?Agility – leading in transition“
was the topic of the ESMT Annual Forum in Berlin last week. It was quite well received if we just count the number of participants. But which message, idea should we take home from it?
"Agility" the famous new buzzword created from agile project management for software development, was used in the sense of "flexibilty" with a concentration on rapid response to customer needs. Anything really new about it? Yes and no. If you listened carefully, "agility" must be based on a very well-thought strategy, which makes me optimisic for the future of corporations. But the leaders on the panel admitted they would rather apply this approach for software development (as it could even increase customer dependence by continous procut relases -personal opinion), but not in a nuclear power plant.
“Transition” - where to? No further definition was given. Maybe there are good reasons for it as we are at a tipping point, a bifurcation.
If we observe the world around us, there seems to be a group of people who believe they can manage a global highly networked economy and their societies – living complex systems - by turning the wheels back. They implement even stricter command and control structures, with increasing surveillance, further concentrating the power in the hands of few, even only one person’s hand.
On the other side through our deep insights into natural sciences we know that living complex systems evolve and develop by self- organization. Self –organization is a highly distributed process, without central command and control where anybody is equally important for the systems well-being. It leads to resilience, the ability to adapt to the ever changing environment. Exacly what we need today.
For me the main message form the ESMT Annual forum is: “The leaders of major European corporations have recognized that “command and control”, the centralization of decision making in combination with detailed process descriptions and overregulation will no longer be a successful leadership model”.
They experience the negative impacts each day personally. The few decision makers are constantly overstrained; they experience unrealistic expectation by employees and surrounding society; they feel having never enough time for well-thought decisions, time to watch their effect is not given and now all complain upon “acceleration, anything comes faster than ever”. The last point needs to be challenged. It is rather true that due to the limited awareness each individual has in relation to all the daily global events, it might miss some of the important ones. Even the digitalization took the same time as many other new technologies.
In conclusion it is time to spread the tasks, to make the first steps towards organized self –organization principles in companies (and society) to allow for in time well-thought actions. This is the take home message from this event.
The chosen approaches differ, but as Dieter Zetsche stated: “It is time to introduce a new German word “Kulturoptimismus” (culture optimism) in Wikipedia.” This means, that employees have so many good ideas, management can learn from. People are willing to engage, to take responsibility – but only if they can shape and decide upon their future, if they are really involved and not put aside to fulfil task others gave them. He seems not to have expected it before the initiative started in Daimler. Why?
For me it is clear: "It is time for a Mindset change – but is the majority of the leaders ready for it? "
Probably only a minority, but we all could accelerate if we start with ourselves. New insights from motivational psychology, neurobiology and systems science have resulted in methods ("tools") and new approaches which enable this change, e.g. mental contrasting with implementation intentions or embodied communication. These methods lead to more effective decision making and strenghthen the realization of goals. They facilitate a new way of co-operation and comunication leading to solution oriented dialogues instead of fighting for "ones own point of view" . They are well suited to introduce the first steps towards self-organization, to give autonomy in a set framework.