Leading by Adventure - 044 - About adopting guest adventurers

Inspire your team meetings and foster creative outcomes through unusual perspectives – Use imaginary participation to induce novel perspectives

adventurer sat on a peak - header image for guest adventurers blog

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Why take this challenge?

Introduce new and creative perspectives on your difficult situations

Tap into subconscious wisdom and provide validity for giving it voice

Build your people’s skill set in incorporating creative elements in their thinking

Graphic image reflecting different pathways to take the adventure

Our ability to empathise with others, to put ourselves in their shoes and try and see the situations through their eyes, is a great asset. It is really helpful in building relationships and helping people through change. But it also has other hidden benefits that are not so well used.

For example, it enables us to do a half-way reasonable representation of people within those situations. Even people we have not actually met.

This means that we can reflect a small amount of the wisdom of great people into our own thinking. True, it is limited to our own experience and thinking, combined perhaps with aspects of our subconscious and creativity. But it offers that subconscious and creativity the authority and opportunity to voice helpful and insightful (perhaps extreme) perspectives that might otherwise not be available to us.

But how should this be used in a way that might best help us and our team? That is the subject of this week’s adventure.

+ Green track - taking it in your stride

Personal Guest Adventurer

So, let us take your current idea, situation or problem.

Who might be best able to provide helpful different perspectives on it? An adventurer like Ben Fogle? A statesman like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr? A controversist like Donald Trump? Perhaps a quintessential creative, leader, entrepreneur, social reformer, prophet, pirate, activist? Even a stage or film character?

Think about what you are currently focusing on as if you were them. What would they say? How might they see things differently to you? How might they shock or disrupt your thinking?

As you think about this, allow your subconscious free rein. Let it come up with anything, Some of it might be rubbish, but other things might have something really insightful to add. You don’t have to answer all of ‘their’ questions or challenges – just those that you feel could be helpful.

+ Blue track - a bit of a workout (click to open)

Guest Adventurers at your Meeting

Introduce the idea of the green track to your team. And ask them to select up to three different individuals or characters who might provide the most helpful novel perspectives on the situation. Create name tags (or even photos) around the table (or the virtual screen) to represent them.

Then invite the members of your team to feel free at various points in the meeting to ‘take the chair’ of any one of them and to ask a question or voice an observation from that perspective.

The intention is to generate creative insights. The group doesn’t need to respond to them all, just the ones they find helpful. They are after all just comments in the flow of a meeting.

At the end of the meeting ask your team how they found this approach, and what might be done to improve it for future meetings where it might be used.

+ Red track - stepping up to bat (click to open)

Guest Adventurers Strategy

Change is becoming an ever more important component of our working lives. If we are to be successful, the ability to take creative perspectives and include different ways of thinking will become key elements in in our people’s toolset.

The red track this week is about working with your team to think about how you might use a strategy around Guest Adventurers to help achieve this.

You may find the following resources helpful in tackling your challenge or in gaining further benefits from the skills and insights you develop

To catch up on past adventures you may have missed, feel free to browse our Adventures Library

Let us know how you get on.
Share your experience, your insights and your observation using the comments section at the bottom of the Linkedin post.

Please help us to extend and develop our community by sharing what you are doing. Click on the links below where you are most active, and then like or share the article to your network. Thank you for helping.

And share your progress and insights with the Twitter LbA community using #leadingbyadventure

Useful links:

Introduction to Leading by Adventure  |  What we mean by spirituality?  |  Why Adventure
Adventures to date   |  I did it, but it didn’t work very well   |  How do I know if it is working
Bringing this thinking into your meetings   |  Adventure & Mental Health
Leading by Adventure community   |  Explore Strategic Support options

Why take this challenge?

+ Green track - taking it in your stride

+ Blue track - a bit of a workout (click to open)

+ Red track - stepping up to bat (click to open)

Useful links:

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