#43 - Those Darn Fa?ades!

Our fa?ades sneak up on us.*

Some fa?ades are elaborate and strategic choices drawing on extensive personal and corporate resources to continue a feint that faces the world.

For the rest of us, our fa?ades are an unconscious concession to the family and social pressures around us. We are told: be this way. And so we try. Our false fronts become what we think we are because we became well practiced in what others want us to be. These falsities are now part of us, not easily removed. They remain a covering shroud.**

Friends, family, customers, and colleagues tell us to be ourselves. What they mean, however, is to continue inside the shroud-protecting self that we, and they, live inside and they've long grown used to seeing.

Building and maintaining a shroud consumes considerable resources. Those resources become unavailable for what we would prefer to be doing if we are among those executives who want to add value to a flourishing world. Our day and night dreams default to maintaining reputation, appearance, and alliances instead of fully addressing the problem or opportunity.

We end up with polluted and diluted cogitation, as if we are trying to run faster by flailing our arms and legs and throwing back our heads. We look as if we are making a full-on effort, but we are actually creating more surface area, which slows us down and causes us to lose the race.

Friends, as executives, we are paid to think. We are brain athletes who must go through the pain of fa?ade removal to get 1% better.

*A theme touched on in an earlier Executive Thinking

**Going still deeper:? consider this beloved, short volume. ??

Going Deeper: a fun video reminding us how bad form impedes us.

In My Backpack:

A pleasant surprise! I cracked it open on the day the New York Times gave us a front-pager with the discouraging news of heavy metals and other toxins in fertilizer made from urban sludge that farmers are incentivized to use.

A little science fiction brightens such a day, especially this one because the tale happens in a world where a strain of E. coli consumes heavy metals in the planet's soil. In this future world, a unified church is in a complicated war with human beings whose genetics were manipulated to form a race called the Beasts. Robert Chase uses this to examine the theological dilemma of the problem of good.

Many of us who are people of faith are much more familiar with trying to explain evil. In this tale, we are presented with the need to explain occurrences of good because evil seems to be the true and natural way of things.

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Executive Thinking is a?source for being and thinking as an executive who links the world's future to their enterprise mission and its profitable operations. Here you will find some of the soul-searching, middle-of-the-night, honest reflections at the core of who we are becoming as leaders.

A Systems Convener and Executive Advisor walking alongside accomplished executives in the third turn of their careers, Mark L. Vincent, Ph.D., EPC, loves leaders who love leaders.

In his own third turn, Mark continues to grow his capacity for wise advising, artful facilitation, and public presentation.

Mark has founded?Maestro-level leaders,?Design Group International,?and the?Society for Process Consulting and authored a number of books, including Listening Helping Learning. He now partners with Mygrow to build an emotionally intelligent world