Curiosity: the key critical capability for transformational leadership

Leaders who set out to remodel their organizations to compete in a rapidly changing digital environment frequently face a frightening realization: in order to reinvent their businesses, they must transform themselves first. Although it might seem a too philosophical affirmation, what we see in reality is most transformations don’t succeed because leaders think of themselves as “too big to fail.”?

“I have experience with that”. “We’ve been doing this for decades”. “We know how to do it”. “This [whatever external treat] is just a fad”.?

We have defined success for so long as a consequence of the accumulation of past knowledge and experiences rightly applied to recognizable challenges. You’ve been there, you’ve done that, you know what to do. There is nothing wrong with that if the challenges would remain the same. The problem is that most of our business and ethical challenges are not even known yet. Could we even recognize them when they arrive? I guess this is the hardest (and Socratic) challenge for leaders to catch up with the speed of change and be able to keep learning.

Curious rather than digital

You may imagine that an organization in transition requires a steady hand, someone with foresight and expertise who sets a prudent path to travel gradually and competently. And, of course, businesses need executives who are also digitally proficient, don't they?

The “Leadership in the Digital Era” survey, conducted by professor Linda Hill for Harvard Business School,?found that none of these traits is as essential as you might expect when driving digital transformation. 71% of 1,500 executives polled in more than 90 countries ranked?Adaptability?as the most crucial leadership trait. The survey respondents rated creativity, curiosity, and comfort with uncertainty as highly desirable attributes.?Worryingly, less than half of the participants believe that they or other top executives in their firms have the proper mentality and skills to lead in the digital era.??Given the rapidity with which new technologies arise, digital transformation is not a one-and-done activity, nor is the leadership transformation required of leaders.

Deep diving into the unknown

As board members or senior leaders in an organization - where most of the time we are required to have answers –, we must dig deeper and deeper until we understand a little of how much we don’t know about our clients, our people, our corporate taboos, our outdated cultures, symbols, and corporate myths, about our competitors, partners, and so many other stakeholders. Facing the brutal facts about how far we have to go to keep up with the world’s change is the fuel we will need to look for new answers to new problems.

Before I entered the corporate world, my academic life was in Anthropology. The first thing you learn as a method – and a tool - to research properly is ethnography, a kind of research methodology where you have to put yourself in a place of an alien, asking very basic questions about the world you are observing and assuming you don’t know anything about what it means for the population living there. This kind of exercise has proven to be an amazing tool for lifelong learners.?

Talk to people

Employees, employees who are leaving, clients, ex-clients, distant partners, brand advocates, social media haters, the to-be competitors, technology futurists, pragmatic business controllers, and leaders across the organization. Not a kind of formal conversation but rather an open “want to see how you see” dialog.

Leaders must think and act from the outside in, building a 360-degree picture of the dynamics within their businesses and those of the ecosystems in which they operate. This necessitates contextual intelligence, as defined by Harvard Business School professors Tarun Khanna, Anthony Mayo, and Nitin Nohria. A CEO can only figure out how to catalyze change rather than prepare for it if they comprehend the most salient facts or the most influential persons in a specific situation. It is about inviting employees to participate in decision-making and building a culture in which individuals feel comfortable enough to take chances and act in the firm's best interests. It is also about gaining and extending trust to increasingly varied stakeholders outside of the organization and cooperating with them in novel and new ways.?

Companies face a more dynamic competitive landscape in the digital era: significant competitors are no longer the conventional suspects, and consumer and stakeholder expectations continue to shift. Because of the rapidity and complexity of technological development, digital transformations must be more iterative than traditional types of organizational change.

“We don’t talk about Bruno”

In order to address what Jim Collins calls “the brutal facts” of our businesses and industries, we have to stop avoiding having difficult conversations or hurtful truths about what, how, and why we do things. In the blockbuster Disney animation Encanto, uncle Bruno is the character who is able to see the cracks nobody is seeing at the enchanted house. But the “vision” is not welcomed, and Bruno is outcasted. No one wants to talk about what might be secretly undermining the structure. We don’t like pessimists, but we deeply need them to be part of the transformation. We need to embrace all elephants in the room and be able to talk about them openly.

If their organizations thrive, leaders must learn to experiment, iterate, and pivot themselves. Leaders need a new attitude toward risk to be comfortable with the inevitable blunders and unverified hypotheses of exploration. Avoiding possibilities to prevent failure is possibly the most dangerous position in the digital economy. In a fast-paced world with more risks than ever before—cybersecurity, reputational hazards, pandemics, and societal crises—executives must have the bravery to place large bets.

Leaders must balance curiosity with intentionality as they determine when to be broad-minded and open-minded and when to be focused and delve deep. They must develop the ability to detect "weak signals" about what is going on in their companies and ecosystems. As one participant put it, "you are often too late, especially when first-mover advantage is at play" when a weak signal becomes a trend.

Courageous conversations with employees and customers, and suppliers, especially those struggling to survive economically and physically in these trying times.

Create a variety of learning opportunities

From the top to the very bottom, ideally, we should blend diverse learning experiences such as face-to-face workshops, webinars, brief brainstorming sessions, peer coaching, user interviews and feedback sessions, executive mentoring, rapid prototyping, hackathons, and even a new corporate learning ecosystem.

Develop and execute a cross-divisional upskilling framework that would enable internal R&D talents to become intrapreneurs, inspired by schools of thought that saw entrepreneurship as a disciplined competence that could be nurtured and taught. We can design programs from the ground up when there is no adequate "off-the-shelf" upskilling framework.?

The only reasonable response to the digital sea changes happening around us is for leaders to adopt a learning mindset and show generosity toward other people and themselves. As it turns out, digitally mature companies are led by people who can transition from taking center stage to set the stage for organizational success.

Curiosity at the service of permanent reinvention

What are the issues we should be willing to be curious to learn more about what is changing?

1 – Talents and work models.?Do they want different things in life? What do they value? What is success for them? How do they want to work? How do they want to be led and want to lead? Where? Why? How differently do we have to be for the next generations?

2 – Governance and leadership models.?While digital natives and digital-first executives have seen the benefits of "failing quickly and often," leaders of less digital organizations may find it challenging to do so. Their outward confidence may conceal dread and concern, but they must be willing to admit mistakes and misinterpretations and recognize what they don't know or what isn't functioning early on. Executives must be willing to accept responsibility for errors and share credit for victories. Vision and strategy are crucial in today's society, but the capacity to organize collective action—co-creation rather than top-down direction—has never been more critical. Leading in the digital era is an exercise in trust. The most exemplary leaders remain emotionally connected and present while talking frankly and truthfully. Power must be distributed. It is critical to shake the command-control model based on hierarchy and norms. Leaders must learn to wield power without resorting to official authority. They chart the course of the organization, communicate the mission and principles, and enable others to carry it out.

3 – Never stop asking questions – especially if you are in the boardroom.?You are in charge of a business, but you have limited resources to really understand it — and that knowledge is often mediated through management. What did the board members of Boeing, Carrillion, Wirecard, and Theranos know about the impending difficulties before their businesses' existential crises? Boards may easily become passive receivers of agendas set by strong CEOs and top executives because they only see what is given to them. Board members, on the other hand, may play a transformative role in a business by asking questions that allow for deep thought and strategic change, rather than just reacting to what the CEO provides and then stepping in to deal with a crisis when things go wrong.

4 – Be an – positive – investigative journalist.?It's critical to create an atmosphere where executives feel comfortable speaking out, as well as to pay attention to how often they bring you tough and uncomfortable situations and queries. If you don't see any of these, it may mean that something is being kept concealed from you. The goal is to normalize difficult discussions with all executives without feeling threatened. Are we talking about long-term problems, both within and outside, enough? During times of crisis or tremendous upheaval, such as the pandemic, it's easy to get caught up in the moment. Management development and succession, long-term competitive and technical challenges, as well as environmental and regulatory problems, may all be buried in the shuffle.

5 – Bursting the bubble.?It's easy for a business (and its board of directors) to become inwardly focused. While having industry experts on the board is beneficial, a lack of variety of opinions may lead to myopathy due to homogeneity. What do you perceive as being constantly debated but never resolved? This inquiry may offer insight into the organization's underlying issues. What are you not talking about that you should be? Are we speaking to all stakeholders, rather than just the shareholders??

6 – Don’t let strategy be eaten by culture.?Would we all characterize it in the same manner, and in the corporate culture consistent? Culture, like trust, is difficult to describe. When we examine some of the recent business disasters, however, we find that a corrupt culture and a lack of trust were often at the root of the issue. The capacity to find data to understand the culture has gotten simpler. Many companies now provide services that may provide an accurate assessment of culture as well as insight into where and how it needs to improve. These reports may be upsetting to read, exposing problems like bullying, practices that render the company vulnerable to unethical activity and even fraud, and a lack of diversity and inclusion. None of these issues is simple, mainly because businesses struggle to deal with disruptive change and understand the full scope and complexity of their effect on society. And, in general, people dislike talking about tough topics.?