Hakuna Matata

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/06/the-lion-king-3d-film-review

I recently went to see The Lion King Musical and was inspired by the story. The Lion King, a story about a lion cub named Simba, whose power hungry Uncle Scar, killed his father, convinced Simba it was his fault, and told him to run away from his problems into the jungle. There are some days where I feel just like Simba, where I think running away is the only answer to my problems. And I'm sure there are days where you feel similar as well. But Simba eventually had to face his problems, and was able to save Pride Rock. And just like Simba, we too need to face our problems and find ways to sustain ourselves in tough times.

When Simba decided to face his Uncle Scar and come head on with his problems he had his family and friends, a crazy monkey named Rafiki, and faith in his strength of mind, to help sustain himself. You could say that these things were his Hakuna Matata. The things that helped him realise he didn't need to worry because he would be able to deal with these issues. This got me thinking, what things do I use to sustain myself? What do I do to conquer my own Pride Rock? What makes my Hakuna Matata?

There are three things that always get me through.
1. Friends
2. Sad Movies
3. Reading Books

Friends.
Just like Simba I rely on my friends. There is nothing better than asking hearing a different perspective on your situation from them or even just hanging out to take your mind off what's going on. And getting a hug from your friend is probably the best thing of all. My friends always find ways to make me laugh and help me realise that, hey maybe things aren't all that bad.

Source: http://youqueen.com/life/personal-development/how-to-want-what-you-have-and-adopt-the-attitude-of-gratitude/

Sad Movies.
As strange as it may sound, when things aren't going all that well I like to sit and watch sad movies. There is something oddly therapeutic about crying your eyes out to The Note Book, sobbing loudly whilst watching Titanic or balling when Mufasa is pushed off the cliff in The Lion King. I find that watching sad movies lets me release my stress and sadness. I walk away feeling clearer and can face the challenge with a more open mind.

Source: http://www.shape.com/weight-loss/weight-maintenance/gaining-weight-blame-your-favorite-tearjerkers

Reading Books.

When I read, I lose myself in another world. I imagine myself sitting and watching the whole story unfold in their world. When I read Harry Potter, I was at Hogwarts watching it all happen. When I read Twilight, (I was young, I didn't realise how terrible it was) I was at Forks High School with Bella and Edward. Books let me distract myself from what I'm having to deal with. Instead I deal with the imaginary problems of the characters in the books.

Source: http://www.futureofeducation.com/profiles/blogs/7-inspiring-and-motivational-books-to-read-in-2015

These things are what make up my Hakuna Matata, my problem free philosophy. They help me worry and stress less, and just deal with the problem head on. Everyone has their own Hakuna Matata in their lives. Identifying them helps us deal with stressful situations and sustain ourselves. So today, I leave you with a question. 

What does Hakuna Matata mean to you?

Source: LionKingSongs

Building bridges

I'm going to give you two words, and in the comments I want you to write the first thing that pops into your head. Ready?

Nuclear power.

I imagine a lot of you thought of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the radiation leakage in Fukushima. For lot of people, that's more or less where our knowledge ends. However there is a group of people who know more about nuclear power and yet we rarely hear their knowledge. This group of people are atomic scientists. Specifically those that focus their research on nuclear energy.

These scientists know multitudes about the safety, reliability and more about nuclear power, yet we hardly hear from them. There is a gap between what they know and what we know. This gap is not exclusive to nuclear power but extends to all science.

"There is a gap between what science knows and what society does."- Rowan Brookes

Some of the planks on the bridge need to be put on by scientists as they learn to communicate with the public more effectively. But some of those planks can be put on by us. By learning more we can help piece the bridge together.

Here are a few things that you could do to help you start placing the planks on the bridge between science and public opinion. We'll start by focusing on nuclear power.
1. Learn more about nuclear power.
Jump on Google or YouTube, type in nuclear power, see what pops up.
A few friends and I have made a video about nuclear power to help get you started. We've tried to summarise all the key information for you.

Here are a few other useful videos.

2. Share your knowledge.
Now you know about nuclear power, but there are many that don't. They might have some misconceptions, try and clear it up for them.

References:
Image:
AJB's Photos 2010, A wooden bridge through the woods, online image, viewed 28 August 2015, https://ajbp.wordpress.com/tag/wooden-bridge/
Video:
SciShow 2013, The World's First Human-Made Nuclear Reactor, online video, viewed 15 August 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLJ1ebNcNLM
vlogbrothers 2011, Japan's Nuclear Disaster Explained, online video, viewed 15 August 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBvUtY0PfB8
Veritasium 2015, A Walk Around Chernobyl, online video, viewed 15 August 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DWnjcSo9J0
Veritasium 2014, The Most Radioactive Places on Earth, online video, viewed 15 August 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRL7o2kPqw0
Veritasium 2011, Radiation vs Radioactive Atoms, online video, viewed 15 August 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sehKAccM8p0

Old geezer

"Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigour of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life." Samuel Ullman

When I began university, I thought that the most important change in global issues came from the physically young. It makes sense, the youth are the future of our world, so why wouldn't their contribution be more important?

And to an extent, I was right. The most important change IS from today's youth. But youth has a very different meaning to what I originally thought.

These are people within my life, that I consider leaders of change in global challenges. Some are from organisations such as Rosies, a mission that works with the homeless. Others lead in smaller ways, such as the education of others on Indigenous Australian rights. 

All are of different ages. All are making a difference. And all of them are youthful. How can this be, you may say? Youthfulness is not dependent on age, rather it is dependent on attitude, (Landone 1988).

The old geezer- someone who is unnecessarily critical of new things and approaches problems with anger and frustration.
The young one- someone who is open to creating and receiving new ideas, and approaches problems with vigour and optimism.

When we are facing a challenge, we can come at it with two different attitudes. We can either be the old geezer, unwilling to listen, or we can be the young one, open to new things. Successful leadership is making sure the young one wins out against our inner old geezer.

"Let your passion drive your approach to leadership." Yap Soo Huey

By embracing our inner youthfulness we are letting passion drive our actions. People are attracted to this enthusiasm and will be drawn to us and the global challenge we want to overcome.

Our actions affect the people we are bringing with us on this journey towards change, and so the youthful and passion driven approach is important. If they seem disinterested we should take a step back and consider our own attitude. (Shankman, Allen, Haber-Curran 2015)

The reason their disinterest may be because we seem disinterested and are letting the old geezer win. By being excited and interested in what we are working towards, we encourage others to feel the same, (Bennis 2000).

Think about it, when you see someone who is enthusiastic and happy, it's hard not to feel the same way. Passion and positivity is contagious, and embracing our youthfulness helps us spread this to those we are leading towards change.

To get a real understanding of how youthfulness influences our ability to solve global challenges lets take a look at an example.

The United Nations contains leaders from many countries that create resolutions they agree to follow in order to help solve global challenges.

In Libya in 2011, the then current leader, Colonel Ghaddafi, began large scale systematic killing of those against his regime. In order to stop this the United Nations needed to consider R2P, responsibility to protect. This document outlines the responsibility of a country's government and the international community to protect the citizens of that country. These ideas are fairly new in terms of dealing with unjust killing and are highly contested.

In using this new idea, the United Nations had to fight with their inner old geezers who were telling them to stick with the status quo and use old policy and ideas. They didn't let the old geezer win, and intervention in Libya was allowed to occur, to stop these killings.

There is also a smaller division in the United Nations that is present in Australia called the United Nations Youth Australia.

Last year when the G20 was held in Australia, they held a Global Development Summit. Here young Australians had the opportunity to learn about economic prosperity, and could contribute their ideas on what the G20 should focus discussions on. After the summit, the organisation compiled a letter with all of the ideas discussed and sent it to the G20 talks where it was used to help guide their approach to the challenges of economic prosperity.

This initiative took advantage of the young Australians who had embraced their inner youthfulness and hence had passion and energy when looking at these issues.

We can see the United Nations knows being youthful is about your attitude, and that having a youthful attitude can mean the difference between success and failure.

When you walk away today, take this with you;
Youthfulness= attitude + passion NOT AGE
You can be a 'young one' or and 'old geezer'.

And last but not least...

Don't let the old geezer win.

References:
Text:
Landone, B 1988, Beginning Youth, Society of Metaphysicians, United States
Shankman, M, Allen, S & Haber-Curan, P 2008, Emotionally Intelligent Leadership, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Bennis, W 2000, Managing the Dream: Reflections on Leadership and Change, Perseus Publishing, New York
Video:
United Nations 2011, UN urges Libyan authorities to respect freedoms, ensure protection of civilians, online video, viewed May 26 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1C0BBfzxKc
UN Youth Australia, Global Development Summit - Your G20, online video, viewed May 26 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0wIB2MTGog

The lone nut

"Change doesn't happen from the top, to make change you need to let individuals take control." Felicity Ketelaar.

When we think of leadership, we think of ONE person, directing a group of people to achieve a particular goal. We seem to think that it's the role of a lone nut, ONE person with a crazy idea for change, with many followers. But in fact leadership is a team effort.

Leadership begins with the actions of one person, but ends with the empowerment of the followers. This concept is called distributed leadership. The idea is that making a change in an issue does not rely on the leadership of the lone nut, but instead relies on the combined leadership of a mixed bag of nuts. To create this combined leadership, the initiator needs to encourage others to step up and take charge when their expertise is needed.

"Distributed leadership is not something 'done' by an individual 'to' others, or a set of individual actions through which people contribute to a group... [it] is a group activity that works through and within relationships, rather than individual action." (Bennet et al. 2003, page 3)

When the initiator encourages collaboration and teamwork, and allows other people to take their turn as a leader, the goal that everyone is trying to achieve can be reached much more easily. We only need to look at Gru's minions to see this.

Dave, in the beginning is directing the minions so that he can screw on the light bulb. They fail at screwing at doing this because they are relying on the leadership of an individual. But at the end of the clip we see them adopt collaborative leadership and all the minions are able to use Dave as a lightbulb.

This example is a bit silly, but we can take a look into our local community for some inspiration. I recently had the opportunity to interview Felicity Ketelaar, who works for the Refugee and Migration Review Tribunals. These tribunals are currently undergoing a massive change, they are trying to nationalise the organisation.

The tribunals consist of two fairly autonomist offices in Sydney and Melbourne, that have very different cultures instilled into their current systems. In order to nationalise the tribunals, people need to stop thinking of the two offices as separate and instead think of them as one unit. They also need to adapt the separate cultures so that they create a unified one.

People tend to be fearful of big changes like this as they are comfortable with the status quo and unsure of what the result could be in the future. To help people feel like the change isn't being imposed on them Felicity, as part of her role as a change leader (in charge of creating a smooth transition) for the Melbourne office, has given leadership roles to different areas within the tribunals, she has empowered the mixed bag of nuts. 

People on all levels of the organisation have been given roles, from administration to higher level staff. It allows all people to view the move towards this change as a joint effort. They are able to take control of the situation and hence this process of making the change is a result of everyone's combined opinions and ideas.

"Identifying a change champion in individual work areas benefits that particular area and gets people on board." Felicity Ketelaar.

This distribution of activities to different areas of the organisation through change champions (leaders of transitioning the change in their particular area) has allowed, so far, a smooth transition, with most people getting on board. Felicity has made sure that the people at the bottom don't hold her up, instead she holds up the people.

Felicity has found that this kind of environment is difficult to create. She has noticed that it is easier to create when people are genuinely passionate and interested in the issue at hand.

In most workplaces people are all there for different reasons and so find it difficult to align their interests towards a common goal. Their different motivations make it difficult to lead them towards an end goal. This is where, as the initiator, communication and knowing the types of people you are dealing with becomes really important in distributive leadership.

The initiator needs to be able to adjust their communication style to suit the people they are talking to. This allows everyone to work towards a common goal and hence encourage them to take on leadership roles to optimise teamwork, (Carter, Bishop, Kravits 2012). 

Leadership is not just about directing a group of people, it's about creating an environment where people are not afraid to take on leadership roles when it is needed. 

Being a leader can mean being a bit nutty, but it is not about being the lone nut, rather it's about having a mixed bag of nuts.

References:

Text:

Bennet, N, Wise, C, Woods, P, Harvey, J 2003, Distributive Leadership: A Review of Literature, The Open University, United Kingdom

Carter, C, Bishop, J, Kravits, S 2012, Keys to Succes: Teamwork and Leadership, Prentice Hall, New Jersey

Video:

Michael Hughes 2010, Leadership From A Dancing Guy, online video, viewed 12 May 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO8MwBZl-Vc

Kieu Minh Hieu 2013, Teamwork- Minions- Despicable Me, online video, viewed 12 May 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvVEeoKrm48

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment 2014, The Nut Job- Featurette- Teamwork, online video, viewed 13 May 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Rqf82zoiI

Images:

Hakimi, N 2009, Leader Empowering Behaviour: The Perspective, online image, viewed 14 May 2015, https://repub.eur.nl/pub/17701/EPS2010184ORGHakimi.pdf

Netball nightmare to good dream?

"I have had dreams and I have had nightmares, but I have conquered my nightmares because of my dreams." Jonas Salk

My netball team doesn't win games very often, you could say it's a bit of a nightmare sometimes, and to find a way to fix this we must live in disequilibrium, that is find a balance between too much loss and just enough to help us win.

So what exactly is this balance? Well when you're trying to solve and adaptive challenge you experience loss. People are required to change the way they think and old ways of doing things need to be modified or sometimes completely gotten rid of. But there needs to be a balance, you can't have too much loss, otherwise people won't be willing to fix the problem and will become preoccupied with the pain that changing things is causing them.

So now you're probably thinking, sure, I have to find this balance when I'm solving an adaptive challenge, but what is an adaptive challenge, and what does this have to do with your netball team? Well let's use some examples. The problem of my team not winning is an adaptive challenge, because the root of the problem lies with the attitudes and values of the team rather then technical aspects such as positioning or skills. This means that the solution is unclear and finding one has caused a lot of arguments. For some netball teams this could be a technical challenge. A technical challenge is where the causes are clear cut and hence so is the solution. For example a team might be loosing because they're all playing in the wrong positions. All that needs to be done to fix this problem is put everyone in the right positions, (Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky 2009).

So now we know that there are two types of challenges, adaptive and technical, and that when dealing with my netball team the challenge is adaptive. If you're still a bit confused about the difference between the two, this video should help make it a bit clearer.

For my team, trying to find to help end my teams nightmarish losing streak is really difficult. This is because there is a gap between what we want within the team and what actually happens. We all strive to try our best no matter if we win or lose. However only a few players consistently try throughout the entire match. Some players begin to give up during the game if they realise we are losing. We have to learn to align our values with what we are actually doing, and this will be a difficult process that will involve trial and error, (Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky 2009).

The most challenging part of solving this problem is figuring out why this is happening and taking action on it. This is because finding out why we are losing can bring about very emotional responses some may even attack people's opinions. Just last Friday the team discussed what they thought was causing the problem was and how we should go about solving it. We took the time to listen to one another. The thing most lacking in leadership is the ability to listen generatively, to use your heart and mind to take in what people are saying and hence identify as many interpretations of the causes of the problem, (Scharmer 2015). This here is an example of the importance of generative listening, with a little bit of fun.

By using this technique when listening my netball team was able to take on board what everyone was saying and hence created a positive and collaborative environment. This conversation brought about some very emotional responses, but by using generative listening we were able to respond in an appropriate manner.

We found out that some people were unaware that others thought there was a problem, and didn't believe there really was one. Others thought that the reason we were losing was because we were trying to be too fair to everyone instead of doing all we could to win. There was a consensus that as a team when we started losing, a lot of us gave up. And this brought about the conflictual interpretation that some people just didn't really care about how their giving up affected the rest of the team. This made some people really upset, and they began to quiet down, not really wishing to participate anymore. However sometimes we need to hear these things.  Having these more conflictual interpretations opens up avenues for solving the problem, (Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky 2009). The aim, of course, is not to upset people, but sometimes in getting to the root of the problem this is the result.

During this conversation the team had to find a balance in resisting loss and accepting it. We decided that team members should be more involved in the running of the team through drills, strategy and choosing positions on game day. This may not work, and we may have to go back and try another solution, but by finding a solution which balances our losses and gains, we have moved a step closer to solving the issue. We're turning our nightmare into a good dream.

And I wish the same for you, I hope you can turn those nightmarish problems into sweet dreams.

References:

Heifetz, R, Grashow, A & Linsky, M 2009, The Practise of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing your Organization and the World, Harvard Business School Publishing, United States of America.

Scharmer, O 2015, Theory U: Listening, Edx/MIT online video, viewed 27 March 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_5CMLr6do8#t=402
CIL 2015, Adaptive vs. Technical - Dr. Ronald Heifetz online video, viewed 3 May 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwWylIUIvmo
Michael Bischoff 2010, Theory U: Illustrated through a silly game with kids online video, viewed 3 May 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byGUgoXFppE

Getting to know me

I like to think that I am the type of person that brings fun into the things I do. Whether that be something simple like playing netball with my team, or something complex like working through a global issue. The reason I try to do this is partially because of an inspiring teacher I had in primary school. She was the most passionate person I had ever met. Always enthusiastic about everything she taught, attracting everyone to her with her energy.

When she noticed that everyone had stopped paying attention in class, she'd do something to make us laugh and keep us focused. Sometimes she'd jump onto the tables and start singing her favourite song. The rest of the lesson was that much more fun, just because she'd keep reminding us about it. During sport lessons when we had gotten out of a game, and were waiting to go back in, she'd make us sing 'Stop In the Name of Love' by the Supremes. We even had actions we had to do. She taught me that anything can be fun.

By trying to make things fun you almost force yourself to consider things in different ways, opening yourself up to new opportunities and perspectives. Sometimes you can surprise yourself and by making that boring thing fun, you find out that you're actually pretty good at it.

This outlook on things inspired my life motto, "Just a sprinkle of fun and you'll move in leaps and bounds."