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Change is a state of mind
When running the “Leading Amidst Ambiguity and Change” seminars, I usually start by emphasising three important attitudes which, if fully adopted and embraced, will substantially enhance people’s ability to provide solid and clear leadership in uncertain times.
A rule of thumb
To illustrate the first quality, I ask the participants to put their hands together, interlacing their fingers, one thumb on top of the other, as if in prayer. Then I ask them to adjust their hands slightly so that they are now interlaced with the other thumb on top. Immediately they do this, several participants become visibly uncomfortable. I encourage them to stay with that feeling of discomfort and point out that, however strange it may feel to them, for many people this is the right and comfortable way for them to interlace their fingers.
Next, I ask them to swap from the initial position and back again in quick succession, before letting their hands come to rest in the previously unfamiliar position. Many report that this new position now feels less odd, more natural. For others, the feeling of strangeness is not diminished in any way.
And the point is?
The point of the exercise is to illustrate that humans are habitual and patterned beings. Having once successfully solved a problem or challenge, however trivial or otherwise, that becomes our standard response to any similar set of circumstances. As with the way we interlock our hands, so with much of our behaviour. Many of our actions and thoughts are largely automatic and outside our conscious awareness. Indeed, once we become aware of it and try to establish a new pattern, it feels unnatural, uncomfortable and inappropriate.
So long as the world stays exactly the same as it always was, thus fundamental human behaviour serves us well. The problem is that, when the world about us starts to change, our response to it does not. The extensive range of choices that should be available to us has gone. As we create the increasingly untenable illusion of stability, we miss the richness of texture that the world has to offer us, and fail to explore available alternatives. We get caught up in ritualistic repetition that can be anticipated by others. Our actions lose their force and vitality, and we start to create a series of bars that builds a prison.
Becoming a pattern hunter
Not only is this true of individuals, it also applies to groups, teams and organisations. Indeed, the failure to be spontaneous and adaptive in response to changing circumstances is a primary cause of organisational failure. Equally, these patterns soon become deeply ingrained and are consequently hard to shift.
As such, a key role of any leader is to become a pattern hunter. Leaders need to be keenly aware of and be attuned to norms, habits, routines and patterns, in themselves, in others, and in the organisation. And they need to do this persistently and compellingly.
Deep thought
The second essential quality of leaders in ambiguous and uncertain situations is to be intolerant of woolly, vague and unclear thinking in themselves and others. They need to be clear and specific about what it means to be called upon to lead and about how they add value to the organisation. Robust thinking is hard to do. It hurts the head, so we tend to avoid it. We will often engage in any kind of displacement activity rather than really think. We justify this to ourselves by highlighting the number of plates we have to keep spinning and the consequent impossibility of finding time to just sit and think.
In reality, nothing is more important in a leader than the ability to think clearly and robustly about the business and to make the time to do so. Those who do not, are not leaders. At best, they are simply managers; at worst, just fire-fighters.
The clash of ideas
I point out early in the seminar that I am going to present a number of challenging ideas and viewpoints on the subject of leadership and change. I stress that participants must not simply accept and agree with what I have say, adopting my ideas as their own. Rather, their views on leadership should be individual and personal to them. It is not important that their thoughts coincide with those of any fashionably and current school. Such ideas will anyway be superseded by others before too long, as with any other fashion.
What I am looking for is for them to clash their thinking against mine and to be open to whatever new ideas come out of this conflict. What is important is that their views are clearly and consciously thought through and are congruent with their personal beliefs and values. It must be their personal view of leadership. The purpose of such a personal vision is purely to guide action. The test of its validity is simply: Does it work? Does it lead to superior long term performance?
The power of inquiry
The third and final thing I ask participants to do is to suspend judgement until later.
In times of change and uncertainty, there are no sure and secure answers. Leaders must act with intention whilst having no certainty of outcome. The only thing we know for sure is that the future will, in significant and important area, be unlike the past.
What is required, therefore, is not so much direction as inquiry. The job of a leader is to ask challenging questions and then listen. To fully listen we need to temporarily abandon our interpretive and evaluative faculties, as these reduce the quality and quantity of data we receive, and restructure it more in line with what we want to see.
Suspending judgement allows us to see the world differently and with sharper focus.
Seven plus or minus two
As the conscious human mind is only capably of holding seven plus or minus two chunks of information at any one time, we do not have the mental bandwidth to fully perceive and evaluate at the same time. If we try to hold both processes in mind at once, both become impoverished and potentially detached from the real world.
I am not suggesting that we should no longer interpret or evaluate. Rather, I am pointing out the critical importance of separating out data gathering from data analysis. In uncertain times a leader first needs the capacity to absorb all that he/she can, noticing pattern and novelty, but suspending judgement until later.
Facing the challenge of leadership
As I have already suggested, in times of challenge and change, leaders can easily become reactive, flinching away from the challenges that face them. An important part of the role played by an effective executive coach is to turn the leader back to face full on the challenges presented by change and uncertainty.
Great leaders are results focused, not comfort focused. They engage people in creative and participative conversations, and pay attention to what unfolds. In doing so, they keep an open mind, challenge patterns and habits, and are highly attuned to woolly thinking in themselves and others.
We are now beginning to learn a great deal more about those factors that aid and those that derail successful change initiatives once these necessary preconditions for success are in place. I will discuss these factors in a subsequent article.
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