Davos 2023 - Lessons To Be Learned From Fragmentation

Davis 2023 is now history. Celebratory moments are safely tucked into memory. Reflective analyses have been posted, Tweeted, printed, broadcast, shared and reshared. The corporate jets have departed for their respective homes. The protestors have moved on to fresh ideological battles. The storefronts have once again returned to the Promenade. Life in Davos is back to normal.

But what, if anything, have we learned?

This year the World Economic Forum (WEF) chose “Cooperation in a Fragmented World” as its theme, a bold option for a gathering of leaders historically more skilled in competition than cooperation who rarely directly encounter the forces of fragmentation other than as disruptions to the bottom line or affairs of state.

Cooperation in leadership circles presents a slope that grows more attractive and slippery every day. Global problems and global opportunities both require direct (active) and indirect (passive) cooperation. A lone wolf does not cut a path for the pack to follow any more than the solitary voice on Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park makes policy.

Fortune still favors the brave, but only if they have the right allies.

Like all of us, leaders are sometimes more comfortable falling back on “old think” approaches that too often confused consensus with cooperation. Just because an idea or solution is so content-free that no one can object to it doesn’t mean everyone is behind it. Silence is not support and pureed ideas are rarely either breakthrough or meaningful. In a changing world, time is the enemy. Leaders no longer have the luxury of taking years to recognize and respond to change or crafting elegant, bulletproof solutions everyone can agree with.

Today, the art of leadership is really the mastery of time.

Effective solutions to the macro challenges that dominate forums such as Davos, require bold action advanced on cooperative platforms. When leaders look to build consensus through cooperation the resulting solutions are often uninspiring. In today’s increasingly fragmented world, breakthrough thinking is easier to come by and far more valuable than viable consensus solutions. Consensus assumes that everyone’s interests are aligned to a greater or lesser degree. That’s generally a mistake.

We live in a post-modern mosaic but pretend it is a still life oil painting. Leaders would be well advised to quit thinking about still lifes and mosaics and instead direct their attention to what the Japanese call kintsugi or “golden joinery.”

Rather than seeing fragmentation of static models as threats, kintsugi sees it as an art form. Since sometime in the late 15th Century kintsugi masters have been mending valuable broken pottery by rejoining the broken pieces with lacquer dusted or mixed with a variety of powdered precious metals, primarily gold.

Instead of seeing fragmentation as a flaw that destroys value and should be hidden, kintsugi believes that breakage and repair are part of an object’s legacy that should be both visible and celebrated. This art form is closely aligned with the Japanese philosophy of?wabi-sabi that sees every aspect of life as transient, imperfect, and ephemeral. While wabi-sabi doesn’t translate directly into English very well, the concept has been embraced in Silicon Valley to describe the nature of technology.

Fragmentation is as real in public and private governance as it is in ceramics and technology. The more we globalize, the more we fragment. Our future demands that sooner rather than later we learn how to realize the beauty fragmentation can create rather than always seeing it as a threat. After all, any threat to unexamined consensus is probably a giant step in the right direction.

Bold leadership isn’t incremental. ?It doesn’t exist dormant in some undefined and unknowable future waiting to be discovered. It acknowledges fragmentation without being sidetracked by it.

Rather than take measured and incremental tiny steps toward goals in 2030, 2040 or 2050, leaders must challenge teams to race toward creating game-changing positive disruption.

Challenging timelines doesn’t come with a guarantee. But it does bring fresh urgency and creativity to any discussion. Effective solution development is a natural cycle, beginning with dreaming and daring, followed by movement and speed, ending in building, and starts again. In our world of continuous constantly accelerating and unremitting change that cycle takes increasing shorter time to complete. The lifecycle of effective solutions becomes measured in months, not years.

The WEF is correct. “Cooperation in a Fragmented World” is indeed a critically important topic, or could be, if we learned to see a fragmented world as a thing of potential beauty just waiting for the right leaders to begin their repairs. But that can’t happen until Leaders set the model for how the cores of their companies, industries, institutions, and governments view fragmentation.

Fragmentation is inevitable. Things break.?History teaches us that sooner or later even the most revered ceramic piece gets knocked over and broken. The future belongs not to leaders who pretend they’ve created structures that can’t be disrupted, but to those who have the speed and agility to reach the lacquer pot first and begin to affect repairs.??

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