Published: 2019
List Price: £12.00
Format: Paperback ~ 206 pages
Size: 21.6cm x 14 cm
ISBN: 978-1-911193-67-8
Tags: Futures, IFF, Competencies

Maureen O’Hara & Graham Leicester
Contents
Reviews

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Dancing at the Edge 
Competence, Culture and Organization in the 21st Century
Second Edition
​
​Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester 

with a foreword by Edgar Schein
​
Exploring the competencies needed by 'Persons of Tomorrow'

In his 1969 essay, 'The World of Tomorrow and the Person of Tomorrow', the psychologist Carl Rogers looked ahead to the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world we inhabit today. He suggested that living in such a world would require a whole new set of competencies – demonstrated already by the ‘persons of tomorrow’ he saw around him even then.

In Dancing at the Edge, Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester pick up
the thread fifty years on. Drawing on extensive research and their own wide experience, they map the ‘powerful times’ in which we live, the 21st-century competencies required to thrive in this complexity and how to discover and develop them in practice.

They identify:
• Three emergencies: real, conceptual and existential
• Three potential responses: denial, collapse and transformation
• Three literacies: psychological, cultural and epistemic

These literacies – or ways of reading the landscape – open the door to
our 21st-century competencies, which are innate, relational, and will develop through practice in a supportive organizational or social setting.

The picture that emerges is complex but remarkably clear and
surprisingly hopeful – even exhilarating. Organizations of every sort from businesses to schools and healthcare, from government bodies to NGOs, can create the conditions, offer the support and provide the context within which engaged, aware, passionate and compassionate people can rise above denial and take on the challenges of today’s powerful times.

This is a handbook for anyone aspiring to develop their 21st-century
competencies and for any organization hoping to cultivate the persons of tomorrow in its midst.
Maureen O’Hara and Graham Leicester are uniquely qualified to flesh out Carl Rogers’s vision (Maureen worked closely with Rogers for many years). Here they explore the competencies – the ways of being, doing, knowing and organising - that can help us navigate in complex and powerful times. They argue that these competencies are innate and within reach of all of us – given the right setting, plenty of practice and some gentle guidance. But they are seldom seen because they are routinely undervalued in today’s culture. That must change, the authors insist, and this book is intended to begin that change.

They write of ‘persons of tomorrow’ that they have witnessed:

"We find that people who are thriving in the contemporary world, who give us the sense of having it all together and being able to act effectively and with good spirit in challenging circumstances, have some identifiable characteristics in common… They are the people already among us who inhabit the complex and messy problems of the 21st century in a more expansive way than their colleagues. They do not reduce such problems to the scale of the tools available to them, or hide behind those tools when they know they are partial and inadequate. They are less concerned with ‘doing the right thing’ according to standard procedure than they are with really doing the right thing in the moment, in specific cases, with the individuals involved at the time. In a disciplined yet engaging way they are always pushing boundaries, including their own. They dance at the edge."

Read more:

About the authors:
Graham Leicester
Maureen O'Hara

See the full Contents
Read the Introduction
Read the Foreword by Ed Schein
​Read Reviews of the First Edition

Readership:

This is a book for anyone who thinks about tomorrow’s world:
  • Concerned individuals
  • Policy makers, community leaders and ‘activists’
  • Leaders and HR specialists in organisations of all sorts
  • Researchers and students in subjects like business, organisation and leadership studies, social anthropology, social psychology and psychotherapy
  • Anyone seeking to change the way communities and organisations think and behave in relation to the future

Related titles:

All Intl. Futures Forum titles
​
​​See all other titles on:
​Leadership, Innovation & Organisation Management
Theodore Hesburgh, President Emeritus of Notre Dame University, once said that leadership demands certainty: “You cannot blow an uncertain trumpet.” On the contrary, argue Leicester and O’Hara, we must all learn to play the uncertain trumpet like virtuosos.

It is an image that conveys the subtle discipline required of the ‘person of tomorrow’ – an artistry that, they argue, is essential to restore hope in the future.