How is Consilience Unique?

While much of Consilience reflects a rich tapestry of contributions by many brilliant minds, there are several ways it contributes uniquely to the dialogue on leadership. Consilience offers an integrated outside-in and inside-out approach to leadership development, by simultaneously addressing the very real external pressures on leadership to “produce” and the critical role one’s inner life plays in achieving peak performance. Anchoring on “three legs of a stool” (ideas, action, relationships), it defines leadership as envisioning, enacting and enrolling and “good Leadership” as the ability to achieve critical outcomes in the current context. (Conversely, leadership development is needed when leadership’s current capability to envision, enroll and enact, is not sufficient to generate the required results in the current context.) The Performance Prism (also grounded in ideas, action, and relationships) offers a simple, yet powerful diagnostic tool for identifying strategic and organizational barriers to winning in the marketplace. Four leadership meta competencies (seeing, doing, connecting, being) and the stealth leadership super power – the Neutral Witness -- provide an inroad to the internal development work of honing self-as-instrument, which accelerates performance in the external world. The being meta competency, the wellspring from which the other meta competencies originate, offers a gateway to a greater Being, and with it an out-sized opportunity for accessing new levels of wisdom, creativity, resilience and joy. Thus, by pulling the thread from the external context to the deep interior, Consilience integrates more commonly accepted approaches to leadership performance and leadership development with more esoteric approaches to leadership-as-a-spiritual-journey.

© 2021 Carolyn Volpe Cunningham