Lex Schroeder

Roundabout Ways to Support Women Leaders

Question your assumptions about power. As business thinkers have encouraged more “flat”, networked organizations, we’ve begun to change leadership structures. But we must do more than adjust structures; we must question our beliefs about leadership and more specifically, power… how it works and what it looks like. Letting go of strict, top-down hierarchical structures doesn’t do much if we approach our work with the same old attitudes about power.

For Collaborators, Proper Alignment Keeps the Work Moving

While it’s uncomfortable and disheartening to lose sight of purpose, to notice how our individual purpose or a shared purpose might be changing, or to observe individuals or entire groups fall entirely out of alignment, we have much to learn there about what helps collaboration along and what keeps us (and the work) stuck.

“Your Job Is To Stay In Inquiry”: Highlights from the Lean Coaching Summit

Toyota uses the Toyota Production System (TPS), but it might as well be called the Toyota Thinking System because that’s what TPS and lean is all about, thinking better by way of problem-solving. In order to do this, coaching and dialogue must take place at all levels within our organizations: top down, bottom up, across teams and departments, across companies within the extended value stream, and across sectors.

Ideas That Move

Ideas That Move is a workshop and retreat series designed to support women creatives of all ages, fields, and backgrounds in putting their good ideas into practice. Full 2-3 day retreats co-facilitated by Lex Schroeder and yoga instructor Ellen Lempereur Greaves are offered semi-annually and include daily movement and meditation practices as well as workshops, [...]

Leading Our Own Lives First: Ageless Lessons from Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing A Life

Real leadership means making good choices for ourselves, big or small, on a daily basis and over time about how we live in the world. Choices that we can believe in, that feel authentic and true for us as women and creative people; choices that often go against the grain and feel difficult; and choices that as much as possible, sustain us individually as we seek to do good work in the world.

A Generation Inclined to Share

What might other, more meaningful kinds of sharing look like? On one level, it may mean doing something with all of that good information we come across on a daily/near-daily basis and feel compelled to share with others. It may mean attempting to make sense of all of those ideas, reflecting on them in community with other live human beings (or even just one over coffee) or moving those ideas forward one way or another by offering our own unique insights in our work or art.

In the Wake of Violence, Notes On Power, Powerlessness, and Voice

Lex • April 23, 2013 • 0 Comments

Understanding power differently, as something accessible within each of us (not to be found elsewhere), does not mean we will find the answers to our problems alone, that any one individual has the answer or solution, or that we must go it alone in our work or activism. It does mean we must listen more closely to ourselves as individuals and then use our voices in service of what Martin Luther King called “the beloved community”.

Developing Capability for Lean Learning Through Open Space Conversations

Lex • March 30, 2013 • 0 Comments

When you let lean community members decide what they want to talk about, and provide a useful structure to help contain those conversations, it’s incredible how quickly people identify key questions and get right to the heart of the matter.