Do you have clear, specific goals for 2018? Maybe even SMART goals? That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? For much of what you need to accomplish this year, that’s probably good.
Leadership for Imperatives for Complexity #5
As leaders, we often identify our role in terms of the results we are responsible for. And yet there is a second aspect of your role in complex situations that is just as important to focus on – creating the conditions that foster the emergence of your desired outcomes. Yeah, that’s a lot harder to get your arms around than the results. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
Gratitude
Leadership Imperatives for Complexity #4
Complexity is messy. When we encounter a messy problem, most of us tend to pay attention first to “the problem” as something separate from us. For example, if the quality of public education in my town has declined, I look at things like school financing, teacher preparation, curriculum, etc. I implicitly define the problem as “out there.” While those things surely deserve attention, I’ll be more effective in making changes if I also consider myself as part of the system and thus something that might be changed to shift the system.
Leadership Imperatives for Complexity #3
Don’t make false choices (part 2)
In my last post , I talked about shifting from OR to AND with respect to two of the key paradoxes that are key to leading in complexity:
- Stability AND fluidity
Leadership Imperatives for Complexity #3
Complex situations are full of places where we have to make tough choices. Expand the current market or enter a new one? Let an aging product die or re-energize it with new features. Some of these may truly need to be either/or choices. And there are lots of places where we need to move from OR to AND.
I'd like to give you some feedback.
Often the very idea of giving or getting feedback puts our brains into defensive mode. Most of the feedback we get/give is some version of “You should do X instead of Y.” While it can be useful to get suggestions for improvement, there is another kind of feedback that we rarely get that’s even more helpful.
VUCA - It's all about YOU!
Much of the research and advice for leading in complexity suggests how to shift the organization – safe to fail experiments, adaptive planning, amplifying weak signals, etc.
In my work with executives (and more recently with goats), it has become clear to me both that these strategies are important AND that by themselves, they aren’t enough. Necessary but not sufficient. We must also work differently with ourselves.
Do you know what’s happening?
What keeps coming up is the importance of deeply sensing what is happening. The more deeply I can feel into what’s going on with the team, the more we can accomplish together. As leaders, we can use this sensing to make every interaction more powerful. In this post, I’m going to tease apart what I believe is involved in this sensing. My experience suggests there are 3 essential components.
Are you disturbed?
If you’re not, maybe you should be. While events around the world continue to be disturbing, that’s not what I’m talking about here.
Robert Greenleaf, who first brought Servant Leadership into popular awareness puts it this way. “Awareness is a disturber and an awakener. Able leaders are usually sharply awake and reasonably disturbed.“
Awareness is disturbing. So why bother?
As leaders in these difficult times, we need this “disturbing” awareness to fully meet the complexity and uncertainty the world brings us. All of us have habitual ways of thinking that limit us.