Lemmings, and how to navigate uncertainty

19. May 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Change, Complexity, Decision-making, Innovation, Leadership, Purpose

To find yourself, think for yourself. Socrates

Lemmings suffer from a classic reputation issue.

In 1958, Walt Disney’s controversial interpretation of a natural phenomenon in White Wilderness immortalised the lemming ‘suicide plunge’.

In fact, the small rodents don’t commit mass suicide; their populations fluctuate wildly and when numbers are high, they migrate in groups as a natural population leveller.

“The cliff-death-plunge sequence was done by herding the lemmings over a small cliff into a river,” explains scientist Dr Karl Kruszenicki. “It’s easy to understand why the filmmakers did this – wild animals are notoriously unco-operative, and a migration-of-doom followed by a cliff-of-death sequence is far more dramatic to show than the lemmings’ self-implemented population-density management plan.”

Regardless, the lemming suicide myth became fixed in fact as well as celluloid. Chasing each other over a cliff to a certain death has become a metaphor for humans’ unthinking, crowd-driven behaviour.

Sadly, the practice of following even when the evidence points a radically different way – failing to question ‘accepted wisdom’ – remains all too prevalent.

This might reflect many people’s yearning for a simple life in the face of mounting complexity. It might also signal a deep fear and confusion about coping with the fast-changing, uncertain times in which we find ourselves.

Certainty, if ever it worked, has been debunked as an illusion. Poor workforce engagement levels, lagging productivity and sluggish innovation performance are signs that current approaches are failing, that what we know as ‘fact’ should be questioned.

Leadership models that might have worked in the industrial era don’t translate comfortably to a complex, highly fragmented world.

That leaves a vacuum, and in a vacuum we retreat to the familiar, even if we know it doesn’t work.

So, how to pull away from the cliff’s edge and head with confidence into the complex maze of emerging opportunities?

As author and leadership coach, Dionne Lew, says, values are the key. “Properly used, values provide a filter that helps us decide what to do and, consequently, who we become,” Lew says. “We should live them, not just speak them, and be able to demonstrate our commitment to them in practical terms.”

While it sounds simple, living from one’s values is far from easy, requiring clarity, humility and fortitude. No wonder, then, that the deep link between values, self-awareness, leadership and impact has been the subject of intense exploration and debate for millennia.

Sydney’s St James Ethics Centre has created a unique niche in the work it does with large organisations, individuals and the public on the role of values and ethics in day-to-day life.

Ethics is “about being true to the idea of who we are and what we stand for, about having the courage to explore difficult questions, and about accepting the cost,” according to Suzanne Ross, a consulting fellow with the centre. “It’s about the asking one simple question when faced with everyday life and the complexities of the workplace: What ought I to do?”

Resolving to fully explore that question, no matter how uncomfortable the process or how difficult the ultimate course of action, is the key to self-discovery and a hallmark of history’s great leaders.

Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why, says it’s a matter of acting from the inside out.

“All the great and inspiring leaders … they all think, act and communicate the exact same way, and it’s the complete opposite to everyone else,” Sinek says. “It’s probably the world’s simplest idea – I call it the Golden Circle – why, how, what.”

Most people know the ‘what’ and some the ‘how’, he says, but “very, very few organisations or people know why they do what they do… by ‘why’ I mean, what’s your purpose, your cause, your belief? Why do you get out of bed in the morning, and why should anyone care?”

People who start with ‘why’ – from the Wright Brothers to Martin Luther King and the late Steve Jobs – have a better chance of attracting support, of building sustainable businesses, of driving change and achieving what others would see as impossible.

A deep understanding of why you’re doing it – whatever ‘it’ is – communicates far more than words.

“We follow those who lead, not for them, but for ourselves,” Sinek says. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

Why collaboration is hard (and critical)

14. April 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Complexity, Decision-making, Innovation, Leadership

“No one can whistle a symphony.”  HE Luccock

Nearly five decades ago, Gordon Moore noted a phenomenon that’s survived the passage of time.

The capacity of the integrated circuit had doubled nearly every year since its invention in 1958, and Intel’s cofounder predicted that exponential growth would last another ten years.

That was 1965. Moore was right about the growth trajectory, wrong on the time frame.

Today Moore’s Law is part of high-level conversations around the world as leaders grapple with increasing complexity and the disruptive impact of each new wave of technology.

The world is changing at warp speed. In such an uncertain, fast-moving environment, how to keep across the flood of information and key developments? How to know what matters (and what doesn’t)? How to tackle problems that transcend organisational, sectoral and national boundaries, whose complexity or magnitude challenge traditional definitions and capabilities?

Collaboration.

Derived from the Latin con- (with) and laboro (work), collaboration is loosely defined as two or more people working together on a common goal.

“Humans are not special because of their big brains,” says social anthropologist Kim Hill. “That’s not the reason we can build rocket ships – no individual can. We have rockets because 10,000 individuals co-operate in producing the information.”

With globalisation and the growing focus on innovation, executive teams have rediscovered collaboration as a way to achieve better outcomes than would individuals working in isolation.

A recent study by global technology company Cisco found that the primary reason people collaborate is to innovate.

“In businesses, this type of collaboration focuses on developing creative solutions or ideas that improve an existing process or product,” according to Harbrinder Kang, who oversees strategic development of Cisco’s Networking Academy program. “Through ongoing collaboration, socialisation, and vetting, the idea develops into a viable solution to address a new market opportunity, re-engineer a core process, solve a problem, or create business value.”

Nice in theory, yet in many organisations the frantic pace, heavy workloads and organisational barriers often derail the most well-intentioned collaboration efforts.

As well, researchers Herminia Ibarra and Morten T Hansen say collaboration is often blamed for costly delays when other factors are at play.

“As a CEO visiting one of our classes put it, ‘If you have time, you can be infinitely collaborative, but if you have to fix things in a significant way and you’re in a hurry, you’ve got to be more directive’,” they say. “This common wisdom has been used a lot lately to denounce collaboration at the top as an affordable luxury in munificent times but a slow and costly method when the competition heats up.”

Ibarra and Hansen acknowledge that companies can lose focus and accountability when they ‘overdo’ collaboration, but warn it’s dangerous to revert to command-and-control when the market demands speed.

They suggest two ways to ensure ‘fast’ collaboration: to formally designate a directly responsible individual (DRI) as the point of contact or follow-up, and refusing to allow people to pass off politics as collaboration.

“Unclear accountability, parochial interests, and political jockeying among senior managers, and not collaboration per se, are what really slow things down,” Ibarra and Hansen say. “Leaders set the tone by making clear what they want people to collaborate on and what they expect them to handle expeditiously themselves.”

Cisco’s survey found that collaboration remains grounded in human interaction and relationships.

Says Kang: “People were more engaged when they could see and hear each other well, basically interacting the way humans have interacted for thousands of years: face to face. When personal meetings were not possible for our participants, they embraced technology… that most closely emulates human interactions.”

Ironically, in a lesson for the corporate sector, it’s in the social innovation space that some of the more ambitious and successful collaborations are occurring.

“Leaders and organisations are acknowledging that even their best individual efforts can’t stack up against today’s complex and interconnected problems,” according to Ben Hecht, president and CEO of the Living Cities impact investment initiative.

“While collaboration is certainly not a foreign concept, what we’re seeing … is the coming together of non-traditional partners, and a willingness to embrace new ways of working together. And, this movement is yielding promising results.”

Why character matters more than passion

17. March 2013 · 2 comments · Categories: Decision-making, Innovation, Leadership, Purpose

“Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.” Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

In an Age of Passion, Cal Newport’s is a lonely voice.

A computer scientist at Washington’s Georgetown University, Newport has written extensively on the Cult of Passion, its increasingly synonymous relationship with success, and the pressure now exerted on people to follow their “passion”.

“To a small group of people, this advice makes sense, because they have a clear passion,” Newport says. “But this philosophy puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us — and demands long deliberation. If we’re not careful, it tells us, we may end up missing our true calling.”

Such pressure, he adds, can be downright destructive. “Every time our work becomes hard, we are pushed toward an existential crisis, centred on what for many is an obnoxiously unanswerable question: ‘Is this what I’m really meant to be doing?’,” he says. “This constant doubt generates anxiety and chronic job-hopping.”

Newport argues that the traits that lead people to love their work can be found in many jobs, but they have to be earned.

“Building valuable skills is hard and takes time,” he says. “For someone in a new position, the right question is not, ‘What is this job offering me?’ but, instead, ‘What am I offering this job?’”

Millennials in particular are bombarded constantly with glib stories that reinforce a dubious link between achievement and commercial success and the single-minded pursuit of a ‘passion’.

The Passion Industry has spawned a plethora of advice sites, podcasts, TV shows and self-help books predicated loosely on finding that passion or one’s ‘life purpose’.

What often gets downplayed or omitted in these narratives is the deep doubt, crushing  disappointment, financial insecurity, broken relationships, ill-health and disillusionment that often accompany the pursuit of a major dream or objective.

Passion might help, but it’s not passion that pulls you through the darkest of times, researchers say, but a mix of character strengths ranging from self-discipline and persistence to social intelligence and optimism (the corporate world is slowly catching on with its current focus on resilience).

Together these constitute what psychology researcher Angela Duckworth calls ‘grit’: the tendency not to abandon tasks from mere changeability, or in the face of obstacles.

Duckworth’s 12-question grit survey is reported to be a remarkable predictor of success, more so than IQ, self-control, or a simple ‘passion’.

The late Apple founder, Steve Jobs, helped perpetuate the Cult of Passion although in his early life, Cal Newport points out, Jobs clearly didn’t harbour a burning passion to run a technology company.

“If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers,” Newport says. “I don’t doubt that Jobs eventually grew passionate about his work: if you’ve watched one of his famous keynote addresses, you’ve seen a man who obviously loved what he did. But so what? All that tells us is that it’s good to enjoy what you do.”

Blogger and self-confessed computer geek, Sacha Chua, agrees.

“When people wish for passion, I think what they’re really wishing for is certainty: the knowledge that this, here, is exactly what you are meant to do, that intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, and what the world values,” Chua writes. “I used to tell people to ignore the myths of a sudden calling. Passion doesn’t strike out of the blue. You find a spark of interest and you nurture it. Hard work and experience gets you past the first few ruts.”

 

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