Thinking Principles for the Quantum Leader

The eight principles of quantum thinking and how these can be developed and practiced through cultivated thinking skills. Thinking Principles: Holism (quantum holism): Fostering the ability to see and use relationships Comfort with uncertainty (quantum indeterminism): Allowing room for the unexpected, the not-yet-thought of; creating looser, more flexible structures; replacing rules with guidelines or principles. “Hands Off” (quantum emergence): Trust the system’s self-organizing “wisdom” and decentralize power accordingly. Aware of Context (quantum contextualism): Aware of surrounding environment, all factors and players influencing the organization and organization’s influence on all relevant factors and players. Both/And (quantum wave/particle duality): Seeing many ways “from A to B,” seeing that one solution or possibility does not exclude others, better able to deal with “messy” or ambiguous situations. Child’s Play (quantum potentiality). Exploratory, curious, letting the imagination play with alternatives and possibilities. Leadership as an “infinite game.” Question-led (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle): Constantly questioning the assumptions behind envisioned solutions, methods, practices, one’s own thinking. Wondering how things work and why and what else might be possible. System-led (quantum participatory universe): Seeing oneself as part of a dynamic, evolving, self-organizing system, and my role in it. Seeing the organization as a win/win ecosystem. Thinking Skills: (Nurtured by practicing combinations of the 12 principles of SQ) Intuitive thinking: Not fast gut-level “intuition,” but rather slow, gestational intuition. Ability to sit receptively with an open mind and let a problem, situation, or possibility “speak” to you. Insight. Reflective thinking: Revisiting a problem, situation, personal interaction and becoming aware of the factors at play in it, one’s own role in it or response to it. Repeatedly asking “why?” things unfolded as they did. Surfaces alternative possibilities and behavior. Associative Thinking: Seeing similarities and relationships and the possibilities latent in them. Critical Thinking: Standing back from a situation or problem and becoming aware of the logic or assumptions at play, then able to question these. Creative Thinking: Constantly asking What if? Why not? Could it be? Moral/Ethical Thinking: Having a basic, guiding intuition that there is a moral order built into the universe itself and that this must be reflected in our behavior and decisions.