Leadership in Chaos: 3rd edition.
Leaders Digest

Leadership in Chaos: 3rd edition.

By 12th July 2024 July 16th, 2024 No Comments

Leadership in Chaos: 3rd edition.

Emergent discovery, positive dissent and output vs input.

“Listen to others, you will be wise. The beginning of wisdom is silence”.

Pythagoras

Ellen Jantzen

Change: emergent discovery.

The secret of change, Socrates said, “is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but building on the new”. Innovation therefore, is critical. And achieving it, should be less about individuals, and more about a culture of Emergent Discovery. This means continually searching for ideas in novel spaces; developing speculative conjectures; and relentlessly questioning hypotheses. It requires a culture where people, particularly leaders, are comfortable with impossible ideas and challenging dogma. A culture that views “flawed” ideas not as dead ends, but as building blocks. And where the evolution of ideas is a collective, shared responsibility. This is how management need to change in an emergent discovery culture.

A thought for leaders: A world of permanent VUCA, has different demands on an innovation culture. Emergent Discovery is a fresh approach, that builds a successful innovation culture. It requires that you, as a leader, make it acceptable to broach the unreasonable. That you leverage your critics’ insights, to improve ideas. And that you make it about ideas, not personal ownership (so it’s not personal if it fails).

Ellen Jantzen

Leadership: positive dissent.

What do the following disasters have in common; the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Gary Lineker throwing the BBC into chaos and JP Morgan suffering reputation damage and lawsuits, for retaining Jeffrey Epstein as a client after he pleaded guilty? The answer is: why don’t managers see it coming? They don’t, as this article explains, because dissenters and doubters can’t speak up (along with some pluralist ignorance). So group think sets in. James Detert, a professor at Darden School of Business, says evolution has hard-wired us not to deviate from our group. “If you think about our time on earth as a species, for most of it we lived in very small clans, bands, tribes, and our daily struggle was for survival, both around food security and physical safety. In that environment, if you were ostracised, you were going to die. There was no solo living in those days.” 

A thought for leaders: Leaders need to persistently praise people who speak up. The penalties are often more obvious than the rewards, so keeping your head down means safety. As Warren Buffett said: “As a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press”. How can you support a braver culture of positive dissent and encourage doubters to speak up?

Ellen Jantzen

Culture: output vs input.

Remote work battles roll on. But as the tide rises on flexible work, it’s becoming clear that bad leaders will eventually lose the remote-work war. Some issues are generational (older management are less in favour of remote). Others are related to control and the need to look over shoulders every minute. Despite robust research supporting remote work, bad leaders care more about the theatre of productivity, and remain “input management” focussed. Good leaders conversely, care about real productivity, motivation and “output management”. With widespread tech layoffs, some companies have increased input management styles and no more mr nice boss policies. This feels short term and short sighted.

A thought for leaders: Remember, nobody wants to be managed, we want to be inspired. Management styles are already shifting, with many rethinking hierarchy, with flatter, more decentralized structures. Are you building a culture for the future, and supporting talent to deliver the right output? Or are you falling into the trap of short termism, and focussing on input management?

And finally, here’s another leadership principle.

Leadership Principle: Choose Consciously and Wisely.

The only thing you ever truly control in life is NOT the situation, but your response in the moment to the situation.

Dig a little deeper into this principle here.

You can follow Flow Group on Linkedin here.

P.S. Our featured artist this month is Ellen Jantzen, an artist who approaches photography as an art form. Jantzen is interested in states of reality, attempting to make visual the ephemeral nature of sacred, spiritual realms by transplanting replica trees into the natural world. One is artificial, the other a spirit form; both represent the transcendence of nature.