The Leaderful Fieldbook

We have commented here and elsewhere that transitioning from conventional leadership to leaderful practice is often a challenge behaviorally, pointing to the need to inform a team about its opportunity to adopt more leaderful behaviors, such as assuming more responsibility for the agenda, taking risks, valuing differences, and the like. However, leaderful development is also a challenge from a cognitive point of view. Cognitive psychologists (such as David Perkins) would contend that a concept like leaderful practice might be considered “troublesome” knowledge. It is troublesome because it disturbs but then transforms familiar world views, such as the need for leaders to protect us from existential anxiety. So, we might consider leaderful practice to be a threshold concept and, in a paper that I am working on with Jeff Yip, we see threshold concepts as often requiring a change in thinking and in practice. However, the process of conceptual change can result in transformed practice because it can result in demonstrable improvements in critical reasoning and in problem solving.