DISRUPTING LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT: CAN WE KEEP UP WITH CHANGE?

I recently worked with senior executives in two diverse organizations: one a multi-national in the resources sector and the other in the public sector. What was striking was how similar the big picture issues were they facing. Both focused on the pace of external change and how it was impacting on them, in particular technology and community expectations. Both committed to changing the internal culture, to breaking down hierarchies and silos and giving more emphasis to engagement, diversity and building capacity. These all give rise to critical questions of leadership and adaptation. Both groups asked some version of the same question “How well equipped are we to respond to the future that is unfolding in front of us”? Both groups also said “we don’t know how long we can keep up the pace at which we are working on change"!

I left both groups feeling optimistic about senior leaders determination to confront what they were facing but somewhat unsure of their capacity to do so. So my big question is “ how can we turbo-charge what leadership development is doing to increase the likelihood that leaders can keep up with and work in change"??

This question is relevant in light of exponential change , where change is no longer linear but proceeds in an exponential manner leading to all-round disruption and creative destruction.

A recent article in Forbes Magazine shows which technologies are having an exponential impact and how disruptive they are already being.

McKinsey & Company suggests that change happens ten times faster and 300 times the scale than it did just a century ago, creating 3000 times the impact.?

Has leadership development changed how we prepare people for the future and change, ten times faster and 300 times the scale? The answer is clearly no!

Even within the most advanced approaches to our craft, exponential approaches to developing leaders are rare. There are models for working at scale and having an impact: there are methods and tools adapted from technology that foster speedier and more networked forms of development, but the fundamental assumptions embedded on our models of leadership will most likely need adjusting as well.?

While many leadership frameworks, including that which I draw on (adaptive leadership), are undoubtedly suited for the VUCA times we live in, some of the core beliefs and assumptions of these models may no longer be fit for purpose in an exponential world. For example?

(i) Adaptation is an incremental process of adjusting to a new reality where large parts of a business’s practices are taken into the future, and only small critical elements are discarded to create space for innovation. An incremental, evolutionary approach is appropriate in a linear world of change, but it is not in an exponential world.

(ii) Adaptation and change are premised on the belief that people can see and interpret trends and pressures as they occur and begin to orchestrate relevant constituencies to mobilize and work together over time. However exponential change comes out of nowhere and, therefore we need new ways to help leaders develop foresight and perspective.

(iii)??Biotechnology and neuroscience are showing the limits of human thinking, as has Robert Kegan and his colleagues. Indeed Kegan as said that we are not currently equipped to see and comprehend transformatively. In other words, most of us, no matter how smart or sophisticated, can't get above it all to get a broad perspective, let alone tolerate the impact of uncertainty and turmoil of change. Too many leaders do not have the “wiring” to do so. So we need methods that build these transforming capacities: hyperawareness of both the self and the system we operate in; greater tolerance for disturbance and ambiguity and development of transformational thinking.

Leadership development and learning, therefore, need to remember some basic principles, which remain constant for all?

?????Learning is fundamentally social

?????Knowledge is integrated within groups, teams, and communities

?????Learning is active

?????The depth of our learning depends on the extent of our engagement; and

?????Deep transformational learning occurs when there is a combination of challenge and support.

However, it is evident in an exponential world that classroom learning, no matter how useful is not sufficient, it needs to complemented by or foster some, or all, of the following.

1.???Make the work of leadership learning more collective, distributed and public. Leaders need to learn and experiment together and, in public, in their organizations because if they can’t practice together, where making mistakes and experimenting is supported and less shameful, how can they do so with the significant challenges they face. After all, the challenges organizations face are collective challenges. We know that no one person or team has the answers, so responding to them has to be collective, joined up and distributed work. Leadership is a practice that needs rehearsal. We wouldn’t expect sportsmen and women to exercise their craft without practice, and yet somehow leaders are supposed to “just do it;”?

Experiential methods used in teaching leadership, for example, Adaptive Case in Point , can provide a starting point for transfer into simulated worlds. Such approaches have been shown to help move learners from socialized to self-authorizing thinking and beyond so that they can see and interpret systems, take multiple and competing viewpoints and tolerate the ambiguity and pressure of doing so. Case in Point, as I discussed elsewhere , fosters this type of learning because it brings the dynamics of leadership and change (VUCA) into the classroom.

2.????Harness new technologies , for example, VR and AR, to create augmented realities both in?classroom and workplace settings that will support the collective and public learning and practice noted above, as well permit leaders to experience more distant change up close and immediately. AR will allow people to be exposed to a wide range of unique, new and challenging situations within which they can experiment safely with new behaviours and approaches.?Combined with other technologies, leaders could access virtual coaching, seek immediate input or gather expert opinion (for example Kaagle ).

Mariano Alcano and his colleagues suggest?that VR provides the opportunity to simulate real-life situations, including social conditions, triggering embodied experiences in which the body, environment, and brain are in a close relationship. Consequently, behaviors, attitudes and beliefs can be transferred from reality to virtuality, and vice versa, in a spontaneous, unconscious manner, allowing the creation of lifelike scenarios. Such interaction, between reality and virtuality, is in its infancy but could exponentially change how leaders learn and get coached.

As Ravin Jesuthasan and Marie Holmstrom say “Development programs must evolve from a static, closed-system approach. Instead, these programs must keep pace by delivering engaging, “open source” content and experiential learning opportunities that are rich with high-fidelity simulations and real-life technology applications.

3.???Bring leadership development and learning to scale, both physically and technologically. Marketers now use AI and other technologies to connect with customers and create novel and engaging experiences, and they do so by building communities; communities that share and learn. Leadership development can do the same. For example, new media such as Facebook, Twitter, Altspace or Daydream can teach us a lot about building communities but also creating impact at scale. What can we learn from viral marketing, so that we, as leadership developers can spread the effect of learning more widely , more rapidly and at scale?

?It would be possible to do so, for example, by emulating the social, community-based learning that arose from the #MeToo movement . At the heart of such movements is a learning-oriented social activity designed to spread a new awareness and the practice of different behaviors. #Me-too, like most social movements,??exemplified

?????Collective action

?????Peer to peer

?????It was voluntary and had a high degree of choice

?????It was nonhierarchical and decentralized

?????It was public

?????Experimental; and was

?????Reinforced through direct engagement.

Some combination of these attributes is required to socialize leadership learning and the innovation of change.

Inviting leaders to experiment with their learning and its application can be done more innovatively especially utilizing social media tools. For example creating an internal Twitter feed to spread information and receive feedback, internal polling tools, such as those used by Google to give executives continuous input during meetings and using Facebook-like social apps such as Nuzzle, Signal or Nextdoor, to build and engage internal organizational communities.?

These type of activities extend known methods such as Leadership Circles and Communities of Practice because they are designed to spread the application of new ideas and behaviors, to support specific forms of action but do so without centralized control or the use of formal authority. That is why scalable social learning processes elevate our ability to operate within, build and nurture community-based learning. Leadership and experimentation become distributed, and leaders can surface ideas, share and interpret them, support the public learning of others and help our communities and organizations adapt.

While various forms of social leadership already occur in up to 50 percent of organizations a recent study has shown most organizations don’t know how to integrate social technology with leadership learning. Leadership educators can be in the vanguard to partnering with clients to better do this.

However, this requires a fundamental shift for both leadership developers and organizations that want to build capacity. Away from leadership being the domain of a selected few to leadership as a shared and distributed activity; away from hierarchy toward networks and communities of interest and away from a linear mentality toward a systemic and ecological mindset.

As I continue to think about and explore the forms of innovation and disruption we as leadership educators can take, I still have many questions.?

?????How do we move ahead and make bigger bets on how we grow, stretch and challenge leaders to learn?

?????How do we stay relevant to businesses and organizations that are being disrupted as we speak?

?????What forms of risks and public learning must we, as educators, consultants and coaches take?

?????What do we need to take with us into an exponential future and what must we leave behind?

Join me in thinking and learning our way into the future!