A crisis can generate a focus on what really matters. We set aside petty and irrelevant concerns, discard turf wars, prejudice and office politics in the overwhelming concern to save the ship from sinking.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about growth and repair recently. Partly as I recently fell out of a tree and broke my wrist and am now at the start of the rehab and partly as I am talking to a number of teams and organisations whose primary feeling is exhaustion.
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In a typically surreal moment in the story of ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’, Alice finds herself with the Red Queen running as fast as she can simply to remain in the same spot. The Red Queen tells Alice, ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’
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An impossibly large number of people think they are above average drivers. Most students assess themselves as better than average and a study of college professors found that ninety percent of them thought they were above average teachers. No doubt, most leaders would assess themselves as above average too. These are all manifestations of a cognitive bias known as the illusory superiority effect, sometimes referred to as the Lake Wobegon effect.
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It is not that often that I take inspiration from Children’s literature but as I was recently reminded, ‘if you want new ideas, read old books .’ The story of Chicken Liken comes from a very old book and certainly pre-dates any attempts to record it in print. It may be of Norse or Anglo-Saxon origin but versions of the story are found all over Europe. When the story first appears in a book, it is printed in Danish, and Kylling Kluk was the name of the brainless little chicken.
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Agility, resilience and innovation are some of the key organizational characteristics that any astute business leader will be seeking to nurture in the current environment. But most organizations are congenitally incapable of incubating, growing and leveraging these skills to their advantage.
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I think like many of you I will be glad to get to the end of 2020, it's been a tough year for many reasons. I'm conscious of the many lessons there have been and the need to reflect and distil these but for now, 3 very quick thoughts:
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Leadership performance in any domain; business, politics, education, religion or the military seems over time to be firmly stuck. Leadership has not got better and in many cases a cogent case could be made that it has got worse. Is this predestined? Are we to endlessly repeat the mistakes of our forefathers or never to exceed their accomplishments? It seems more than likely but it shouldn’t and needn’t be so.
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Good leaders are constantly adjusting their approach according to the situation. If you’re familiar with John Boyd’s OODA loop model, originally inspired by an analysis of air to air combat, Observe and Orientate, are the first 2-stages in the cycle. They are all about creating good situational awareness.
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I guess a lot of the leadership lessons that I’ve learnt over my career have a lot to do with my particular weaknesses or blind spots as a leader; I’ve learnt to invest far more in team relationships and communicating for example. But I think in some ways the biggest leadership lesson I learnt was when I was still at school.
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