Towards the end of last year a colleague and I came across a blog post that we found particularly challenging.Central to the post was the question:
What if everything you know is wrong?
The more we thought about it, the more excited we became by the potential this question is capable of unlocking. We began to have very excitable conversations about how this question could enable people to leap into a brand new paradigm in which ideas, products and solutions that don’t yet exist could be conceived. We got excited by the potential of this question to get people through the current economic turmoil into the new economics that will emerge. What if the people we introduced this question to could become leaders and first movers who actually invent the future? What if we could multiply that to thousands of people? The Experiment was born.
Available from today we have put together a weekly programme of exercises that should take each participant about an hour a week. At the end of each week we ask each participant to report back on some simple metrics so that we can begin to collate data on the outcomes of The Experiment. This really is a genuine experiment that we believe will make a huge difference to those who participate. The administration fees have been kept as low as possible to make The Experiment accessible to as many people as possible.
So this is your invitation to join us and to spread the word and to find out where this journey leads.
The more I think about leadership the more often I come back to this word ‘ontology.’ To be a great leader requires a level of authenticity and adaptability that goes way beyond methodology. Knowing how to do something is a management approach. Great leaders are set apart not by skills but by strengths. Skills are external things I can acquire. Strengths are personality based things I develop.
The more one studies leadership, the more apparent it becomes that great leaders are not distinguished by what they do but by what they are. Leadership is not a role it is a state of being. If this sounds fluffy and impractical, then consider the challenging of leading organisations and individuals into a future that is difficult to define. What I do may need to change drastically. What I am, will grow and develop but will be a much more reliable constant. My skills may become obsolete. My strengths will enable me to adapt.
A few weeks ago I finally got round to watching ‘The King’s Speech’. The film traces the emergence of George VI as the King who led Great Britain through the uncertainties of World War II. The captions at the end of the film refer to George VI as becoming ‘a symbol of national resistance.’ His role was not to define how the war would be won but to embody a sense of certainty and stability as the nation walked into the unknown horrors and outcomes of a second world war.
As we face a future in which there are so many uncertainties leaders need to embody certainty and stability. They need to be an anchor for those they lead. Not an anchor that holds people back from change but an anchor that provides a sense of stability in the midst of change. Great leaders are not defined by their skills but their qualities. What they do is important, what they are as they do it sets them apart.
Our overly occupied brains love to simplify things into right or wrong, good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable. We seek out certainty and absolute answers and we instinctively avoid uncertainty. When societies undergo significant change there is always a tendency to attempt to ignore the change by continuing to do what we have always done. Leading through organisational change is challenging when the leader understands what the future needs to look like. How much more challenging is the job of leading people into an uncertain future? How can a leader face this challenge.
Auto-piloting marine craft is a complex task. Each vessel handles differently. The oceans are a moving surface across which to navigate. The weather changes the handling characteristics of the vessel and the movement of the ocean surface. Then there are both stationary and moving obstacles to avoid. Binary logic (yes – no; true-false; on-off) cannot deal with the variables of piloting a marine vessel. What is needed is fuzzy logic. A way of using data that allows for multiple interconnected variables. Fuzzy logic systems give a ‘truth value’ to each variable. To put it in language that we non-mathematicians can deal with, fuzzy logic acknowledges all the shades of grey between black and white.
The business world is full of people selling and seeking absolute solutions. Step-by-step recipes for guaranteed success. Expertise is defined and valued by the absolute certainty of knowing what to do when and how to do it most efficiently. The problem is that such expertise is orientated around the past and should come with the warning that : “past performance is no guarantee of future returns.” In fact, in a future about which one of the only certainties is that it will be different past performance may be incredibly unreliable as an indicator of future returns.
What we need is an approach to leadership that values fuzzy logic. Not a proven expertise in past performance but an ability to adapt and respond to innumerable unpredictable variables. In human terms that is going to lead into a creative space in which authenticity, principles, values and networked thinking are the defining qualities of a great leader. Successful navigation of the future will belong not to those who know how to do what we’ve always done but who can respond quickly and creatively to a rapidly changing environment.
Most commentators agree that we are on the edge of a number of paradigm changing shifts. Economists are pointing to a new look future. Those whose expertise is the nature of work are telling us things will be very different. As we all learn the language of cloud computing the way in which we use the Internet and the machines we use to do our computing are on the verge of another huge change.
Last week I posed the question: how do you plan for the unknown? The question I’ve found myself asking this week is: how do you lead into the unknown?
The future is not entirely unknown. We can see trends that are emerging and those that are declining. We can look at technology currently being developed and project forward to understand the implications of that technology. What we end up with is a big picture that is very fuzzy in places but much clearer in others. As we look at the clearer parts of the picture it may be possible to know what we must do as leaders. The more fuzzy areas present a real challenge. Being a great leader as we walk into a fuzzy future will be less about knowing what to do and much more about knowing how to be.
Many companies have them, few are meaningful, most are meaningless. For some people having a mission statement is everything. Its a bit like having a business plan in your filing cabinet: you feel like it ought to be there but you haven’t referred to it or taken notice of it for months. Don’t get me wrong both a mission statement and a business plan can be useful documents but not when they are meaningless exercises completed because of some empty sense of doing what businesses do.
If you are reviewing or thinking about writing a mission statement here are a few thoughts to bare in mind:
Better to have a sense of mission than an ordinary, run of the mill, mission statement. The word mission implies something that is bigger than any business. Mission implies having an impact on the world. A man on a mission to make a personal fortune is focused on personal gain and cuts a sad figure. A man on a mission to reduce the amount of carbon produced in electricity generation may make a fortune but is focused on an ecological goal. I can buy into the second mission. It excites me. He may be on the way to significant wealth. I don’t care. He wants to make a difference in the world. What difference do you want to make through your activity?
It doesn’t matter what your business is, you have an impact on the world around you. Your mission statement needs to reflect a passion about having a positive and beneficial impact on the world. Your business may not be a world changer but it can change small corners of the world and if enough people change a small corner then together we make a big difference. Many mission statements are short-sighted. they are about business goals or quality. They fail to see the world in which the business operates. A world that will be better or worse as a result of the company’s activity. How will your activity improve the world today?
All this said, let me finish with a plea. Mean it or don’t write it. Better to have a sense of mission without a mission statement than a mission statement without a sense of mission.
When you write down your thoughts and review them you will notice bits and pieces coming together as your mind plays with parts of a jigsaw. You may, or may not have known that the parts belonged together. At the very least your mind had begun to identify them as of interest. Yesterday, whilst reviewing the posts on this blog, some pieces came together that point to a way forward from where you are.
The journey starts with a recognition of fear. Today many people will fear for the future. That may be a fear for the future of your business, your employment, or your children’s employment. Fear causes us to withdraw. Fear isolates us. Fear narrows our focus and often prevents us from doing the very things we need to do. So here is step 1 of the way forward – share your fear. Tell someone else how you feel. In itself, it won’t resolve anything but it will break the pattern. Think of it as the point at which you get up and prepare for the journey.
Step two is another small step. You need to be honest about the uncertainty we are all facing. Fear creates a dishonesty that clings to stuff you know doesn’t work any more. It is why we keep doing what we have always done even when it is not getting us anywhere. People do it, small businesses do it, large businesses do it and nations do it. The reason we do it is that the past is knowable and certain. The future is unknowable and filled with uncertainty. Trouble is the past doesn’t exist anymore and the future is shaped by what you do now. So step two is to be honest about the uncertainty we face.
When I acknowledge my fear and am honest about the inevitable uncertainty of the future something begins to change. Fear begins to change into nervous excitement. From being stuck clinging onto the past I begin to anticipate the future. Fear becomes a sense of adventure. Remember that adventure involves some fear. If it didn’t it would be a walk in the park. Life and business are not a walk in the park they are an adventure. When the future becomes an adventure then I walk into the future with wide eyes to discover new things. This is step three. Now you stride out into the adventure that is the future.
If you have followed this post emotionally you will recognise that the word ‘future’ has changed for you. At the beginning of this process planning is near impossible. Now your adventure requires that you plan. So how do you plan for the unknown? The answer is that you plan on two levels.The first is big picture planning. A jungle explorer knows that there will be bugs and predatory animals. She knows that there will be a need for food, water and shelter. Even going into the unknown she can plan to be sure that she meets these basic challenges. The specific path through the jungle cannot be planned very far ahead at all.
I don’t suppose anybody ever introduced themselves like that and yet it is the way many people approach social interaction. It is also the way many employers and training organisations expect people to approach training.
“Hello You. This is who I want you to be.”
The reason training (and our education system) works like this is ultimately a problem of logistics. The more people you are training, the more difficult it becomes to allow individuals to interact with the content in a way that makes it their own. Enabling individuals to assimilate and personalise learning effectively requires three things:
more time
more faith in the individual
more courage to embrace the less predictable outcomes
As a trainer I understand the ego driven attraction of addressing large audiences (with my poor singing voice its the closest I’ll ever get to the x-factor). I have also benefited as a delegate at large training events. BUT the most profound insights, the times when training has led to deep personal growth have come from smaller groups and 1-1 sessions led by people who believed in me.
This is not to say that training should be content/ instruction free. It is to say that the content and instruction should come from a place that starts by believing in the individual brilliance of those being trained.
“Hello You. What can you become now you know this?”
Over recent months I’ve done some reading and thinking around the nature of work in the future. The arguments set forth are compelling and the technology required is already in existence and will become more affordable. At the same time the news media is full of stories of strikes and threats of strikes as people around Europe vainly attempt to hang on to an economic model that is now unsustainable. Bringing these two things together I wonder what it will take for people to embrace the paradigm shift required to move from the exisitng reality to the predicted future.
Whilst part of me is annoyed by those encouraging the strikes another part of me cannot but feel for those individuals who so clearly fear the future. Like it or not the future is going to be different and that triggers threats to individual status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness – all five of which, according to David Rock’s SCARF model, trigger instinctive flight or fight reactions.
The other day a discussion on pensions on the BBC disintegrated into the statement of two positions that refused to interact with one another. On the one side were those who wanted a retirement of good length and good health. On the other were those who saw the economic necessity of change. The result being that nothing was gained by either side and the real issues were passed over. Just once did someone mention those whose career is spent in heavy labour. These tend to be lower paid jobs and with all the will in the world they cannot be done by someone in their late sixties or early seventies. So whilst the public sector strikes over the right to a long and comfortable retirement from office jobs nobody is addressing this very real problem. Whilst pundits argue over the right to a long and comfortable retirement versus the economic inevitability of change what about those whose jobs cannot be done into older age?
We are in a period of economic fear. Fear for jobs, fear for our young people, fear for our old age and fear of an unknown future. That future is in parts inevitable and predictable. Economic reality and technological capability will change the future of work. There are real and pressing questions to be asked about those whose work is physically demanding but instead we debate the generalities. I wonder how much of the predicted future will change through resistance. How much of our potential will be unreached because of our fear? How much of the predicted future is inevitable? How much pain wll it require before a nation embraces the kind of paradigm shift that appears to be necessary?
The more we thought about it, the more excited we became by the potential this question is capable of unlocking. We began to have very excitable conversations about how this question could enable people to leap into a brand new paradigm in which ideas, products and solutions that don’t yet exist could be conceived. We got excited by the potential of this question to get people through the current economic turmoil into the new economics that will emerge. What if the people we introduced this question to could become leaders and first movers who actually invent the future? What if we could multiply that to thousands of people? The Experiment was born.
