James Sibel’s scientific contributions

The 21st century world has been exposed to a diversity of disruption and crises, ranging from the increase of speed of technological advancement to more devastating disruption in the form of crises, such as terrorism, natural disasters, political unrest, and a global pandemic that took nations, communities, government agencies, and corporations by storm, disrupting numerous aspects of people's lives. There have been numerous publications discussing the leadership factors associated with leading effectively in crises, including the introduction of Shock Leadership principles and models. This chapter addresses the core element of mindfulness, and mindful preparedness, and its highly necessary role for leading in disruption, discontinuous change, and crises.

This robust qualitative research study used an abductive-inductive-deductive (A-I-D) grounded theory approach sought to understand the challenges that participants in social movements experience, and the reasons that the movements failed, were only partially successful, were hijacked by other agendas, or became politically demonized. The data, collected and analyzed through conversational storytelling interviews, Peircean Self-Correcting Analysis, and an iterative, modified Gioia methodology yielded numerous concepts, themes, and aggregate dimension, and exhibited interesting phenomenon and low-level substantive grounded theory regarding social justice participant or leader behavior, specifically behaviors linked to co-opting, superfluous social action, cancel culture, stereotyping, fundamental attribution error, self-decelption, White liberalism, and misplaced blame--Social Justice Faux Heroism Phenomenon. Additional rounds of research are ongoing to examine, through triangulation and mixed methods, the potential additional dimensions that relate to this grounded theory.

Global crises that jolt entire systems, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can place groups, organizations, and communities in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments that affect all sectors of society, having potentially disastrous effects including high morbidity and mortality rates, political upheaval, and extensive disruption of entire economic systems, causing damage that can last for years. Effective leadership is a pivotal organizational commodity in times of normalcy, and it becomes increasingly critical during crises and the subsequent environments of discontinuous change. There has been a consistent level of international criticism regarding national, state, local, and corporate leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. This chapter explores the leadership challenges associated with highly chaotic environments and introduces an advanced model of leadership—Shock Leadership—and a leadership development framework necessary for higher leader reliability and effectiveness in disasters and other crises that create disruptive and discontinuous change.

For decades we have been on the brink of technological revolution, with the ever-rapid advancement and emergence of technologies that have altered the manner in which humans live, work, and interact. Technological advancement, in the era of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), has changed the way that work is done and increased the intensity of market competitiveness, which has prompted a refocus of talent acquisition and development on technological and technical acumen in order to fill a predicted gap in these skills. We performed an interpretive phenomenological study exploring the experiences of Fortune 500 leaders with regard to Industry 4.0 and emerging technologies. The results identified corporate practices aligned with an organizational primacy on profit, acceptance of inevitable change, recognition of shifts in job losses and job creation, and a cross-organizational, inadvertent creation of functional and social skills gaps in the workforce. Additional study and practice recommendations are provided.

Scenarios that disrupt and jolt entire systems, such as the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, place organizations, communities, and populations in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments that can affect all sectors of societies and can have disastrous effects ranging from high morbidity and mortality, political upheaval, and extensive economic damage that can last for weeks, months, or even years. Effective leaders are considered one of the most pivotal resources for organizations both in times of normalcy and crisis, yet international criticism has flared pertaining to national, state, local, corporate, and policy leadership in this COVID-19 environment of discontinuous change. We posit that these challenges arise as a result of historically rare allocation of sufficient resources to crisis and disaster preparedness. This paper explores the leadership challenges associated with highly chaotic environments and makes a theoretical argument that leadership effectiveness in these scenarios can best be realized through an advanced, comprehensive, and preparedness-based model of leadership development—Shock Leadership Development.

For decades, increasingly rapid technological advancement has altered the manner in which humans live, work, and interact. In today's industrial and organizational environment. The fourth industrial revolution (4IR), and the related emerging technologies, have changed the way work is done and increased market competition. A forecast of an impending tech skills gap has created an environment in which organizational leaders have prompted human resources departments to refocus recruiting priorities on technical and technological acumen. We performed a qualitative study employing an interpretive phenomenological approach for the exploration of the experiences of Fortune 500 organizations in the face of Industry 4.0, examined from the lens of corporate leaders. The outcomes indicated corporate practices aligned with an organizational primacy on profit, recognition of shifts in job losses and job creation, and the inadvertent creation of a functional and social skills gap in the workforce. Also recognized was a perceived inter-generational conflict brewing in organizations. Additional study and practice recommendations are provided. Keywords: Industry 4.0, Artificial Intelligence, Talent Acquisition, Organizational Development

Employees, Customers, and Communities are increasingly interested in the impact that corporations and other organizations have on society. Corporations have begun to recognize this and have engaged in shifting their business models to adjust for this need as parts of the way they do business. Unfortunately, in an attempt to remain competitive and maximize profits, some of these organizations have not engaged deeply into development of CSR/OSR programs, and have been participating in practices such as corporate greenwashing, corporate camo-washing, and other surface-level social responsibility programs. These practices have not been lost on the public or to researchers, and corporations are again beginning to recognize the necessity and importance of authentic and comprehensive CSR/OSR programs. Often, this requires dynamic systems change initiatives because effective CSR/OSR programs can require large scale, whole system change. We present the Stakeholder-System Symposium (S3-Group) Large Group Intervention to engage the whole system for rapid change in CSR programs. This action research study implemented the S3 mass stakeholder method (MSM) intervention for enhancement of a corporation’s CSR programs during a corporate-governmental partnership negotiation. Qualitative analyses and descriptive statistics were used in order to assess intervention outcomes.

Tolerance is a word that is commonly used in organizational diversity and inclusion (D&I) policies, with the intention to describe acceptance in mandated corporate human resources programs aimed at defining a workplace free of bigotry and racism. However, we posit that the idea of tolerance in the language and attitudes of organizational policies, procedures, and traditional practices is a by-product of institutional implicit bias and racial privilege, and is, instead of a beacon of light towards equity and accepted multiculturalism, a contributorto the continuance of a dominant-subjugated culture that renders organizations’ diversity programs ineffective or lacking, preventing true inclusion. Through a bi-directionalretrospective-prospective interpretive phenomenological approach (BDRP-IPA) action research study, we identified statements of bias and privilege that arise in organizations and categorize their racial underpinnings in terms of language and attitudes of tolerance, describing how this practice perpetuates a culture of inequality, inequity, and exclusion. The findings suggest that the language and organizational culture-driven attitudes of tolerance can drive damaging behaviour, and that the hermeneutics of tolerance in organizational policy should be discontinued and replaced with language of equality, equity, and multiculturalism.

In the era of the 4th Industrial Revolution, and an environment of emerging technologies and the evolving ways of doing work, novel tech related to communications has made it possible for people to have meetings, hold classes, and socialize virtually, even if they are spread around the globe. A new technology, holoportation, which has emerged and continues to develop over the past several years, has become available, marketed, and is being used in some locations for communications. Dominant to its 2-D cousins of Zoom, GoToMeeting, and other commonly used platforms, holoportation brings the capability of 3-dimensional viewing, utilizing VR and AR (VR/AR) and complex video-computing to place parties in virtual environments that appear as though they are present in the same room as each other, creating an environment of real-time telepresence. This technology, and the new versions of it being developed currently, has many advantages in numerous industries, professions, and locations, including in the practice of conflict analysis and negotiation. This article describes the use of these technologies, as well as some current challenges, with respect to doing conflict work.