Leadership as Practice: drawing on Heidegger's 'Being & Time' via Dreyfus

Like any new dad pacing the pavement with a newborn, I fell into a 25 hour youtube hole on Martin Heidegger's 'Being and Time' - one of the most influential (and variously complicated) philosophy books of the last century.

This video is what struck me and stuck with me from the 2007 Hubert Dreyfus lecture series. It takes the ideas and applies them to my interest area: leadership - how we face into complexity and get things done with others.

In 14 minutes it covers:

• The key distinction between the "Present at hand" and "Ready to hand" ways that things can be

• How we tend to over-emphasise objective analysis, and push it beyond it's limits for helping us in our primary task: dealing with situations

• What it means that we have been thrown into the complex situations of our lives

• Why its an error to look for what one should do - and how we need to face complex situations with authenticity and resoluteness - guided by what we care about

• How and why leadership is NOT a science but a practice (and what that means)

• How we misunderstand "leadership" as something we can be "objective" about

• An alternative (more realistic) way to see leadership - with implications for how we approach leadership development

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zOt3DN-ksY

It's not a video that I would tend to use in leadership development (unless we were on a deeper journey) but exposes some of the underpinning philosophy that shapes how we at Let's Go think about leadership.

We hold that:

• Situational awareness is more important than best practices

• Tools are more useful than specific answers

• Leaders must be guided by what they care about

• Ultimately leadership is about making choices and living with the consequences