The difference between aligned and misaligned teams/organization, is the difference between average and excellent. When strategies are misaligned with culture, organizations and businesses pay extremely high price. Aligned teams happen to be innovative, perform faster and better in the changing environment. Leaders and entrepreneurs need to be able to create safe environment – platforms, where the collective intelligence emerges, people align and continuously innovate. The Diamond Leadership is a simple co-creative guide that puts in one place the tools and practices that liberate innovation and align teams in organizations. It will assist you to create cohesion in your team where creativity and innovation are natural states of functioning?

1. DIAMOND LEADERSHIP
In the New Leadership Paradigm,
the role of the leader/leadership is to create and/or support
platforms where the collective intelligence, knowledge and
creative energy of the people in the system (community,
organization…) will flow to the surface, resulting with
innovative and cohesive meaningful action.
Viktor Kunovski

2. The Diamond Leadership
Leading the creative innovation
Designing learning organizations
The Diamond Leadership practices, provide and support a
CO-CREATIVE platform for liberating the creative potential of
people in teams, organizations and society.
Their skilful use creates high alignment, flow and cultures of
innovation in the systems that practice it.
In fewer words, it creates learning organizations.

3. The Diamond Leadership
Origins and use
These practices are a blend of powerful
post conventional transformational methodologies and tools for
group interventions (such as Open space, U theory, Inquiry…),
fused and upgraded with the powerful practice of presence.
They can be used in micro and macro settings; profit, public
organizations, communities and nations.
From short meetings on strategic issues, to new product
developments, strategy designs and implementations, team
buildings, marketing planning, culture transformations etc.

4. Why these practices?
Alignment and innovation
The difference between aligned and misaligned teams/organization, is the
difference between average and excellent.
When strategies are misaligned with culture, organizations and
businesses pay extremely high price.
Aligned teams happen to be innovative, perform faster and better in the fast
changing environment.
Leaders and entrepreneurs need to be able to create safe environment – platforms,
where the collective intelligence emerges and flows in the teams, where people
align and continuously innovate.
The Diamond Leadership book is a simple co-creative guide that puts in one place
the tools and practices that liberate innovation and align teams in organizations.
It will assist you to create cohesion in your team where creativity and innovation are
natural states of functioning?

5. The Diamond Leadership
flat-lining = average performance
Knowing - comfort zone
Creative Dialogue
Key Question
Not Knowing
Breakthrough
creativity & innovation
DIAMOND LEADERSHIP book is now available on Kindle:

6. Diamond Leadership
Practices
SYSTEMIC LEADERSHIP Co-CREATION
CREATIVE DIALOGUE
NOT-KNOWING
PRESENCE
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7. Systemic Leadership
Co-CREATION
The system is the wisest
Besides technology, co-creation must be the second largest driver of our future.
Mary-Ann Schreurs Dutch Design Week 2013
The leadership of the future will not come from a particular individual – “the leader”,
but from groups, communities and networks...
Betty Sue Flouers, co-author of “Presence”
The systemic leader needs to become an ally of the collective intelligence. S/he
or they (the executive team) need to serve the system by developing co-creative
platforms and interventions through which the collective intelligence, wisdom
and innovation will emerge, and be distilled through the co-creative
process by the system itself.
excerpt from the "Diamond Leadership" book

8. CREATIVE DIALOGUE
(INQUIRY)
“Dialogue is a conversation with a center.”
William (Bill) Isaacs
“The most important work in the new economy is creating
conversations.”
Alan Webber Fast Company magazine
DIAMOND LEADERSHIP book is now available on Kindle:

9. KEY QUESTION/S
for CREATIVE DIALOGUE
Good companies work with answers, excellent companies work with
questions. If you ask the organization the right question, that is more
powerful than the answers they already have.
Nick Udal - NOWHERE
If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution,
I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to
ask, for once I knew the proper question, I could solve the problem in
less than 5 minutes.”
Albert Einstein
“It’s the question that drives us, Neo...”
Trinity to Neo, in the movie “The Matrix”“

10. KEY QUESTION/S
for CREATIVE DIALOGUE
The key question is used as a vehicle to extract the wisdom from the
person and/or the system through the process of creative dialogue/inquiry.
The key question is open ended.
You can’t answer it alone, you need systemic co-creative energy.
We want to hold it rather than answer it fast, in order to allow the creative
tension to work on us - The “unknown” to metabolise and UNFOLD in
something NEW – “innovation”.
…With the key question, there are no compromises. It must keep you energized
and awake, and hold your attention. If there is not enough energy in the
question, simply do not start (the meeting, strategy session…) until you feel
right…
excerpt from the "Diamond Leadership" book

11. SERVICE to HUMANITY
7 SEVEN
MAKING a DFFERENCE
COLLABORATION WITH CUSTOMERS
AND LOCAL COMMUNITY
INTERNAL COHESION
DEVELOPMENT OF CORPORATE
COMUNITY
TRANSFORMATION
CONTINUOUS RENEWAL
SELF- ESTEEM
BEING THE BEST. BEST PRACTICE
RELATIONSHIPS
THAT SUPPORT CORPORATE NEEDS
SURVIVAL
PURSUIT OF PROFIT &
SHAREHOLDER VALUE
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
For teams & organizations
What is our purpose as organizations?
Why do we exist as company?
How are we serving the humanity?
How are we creating strategic alliances and partnerships?
How are we creating fulfilled employees?
How are we engaging with the local community to protect
the environment?
How are we creating organizational alignment?
How are we liberating creativity and passion in the
organization?
How are we uniting behind our purpose?
How are we learning and innovating continuously?
How are we constantly sharing knowledge?
How are we supporting life long learning?
How are we building excellence and quality in products,
systems services and processes?
How do we reduce bureaucracy, hierarchy, silo‐mentality,
power seeking, confusion and arrogance?
How are we maximizing internal as well as external
communication?
How are we reducing Internal competition, manipulation,
blame, internal politics, gender and ethnic discrimination?
How are we creating profit and financial stability?
How are we caring for the health, safety and welfare of
employees?
How do we reduce excessive control and caution, short
term focus, corruption, greed and exploitation?

12. PRESENCE
“Presence moves us towards greater internal depth, freedom and wisdom, and
it is a natural optimizing movement. ”.
Jeanne Hay the Ridhwan school
In order to be “born” in the new more complete world (in other words to break through
and transform), we need to be open and present. Without presence, we may have a
superficial understanding, but no internal knowledge.
Senge, Jaworski, Scharmer & Flowers
The success of particular intervention depends on the inner
conditions of the intervener.
William O'Brien

13. PRESENCE
Speeding up by slowing down
“We need to slow down considerably in order to enter the flow
zone”.
The key in this practice is the ability to hold the presence for longer intervals and
“out manoeuvre” impulses for immediate action taking, triggered by impatience,
frustration, fear, not-knowing…etc.
Presence is the best gift that you can give to your self or your team. It is needed
in order to relax and slow down the often confusing internal dialogue of
the person, or the “noise” within the group.
Presence is needed to “collapse” the boundaries of the comfort zone
and take the team forward into the flow-innovative zone. A breakthrough of this
magnitude is hardly to happen without enough presence in the team/system.
The catalyst - (ideally the leader) needs to be fluent in holding presence.

14. NOT-KNOWING
The known is easy (our comfort zone).
The unknown is the source of creativity and innovation.
The results for staying within our comfort zone is flat-lining/no
innovation.
We need to learn to be comfortable with the unknown, embrace it, tolerate it
and overcome our fears and believes about it.
We need to deliberately dive (by asking questions) into the unknown,
hold the creative tensions and the fears that come with it and explore it.
Because of impatience, lack of presence and/or frustrations, we often exit
the creative tension when faced with the not-knowing and take premature
actions to avoid or release the tension.
Being comfortable with the not-knowing is particularly useful and
important for leaders to learn since the expectation of “knowing all” is
unrealistic and it blocks their personal and the team flow.
Sitting and allowing the unknown is a practice that can be only mastered by
practicing presence. It is a learning process that can’t be grasped by the
mind only, that is why again and again the practice of presence is critical.

15. Collective illumination
– breakthrough
…At a certain point, in the eye of the storm, when we have sustained the
creative tension for long enough, at the bottom of the unknown, the boundaries collapse and
the system relaxes, and reaches “the zone” of flow and “knowing” – an “aha” moment of
collective breakthrough and illumination.
This knowing is very different from the everyday mode of knowing that we have while in our
comfort zone – this is the no-mind knowing.
Through the process of creative tension and cooking together, we metabolize our fears and
weaknesses, and reach the level of personal and collective transformation. Sublimation of
this kind is not possible in the old conventional ways of communicating and relating .
As a result, the system reaches new levels of alignment, team members get to know each
other on a more intimate and humane level, their confidence and mutual trust grows, and the
team grows together – gaining the clarity as well as the stability and strength of a diamond.
The creativity and innovation levels reach their peak, along with the productivity, and the
system emerges ready for inspirational prototyping, execution, and implementation.
excerpt from the "Diamond Leadership" book

16. With power must come wisdom
In order to support change and
cultivate great creative performances,
leaders need to practice presence, ask
key questions for creative dialogue,
allow not knowing and stimulate
co-creation.
DIAMOND LEADERSHIP book is now available on Kindle:

17. DIAMOND LEADERSHIP
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DIAMOND LEADERSHIP book is now available on Kindle: