How we lead is directly related to how well we tend to our inner emotional and psychic landscape. Whatever untended ‘business’ inside of us will be projected onto the people around us, especially if we hold more positional authority.
A collection of excerpts from past keynote speeches that touch on leadership, introspection, creativity, stepping up, and more.
This essay was based on a vivid and disturbing dream. It describes a large ship of adolescents trying to sail into a fierce storm, unable to harness the power of their collective courage and creativity to save themselves. It speaks to what’s needed for any team to assemble well and survive such times.
In this essay, I highlight the essential role of the fool and his/her capacity to challenge our assumptions about what we accept as the truth, the key to any creative endeavor worth its salt. This may be more relevant now in 2025 than when I wrote it in 2021.
A summary of the skills required to ‘up’ our relational resilience. Skills such as listening infused with curiosity, refraining from the need to be right, expressing authentic gratitude, patience to allow problems to unfurl in their own timing, making the “intangibles” visible, and taking responsibility for our fragile egos.
King County Transit engaged me for several years on a variety of projects.
Rob Gannon hired me to support his first year as General Manager with King County Metro-Transit. He was taking over from a GM who had been in place for many years and was seeking to establish a strong foundation for his executive team and a different leadership culture. I coached all members of his team, facilitated several team retreats and supported them to identify the practices and agreements they would commit to over time to sustain trust, and engage in collective sense- and decision-making.
“As a leadership coach, Lisa has shown me how to wrestle with competing forces–even the ones I had labeled irreconcilable. With her support and guidance, I have found ways to energize inside of conflict, whether it be actual “on the ground” issues, or the sparring of my own internal demons and better angels. I am finding ways to cast off the archetypes of traditional leadership in favor of expressing myself genuinely. And my team, my whole organization, for that matter, is refreshingly responsive. Lisa is interwoven grace and tenacity; equal parts gunnery sergeant and zen master.”
–Rob Gannon, King County Transit General Manager
The Creative Ground team was also hired by King County Transit’s Design & Construction Division to help remedy an incoherent leadership team and a disjointed culture amongst its engineers and project managers. The culture that its new Manager Pete Melin stepped into was dominated by petty politics, blame lack of accountability, all too common within deep bureaucracies. We interviewed a select group of staff, developed an organizational culture assessment and suggested a slate of recommendations to rebuild the senior team and develop better practices of communication across the Division.
“We worked with Lisa over several productive months when I took over a section of Metro Transit that was struggling with trust and communication issues. Lisa is an insightful, compassionate truth teller who will provide you valuable feedback and tools. She truly cares yet she’ll tell you what she sees, not necessarily what you want to hear. If you are willing to acknowledge the true state of affairs, and buy into a collaborative plan, you’ll not be disappointed. From organizational development, to executive coaching, or anywhere in between, Lisa provides a positive view of leadership, staff, or organizational challenges and an achievable path to improvement.”
–Peter Melin, previous Manager, King County Transit Design & Construction
After leaving Arts Corps and returning to government to learn how to enliven the creativity of individuals working inside large institutions, filmmaker Brian Quist offered to film me talking about what I was learning about creativity in the workplace. He filmed me in context and much of what I said back then still rings true, although my passion to help reinvent government has waned somewhat. I am not sure it will happen in my lifetime. However, I’m still just as passionate about individuals finding their creative powers and using them for good inside of the institutions they work within.
A quick hit on how schools might be adapted to consider the whole child. And to imagine we are all much like a plant that needs the right organic conditions, the fertile ground, to grow well.
This short clip was filmed by my colleague Steve Miranda who was teaching at the Puget Sound Community School. He was doing a deep dive on the value of creativity and teaching creative habits of mind. I had been on a run of speaking gigs talking about creativity. This one probably sums it up best when I said that if we couldn’t access the ability to challenge more of our assumptions, we might find ourselves, as a civilization, just running headlong over a cliff!
The timing of this talk could not have been worse for me personally. I was asked in 2009 to give one of those 18-minute TEDx talks in Tacoma, WA. But my son’s dad and I had just split and I was submerged in a sea of sadness. Somehow, I pulled some thoughts together with a slide show of images and proposed an idea around creativity -- that our souls were seducing us to come home to ourselves, to be ourselves in all our authenticity, and this journey would enliven our creativity, guaranteed.
As Donald McKinnon says in his book, In Search of Human Effectiveness, “The most salient mark of a creative person is courage… the courage to stand aside from the collective and be in conflict with it if necessary; the courage to become and to be oneself.”
“As facilitators, we were witness to a startling resurgence of power and energy, a deep longing to come home to ourselves, and a growing belief that we have everything we need to dream in a new world, with all the beauty we can imagine. A few days after our return, one of retreat participants said she was feeling, ‘an unshakable seam of contentment’ that she had never felt before.”
