mindset, subtracting from what surrounds them in order to achieve their individual progress.

Prof. Truran also posed the following questions along with his explanation:

What kind of leadership are you inspiring?

What change will you / your company choose?

Great Q’s and much food for thought. I’ll leave it at this and would love to hear your thoughts?

3. Creative, Innovative, Agile Thinking and Action

I’d like to dig into Agile for a moment as it’s becoming a way of working that just keeps on giving. If you’re not yet familiar with Agile methodologies, you will no doubt have heard of Agile Principles, Scrum and job titles like Scrum Master. The strong rugby analogy relates to cohesive teams with self-managed roles working together for a common goal.

What separates Agile from other software development and project management approaches is the focus on the people doing the work and how they collaborate between self-organising, cross-functional teams.

The Four Agile Principles

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

The underlying golden thread here is all around Agile Thinking, which is underpinned by Emotional Agility.

Agile Thinking is the ability to consciously shift your thinking when and how the situation requires it. It is a set of beliefs, values, principles and way of thinking.

Organisational development methodologies are always interesting as they shape our businesses and the people who work in them. Saying this, my years in both executive search and leadership development have taught me that people and culture, or our values and how we think, individually and collectively will make or break any methodology.

If you’re interested in the Emotional Agility element of this, there is a brilliant two-part podcast from emotions researchers Brené Brown and Dr Susan David, which you can listen to here.

Q: As a leader, what can you do to foster Creative, Innovative, Agile Thinking and action in your yourself, your team and throughout your organisation? We know that this type of mindset is vital today and into the future and yet, it can be tricky to shift.

Fortunately, there are some really smart team programmes to help you with this. Have a look at Innovation: Mindset & Toolset, Lumina Learning’s offering on the topic. It was originally developed for the Kuwaiti Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS), is based on behavioural science and is ideally suited to teams.

So that’s me for the time being. Three trends that are worth being aware of, thinking about and taking action on. If any of these are top of mind for you right now I’d love to hear more about what you’re up to in your business life. Please feel free to comment and share your insight with us and if you know of someone who would also enjoy this edition of LIFT, why not share it?

Last, but not least, if you’d like to talk to me about development for yourself, your team or your business, get in touch and we’ll arrange a time for a conversation.

Until next time, take good care of yourself.

Best, Louise

louise@mowbraybydesign.com

👋 Are you on Clubhouse? If so, let’s connect.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit louisemowbray.substack.com

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Today I'm talking to Stan Stalnaker, Founding Director of Hub Culture, the conscious social network with over 50,000 global members. Since its inception, Hub Culture has produced over fifty pop-up locations in cities around the world with over 70,000 hosted guests, introduced virtual reality environments, interviewed thousands of cultural and business leaders, and launched integrated financial services around Ven. I wanted to talk to Stan about what Hub Culture is up to today, his recent visit to the Amazon and how the network is serving their digital citizens from a conscious leadership perspective. If you enjoyed this episode, check out the show notes, relevant links and more at: www.mowbraybydesign.com/lift-stan-stalnaker

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Today I’m talking to Tanner Methvin who has worked in the field of Social Innovation for the last 20 years assisting private, public and not-for-profit organisations to build a more environmentally conscious, socially just and abundant world. Tanner is a Partner at Impact Amplifier, a Director of Earth Capital and sits on several boards. He originally hails from Los Angeles and moved to Cape Town in 1998, where he is now based. I wanted to talk to Tanner to understand more about the social enterprise and impact investment industry, particularly in Africa. If you enjoyed this episode, check out the show notes, relevant links and more at: www.mowbraybydesign.com/lift-tanner-methvin/

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In this episode of LIFT, I talk to Dr Jan Bellermann, Founder of the Conscious Leadership Academy in Munich, Germany. Jan is an international Keynote Speaker, Trainer and Coach on the big topics of conscious leadership and values-driven cultures. I recently met Jan at the Conscious Companies event on Conscious Leadership and Ethics in Johannesburg, South Africa where we were both invited to speak - Jan delivered an inspiring keynote and I wanted to learn more about his journey so far… If you enjoyed this episode, check out the show notes, relevant links and more at: https://www.mowbraybydesign.com/lift-dr-jan-bellermann/

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Mathieu Cocquillon, Co-Founder of Mama Money, Africa's first cashless money transfer system talks about why he and his business partner, Raphael Grojnowski started the business, their journey so far and how Mamma Money is touching the lives and effecting the wallets of millions of people across Africa and beyond. If you enjoyed this episode, check out the show notes, relevant links and more here: https://www.mowbraybydesign.com/lift-mathieu-coquillon/

LIFT with Louise Mowbray: Recent Episodes

LIFT Podcast by Louise Mowbray