Leadership

Exploit, Explore and Empower

There are three kinds of activities that we can do as leaders. Exploit: Engage best practises when you want to make the most of what is well know. You look to optimising for efficiencies. Explore: Identify next practises when you want to understand what works and what doesn’t. The end goal of all activities in this area is to end up in the exploit zone. You look to optimising for effectiveness. Empower: This is the high-leverage activity for a leader. When we develop the judgement needed to know the right time to delegate the power of this decision (to exploit […]

Leadership

Strategic Foresight – The Skill that Every Leader Needs to Learn

Premise: For most of the 20th century, leadership has been about managing the known about optimizing for efficiency and reducing variance in every sphere of work.  But today, we live in a world where variance is the norm. The pace and scale of change around us mean that optimizing for efficiencies is a lost cause, maybe even a doomed cause and a recipe for disaster.  Leaders who succeed in the future will be those who make the shift from extrapolating the past to preparing for the future. One can’t really predict the future; one can only prepare for it.  And […]

Leadership

The Surprisingly Simple Reason Teams Fail

In this TEDx talk Tessa West shares the story of the disaster that played out during NASA’s Mars Mission in 1999 and one of the main reason (among others) for the failure – A simple yet fatal communication gap. The teams working across continents were using different metrics to measure pressure, each assuming that the other would use the same as well. The question we need to ask ourselves is the following – What are the most basic assumptions we are making when interacting with our colleagues, specially, if they are from a different culture from our own? Breakdown in […]

Leadership

What Swarm Intelligence Teaches About Leading Complex Adaptive Systems

Premise: The traditional organizational paradigm, defined by rigid hierarchies and linear command-and-control loops is at a breaking point and no longer an effective form of leadership. What we need now is the ability to respond quickly and effectively, which means that the role of leaders needs to evolve from being the decision maker to the conductor of teams making the right decisions. In such a scenario, the primary constraint is no longer a lack of data, but an abundance of data and the inability to process them at the speed at which they are created. In a world which changes […]

Leadership

The Speed of Trust – Built Slowly, Lost in a Hurry!

I read this blog post by Gapingvoid yesterday about Trust. In the post they share the story of Robert Goodman and Jesse Jackson and how Jesse freed Robert from Syria by changing the game – from one government against another, to one human fighting for the freedom of another. Jackson had built his reputation as a humanitarian. One decision, one action at a time. The same is true for all of us. Trust and reputation are created slowly – one decision, one action at a time, drip by drip. It is depleted in a hurry – one decision and one […]