Brave new leaders for brave new worlds

Caroline Burns recently published a great article on the "between a rock and a hard place" situation we put our corporate leaders in. In brief:

We encourage leaders to "fail fast," and then punish them intensely for failing at all.

No wonder, then, that leaders operate from a place of fear—they're right to be fearful!!

There were two observations that I had while reading the article that I wanted to share here. I've tied each one back to a specific phrase from the original article.

1. What to expect, not how much

“Are we asking too much, or perhaps not enough, from our leaders?”

I think in fact that we are asking the wrong kind of thing of our leaders, not just too much or too little. For example, when it comes to innovation, the VP Innovation isn’t the one who’s expected to come up with all the bright ideas. (Hint: if that’s the case in your company, call me.)

Rather, the VP Innovation’s job is to structure and maintain the ecosystem that enables an entire team of folks (ideally everyone in the company) to bring forward an idea, have it tested, show some value, build a little momentum, go through a slightly larger test, and so forth.

Caroline talks about leaders being afraid of getting it wrong, and therefore failing to “fail quickly.” Leaders are more comfortable making the big mistake they can defend after the fact than making the small mistake now that they can’t prove in advance.

These all flow from my point above—we’re expecting our leaders to come up with great ideas that we can identify as "great" right on the surface. Ideas aren't like that. We don't know which ones are great until the ideas get a chance to strut their stuff.

And we hold those expectations instead of expecting our leaders to create pipelines for idea generation and demonstration. Those structures are the ones that allow a bunch of small failures as the price of discovering (and refining) the things that really make difference. A pipeline that produces consistently disappointing results is something to hold a leader accountable for.

A single moonshot that doesn't pan out tells us about one thing only: luck. And if you think about it, there's actually no reason to reward/punish a leaders based on a single unrepeatable event. After all: what are you even learning for if this is a one-off event? There will never be another one!

2. More data ≠ clearer insight

“Leaders have more data than ever but in most organisations this data is increasing complexity not removing it.”

The “big data” revolution sold us on the idea that if you had enough data, it was basically the same as having a complete representation of the entire ecosystem. That’s just not true. We will always need a context in which to interpret the data.

And that interpretive context requires making decisions about what is relevant. We can’t sidestep that simply by piling on more and more data; in fact, more data just makes it worse. (For you art lovers out there: more data is more Jackson Pollock than Georges Seurat—nothing integrated spontaneously “emerges” as you keep piling on more and more data.)

This is more than just theoretical. We see it playing out for real in the survey results that Caroline quoted—

According to the Oracle- Stephens-Davidowitz survey an overwhelming 91% of business leaders say the growing volume of data has limited the success of their organisation, and 77 % say that the dashboards and charts they get do not always relate directly to the decisions they need to make.

??PRACTITIONER NOTES: What do we do?

Leaders need to own the process for creating great results, and empower their teams to make good use of those processes. So leaders do need to—

1. Decide “what would have to be true” (WWHTBT) for something to work, and
2. Make a judgment call about what evidence would give us confidence that the WWHTBT conditions either are or are not true.

That’s not something that they should do on their own. They lead teams of brilliant people who have incredibly valuable contributions to make to these conversations.

All this aligns beautifully Caroline's conclusion: leaders need to empower their teams and position their middle managers as important conduits for information and insight to flow up the chain as well. In a structured fashion.

Crucially, leaders don't need to do any of the following, under this view:

1. Come up with great ideas
2. Greenlight anything for prime time that hasn't shown promise time and again at smaller, less risky scales.