From building wisdom to the emotional and energetic dynamics within organizations, here’s a roundup of what resonated most this year. Here are the most-read blogs of 2024.
Readers rallied around the importance of emotion and energy within organizational cultures.
- Finding the Source of Organizational Pain described how our bodies can provide a metaphor for finding the true source of pain within organizations beyond symptoms on the surface.
- Kathy defined organizational energy as the fuel for creating more authentic, reciprocal relationships focused on a shared higher purpose in How to Create More Positive Energy.
- In November’s A Vote for Kindness, Kathy emphasized the transformative power of kindness to help people navigate challenges and create positive dynamics, regardless of the context.
Wisdom was a powerful theme in 2024 to help develop a deeper understanding and longer-term perspective.
- Standing in Inquiry explained better ways to interact with people who believe differently from us by transforming judgment into curiosity.
- All systems are designed to serve a purpose, but it may not be the stated one.
- In Finding a Systems Purpose, Kathy provided keys to learning what’s really being rewarded in our organizations.
- Based in part on lessons from the Stoics, 4 Ways to Cultivate Wisdom helped us understand how to cultivate wisdom intentionally to support healthy transformation.
Not surprisingly, two of the most popular posts examined leadership through lenses of ethics and perception.
- In When Leaders Violate the Moral Dimension, Dr. Kathy Allen returned to the classic book On Leadership to reflect on four ways leaders transgress the crucial moral dimension.
- Leaders have increasingly focused more heavily on style rather than substance. How much does this erode a higher shared purpose? Kathy answers this question definitively in Leadership as Performance Art.
Leadership informed by Nature as a model, mentor, and muse continued as a powerful central theme in 2024.
- What Nature Says About Letting Go emphasizes the importance of releasing control and explains why some things we hold on to can hold us back.
- Kathy describes the “perfect partnerships” within ocean ecosystems that offer a model for building more regenerative practices in Nature’s Lessons on Collaboration.
- In one of her most recent blogs of 2024 (brand new and still one of the most-read of the year), Kathy writes some Reflections on Influencing Living Systems, in which she offered this powerful post-election thought:
Living systems are always dynamically evolving and, at their core, uncontrollable. When we focus on this broader system view, we see that by combining our actions, we CAN change the world.
-Dr. Kathy Allen