Catching the Next Wave Aga Szóstek, Łukasz Szóstek

Nobody is born a leader. Yet we seem to believe that there is a set of skills that will turn us into leadership perfection. Aga doesn't believe that one bit. This is why she wrote the book "Leadership by Design". It is a 12-week course in designing your personal leadership practice. In this bonus episode, Łukasz asks Aga about the reasons for writing such a book in the first place and about the change a book like this can inflict on the life of a leader.

Season 11 of the Catching The Next Wave podcast was about doing. But, it turned out that doing is not just about putting something into the world, it is a much more nuanced concept to ponder including aspects like curiosity, open-mindedness, accountability, and much more. We started by distinguishing between thinking and doing only to arrive at a conclusion that one is impossible without the other. We hope you will enjoy that season much as we did.

So many of us are afraid to be different and stand out of the pack. Our guest, Andrew Lacanienta, a senior strategist at George P Johnson Experience Marketing, thrives when he can share his uniqueness with others as long as what he does is truthful to himself. Andrew holds a PhD in Experience Design so we just couldn’t avoid the topics of experience and transformational design, however, we tackle them from both the personal and the business context. We also talk about the importance of embodied experience that makes us connect between our minds and hearts.

What do life-long learning and building communities have in common? David Nebinski, the host of the Portfolio Career podcast and a Community Operations Manager for the Chief of Staff Network Community says that communities are places for a social learning experience, which allows for creating a common language and stimulates accountability. We dive into the need for flexing your mind in order to deal with uncertainty and use generosity as a way to expand your worldview.

What can the mixture of curiosity and making things visual do to your collaborations? It is one of the many topics we discuss with our guest Anna van der Aa, a coach, researcher, visual facilitator, and songwriter. We discuss the notion of clean coaching using clean questions and we dive into evidence-based decision-making as a way to do things in an informed and wise way. And we try to figure out how people rock :)

How to define inventors of our times? This is a question, we try to answer with our guest, Daniel Owsiański, a VP of Technology at volt.io. We talk about the creativity of teams versus individuals, productivity versus effectiveness, and leadership versus management. We discuss the need for self-organizing teams and embracing the process, which is the only thing under our control.