Principle: Balcony and Dancefloor — Lizard Brain

we often ask someone to act as a “balcony person” in a meeting or workshop. This person’s role is to sit in the back of the room and take notes on what happens, recapitulating participants’ various comments and behaviors. It

itself. Images used as metaphors help to hold complex and disparate elements. Conflict and chaos are clarified, simplified, and unified with fitting metaphors, and thus, we should expect to find a distillation of useful metaphors at the core of the practice of the art of adaptive leadership.

Observing is a highly subjective activity. But in exercising adaptive leadership, the goal is to make observing as objective as possible. Getting off the dance floor and onto the balcony is a powerful way to do this. It enables you to gain some distance, to watch yourself as well as others while you are in the action, and to see patterns in what is

Since the section had no leader, sky decks served as a natural part of the immune system to foster a healthy and balanced group dynamic. While everyone laughed, everyone also got the message. Sometimes direct confrontation with colleagues is the best path, and other times there are more subtle, comfortable mechanisms to hone a team’s chemistry.

typically ask the balcony person to tell the group initially what he or she observed, just the facts, without any interpretation, as if the group were watching a videotape of a soccer game without any commentary.

Why don’t you ever see tightrope walkers without long poles? It’s because they’re stabilizers, as critical to the reaching of destinations as the steps taken toward them. And yet, the poles work by feel, not thought: focusing on them risks falling. Temperament functions similarly, I think, in strategy. It’s not a compass—that’s intellect. But it is