Episode Details

“Why do we need leaders at all?” is a better question than you might think. We’re so used to hierarchical structures and others telling us what to do from infancy on, that the idea that leadership has a function — that it’s more than “just the way things are” may escape us.

In We the People, Sharon Villines and John Buck write: “Unpredictable events will always occur as we pursue our aims. The purpose of leadership is to steer us through or around them.”

Notice that they said “leadership,” not “leaders.” They define leadership as a cybernetic process that exists in relation to the gap between expectation and occurrence.

The other gap — the one that most of us think of as the purview of leadership —the one between current and desired reality, isn’t the point. As Villines and Buck point out, “Without disturbances, we could organize our work processes just once and function robotically without leadership. Everyone would show up for work on time and never take more than the allotted time for lunch.”

Leadership exists because of uncertainty about the future.

What does this mean for those of you who aspire to leadership? What are the requirements of effective leadership in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world?

Four things that have nothing to do with motivation or control come to mind:

1. You need a 35,000 foot perspective. While team and individual contributors benefit the whole by focusing on their parts, the leadership point of view must be informed by more external inputs and a greater range of interests.
2. You need a rapid and valid feedback from all parts of the system as you move forward. You need to know what’s happening within and without our organizations in as close to real time as possible. This means that channels of communication must be highly efficient in both directions, and there has to be a baseline of safety and trust among all nodes.
3. You need a nervous system that can handle making decisions with limited knowledge. That doesn’t need to wait for perfect information (which, if it exists, always shows up too late). That doesn’t make unilateral gut-based decisions in the absence of whatever data exist inside and outside your organization.
4. You need to cultivate the ability to perceive reality as it happens, without routing it through the lens of your past conditioning (ie “fighting the last war”). To be able to see patterns where they exist, and novelty where old paradigms are irrelevant.

So here’s a quick diagnostic to assess how your leadership operating system is likely to perform under pressure. No one’s going to see your answers but you, so please pick the response closest to what your honest default would be — not necessarily you at your best.

1. You’re in the middle of executing a plan that’s working. Then you come across an article, a conversation, or a data point that suggests the broader landscape your organization operates in may be shifting in ways your current strategy doesn’t account for.

1. A) I register it, but I stay focused on execution. We set this plan for a reason and I don’t want to chase every shiny object.
2. B) I forward it to my team and ask someone to “keep an eye on it” — though I know that usually means it disappears.
3. C) I have a regular practice of scanning for exactly these kinds of signals — economic, technological, cultural, regulat