When was the last time you had a new thought about leadership?

Full of graphs, memes and possibly things on fire, your LinkedIn profile undoubtedly demonstrates what a thought leader you are. But between trying to save the world and not upset your director’s/client’s/father’s fragile relationship with change, just how hard does your idea of success feel?

Success. I don’t know where your attention mostly is right now, but to you this word might currently sound so privileged it’s just inappropriate.?

More than icky, fully absurd; an image suddenly in your head of back-combed children of the 22nd century, dressed for the scavenging, Cyberpunk Oliver Twist future, hunched around a burning oil drum and an iPad2 found on the local e-waste mountainside with an unrealistically still working battery, staring in hushed disbelief at a trillion search results from iStockphoto’s heyday. Slowly mimicking air-punches incomprehendingly.

How would you frame success if you had to right now?

“Overthrowing colonial power structures to save viable life on Earth, Timo – how about that for career goals?”

Well, sure. And how easy does that feel?

Maybe success feels more to you like a murky unknown. Which could have something to do with not seeing a clear box for you to fit into that’s better than the box you’re stuck in at the moment.

I’m not sure anyone often fancies sitting down to have a lovely long natter about “leadership styles” – you’re either out there doing it already or you don’t really wanna be doing it honestly. And who can blame you? We only come out with language like this when we’re trying to sound employable and not like we’re straining to keep a lid on a panic attack.?

Yet, what if much more effective leadership turned out to be a lot less about pulling on your McKinsey chinos or your XR bandana and a lot more connected to making your days feel easier?

Also, what if feeling a lot better about leadership starts with thinking you have no future?

I’m a tease. Walk with me.

Hard times.

You don’t need an unqualified essay from me on expectations and how they are the root of most modern anxieties. Nor an essay on success, because I don’t look like I know the first thing about it.

But dear friend Nico Olivieri has a very clear idea about it. He’s made it his business to help people unlock a whole new relationship with the word.

“What if one insight could make performing at your best inevitable, every single time?” he posted this week.?

If you don’t know him, you’ll say it sounds like he and I have climbed to the High Plains Grifters levels of LinkedIn and could be about to sell you either a tech conference or a very expensive yoga retreat. But Nico’s work doesn’t involve any ritual or rigorous sub zero routines or interceding with higher powers.?

It’s more to do with stopping to question the framing of a problem. Or, in fact, the way you frame yourself in responding to a problem.

There is a school of thought that suggests our fixation on The Future stops us living in the moment. There is only now, after all – memory and hope are both made of the same hazy, fluxing, very very edited brain story stuff wafting about in your skull sponge. Switching off all that self-imposed story to listen in to the truth of the moment you’re in might unlock a much more effective response.?

Which is, effectively, a way to re-open the future to yourself.

It’s not an idea that a practicing artist would need much convincing about. We know we feel most alive, least anxious, most purposeful, least worried about consequences, most effective, least worried about having an answer for everything when we are in flow state. And that involves recognising the gut-ping of inspiration – truth, ringing your doorbell with an idea.

Tune in to that, I’ve found over the years, and other people feel it too. Like a sort of tiny experience of shared magic.

Planning may be essential for logistics, but listening in to the moment is how to make decisions that enable the flow, and likely better planning. Most business practices systematically push us to do the opposite. And train leaders to end up practically scared of it.

The perspective-transforming, magical effect of art, of storytelling, isn’t magic – it’s practice. It’s un-mystical behaviours done over and over with increasing confidence. But its root is shared by all of us. The unscientific-sounding human ability to know one’s own truth in any given moment, if we give ourselves permission to listen for it and act on it. And practice doing so.

Nico and I have spent some time doing something with this.

Namely: it.

Starting with the sense we shared about doing something with our overlapping experiences and recording conversations of us figuring it out in front of ourselves.

Leading In Real Time: Conversations about change is a discrete little page on his Easier project site at the moment. There we are loosely exploring a few big themes typically associated with leadership expectations and looking honestly at what they really mean.?

That’s it. No call to action, no sign-up, no Insta breakdowns. Just listen in. And join in if you want to.

It doesn’t matter if you’re facing a department budget freeze or climate disaster culture change, if you’re feeling stuck, you’re feeling stuck.

I wonder if it’s time for you to have a new thought about your own leadership?

Crisis and change: how to get more effectively excited.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ME AND MY CLIMATE & FUTURES CREATIVE WORK AT MOMOZO.CO >

Your LinkedIn profile might demonstrate what a thought leader you are all the live-long day, but between trying to do it and quietly learn about it, have you ever had a great conversation with anyone about what leadership really kinda means… as you? Probably depends whose idea of success you’re still trying to fit.