Guides and Rules of the Road 105deranged king and the only one who stands by him in
his madness to his tragic end. Indeed, the king acts
more foolishly than the fool does. A court jester is a
great mentor.
Have at least three internal mentors, the more dif-
ferent, the better. As a leader, you will not face easy
problems with a fixed answer. If you did, you wouldn’t
need a mentor – a mathematician or a logician would
be good enough.
When you want advice, take a few minutes for yourself
alone and conjure up an image of each mentor. Make
them as vivid, colourful and ‘real’ as possible. Ask each
mentor in turn for their advice. Take your time. You
may get nothing at first, you may get something obvious
or you may get something unexpected. You may get no
answer at all, or a direct or indirect one, or one without
words. Your answers may come in the form of stories,
pictures, sounds, cryptic allusions, obscure references.
They may appear like dream fragments. They may even
be tasks. Whatever they are, they are answers, not nec-
essarily the ‘right’ answers, but maybe better ways of
looking at the question.
The sort of problems you face are not going to be
easy cut-and-dried problems, but more like complex
shapes in a dark room. You do not know what they are
and you find out by lighting them from different angles
to see their true size and shape. Mentors help you, and
the more different the mentors, the more diverse and
illuminating the viewpoints. Three similar mentors
would all light up the same part of the problem and you
would get an excellent understanding of that part, but
the rest would be as dark as ever.
When you have your responses, think about the fol-
lowing questions:
What do they have in common?
How are they different?