Leadership in Chaos: 21st edition.
good hope, the network office, soviet lies.
Hi 👋, welcome back to our 21st edition 🙌.
“If we can recognise that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that *we do not know enough to be pessimistic*.”
Hazel Henderson, British-American futurist.
Leadership: good hope.
Bad news dominates news cycles. Fear, controversy and anxiety grab our attention. “If it bleeds, it leads” etc. Good gets eclipsed. A recent study found that on social media, bad behaviour is in fact due to a few bad apples. Just 3% of active users are toxic, but they generate 33% of online content, 1% of communities launch 74% of conflict, and 0.1% of users spread 80% of fake news. But it often skews our view. In his book Humankind – A Hopeful Story, Rutger Bregman points out that the story of Lord of Flies and the descent into dark chaos, although interesting, doesn’t entirely represent the truth. The real story of a group of 6 Tongan schoolboys who were marooned on a remote island for 15 months in 1965, turned out very differently. It was a story of the ‘survival of the friendliest’, and how much stronger we are, when we lean on each other. But that wouldn’t sell.
A thought for leaders: It’s easy to transfix on the bad stuff. Like a stand up comedian, getting derailed by the single heckler, we can narrowly focus on what we haven’t done, or failed to see. On the bad actors, the trouble. But as leaders, it’s our job to stand back, to bring light, hope and inspiration. And to focus on what we have done, what we have seen, on the good actors and the progress we have made. Simple but easy to forget.
Change: the network office.
The world remains chaotic and uncertain. One things clear though. The future will look different from the past, and this includes the office. Commercial property agents are struggling with this. This MIT interview with the author of Re-thinking Real Estate, predicts that more and more people want to work, and live, somewhere that feels like a community. And as work becomes more distributed, it’s popping up closer to people’s homes — in new types of towns, different parts of the city, and in different types of buildings. Many global companies complain they have offices in the right cities, but the wrong neighbourhoods. Offices that will succeed, it suggests, will echo WeWork’s goal: to have a branded network that gives people the freedom to book whatever they need and access whatever they need as their business or job demands it.
A thought for leaders: Can you think about your office like a distributed network? Instead of a single building, could it be a network of spaces in regional, community or village hubs. Although the real estate market has some catching up, increasingly it may be what people will want. Smaller, agile, networked, distributed offices. This is the future. Are you ready?
Culture: soviet lies.
Culture is contagious. Lying is the same. Research shows that the biggest driver of a decision to lie in fact, is believing others would do it in the same situation. We do what we think others would do, not what we think we should do. If we think lying is permitted or promoted, we lie. We do what we believe is valuable. If trust is valuable, we uphold it. That’s a value system. And as culture is contagious, then not only companies, but countries can get infected with bad culture. In the Soviet Union, from its creation, to its dissolution, the national newspaper Pravda was a communist mouthpiece for the ruling party. It continuously lied. Everyone knew it. But it was culturally acceptable. Lies were everywhere. But lies eventually corrode and corrupt. A Soviet work culture joke was “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work”.
A thought for leaders: If we permit a little lie, we signal that little lies are ok. And with each signal, we slowly drift. Week by week, month by month, year by year the lies grow, till suddenly we don’t know what the truth was to begin with. Remember as Martha Beck said, “How you do anything, is how you do everything”.
Podcast: EP 27: What the Trump legacy teaches us about Leadership
It is a timely reminder, given the political events of this month and related to our theme around Culture and how what we permit, we promote.
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P.S. This month’s featured work is by visual artist Kaiwan Shaban. Hailing from Kurdistan and based in Poland, he produces incredibly cinematic and atmospheric digital scenes, that seem like stills from a neo noir film, with elements of Sci-Fi. From lighting, to composition, to colour grading – every element is meticulously crafted to create a compelling narrative. He says, “As an artist, I am deeply inspired by the delicate balance between light and shadow, and the profound stories they can narrate when combined.”
