Leaders who feel they must come up with the perfect plan endure huge pressure. In playing the role of the heroic leader they become the organisational bottle neck. In telling everyone that they know the way forward; they disempower everyone around them. This mind set is the main obstacle to agility.
Right now, the capacity to pay attention, make sense, act and change ahead of the curve is the holy grail of most organisations and if it is not, it should be.
In addition to our ability to analyse and predict we need to learn to engage directly with what is happening now so that we can learn faster from what just happened. Organisational strategy becomes “just-in-time” and “just-in-case” supported by more investment in general knowledge, diversity, the ability to do a quick study and the capacity to respond to intuition.
What may look like a people problem is often an environment, situation, or system problem. Organisations are brimming with misdiagnosed problems. Just as a caged bird is so close to the bars that it does not know it is in a cage, we too do not recognise the structures that surround us. Rather we just find ourselves conditioned to behave in certain ways.
In his brilliant book The Laws of Human Nature, Robert Greene writes in praise of what he calls ‘reality groups’ – groups that are infused with a functional and healthy dynamic arising from their ability to maintain a tight relationship with reality.
Running the business is grounded in the here and now. It depends on data from the past. And it can be a relatively comfortable space because it deals with known facts. In contrast, changing the business is about the world outside the organisation and about the future. And the world outside is much bigger and more complex than the organisation – to the extent that it is essentially unknowable.