Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change

Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change sets out an innovative approach for guiding organisations and indeed entire systems through ongoing, disruptive change. It combines Deborah Rowland′s own rigorous research into change and its leadership with insights from her extensive field experience helping major global corporations including GlaxoSmithKline, RWE and Shell achieve lasting change with increased productivity, employee engagement and responsible societal impact. It is filled with helpful inspiring stories of leadership and change from the real world and, bravely, the author′s own personal journey.

Challenging leaders to cultivate both their inner and outer skills necessary for success, Still Moving weaves together the being and doing of states of leading change and emphasises the importance of a mindful stance and deep systemic perception within a leader. With the goal of collaborative, sustainable change, the book delves into a variety of important topics, including present–moment awareness, intentional response, edge and tension and emergent change. Compelling and provocative, Still Moving questions the conventional wisdom of much change theory and asks that leaders first work on their inner source in order to more effortlessly change the world around them.

Foreword ix

Acknowledgements xiii

Moved by Stillness xvii

1 Introduction 1

2 Is Change Changing? 11

3 Still Moving   The Inner and Outer Skills 29

4 It All Starts in Mindfulness 57

5 The Power of the Systemic 79

6 Make Disturbance Your Friend 103

7 Holding the Fire 125

8 The Time for Emergence 149

9 A Tale of Still Moving and Business Transformation 173

10 Still Moving and Your Leadership 199

11 The Sense of an Ending 215

Appendix 1 Detailed Still Moving Research Methodology from Chapter 3 227

Appendix 2 Detailed Leadership Development Programme Description from Chapter 9 229

Notes 233

Bibliography and General Recommended Reading 239

Index 241

Deborah Rowland brings a unique combination of experience, insight, and research to the leadership of change. She has personally led change at the executive level in major global organizations including Shell, Gucci Group, BBC Worldwide, and PepsiCo. She also founded and grew a consulting firm that pioneered research in the field. Now, as founder of the consultancy Lead Free, she acts as a change coach to CEOs and their teams around the world. She is the co–author of Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works (Wiley, 2008).