4 Reasons to Ignore '5 Tips'

The Leadership Industry and consultants love to provide individuals and organizations with their short list of success factors -- typically lists that lend themselves to their proprietary models or toolkits. I just did a quick web scan and found this sampling

1. '10 Awesome Tips for Being a Better Leader'
2. '5 Leadership Tips for the Digital Workforce'
3. '5 Leadership Tips for First Time Managers'
4. '5 Simple Ways to Become a Better leader'
5. '4 Tips for Digital Leadership Success'
6. '10 Tips for Digital Leaders'
7. 'CEO's Leadership Tips'
8. '5 Tips for Leadership Success'

Ok, you probably get the point by now. Lots of companies and thought leaders are working their databases or interview data to isolate the 3/4/5/6/8/10 factors that are predictive of 'success'. In fact if you add up all these lists, you have hundreds of tips. Who is right? What if they clash with each other?

So rather than adding to the chaos of competing shortlists with 'right answers' on leadership success formulas, here are 4 reasons (I couldn't do 5) why I believe that this approach -- at its core -- is flawed and should be abandoned forever.

1. Generally these lists are based off of some assessment of leaders and then an isolation of the factors that a group of them have in common? The missing part for me here is how we know that these people have been any more successful than others? Compensation? Promotion rates? Value creation? Societal impact? So, the very notion of defining success comes under scrutiny and forces the question of whether it is self-interest of the consulting firms that pushes the question in a direction that inherently benefits them. 
2. Is an approach that analyzes the past in order to predict the future fundamentally flawed by default? Do a set of capabilities that a group of people demonstrated through a backward looking assessment predict their ability to 'succeed' in an uncertain future? Data provides insights and can help us ask better questions, but does it provide definitive cookbook answers on better leadership. And as we create more lists, we also create more data. Does this add to or cut through the complexity?
3. Competency lists generally always lead back to the same answer. What changes at warp speed is their operational context and they don't measure that. For example, decision making. Decision making has always been important and will always be important. However, decision making in the age of AI alongside cognitively competent bots and massive amounts of data, in short timelines, with higher levels of risk tolerance and greater amounts of ambiguity is different. Its not enough to say 'decision making made our top 5 list.' We've got to put it fully into the context of multiple futures.
4. Lists tend to be closed source -- meaning they come from a proprietary data base owned and protected by somebody. Perhaps the better answers about leadership capability in the context of multiple and semi-known futures come through open source solutioning -- ideation that can happen at the same pace of change and that collects inputs from leaders themselves.

As Moore's law continues to accelerate the pace of change in the world around us, we need to stop trying to simplify leadership down to the 5 tips on anything.  It's just more complex than that. One dimensional perspectives cant provide answers to questions so complex as who will win in the future. In order to move into the future, our industry will need to stop trying to recreate and decipher the past by assessing leaders against formulas that become outdated the minute they were published.

So what do we need to start doing? In order to develop and assess leadership in the complex present and ambiguous future, we need to create scenarios for multiple futures and deeply look at leaders ability to succeed in those contexts. For example, a company is in severe financial distress and needs to focus on immediate top and bottom line action - what kind of leader will be successful here? A company is looking to disrupt its industry by adopting a technology that will recreate its business model, market and value chain - what kind of leader is needed here? A company wants to do both of the above (sound familiar) - whos the right leader? Is there a right leader? Does it take more than one?

I'm not paying attention anymore to '5-tip' style studies or POV's. I'm looking for a deeper exploration of the contextual factors that will shape our future and a discussion on how leaders will need to think, act, and react to thrive in those multiple futures.