Leading by Declaration – The Realm of Difference Making

You want to play in the realm of difference making? Then you need to be willing to take a stand, not with a prediction, but rather with a declaration. It is your natural right. We all can do it. It means you will be taking a risk and going beyond what is familiar and comfortable.

Allow me to make a distinction between three different ways in which we know something - knowing by experiencing, knowing by conceptualization and knowing by declaration.

Knowing by Experience
As you are sitting there in your chair, you can experience the pressure of the chair on your backside, the thoughts going through your mind, a sense of temperature, the bodily sensations. You know these things right now. It is an immediate knowing. That is the domain of knowing called experience. Experience simply is. You don’t need to figure it out.

Knowing by Conceptualization
What you also know is that you cannot describe what you’re experiencing right now because by the time you stop to describe it, it has become what you were experiencing a moment ago. Most people don’t make any distinction between an experience and a memory of an experience. They take them as being the same.

The natural order of the mind, with its creative intelligence is being disturbed or damaged by our misuse of memory, resulting in dramatic loss of authenticity, freedom and truly intelligent behavior. David Bohm, Physicist 

Because of the way you and I are constructed, all our experiences devolve into concept. Concept is a representation of a thing; it is not the thing itself. So the instant you have an experience, it becomes a concept. Instantly. We can’t do anything about it.

A real problem starts to arise because our concepts (thoughts) determine our experiences. If you have a boss who is demanding, you can “see him or her” as either committed or unhappy. If you think someone is unhappy, you will interpret questionable behavior as evidence he is unhappy (even if he really isn’t). The conceptually determined experience (he’s unhappy) reinforces the concept, the reinforced concept more fully dominates the experience and we are into a vicious circle of allowing concept to determine experience.

Knowing by Declaration
I want to introduce a third way of knowing beyond the vicious circle of concept and experience. It’s a domain in which knowing is created by you. It is the domain of calling forth, of generating, of declaring.

Many managers think they get paid for making predictions. A prediction is a statement about the future which you can explain. A good manager knows how to gather the facts, analyze the facts, take a look at what the elements are, has enough education and training to know how things work, and has enough experience to see the way it comes out.

But that manager will never become a great leader of innovation unless he or she moves beyond prediction into the domain called declaration. You can get a technician to produce a prediction. If you want to be a really great leader of innovation, start paying some attention, not to what you can predict, but to what you can declare.A declaration is an explicit, formal announcement. Now I don’t mean making fantastic assertions. Communication requires a listener. If I’m going to make a declaration to the people with whom I work, I want it to be heard. I don’t mind if there’s a little controversy, but I do not want them to dismiss me as a raving lunatic.

What I mean by declaration is being able to take a stand. It is about taking responsibility as an act of will, intention. Synonyms include manifesto, proclamation and assertion. Where does this power of declaration come from? It is always only created. It comes from within you. It is self-generated.