LIFT with Louise Mowbray Louise Mowbray

Lead Into the Future Today (LIFT) is brought to you by Louise Mowbray of Mowbray by Design, the creative Conscious Leadership Consultancy. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, you can do so here:
This week I thought I would expand on a perilous trap we’re all guilty of falling into, which is all about shutting down our natural curiosity when we think we know something.
From a leadership perspective, we’re not talking about honing a skill, technical knowledge or expertise. This type of knowledge is updated regularly in our fields and staying on top of new developments is relatively easy.
What I’m referring to is how we think, our mental models, mindsets and lenses on the world.
If we are to lead effectively today, with an understanding of how our world of work is evolving, how we think is either the stumbling block or the elixir.
There are some key leadership traits and thinking styles worth developing now. You’ve no doubt heard a lot about them and if you’ve got them, wonderful - in the words of Curtis Mayfield, Keep On Keeping On. And if you know you haven’t quite got there yet, start now. There is no time like now.
* Agile Thinking and Emotional Agility
* Futures Thinking, Systems Thinking and Sensemaking
* Creativity and Innovative Thinking & Action
* Emotional Intelligence, Self-Awareness & Empathy
* Conscious Communications
“Don’t make up your mind. “Knowing” is the end of learning.” Naval Ravikant
I thought I’d share thirty, short, rather surprising minutes of my life with you, which may resonate and bring some of these leadership ‘thinking and being’ styles to life.
Last week I happened to be on LinkedIn when a notification popped up telling me about a Live session that was being held by one of my contacts. I had the time, am interested in the topic and so joined the session.
Four white men, each an expert in their field talking about the state of play in our world of work. The first thing that struck me was the lack of diversity on the panel. A few years ago, this might have been a more subtle, subconscious observation. However, in today’s world, we’re all much more aware when a panel, board or leadership team isn’t diverse and I noticed it right away.
At one point, one of the speakers - an older, well-known businessman, made a few comments about recent events being black swans. I wrote in the chat saying that we should be cautious about labelling events as ‘black swans’ just because they seemed to be improbable at the time. When the host read my comment to the panel, the older chap sniped “thanks for telling me off, mother”. I was floored. I think we all were by the looks on people’s faces.
His original comments had displayed his lack of futures thinking, sensemaking and curiosity about what’s going on in the world and the latter displayed his unconscious bias and lack of emotional intelligence, self-awareness and a whole lot more.
One of the other panellists immediately stepped in and the host then revealed that we are both members of a global action-based think tank, exploring ‘grey swans’, connecting the dots and attempting to make sense of the world. He went quiet and eventually, with no apology, muttered something along the lines of needing to explore grey swans. Why? Because his fellow male panellists said something that made him re-think his stance.
A clear case of old-school thinking meets unconscious bias, all in one wondrous package. It made me wonder about the culture of his organisation and how difficult it must be to work in that type of environment.
I also felt a deep sense of compassion. On the surface of things, until this point, he had been saying all the right stuff, however, he clearly got stuck somewhere in his emotional development and leadership thinking and the world has moved on.
And whilst this may seem to be an extreme case of outdated thinking, if you’re a woman reading this you will, no doubt, have countless st

Lead Into the Future Today (LIFT) is brought to you by Louise Mowbray of Mowbray by Design, the creative Conscious Leadership Consultancy. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, you can do so here:
What on earth is a Complexity Advisor?
I recently came across one of the most intriguing job titles I’ve seen in a while: Complexity Advisor. I have to confess, my first reaction wasn’t terribly enthusiastic - it was more along the lines of “not another crazy job title”. However, it stayed with me and the more I explored, the more I realised how urgently we need more people who can actually do this.
We’re all innovating and working with spaghetti junctions of complexity. What could be better than someone to help us to make sense of it all?
A wonderful example of this is Steven Hawking’s role as a member of a team of scientists on a quest to capture the first image of a black hole in the Netflix documentary Black Holes | The Edge of All We Know (well worth watching).
On face value, Hawking’s questions to the team appeared to be ones of clarification, and yet, more often than not, he provoked them to see things from a different perspective, which led to a different outcome. Watching this confirmed the awareness that we all know people like this. Mavericks and visionaries who have the ability to fill the role of Complexity Advisor (or any other crazy job title).
Complexity is not the enemy. It’s our status quo.
With every advancement in tech and science, we create more complexity. The trick is to upgrade our mental models so that we can live with ambiguity and find an elegant simplicity in the midst of it all.
Most of the execs and teams I work with are brilliant at what they do. Their gap is increasingly one of mental models; being able to step back, get the big picture, adapt to a changing context, gain clarity and move on.
None of this is new. It’s always been tough to have perspective when we’re in the middle of it all. What is different is the intensity and pace of change.
What we’re talking about here is emotional agility and agile thinking - two vital mental models well worth developing.
If I look back over the last few years - with the last twelve months being the accelerator, even my role has altered significantly. Increasingly, I’m the thought-partner, sounding board and sense maker working alongside leaders and teams to help them to cut through the noise and find better, smarter ways forward.
The aim is always to simplify without resorting to reductionist thinking, which can be deeply problematic in itself.
“Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge.” Winston Churchill
Hire Someone Like This
Whilst you may not love the job title, there are nuggets in all of this. If you consider the most diverse companies are now more likely than ever to outperform less diverse peers on profitability (McKinsey), it’s pure gold. Why? Because we need the rich diversity of lived experiences, mental models, perspectives and skills to challenge the status quo, innovate and thrive.
Over the last decade, we’ve become increasingly obsessed with finding people who are a good fit in our organisations. Don’t do that. Rather, seek out the misfits. Find the people who you would never normally hire.
Unearth the people in your organisation who are deeply frustrated by the old-school constraints imposed on them. People with ‘blindingly obvious originality’ who have a different lens on the world.
Are you a maverick, visionary thinker? You might enjoy Rare Breed: A Guide to Success for the Defiant, Dangerous, and Different by Sunny Bonnell and Ashleigh Hansberger, Founders of Motto, the award-winning brand consultants.
Prioritise Innovation
Last, but not least, prioritise innovation! The 50 most innovative companies of 2020 (pre-pandemic) outperformed the MSCI Index by a staggering 17 percentage points over the past year. If we exclude the tech giants (Apple, Google, Amazon,

Lead Into the Future Today (LIFT) is brought to you by Louise Mowbray of Mowbray by Design, the creative Conscious Leadership Consultancy. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, you can do so here:
The soul of great leadership has always been a little mystical. Why? Because the only way to define or measure outstanding leadership is to discover why people follow one another and to measure some sort of return on this. And the return could be in any form - political power, social impact or making a profit to name a few.
So how can we extract all that we know, become better leaders and produce a better return on our efforts?
The leadership training and development industry arose out of this age-old quest. In 2020, the global market size was valued at $357.7B, which was down on 2019 ($370.3B) due to the global pandemic (TrainingIndustry.com).
That’s a lot of money, especially when you consider that most leadership development programmes fall horribly short of their desired outcomes. You can dig into the ‘why’ of this in McKinsey’s 2020 report: Maximizing behavioural change in leadership development programs.
So let’s get into this topic…
I believe that ethics will be our greatest leadership challenge yet…
Who we need to be as leaders, today and into the future is not who we needed to be three or even five years ago. Because the greatest challenge we’re all facing as we begin to imagine a post-pandemic world is balancing the two most critical ingredients of any business endeavour, that of humanity and technology.
Let’s take a broad view of this for a moment. We know that technologies including facial recognition, iris and fingerprint scanning are already in full bloom, as is the debate on how we should use them. We also have tech embedded in our clothing and our phones, screens and cars and Apple have just launched their AirTag with an anti-stalking feature. And we know that Siri, Alexa, Google and all of our social platforms know way too much about us.
Take the next step, which is closer than you might think and imagine a world where we’re now embedding nanotech in our physical bodies. It’s not a great stretch, embedded and attached medical devices have kept us alive and improved the quality of our lives for some time.
The big shift here is the boundaries between our bodies and the devices that we will wear and/or embed - and the networks that these devices will interact with will become increasingly integrated.
If we think this through, the one leadership quality we are going to need, above all else, is a well developed ethical lens. And yes, I am focusing on us as human beings rather than the changing face of our world of work because they are wholly interconnected.
Leaders will have an increasingly tough mandate…
We know that science and technology can or will be able to achieve most things going forward. I say most things as NASA has just produced oxygen on Mars (MIT News) making living on uninhabitable planets ever more possible. On a side note, if only we applied our minds and funds to our earthly challenges in the same way… However, I digress…
As we have seen with developments in Genomics over recent years (How a Chinese Scientist Broke the Rules to Create the First Gene-Edited Babies | WSJ), the latest developments will always be ten steps ahead of regulation, ethical policies and law.
Every technological or scientific breakthrough we celebrate will present us with an ethical quandary: should we do it? And who gets to decide?
Leaders in the not too distant future will have to make increasingly difficult decisions on incremental advancements in tech and how we use it. Ultimately, science and technology will challenge our concept of what it means to be human, which we have been debating a’la Singularity (Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Stanford) for some time.
There are three Big Q’s worth asking ourselves right now are:
* What are my values, what d

Lead Into the Future Today (LIFT) is brought to you by Louise Mowbray of Mowbray by Design, the creative Conscious Leadership Consultancy. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, you can do so here:
If you’ve been receiving my newsletters for a while now, you’ll notice a fresh new format from here on in. At least once a month, I’ll be digging more deeply into various topics to give you insight, which I trust you’ll find useful in your day-to-day business life. I’ll also be recording these deep dives for you to 🎧 listen to if you prefer. And you’ll be able to comment and have your say - I’d love to hear your views, whatever you’re up to, wherever you are in the world!
Trends and How They Help You
Introduction: Deciphering our World of Work
Right now I’m inspired by and truly grateful for, bright, smart people who can take the complexity of our world of work and make it understandable. And no, I don’t mean people who offer us reductionist thinking, which can lead to stereotyping leaving us wholly unprepared for what’s coming.
What I’m referring to is the art of taking the complex, with all its moving parts and deciphering it into something we can actively respond to and innovate for. And innovate we must!
Ernst F. Schumacher, the economic thinker, statistician and economist said it best:
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
How can keeping an eye on trends help you?
Trends help us enormously if we spend a little time on them. They enable us to make sense of what’s going on - and better prepare us for the future, which we can broadly think of as ‘sensemaking’.
Saying this, there’s a vast difference between the types of trends that come and go and megatrends or what I think of as golden threads, which are usually here to stay. Golden threads weave their way through and into all aspects of our lives and ultimately create the fabric of the future.
Do you remember Pokémon GO, the 2016 mobile augmented reality game? The game has been downloaded over 1 billion times, which means that at least a billion (mostly young) people are familiar with using augmented reality.
These are the young people who will be buying your products and services and who will be on your payroll, probably designing your next offering, in a very short period of time.
So whilst the game itself (and the many applications it has inspired) may rise in popularity or disappear into obscurity, knowing that augmented (and virtual) reality are here to stay informs how you build your new products, services, offerings or even a fresh new way of working.
Today, there are many talented people and organisations doing the hard work of collecting and distilling vast amounts of global data that point us to the megatrends, so that we don’t have to.
One of those people is Amy Webb, one of America's leading futurists and an award-winning author. She is the founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute and publisher of the annual FTI Tech Trends Report. Amy’s resume, which you can read in her LinkedIn profile is beyond impressive and I always look forward to her reports. You will find the latest one titled 2021: 14th Annual Tech Trends Report, which I advise you to read in more than one sitting! You can also 🎧 listen to Amy’s podcast version delivered via South By Southwest (SXSW).
Another person worth following is David Mattin, the business, innovation and trends journalist who has appeared everywhere from Fast Company and the Guardian to Google Think Quarterly and the World Economic Forum.
David, who you may remember from TrendWatching is the Founder of New World, Same Humans and writes a weekly newsletter, which makes sense of what’s going on. It’s really worth subscribing to: New World, Same Humans. And if you’d like to learn more about longer-term trends, he’s also

Today I'm talking to Stan Stalnaker, Founding Director of Hub Culture, the conscious social network with over 50,000 global members.
Since its inception, Hub Culture has produced over fifty pop-up locations in cities around the world with over 70,000 hosted guests, introduced virtual reality environments, interviewed thousands of cultural and business leaders, and launched integrated financial services around Ven.
I wanted to talk to Stan about what Hub Culture is up to today, his recent visit to the Amazon and how the network is serving their digital citizens from a conscious leadership perspective.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out the show notes, relevant links and more at: www.mowbraybydesign.com/lift-stan-stalnaker

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit louisemowbray.substack.com

Today I’m talking to Tanner Methvin who has worked in the field of Social Innovation for the last 20 years assisting private, public and not-for-profit organisations to build a more environmentally conscious, socially just and abundant world.
Tanner is a Partner at Impact Amplifier, a Director of Earth Capital and sits on several boards. He originally hails from Los Angeles and moved to Cape Town in 1998, where he is now based.
I wanted to talk to Tanner to understand more about the social enterprise and impact investment industry, particularly in Africa.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out the show notes, relevant links and more at: www.mowbraybydesign.com/lift-tanner-methvin/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit louisemowbray.substack.com