We recently published the last in the series of seven articles written for the Hub by consultant and coach, Finn Jackson, examining the future of leadership in a changing world.  Over the course of the series, these articles consider the future of leadership and offers an approach explicitly designed for the volatile, complex and uncertain economies we operate in today.  All the articles in the series are shown consecutively below, or can be accessed individually using these links.

• Article 1 - "In Search of Future Leadership"

• Article 2 - "Managing Transitions"

• Article 3 - "Creating Inspiration"

• Article 4 - "Opportunity Mindset"

• Article 5 - "Choosing a way forward"

• Article 6 - "Keeping your head when all around are losing theirs"

• Article 7 - "Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet"

Future of leadership: in search of future leadership

The organisation you work in was not always run the way it is today. A hundred years ago it would have been managed very differently.

The practical and philosophical foundations of modern management were laid down in the 1950s and 60s by Peter Drucker (“the father of modern management”) and consulting firms such as McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group. The approaches they developed were designed for a world that was stable and growing. We no longer live in such a world.

In this series of articles we will search for ‘the future of leadership’: an approach explicitly designed for the volatile, complex, and uncertain economies we operate in today. As we do so we will uncover a series of practices that together generate personal growth, an abundant world, and competitive advantage for our organisations.

We start by understanding how to lead our organisations in a way that enables them not only to survive change but to actually become stronger because of change.

FROM ‘COPING WITH CHANGE’ TO ‘THRIVING BECAUSE OF CHANGE’

We are living through a time of radical and accelerating change. The ability to manage that change is a top priority both for leaders and organisations: those who cannot manage change will fail; those who manage it well have competitive advantage.

The first priority for future leadership must be to enable our organisations not only to survive change but to use change to become stronger.

To understand how to achieve this, let’s look first at the way change happens in organisations. Then let’s look at how to make it happen better.

HOW CHANGE HAPPENS IN ORGANISATIONS

Change in any organisation follows a sequence of steps. These begin when someone notices a potential issue (or opportunity) and raises this to the organisation.

If the organisation agrees the issue is significant then it makes plans to address the matter. This is Step 2.

The third step is execution.

Together, these three simple steps define most organisational change programmes:

But the impacts of the change are not over yet.

The implementation of the change programme will have a psychological and emotional impact on all the people who are affected. Some of these impacts will be large and others small but they will reshape the world views of each affected person, either confirming what they knew already or teaching them something new. These effects are called transitions. Managing them is Step 4.

Then the next time these people find themselves in a situation where change might be needed (back to Step 1 again, via Arrow 5) they will use their new world views, and their experiences of what happened last time, to decide how they will respond: whether or not they will speak up and how they will do so.

Charting this process, from planning to execution, from individual to organisation, and back again, gives us the ‘Cycle of Leadership’. This is how change happens in organisations.

MANAGING CHANGE HAPPEN BETTER

If we want to improve our organisation’s ability to handle change there are just two ways to do so: either we can improve the way we carry out each step or (better) we can close the loop.

To understand this, imagine an organisation that says one thing but does another. Perhaps it says it encourages risk-taking but actually only rewards people who meet their financial targets. Such an organisation might move successfully through the first three stages of change but will fail at the fourth and fifth to close the loop. Instead, people will learn from experience not to believe what they are told. This will make them less willing and able to address new issues (Steps 1 and 2) and more resistant to future changes (Steps 3 and 4). Over time, the organisation’s ability to respond to change will degrade.

Imagine, instead, an organisation that shows consistency in what it says and does. As a shorthand, suppose it defines its purpose and values, then actively applies them in its day-to-day operations and decision-making. Such an organisation closes the loop. What happens next is a kind of magic.

An organisation that lives in line with its stated purpose and values teaches its people by example. When new issues arise, this deeper understanding helps people know clearly and quickly which issues matter and which do not (Step 1). Their added clarity and confidence then helps people to create new plans (Step 2), implement them (Step 3), and handle their transitions (Step 4). In other words, by defining a set of purpose and values and acting consistently in line with them, the organisation increases its ability to change.

In a churning world, this brings competitive advantage.

At the end of each cycle the organisation then gets to update and reinforce its purpose and values, which makes it even stronger at identifying and addressing the next issue that arises.

 By acting consistently in line with a set of purpose and values the organisation switches from linear management to circular management. The organisation and its people become able not only to survive crises and change but actually become stronger because of them. They become what Nicholas Nassim Taleb calls ‘antifragile’.

Things that break under pressure we call ‘fragile’. Things that do not break under pressure we call ‘strong’, ‘robust’, or ‘resilient’. And things, people, and systems that actually become stronger when placed under pressure, Taleb calls ‘antifragile’.

In a time of change, this ability to use change to become stronger brings advantage to an organisation. This is why purpose and values matter: not because of any moral high ground but because in times of change they bring consistency, making leaders and their organisations more able to handle change.

This is the first building block of future leadership and it brings competitive advantage that becomes stronger with each challenge that arises.

We will return to purpose and values in the fifth article of this series. But for now our next step is to understand more clearly how to make Arrow 5 happen. For that we need to look more closely at Step 4, managing transitions. This is the focus of the next article.

Future of leadership: managing transitions

The first step in our search for future leadership has shown how purpose and values can bring competitive advantage that grows stronger with each challenge we face.

This article looks in more detail at how we can achieve this.

TRANSITIONS MATTER MORE THAN CHANGES

We are living through a time of rapid change. Changes in technology, the economy, politics, and society are forcing every organisation to adapt. Each change brings with it psychological and emotional transitions. Some of these are large, others small. All will be important.

For example, following a reorganisation, John and his team found themselves with new roles and reporting lines. The changes involved were relatively straightforward: John and his team could quickly adapt to the new location, tasks, and technologies they were being asked to take on. But what mattered more to them (and affected their morale and productivity) were the unspoken impacts on their identities. Would their new role still be as important to the strategy of the firm? Would they lose their relationships with key decision-makers? What would be the impact on their status in the industry?

It wasn’t the changes that determined the success or failure of the reorganisation but the way these transitions were handled.

Changes happen in the outer world: they involve new roles, tasks, and reporting lines. Transitions happen in our inner worlds: they are about who we are, our identities.

Changes are visible. Transitions are invisible. Changes involve places, transactions, and things. Transitions are about meanings, relationships, and stories. Changes can happen quickly. Transitions can take time for people to work through. Changes are predictable. Transitions are not. This is why change guru William Bridges says, “It isn’t the changes that do you in, it’s the transitions.”

Managing these transitions forms Step 4 of the process by which change happens in organisations (see diagram). It is the step that, collectively, we pay least attention to. But it is also the step that, if managed well, closes the loop of organisational change, making leaders and their organisations more able to address the next issue that arises, and so building anti-fragile competitive advantage. 

To understand how we can achieve this, and why purpose and values play such an important role, let’s look in more detail at what it takes to manage the psychological and emotional transitions that accompany any change (Step 4 in the diagram).

The first person to write about these transitions was Arnold van Gennep. In the early 1900s he studied the rites of passage associated with the major life transitions of death, marriage, and the shift from childhood into adulthood. What he discovered was that we never go straight from ‘State A’ into ‘State B’. There is always a third, intermediate, or transitional stage where we are no longer in the old identity but not yet fully in the new one either. This is the chrysalis stage between the caterpillar and the butterfly.

Getting married provides a good example. Usually this begins with a period of engagement. Here we announce that a change is going to happen and start to come to terms with the idea that we will take on a new identity. This stage is called Separation. In the second, Threshold, stage the wedding itself takes place. Here we cross the threshold and officially become ‘married’: our old life is over but our new identity has not yet formed. Then, during the third stage, we start to discover and integrate what being married is really about. This is Consolidation: the honeymoon period and beyond.

These same three phases exist whenever we start a new role or implement change in an organisation. We separate from the way things used to be, cross the threshold to start building the new approach, then gradually consolidate this new way of being and doing.

The key success factors for the first phase, Separation, are to let go of the past and turn to face the future. This involves accepting that the past has gone, recognizing the resources and learning it has brought us, and deciding to use the future to rebuild what matters most. Ritualistic actions can help us let go of the past. The key to turning to face the future is to create an inspiring vision.

In the second, Threshold, stage people face uncertainty. Here we have let go of the way the world used to be but have not yet built the way it is going to be. Values give us a way to step into that uncertainty, by controlling the only thing we can control: ourselves. By defining our values we give ourselves guidelines and permission to choose quickly how we respond to any situation. This puts us back in control and immediately brings the culture of our future vision alive.

Finally, during Consolidation, the priority is to align and integrate the different elements of our future organisation. Here momentum, coherence, and communication matter. Defining purpose delivers all three: it provides urgency, alignment, and a way to resolve competing priorities. Defining purpose enables different parts of our organisation to make rapid, independent decisions and also remain aligned with a common, shared direction.

We now understand why values and purpose are so important: in a churning world they bring the stability and direction that enable people to step enthusiastically into the uncertainty of the Threshold phase and to achieve Consolidation. An inspiring vision does the same for Separation.

The future of leadership will be about managing change. Future leaders will enable their organisations to adapt seamlessly to change by empowering them to quickly manage all three stages of transition. This will build a new kind of organisation that not only survives change but uses change to become stronger.

We will return to purpose and values in the fifth article of this series. For now, the next step in our quest to find the building blocks of future leadership is to understand how to achieve Separation. For this we need to understand how to create an inspiring vision.

Future of leadership: creating inspiration

Our search for the future of leadership has shown us how to create organisations that use change to become stronger by using values and purpose to facilitate the transitions that arise during change.

To accelerate the first stage of these transitions, Separation, future leaders will need to build an inspiring vision of the future they want to create. This article describes how to do that.

VISION MATTERS – IT MAKES US FEEL ALIVE

“If you are working on something exciting that you really care about,” Steve Jobs said, “you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.”

“If you want to build a ship,” poet and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

In a time of rapid change, a leader’s ability to create an inspiring vision enables them to meet any challenge.

It transforms their results three times over:

• First, in times of change, people are likely to be experiencing uncertainty, confusion, and loss. Getting them to switch to a new way forward means overcoming their inertia, doubt, and even fear. The best way to do this is by inspiring them

• Once people have joined a new project or initiative, difficulties are bound to arise. The more inspiration a leader has created with their vision, the more people will be able to work around those difficulties without needing further input. The more inspiration customers, employees, and investors gain from participating in the project, the more committed they will be to continue engaging with it, no matter what happens. A 2016 survey of tech companies showed that employees at Tesla and SpaceX had the most stressful and the lowest paying jobs, but also the most meaningful and inspiring. The meaning and inspiration they felt outweighed the stress and lower pay.

• Third, the inspiration felt by a leader and their team will show up in the results they produce together over time. Research by Gallup found that companies with highly engaged workforces “outperform their peers by 147% in earnings per share… A highly engaged work-force,” Gallup says, “means the difference between a company that outperforms its competitors and one that fails to grow.”

Creating inspiration will spur people to join a project, motivate them to stick with it, and generate higher levels of contribution. It is also more enjoyable to be around.

So how can we create this inspiration?

SEVEN BUILDING BLOCKS of creating inspiration

Future leaders will describe their chosen way forward in an inspiring, visionary way by using seven building blocks.

The first three blocks describe three elements that research has shown are essential to achieving any successful strategic change:

• clear definition of the problem

• clear definition of the future they want to create

• clearly defined first steps to get there – not the entire journey, just the first steps

These building blocks will have more power if leaders communicate them in ways that resonate with their audiences, so the fourth building block is to create that meaning for those audiences, both rationally and emotionally.

The fifth block is to describe the underlying values, principles, or ideals that the chosen way forward upholds.

The sixth is to ask people to make a choice: will they support the project?

And finally, future leaders will achieve all this best when they communicate it authentically. This is the seventh building block.

The seven ingredients for creating an inspiring vision are:

1. clear definition of the problem

2. clear definition of the future you want to create

3. clear first steps

4. together with the higher principles or values your vision supports

5. delivered authentically by you

6. in language that is meaningful for your audience

7. in a way that spurs your audience to decide whether or not to join you

Individually, these blocks can be boring, dull, and lifeless. The best way to make them inspiring is to turn them into a story.

A VISION-STORY

Human beings are hard-wired for stories. We connect with them, engage with them, and remember them in ways that simply don’t happen when we receive the same information in other forms.

Princeton neuroscientist Uri Hasson has found that, “Story is the only way to activate parts in the brain so that a listener turns the story into their own idea and experience.” Screenwriting guru Robert McKee explains, “When an idea wraps itself around an emotional charge… a story well told gives you the very thing you cannot get from life: meaningful emotional experience.”

A story can deliver a vision so meaningful and inspiring that your audience not only understands the vision but internalises it as their own.

As a simple example, let’s invent one deliberately bland sentence for each of the seven blocks, then combine them into a story:

“We are facing a difficult situation, unlike anything we have experienced before. But we come from a long line of people who have faced difficult situations and overcome them. We can’t stay as we are, or go back to where we were: we have to move forward. And if we move in the direction I am suggesting then we have the opportunity to build something very special. It will uphold the very principles we stand for. We have all the tools and resources we need to begin. The only question is, are you willing to step up and play your part for those who will come after?”

Each building block alone is a single, unexciting ingredient. But, like your mother’s cooking or the recipe for gunpowder, combined in the right order and proportions they can become a whole that is more powerful than its parts.

Story is the best way to combine facts and emotion so that you and others want to make your chosen way forward happen. Future leaders will use this ‘vision-story’, together with purpose and values, to build organisations that use change to become stronger

But before they can create an inspiring vision those leaders will first will to choose a direction to move forward in: the future they want to create. Before they can do that, they need to know what their options are.

The next article looks at how to identify more opportunities in a time of change.

Future of leadership: an opportunity mindset

Our search for the future of leadership has shown how defining vision, values, and purpose helps organisations to adapt seamlessly to change. This brings competitive advantage that grows stronger with each challenge, built on courage, enthusiasm, and the passion of the human spirit.

But before future leaders can define an inspiring vision, they first need to choose a way forward. They will do that better if they first identify a wider range of options.

This article describes how future leaders will identify more opportunities in any crisis. (The next will describe how they will choose between them.)

CHANGE BRINGS CHALLENGE, AND OPPORTUNITY

A time of radical change brings challenges for leaders. Change increases the pressure for new solutions but it also makes implementation more difficult. A time of radical change also makes our standard approaches to problem solving and opportunity discovery less likely to work.

But a time of change also brings new opportunities. Often these are hidden inside what at first sight look like problems.

When Alexander Fleming discovered one of his experiments had failed (growing mould instead of bacteria) he could simply have thrown it away or made sure it was cleaned properly next time. Instead he looked closer, discovered penicillin, and saved millions of lives.

When bullet train engineers, digging a tunnel through a mountain in Japan, faced a problem with flooding they could simply have pumped the water away or sealed the tunnel. Instead they bottled the mineral water, sold it, and built a $50m brand.

When Georges de Mestral returned from a walk to find his clothes and his dog covered with burrs he didn’t just remove them, he looked closely at how they attached themselves, then invented Velcro®.

And when Travis Kalanick and a friend couldn’t get a taxi in Paris one day they didn’t just complain about it, they founded Uber. The rest, as we know, is history.

We’ve all faced similar problems but not created similar outcomes. The question is, what was it about these particular situations that led to these innovations?

The situations were all different. But the people all shared one thing in common: an attitude that led them to look for the opportunities inside the problems they faced.

This is the attitude that defines leadership. Like any attitude it can be learned.

We will never know exactly what happened in the cases outlined above, but it must surely have been one of three things:

• Chance, Synchronicity, or Serendipity

Travis Kalanick might have given up hope of ever getting a cab when suddenly he noticed his friend using a smartphone to order something online.

• Intuition

James Cameron had the ideas for Terminator and Avatar during a dream. The inventor of the sewing machine solved the problem of how to make the needle work in the same way. Perhaps intuition played a role in these examples.

• Actively Treating the Problem as an Opportunity

If we reframe and generalize a situation we can ask where or for whom it might be an opportunity. Instead of thinking “My experiment has failed!” Alexander Fleming might have said, “Something prevented the bacteria from growing,” then, “Who would find it useful to have ‘something that prevents bacteria from growing’?”

Future leaders will train themselves to develop these perspectives. They will take five minutes at the end of each day to remember the things that have gone well. They will get into the habit of praising or thanking others. They will use various techniques to connect more deeply with their intuition. And instead of simply reacting to a situation they will pause and ask themselves what it would have taken to prevent the situation from arising in the first place or what opportunity it might now present for them, or others, to develop new leadership skills.

Altogether, there are ten different types of opportunity that future leaders will look for and several tools or techniques they will use to find them. These don’t guarantee that they will find a world-changing transformation in every crisis they face. But the more that they develop these skills the more options they will uncover and the more likely they will become to make the best of whatever situations arise.

Whichever way forward these future leaders eventually choose, engaging an attitude that approaches problems as if they contain opportunities will bring them five important side benefits:

1. Enthusiasm, Morale: Looking for opportunities rather than problems is more enjoyable to be around.

2. Understanding: Searching for opportunities forces us to understand more deeply what is really going on. This deeper understanding will be useful no matter what direction we choose.

3. Impact, Durability: When John Cleese was writing sketches with the Monty Python team his colleagues would often stop when they got to the first punchline. Cleese would keep working until he found the second, third, or fifth level of comedy. Looking for the opportunities beyond the quick fix will bring outcomes that are more remarkable, last longer, or work at a deeper level than your competitors.

4. Control: By choosing to look for opportunities you put yourself back in control. Whichever direction you eventually move forward in, you do so from a deeper knowledge that it is the best alternative for you. This brings more confidence, focus, and momentum to your implementation.

5. Antifragility: By combining all these points, choosing to look for the opportunities in a situation makes you more certain of your priorities and more able to put them into practice: it makes you more anti fragile.

In a time of change, when all ways forward will be difficult and unpredictable, success depends less on the particular path you choose and more on the levels of inspiration you are able to generate to sustain that direction over time (in customers, employees, and investors). Having an attitude to look for the opportunities hidden in a crisis will make future leaders more likely to find that inspiration.

The approach to leadership being uncovered in these articles takes this attitude and wraps it into a framework and tools that convert it into competitive advantage that grows stronger with each challenges it faces.

The future leader’s next step towards achieving this advantage will be to choose between the opportunities they have identified. This is the topic of the next article.

Future of leadership: choosing a way forward

Our search for the future of leadership has shown us how vision, values, and purpose enable us not only to cope with change but to use change to become stronger. In a world of constant change this brings competitive advantage.

To achieve this we need to create an inspiring vision. That vision will be stronger if we first widen our options by looking for the opportunities that exist in any crisis.

The previous article showed how to find those opportunities. This article discusses how to choose between them.

FIND WHAT YOU LOVE

Having identified more options to move forward, a churning world makes it more difficult to choose which one to implement: when the future is unpredictable how can we know which way forward will turn out best?

Steve Jobs had a simple answer to this question. He was an imperfect human being like the rest of us but he achieved more in his short life than many of us do. Describing what enabled him to recover and find new direction after being fired by the very company he had founded, he said, “You’ve got to find what you love… If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

In a time of change this makes sense. Love is what will bring the inspiration that keeps us going when difficulties arise – and keep our employees, customers, and investors going too.

But love can be difficult to convert into a business plan. And what if we haven’t found what we love yet? Are there other approaches that future leaders can apply?

BENCHMARKING

Benchmarking is the process of looking for existing best practices in other industries, then adapting them to meet our own needs. The best practice example for achieving results in highly unpredictable circumstances must surely be elite army units. Special forces operating behind enemy lines have different objectives from you and me but they know how to accomplish specific, measurable goals in highly uncertain, even hostile environments.

They achieve their goals, despite those difficulties, by defining two things:

• First, as well as knowing their primary objective (to capture the target, gather intelligence, or whatever) they also make sure that every team member understands the wider purpose of the mission: the role it plays as part of the larger campaign. Then, when things turn out differently from expected, they can easily adapt to carry out other, independent actions that support the same aims.

• Second, each unit is given rules of engagement. These define what actions (such as returning fire) are appropriate and inappropriate under different circumstances. This keeps the unit focused on its highest priorities, maximising the chances of success.

By defining these two simple principles of conduct – purpose and rules of engagement – elite army units are able to go into highly unpredictable, even hostile environments and adapt to changing circumstances in ways that maximise their potential to achieve the outcomes they seek.

As we move forward to accomplish our objectives in a changing world we, too, will face unpredictable circumstances. The equivalents of purpose and rules of engagement for us are our purpose and values: these define the underlying intent behind what we are doing and the way we choose to act in the world. And, unlike the army units, we get to choose them for ourselves:

• To find your values, think back to times when you have felt most alive, in flow, operating at the maximum of your potential, ‘doing what you are here to do’. Ask yourself what values you were upholding in those moments. These are your core values.

• To find your purpose, identify your two best qualities and how you love applying them. Then define what an ideal world looks like to you. Your purpose is to create whatever an ideal world looks like to you, by applying your two best qualities in the ways you most love.

When we define our purpose and values in these ways we are effectively defining what we love, and making it actionable.

Then when we work in organisations that align with our purpose and values we feel “alive, in flow, applying our best qualities in the ways we most love to build what our ideal world looks like.” No wonder Gallup repeatedly finds that companies with highly engaged workforces significantly outperform their peers. No wonder Google provides “an environment where people can flourish and grow,” then commercialises the best of whatever emerges.

People who work in organisations that align with their purpose and values are not just building the organisation, they are building themselves: fulfilling their deepest psychological drives, realising their full potential, self-actualising. And when people and organisation work together in this way they become a mechanism for bringing their shared purpose and values alive in the world.

MAKING YOUR CHOICE

We now know how future leaders will decide which direction to move forward in: they will choose the option that aligns best with their purpose and values, given the conditions they face. They will follow what they love.

In other words, like a sailor on the sea, if the weather is calm and the wind set fair, they will choose the course that leads most directly towards the purpose or port they are aiming for. But if the wind is against them then they will tack and jibe across it until the wind changes. Their short term direction might appear disjointed but their long term destination (purpose) remains unchanged.

This approach combines focus, determination, and adaptability. In an uncertain world it gives future leaders the best chance of achieving the outcomes that matter most to them. And it reinforces their values and purpose by example, attracting more people who share those values and purpose, and creating an organisation that uses change to become stronger.

NEXT STEPS

Our search for the future of leadership has now uncovered five steps towards creating organisations that use change to become stronger. 

All that is left is to make sure they can implement their chosen way forward.

The next article will describe two more skills or abilities for achieving this. A final article will then review what we have learned about the future of leadership and examine its implications.

Future of leadership: keeping your heading when all around are losing theirs

Our search for the future of leadership has shown us how to find the opportunities in a crisis and turn the best of them into an inspiring vision.

To help ensure successful implementation of that vision, future leaders will add two final abilities to their skill set.

MAKE CLEAR SENSE OF THE SITUATION

As future leaders work to implement their chosen way forward, difficulties are bound to arise. A world that no longer works the way it used to will make it easy for them to misinterpret what those events might mean. It will also make it difficult for them to spot the new solutions that might be emerging.

Future leaders will enhance their abilities to do both these things – to spot mistaken assumptions and to ‘think outside the box’ to find new solutions – because they know that both will dramatically increase their chances of getting the results they want.

For example, it used to be normal business practice to register patents as a way to prevent others from copying your business. But in 2014 Tesla realized this assumption was holding it back from achieving its strategic goals and opened up its battery patents to competitors.

It used to be normal business practice for hotel and taxi companies to own or lease buildings and vehicles. Letting go of this assumption enabled Airbnb and Uber to develop radically new business models and transform their industries.

Altogether, there are eight common types of mistaken assumption we can easily make, especially in a time of change. By learning to spot these, future leaders will empower themselves to find other, more realistic interpretations, reallocate resources, and increase their likelihood of getting the results they want.

Future leaders will also know that in a time of change new opportunities are always emerging. To their conscious minds, habituated to the ways the world used to work, these new paths will be invisible or might even seem ‘wrong’. But their unconscious intuitive minds will be spotting these new patterns as they develop.

We’ve all watched sportspeople leap and dive in a split second to put the ball exactly where they wanted it to go. We’ve all experienced a solution suddenly popping into our heads out of nowhere or unexpectedly remembered something critically important that we thought we had forgotten. At these moments it is not our rational, thinking minds that bring us answers but our unconscious intuition. Future leaders will develop structured ways of accessing this intuition at will.

By learning to spot mistaken assumptions and connect reliably with their intuition, future leaders will enable themselves to make better sense of a changing world and to find their best ways forward.

CENTRE, GROUND, AND DEEPEN OUR CONNECTION WITH OURSELVES

A changing world brings us more issues to deal with and a greater sense of urgency for doing so.

Faced with these multiple competing priorities, future leaders will develop one final skill: the ability to remain centred and grounded at all times.

At one level this can involve simple techniques for releasing stress, anchoring desired states, or maintaining the mindfulness that has become so popular in recent years.

But the ultimate way of remaining steadfast in the face of multiple conflicting priorities is to connect deeply with the priorities that matter most to you: who you are and what you care about. Then you can quickly know which issues to ignore, which to pay attention to, and what outcomes to create.

Future leaders will set aside time daily, weekly, and monthly to review and connect with their personal priorities. They will use three types of activity to achieve this: exercise, creativity, and meditation.

“Exercise,” says John Ratey, psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, “is the single best thing you can do for your brain in terms of mood, memory, and learning. Even 10 minutes of activity changes your brain.” Richard Branson, for example, says he gets four additional hours of productivity each day from a variety of workouts that include swimming, rock climbing, running, weightlifting, and yoga.

Science has shown that meditation also physically changes our brains, generating higher capacities for concentration and managing our emotions. Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple, was well known for practicing Zen Buddhism. “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice,” he said. Meditation connected him with that inner voice. Ariana Huffington calls her early-morning yoga and meditation sessions ‘joy triggers’. Walt Freese, former CEO of Ben & Jerry’s and now the Sterling-Rice Group, starts and finishes each day with 15 minutes of meditation, exercises for at least an hour three days a week, and at weekends goes hiking, climbing, or skiing.

Finally, in a world where everything is changing, the ability to innovate is an increasingly important part of every leader’s toolset. Innovation is applied creativity, so participating in the arts – either by being creative yourself or by engaging with the creativity of others – is a powerful way to recharge your batteries, connect with what inspires you, and strengthen your creative muscle, your ability to innovate.

Time spent in nature enhances all three.

Like a tree putting down deeper roots, the self-connection developed by whatever combination of these three activities is right for them will not only keep future leaders stable when storms are raging but will also enable them to spread their leadership ‘branches’ out into larger challenges and roles when times are calm.

Switching the metaphor, Abraham Lincoln famously said, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.” Meditation, exercise, and creativity sharpen that axe. They bring a clarity and focus that enable us to deal with our workload more efficiently and effectively.

For future leaders, connecting deeply with who they are and what matters most to them lays the foundation for everything else that follows.

NEXT STEPS

Our search for the future of leadership has led us on a journey. That journey started with the possibility of creating organisations that use change to become stronger and has ended with our understanding the need to connect deeply with who we truly are.

A final article will review all the steps and examine their implications.

Future of leadership: infinite growth on a finite planet

We started this series of articles looking for a new approach to leadership: one explicitly designed for the volatile, complex, and uncertain world we face. What we quickly found is that we have an opportunity to create organisations that not only cope with change but actually grow stronger with each challenge they face.

Subsequent articles have led us through the actions needed to achieve this. They showed how future leaders will use vision, values, and purpose to enthuse people to move easily through the three stages of transition. We learned how to create an inspiring vision, how to find more opportunities in a crisis, and how to select the best way forward. Finally, we saw that implementation will be more likely to succeed when leaders learn to make clearer sense of a changing world and connect more deeply with who they are and what matters most to them.

Together, these steps define the seven competencies of future leaders.

Placed in reverse order, they also describe a process for achieving that future leadership:

1. Centre and ground: connect deeply with who you are and what matters most to you

2. Check for mistaken assumptions, spot emerging patterns

3. Find more opportunities in the situation you face

4. Choose the one that suits you best

5. Check how it aligns with your purpose and values

6. Articulate your chosen way forward as an inspiring vision-story

7. Use vision, values, and purpose to speed the transitions as you move forward

PERSONAL GROWTH, ORGANISATIONAL ADVANTAGE

An individual who applies this framework will connect more deeply with what matters most to them, find more ways to apply that in the situations they face, and increase their ability to get the outcomes they want. As they do so they will learn more about themselves and become more able to put that into practice: they will self-actualise.

An organisation that applies this framework will become more stable and directed. When issues arise it will know which to ignore and which to pay attention to. For issues that matter, it will find a wider range of solutions and put them into practice more quickly and inspiringly. Such an organisation will use change to become stronger. In a VUCA world of constant change this will bring competitive advantage.

GENERATIVE ENTERPRISE, GENERATIVE ECONOMY

Together, people and organisations that apply this framework will become a new kind of enterprise, aligned around their shared purpose and values:

• The people provide the energy and enthusiasm for getting things done. This brings higher quality, shorter timeframes, lower costs, plus greater resilience and adaptability. As Gallup has shown, “a highly engaged work-force means the difference between a company that outperforms its competitors [by 147%!] and one that fails to grow.”

• The organisation provides an inspiring and supportive environment. This not only gives people more enthusiasm for tackling the issues that arise but also enables them to do so in ways that challenge, stretch, and develop them. The more that people then discover and develop their own unique talents (self-actualise), the more they will develop and deliver unique products and services for the organisation. This is why companies like Google create “an environment where people can flourish and grow,” then commercialise the best of whatever emerges.

Together, organisation and people become ‘generative’: they each help the other to grow.

Together, they become a kind of mechanism for putting their shared values and purpose into practice in a churning world.

Together, they generate stability, enthusiasm, then growth.

What happens next, as Paul Polman of Unilever has described, is that others feel attracted to join and contribute. In this way the generative attitude of a single future leader becomes manifested into the culture of an organisation, then outwards into a wider generative business ecosystem of suppliers, customers, and investors that each help the others to grow, aligned around the purpose and values.

In the same way that the organisation develops its people and the people develop the organisation, so the ecosystem now develops its members and its members develop the ecosystem. In this way, these generative business ecosystems have the potential to create an abundant, generative world. They do so partly because it feels right to live in line with their purpose and values, and partly because doing so brings competitive advantage, enabling them to evolve faster in a changing world. (Unilever, for example, has seen its ‘sustainable living’ brands grow 30% faster than the rest of its business.)

INFINITE GROWTH ON A FINITE PLANET

We started this series of articles looking for an approach to leadership designed explicitly for a changing world.

The seven-step approach we uncovered is listed above. It begins when a single leader connects deeply with who they are and what matters most to them. If they apply this as purpose and values they can create an organisation that responds better and faster to change. That organisation will generate enthusiasm in its people, developing them, and bringing higher returns. A business ecosystem that replicates these patterns has the potential to create infinite growth on a finite planet: not necessarily infinite in terms of quantity (though in a knowledge economy this becomes possible), but infinite in quality, and infinite in value.

There is actually nothing new here. Each building block of this ‘new’ style of leadership already exists and is emerging into the world in companies like Google, Tesla, and Unilever. It is emerging because it works: it brings competitive advantage. It is an inevitable, human response to a VUCA world, replacing volatility and uncertainty with stability, enthusiasm, and growth: in people, organisations, the wider business ecosystem, and the world.

The intention of this series of articles has been to make what is beginning to happen explicit: to join the dots, show the larger process, and in doing so accelerate that process.

Under our old style of leadership this VUCA world is a problem. Applying the new tools and techniques described here (and in more detail in my book The Churning Vol. 1, Inner Leadership) it is an opportunity to create competitive advantage, personal growth, and an abundant world.

Finn Jackson is a consultant and coach who helps clients generate lasting solutions to issues of strategy, leadership, and change.

His first book, The Escher Cycle , was called “A unified theory of business” and “A blueprint for winning any game your business chooses to play.”

His second book, The Churning, Inner Leadership, has been called “The inspiring manual to improve our VUCAbility,” “A book which should be on every change-maker’s bookshelf,” and “an ethical framework for business decision makers, based on emotional maturity.”

More resources on the future of leadership