Paradoxical Leadership Introduction by Dr. Wendy Smith
Dr. Smith, who had spoken to LILA last year in a member call, framed her keynote presentation today around the question of “What is the nature of paradoxes?” She expressed that her goal for this talk was to provide us with level-setting language to inspire reflections, push-back, and questions over the course of this conference and beyond. Her follow-up talk tomorrow will focus on potential approaches we can apply to manage and leverage the paradoxes we face in our organizations and daily lives. She suggested that, over the next year, one possible measure of success we may want to use is to see if we can shift viewing our challenges from “problematic” to a “source of possibility.”