strategic thinking

Icon reflecting metaverse in seeing patterns for complex data

Driving your purpose with metaverse thinking

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In metaverse* thinking, the focus is not so much on the ‘what’ as the ‘how’. Once you have the ‘how’ right, you can deliver almost any business goals you desire.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
*Metaverses are ecosystems** of curated data which enable and empower metalevel perspectives for the purposes of insight and agency

What is your purpose?

Purpose Driven Organization, as defined by the BSI in PAS 808:2022, is very clearly about establishing and realising a ‘higher purpose’ for your organization: A purpose that is about optimising your strategic contribution to the sustained wellbeing of all people and planet; achieving this wisely and ethically; while conserving and investing in key resources. It is not just about developing and clarifying a higher purpose, it is very much about redesigning and configuring your organizaton to best achieve that.
Sadly, however, much that has been written about ‘purpose driven organization’ in the business press has been about a more cosmetic approach. About translating an existing purpose into a more inspiring form of words, and then finding ways to share and communicate this to better motivate employees and business partners. And much of the negative press it has achieved has been about this so-called ‘purpose washing’ and the industry that has sprung up to profit from it.
Culturistics exists to help organizations better discover their purpose and to design better ways of delivering it. Whilst we believe in a higher purpose (ours is to help everyone live healthier and more fulfilling working lives through better achieving their individual and collective potential) it is not our role to define higher purpose for our clients – but we do help them to explore what it might be.

How do you make your purpose happen?

Whatever your purpose, goals and ideas, if they are sufficiently ambitious they will need the support of your people to achieve them. Strategy Engagement and metaverse thinking represent the surest and most sustainable means of securing that. So what are the ecosystems** that ensure effective strategy engagement?
You don’t need to be perfect at all these things. But improving the key ones will have a big impact on your likelihood of success. In other words, it will make securing your business goals far more certain. And it will enable your organisation to take on even more ambitious goals next time around.

Prioritising your focus

But how do you identify the key ones? You may already have a fairly clear idea on which they are. And reading the links in each of the bullets above will further clarify your view.
The thing is that the key things to get right will depend on a number of factors. Factors that are unique to your business, your context, and your goals. But if you would like some expert guidance on what they might be for your specific situation, call us. We love to chat about these things
And once your Strategy Engagement is working well, you can point it at pretty much any business goals you want and deliver on them.
Furthermore, seeking to achieve a challenging business goal may be your impetus to continue to improve your strategy engagement.

**Because the concept of metaverse has been pushed extensively in the digital world, there is an underlying assumption, a paradigm if you will, that its ‘ecosystems of curated data’ will be exclusively digital. However, as our list of ecosystems (above) illustrates, curated data can exist in many forms. It is not restricted to bytes, or even paper, but can exist in shared imagination, tacit skills, relationships, patterns, custom and practice. And it can be curated by dialogue, logic, policy, procedure, learning and indeed digital forms. Digital has a lot to offer the metaverse, but the idea is much greater than that, and we ‘miss out’ if we limit its potential to computing. In fact, one of the most inspiring propositions of a metaverse, published in a CLO article: ‘The future of learning’ was ‘that everyone can create their own adventure in an ecosystem supporting curiosity and experimentation’.
 

Helpful Resources: Virtual Flipcharts | Timers | Participation Hacks

Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?

adventurer sat on a peak - icon for guest adventurers

Visioning Workshops – 5 steps to a common purpose

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Visioning workshops are the most powerful and sustainable means to pull your people together into a common purpose in support of your future success. They provide the means harness and align the passion and creative energy of all of your people, and build individual commitment toward a shared goal.
Key to their success is understanding where people are ‘coming from’ as they come into the visioning workshop. This is key to designing an efficient visioning workshop journey. One that facilitates people to coming together from their different starting positions, recognising the validity in each others’ perspectives, and seeing the potential for a powerful common purpose which transcends the differences and offers more than people’s initial expectations.

Step 1: Individual and group interviews

Interviewing to understand personal vision and the basis for common purpose - Courtesy Gustavo Fring via PexelsOur interviewing approach allows people to feel understood and respected in their current views. But it builds from there in tapping into their imagination to identify what sort of future would inspire them and their commitment.
It asks them to imagine a point in the future where they feel justifiably proud of what has been achieved. And it asks them to describe the key factors in generating that sense of pride. It draws them into the possibility of adventure. A description of the future that is ambitious and exciting. Something that makes the investment of the next period of their lives truly worthwhile.
And it asks them to think about how those around them might feel about the same adventure. Along with what might be the challenges, and how they overcome. And it seeks to understand what they might want personally from the experience of the next few years in terms of growth, and experience, and achievement for others.
Finally it asks them, as the customers for the workshop, what they want it to achieve. What would make them leave the workshop feeling that the exercise had been really worthwhile.

Step 2: Analysis and feedback

Image representing facilitator led feedback around common purpose prior to visioning workshop - original photo by Tima MiroshnichenkoIn this way, the interview process begins to open up people’s thinking at a very personal level, and to get them to think about possibilities and potential beyond their everyday mindset. And it makes them curious, for how their answers compare with those of their colleagues. And also about what might emerge from the visioning workshop itself.
Thus when the interviews are analysed and the summary report is shared back to them the begin to see the collective view and how it varies. And this begins to work on them leading up to the workshop, building a sense of hope and expectation for something really significant to emerge, and wanting to be part of that.
Furthermore, they can see their own answers within the flow of a collective picture. And they can see their contribution to what they hope the workshop will achieve. Together, these begin to build their ownership for the feedback document, and the workshop that will address it. It also helps them to see the variety of perspectives, and where their own ideas may be out of kilter with those of their friends and colleagues. And it builds a greater acceptance that their may need to be some compromise to bring it all together.

Step 3: Visioning Workshop design

Metaphor for designing a visioning workshop in terms of pulling together the means for shared dialogueMoving from individual positions to embrace and support a collective vision of a common purpose, is a journey. It is a journey in which commitment needs to be built and preserved and reconciled as the collective will emerges and flourishes. And key to achieving that it that the process is both transparent and scrupulously fair.
In reality, people may only get about 80% of what they thought they wanted originally. Of course they may get another chunk of stuff that they only discovered they wanted as the journey unfolded. And inevitably there will be another chunk of stuff that they are not so sure about. But one thing is almost certain if the process is right: Even if they only individually would select 70% of what emerges, they know it will take them a lot further toward their goals than 100% of what they originally imagined. And they are wholly willing to support the other 30% because of that. That is consensus.
Designing a workshop to provoke, feed and support that journey of consensus is both an art and a science. A science because of the wealth of tools that exist to explore and resolve common purpose. And an art because of the role that experience plays in pulling those tools together. On thing is sure for the designer of the workshop, when its right, you know its right.

Step 4: Facilitating the Visioning Workshop

Image of a group in the middle of a visioning workshop to develop common purposeIdeally, if we design the workshop  perfectly, the process of the workshop will flow naturally and intuitively. It will seem to provide the natural next step at precisely the right moment. And people will not even realise they are following a process. Most of the time, a well designed workshop will feel that way.  But there will still be little bumps in the road. And some interventions just need to be tuned and timed to what is happening in the moment. That is where facilitation comes in.
Facilitation is about being a servant to the process, as the process is the servant to the combined will of the people.
In respect of visioning workshops, one key aspect is about provoking a vision that really is worth of the people’s potential. That really will feel like an adventure which engages their spirit, their enthusiasm and their ideas. The thing about creativity is that you don’t know that you can do something until the creativity has been required, and has delivered. Creativity needs headroom in order to flourish. It needs us to preserve a space between what we already know to be possible, and what we have not yet foreseen. And it needs confidence in our own ability to respond, to grow, to learn, and to imagine. That is the adventure. And it is important that the facilitator keeps the space for adventure alive.
Fortunately, if the interviews are conducted well, there will be plenty of raw material from the people themselves to provide that creative tension.
For more on the design of visioning workshops, take a look at this explanation, and this case study.

Step 5: Future Visioning Workshops

Visioning review workshopPursuing an adventurous shared vision is a learning experience. 12 months in, the people who started off on the adventure, are not the same people you now meet. They have grown in ability, confidence and understanding. The perspectives they had 12 months earlier have evolved. New insights, and collaborative experiences have stretched the way that they think and the potential they see around them. And they are coming to discover that what they thought was 70% right was actually only 50% right, but that is okay because they have only had time to cover 30% of the ground.
However, there is a lot of new stuff to take into account. New information, new possibilities, new resources, new relationships, new ideas.
For this reason, it is good to revisit the Visioning Workshop each year. Sometimes just to make adjustments. And sometimes to refresh the whole approach. The former can be achieved by simply reworking some of the sessions in the original workshop. But the latter will probably benefit from a new wave of interviews and a repeat of steps two, three and four.
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Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?
Icon reflecting metaverse in seeing patterns for complex data

Securing your business goals with metaverse thinking

by

In metaverse* thinking, the focus is not so much on the ‘what’ as the ‘how’. Once you have the ‘how’ right, you can deliver almost any business goals you desire.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
*Metaverses are ecosystems** of curated data which enable and empower metalevel perspectives for the purposes of insight and agency

What are your business goals?

What are you seeking to achieve for your business?
  • Increases in your market share and entry into new markets?
  • Recognition as ‘the go-to business’ in your industry?
  • Better returns, efficiencies, satisfaction and profitability?
  • Greater impact on customers, stakeholders, society, ecology?
  • Exciting visions, ambitious plans, transformation?
  • … ?

How do you make them happen?

Whatever your business goals and ideas, if they are sufficiently ambitious, they will need the support of your people to achieve them. Strategy Engagement and metaverse thinking represent the surest and most sustainable means of securing that. So what are the ecosystems** that ensure effective strategy engagement?
You don’t need to be perfect at all these things. But improving the key ones will have a big impact on your likelihood of success. In other words, it will make securing your business goals far more certain. And it will enable your organisation to take on even more ambitious goals next time around.

Prioritising your focus

But how do you identify the key ones? You may already have a fairly clear idea on which they are. And reading the links in each of the bullets above will further clarify your view.
The thing is that the key things to get right will depend on a number of factors. Factors that are unique to your business, your context, and your goals. But if you would like some expert guidance on what they might be for your specific situation, call us. We love to chat about these things
And once your Strategy Engagement is working well, you can point it at pretty much any business goals you want and deliver on them.
Furthermore, seeking to achieve a challenging business goal may be your impetus to continue to improve your strategy engagement.

**Because the concept of metaverse has been pushed extensively in the digital world, there is an underlying assumption, a paradigm if you will, that its ‘ecosystems of curated data’ will be exclusively digital. However, as our list of ecosystems (above) illustrates, curated data can exist in many forms. It is not restricted to bytes, or even paper, but can exist in shared imagination, tacit skills, relationships, patterns, custom and practice. And it can be curated by dialogue, logic, policy, procedure, learning and indeed digital forms. Digital has a lot to offer the metaverse, but the idea is much greater than that, and we ‘miss out’ if we limit its potential to computing. In fact, one of the most inspiring propositions of a metaverse, published in a CLO article: ‘The future of learning’ was ‘that everyone can create their own adventure in an ecosystem supporting curiosity and experimentation’.
 

Helpful Resources: Virtual Flipcharts | Timers | Participation Hacks

Daily re-restructuring for agility? How adaptive structures maximise agile engagement.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast – but what sort of strategy are you feeding it?
Facilitating mental wellbeing – The power of adventure in keeping our minds fit & healthy.
Patterns of collaborative excellence – Rediscovering the lost wisdom of design.
Prescient emotional knowledge management – do you have what it takes?

Predicted trends for the future of business are exciting and full of hope

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A distillation of eight key themes from the many analyses of future business trends in the business press and from large consultancies

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
 
What are the key trends facing business today? What are the topics business leaders should focus on?
There have been many analyses done on this in the business press and by the large strategy consultancies. And the results paint an exciting and encouraging picture of how business will evolve. Because, basically, the vast majority of the current and upcoming changes are things to do with ‘releasing humanity’. In other words they are about freeing off people to be fully themselves and equipping them to achieve their potential. Both individually and together, at work and at home.

What are the business trends?

The business trends, common to almost all business, group into 8 areas. Specifically, these are sustainability; purpose centricity; value co-creation; agile partnerships; adaptive organisation; digital empowerment;  insight engineering; and human cloud. And all of these trends are potentially good news. Good news for your people (including yourselves), your relationships, and the lives we all can lead.
Let’s explore each one of them in a bit more detail. And with an emphasis on how they might be doing that. Please note, there is no significance to the order in which they are covered.  Rather, they are ordered to illustrate the flow between them. Their overall order of importance will depend largely upon your industry and your situation within it.

Trend #1: Sustainability

Picture of wind turbines in beautiful countryside as a metaphor for sustainability - picture courtesy pixabay via pexels

Sustainability reflects both a global component in terms of our ecological imperatives, and also a local component in terms of our resilience in mastering disruption. The first will continue to broaden people’s understanding for our connectedness. And thereby our responsibility for each other and the fragility of our context. The second will help people to better appreciate their own part in polarised opinions. And thereby help develop new attitudes and vocabulary to reach across perspectives. People’s appreciation of ‘humanity’ will grow. And, as a result, this will stimulate a greater search for meaning and purpose in people’s lives and work.
Related business concepts: ESG; Carbon footprint;

Trend #2: Purpose Centricity

Image of lens focusing on scenery as a metaphor for purpose centricity - photo courtesy ethan-sees via pexelsPurpose centricity reflects business’s response to the search for meaning. This trend can be seen in the growth of businesses which see profit as a means to serve, rather than service as a means to profit. And in the shift toward recruits who seek meaningful roles over highly-remunerated ones. The result of this increased focus on ‘why?’ will lead to new value chains. Consequently creating business opportunities which inspire people within the organisation. Inspiring a sense of pride, loyalty and belonging in those who work for it. The fruit of this growth in meaning will be mental wellbeing. As a result of increased creativity, greater autonomy and efficiency, and closer customer relationships.
Related business concepts: Vision; mission; values; B-Corp;

Trend #3: Value Co-creation

Value co-creation reflects the fruit of closer, more empowered customer relationships. The best of which will continue to evolve from the purely contractual and transactional to a shared partnership for customer success. Advances in technology and digitalisation will enable better, more creative, customer engagement. And supplier staff will increasingly become allies in jointly understanding new opportunities for adding value, and in developing solutions that utilise the resources of both parties to best effect.  This creates new possibilities for everybody involved.
Related business concepts: Customer success management;
How we can help: Customer success management; design tools; design sprint; inspiring interactions;

Trend #4: Agile Partnerships

Agile partnerships will be part of this growth in co-creation, as traditional supplier and customer roles continuously adapt and partner to better serve the consumer (or the next step in their supply chain). Success in this endeavour will be fueled by increased authenticity and trust. And even the vulnerability necessary for fast-forming relationships which support the agility required. Furthermore, the shift in working practices will spawn many who step outside employment to lead an entrepreneurial wave of innovative options which will create shifts and new opportunities in supply chain partnerships.
Related business concepts: Partner strategy engagement; outsourcing; core focus;

Trend #5: Adaptive Organisations

Adaptive organisations will be key to maximising the opportunity and benefit from these fast evolving relationships. Flatter, more agile, structures are required to readily present and empower the best of the organisation’s capabilities to meet rapidly emerging opportunities and challenges. And this presents tremendous opportunity for people to grow unconstrained by traditional hierarchies and role inertia. As people work on the challenges, the challenges work on the people, lifting their potential and accelerating their growth. This enables rapid innovation and change, and releasing people into the best that they might be.
Related business concepts: OD; SAFe; Scrum; Standup; Obeya;
How we can help: Strategic engagement matrix; design sprint; facilitative leadership;

Trend #6: Digital Empowerment

Photo of laptops and mobiles in use as an example of Digital Empowerment - photo courtesy canva-studio via pexelsDigital Empowerment is a key part of innovation and change. In essence it is about optimising the  fast-evolving relationship between human and machine intelligences. Developing each for what they do best. Adapting them to better utilise and empower each other’s potential. For the machine, it is about using AI and code to deliver consistency and routine, and to provide new tools and capabilities to people. For the people, it is about being freed from machine-like drudgery to be creative, build relationships, inspire, dream, care, love, bless. And to stretch and configure the machines in pursuit of this.
Related business concepts: Digital transformation; no-code apps;
How we can help: Design sprint; decision tools; maturity models;

Trend #7: Insight Engineering

Insight Engineering will be a big part of the emerging human-machine relationship. Firing insight through the provision of the right information at the right time in the right context. Unlike most of what we access currently, this will not be restricted to numerical, factual and historic data. Instead it will balance this with emotional, even spiritual, stimuli connected with past present and future. A source of hope, narrative, imagery, inspiration, belief, identity, belonging – all that helps us recall the complex (even fuzzy) facets which reflect who we are and where our purpose lies.
Related business concepts: CRM; Intranet; knowledge management;
How we can help: Insight landscaping;

Trend #8: Human Cloud

Human cloud is a term which reflects the changing nature of employment: Increasingly people are no longer constrained by set windows of time or location in their work. At the commodity end, it sadly represents abusive human consumption, even economic slavery. But in the context of the above, it can represent greater freedom of choice to better integrate work into lifestyle, rather than vice versa. For the individual this can be a more empowering, and humanising, employee experience. And for the organisation, it can provide better, more flexible and timely, access to talent, diversity, insight, resources, ideas, perspectives.
Related business concepts: Alumni Groups; Outsource web-markets

Extent of business trends

It is easy to imagine that these business trends will only apply to the most advanced organisations, but this is not true. The next generation have different values and are looking for business to change to reflect these. The business trends listed above will advance to different stages in different industries and situations, but they will occur to some extent in all.
And wherever they occur, they will thrive, and they will raise the competitive game, and the expectations of those involved.
We will either adventure into this exciting new future, or we will fall victim to it.
To explore these topics further, feel free to contact us. We find our own thinking is continually sharpened and enriched by the questions people ask. And by the discussions that emerge from it.
Busyness strategy - man looking down at watch

Which came first, the busyness? ……………….. Or the decline?

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Busyness strategy - man looking down at watchby Juergen Maier and Mike Clargo

 

We have all gotten so busy. And it seems that, the more senior our role, the busier we are. We recently heard a story of a chief executive who wanted to access some expertise in some important areas of common interest. It took weeks to find space in his diary to make the call, and in the end it took place as he rushed through an airport dragging his carry-on between gates, for a flight he was in danger of missing.
We wonder how much of the potential benefit of such phone calls make it through to our eventual decisions?
People in busy concourseBut this situation is far from unusual; we might even have been that CEO rushing through the Airport whilst taking important calls. As we try to cope with the increasing levels of change and complexity that attends our roles, we find that so much more is forced into our calendars, and we are getting less and less time to properly understand and think things through.
Our strategies for how our organisations cope with change are more important than ever, but we lack the time to bring the best of ourselves to making them. And as we seek to embrace ideas like Agile, we find that the biggest delays arise in finding gaps in people’s diaries.

if the next free slot in your calendar is three weeks away – is that Agile?

Many of us ended up in the leadership of our organisations because we are good at making decisions. We are good at understanding the wider situation, thinking through the implications, and engaging others to move it forward. And, as everything changes around us, and complexity brings in ever more information to us, that quality of thinking is key to ensuring our organisation’s success. But how much of that quality do we still get to apply?
So the question we have to ask you is, if you take your own current trends in increasing pressure, and reducing time to deal with it, how will that look for you in three years’ time?
Woman contemplating lack of busyness strategy - bowed down surrounded by clocksWhat sort of person will be needed to replace you to cope with 2025? And will their qualities be the ones that will be most effective in lifting the organisation to the next level? Or will they simply be the qualities that enable them to barely survive relentless onslaught of calls for their attention?
The reality is we cannot carry on like this. Yes, there are some people who thrive in these situations, but are they the best leaders for the future of the business? And what does restricting our pool of viable candidates to such people do for diversity? Are we excluding calmer, more reflective, more analytical, strategic, and creative minds from all the senior positions in our organisations? Or deterring those people who make a choice to not regularly let their loved ones, family and friends down for the pressures faced at work? And even if they do make it through,  are we getting the best out of those minds under the pressures that are becoming the norm? And what about the ever-rising issues of mental health in the workplace?

busyness suppresses diversity

The situation clearly has to change, and the quicker it changes the better it will be for all of us and society.
Let’s face it, we really don’t want to carry on like this. It may be a buzz for a while. But are we proud of the legacy we are putting into place? Or are we simply proud of clinging on to the title and status in impossible circumstances?

So how do we change it?

We believe that there are three things we need to do.

1: Call it as it is

Man contemplating lack of busyness strategy - looking stressed surrounded by timepiecesFirst, we need to call it as it is. We need to be honest about what is happening and its potential implications for us, our people, our organisations, and our values. We need to move beyond the ‘macho’ front that exists, and open up about the downsides of all this. Yes, that requires courage, but we needed courage to get where we are. We have courage. And it is now time to turn it to a different track. To step into the adventure of: What happens if we stand up, and say “This has to stop!”

2: Carve out time

Second, we need to carve out time for ourselves to really think about what is going on. We need to put a regular meeting in with ourselves. To prioritise it in our calendars. To ensure it never gets squeezed out, or taken over by something else – not even personal things. Ideally this will be a whole day every week. We may think that is impossible, but if it was about something organisationally or medically vital, we would put it in. And this is organisationally vital (and possibly even medically vital too).

3: Make ruthless decisions

Third, we work out how to use this day to address the busyness issue. We define clearly the key differences we personally want to impact on our organisation – the legacy we want to leave – a set of 3-4 very key goals and changes that you will personally pursue to ensure the organisation’s future success.  And we lay out what is currently consuming our time, and where they impact those goals. Then we ruthlessly target anything that is not contributing efficiently. We allocate a budget of time for it, based on its contribution, and we work out what we have to do differently to meet that budget.
And the rest is enacting the decisions that arise from step 3.
And what of the day a week that got us to this point? We maintain that a day a week is always a good investment for someone to be seriously ‘just thinking’ about the organisation and how it is developing. Somebody needs to be doing it. And we are probably the best placed to ensure it happens.

 

Related links

 

About the authors

Juergen Maier CBE

Juergen Maier is Chair of the Digital Catapult, co-founder of vocL – a platform for responsible business voices, former Chief Executive of Siemens UK, and is Vice-Chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership where he supports the drive for the green re-industrialisation of the North of England. He is an industrialist and business commentator.

Mike Clargo

Mike Clargo has over 30 years of experience and innovation in strategy engagement. Helping internationally recognised clients develop exciting visions and engaging their organisations’ passion and creativity in pursuit of that. He is a pioneer in using design thinking and engagement frameworks to develop agile strategies.

Synapse network - metaphor for the future of change

The Future of Change

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Synapse network - metaphor for the future of changeI suspect you have heard the idea that the future is VUCA – a military acronym coined after 9/11 for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.

VUCA change is nothing new

The reality is that the future has always been VUCA to some extent. There has always been change, disruption, technological advances, lies, deception, data-growth, increasing detail, and ambiguity. It is just that it is always increasing, and always has been. Yes there are step changes. Some of them caused by something as simple as either a dietary choice or failed laboratory protocol in China (is that ambiguous or uncertain?). Others being global conflict, barbaric hordes, revolutions, terrorism. Or wildcard election candidates. And these rapid changes alert us to its reality. But it is always there. And it is always increasing.
The future of change is changing. But one thing remains true, ever since Louis Pasteur coined the term in the 19th Century – “Chance favours the prepared mind”. But …

how do you prepare for such a future?

Sadly, some people advocate that “You can’t prepare, so just be ready to react!”. Unfortunately, that advice, whether adopted willingly or by force of circumstance, has led to situations where the demand for ‘reaction’ has become overwhelming. It has led to overload, stress, mental illness, increased pressure and disharmony. In extreme cases, as reflected in the picture below (extracted from a recent paper on stress in the workplace), it has led to varying levels of dysfunction, and failure.

Negative flows of stress in the work environment

However, wiser minds side with Pasteur.

more change requires a ‘higher level’ of thought

Some of these minds take apart the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, and propose the development of separate strategies to address each: Vision, understanding, clarity and agility. Or alternatively, as HBR proposed: Restructure; build in slack; experiment and invest in information
Others (such as futurist Bob Johansen in his book ‘Leaders make the future’) propose development of new leadership skillsets. Skills which enable leaders to: Gain broader empathy and insight; inspire clarity; generate better options; facilitate more effective outcomes; build deeper ownership; and invoke a controlling influence. In short, a prepared mind.
What these approaches to preparation have in common is that they take a meta-perspective. They lift the thinking up to a point where they can more clearly see the patterns rather than get swamped by the detail.

there needs to be time for ‘quality’ thinking

But such preparation does not come by accident. It takes time, space and effort. Time to grasp at least some of the complexity and ambiguity and its possible implications. Space to play with the potential volatility and uncertainty, and to explore creative possibilities within them.  Effort to best ready their minds with the emerging insights from all of this. And to provide effective leadership in whatever emerges. Leadership from minds which has explored the territory, imagined the pitfalls, and recognises the viable paths through it. Leadership which leaks this insight and understanding into every choice they make. Every response they offer.
And the greater the levels of VUCA, the greater the time required, and the more important that our leadership is spending it. If you are already thinking this way, you are probably ahead of your competitors on change. And as a result, finding the time for such thinking is not an issue for you.

overcoming the ‘no time to think’ trap

But what do you do if you are just waking up to this idea? How do you cope if your current reality is that increasing VUCA is creating unreasonable levels of stress and workload? Where finding healthy chunks of time to think is almost impossible? Where many of the items on the picture above plays some part in your current reality?
There is an answer. The fact is you have to get ahead of the curve. And that is going to be painful and involve sacrifice. But, in the longer run, not as much pain and sacrifice as continuing along your current path. We believe that the solution lies in the work of Jim Collins, of ‘From Good to Great’ fame, around ‘catalytic mechanisms‘
The hard fact is we cannot beat VUCA, it will continue to outpace us. But the reality is that in many cases we don’t need to. We just need to stay ahead of ‘the competition’. So the question you need to ask yourself right now is: Are your leadership getting enough quality thinking time to win that race? Or are they too tied up in reacting? Quickly moving from one expedient activity to another, simply trying to keep the fires extinguished?
If there is any danger it might be the latter, now could be a good time to do some rethinking yourself. As part of that, why not talk to us about how the strategy engagement framework can help you better engage your team in this thinking.

10 new leadership skills for being effective in a rapidly changing business environment.

These have been extracted from Lee Say Keng’s review of Bob Johansen’s book  ‘Leaders make the future’:
  1. Maker Instinct: The ability to exploit your inner drive to build and grow things, as well as connect with others in the making.
  2. Clarity: The ability to see through messes and contradictions to a future that others cannot see. Leaders are very clear about what they are making, but very flexible about how it gets made.
  3. Dilemma Flipping: The ability to turn dilemmas – which, unlike problems, cannot be solved – into advantages and opportunities.
  4. Immersive Learning Ability: The ability to immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments; to learn from them in a first-person way.
  5. Bio-Empathy: The ability to see things from nature’s point of view; to understand, respect, and learn from nature’s patterns.
  6. Constructive Depolarizing: The ability to calm tense situations where differences dominate and communication has broken down – and bring people from divergent cultures toward constructive engagement.
  7. Quiet Transparency: The ability to be open and authentic about what matters to you – without advertising yourself.
  8. Rapid Prototyping: The ability to create quick early versions of innovations, with the expectation that later success will require early failures.
  9. Smart Mob Organizing: The ability to create, engage with, and nurture purposeful business or social change networks through intelligent use of electronic and other media.
  10. Commons Creating: The ability to seed, nurture, and grow shared assets that can benefit other players – and sometimes allow competition at a higher level.