Five Winning Behaviours that thrive in uncertainty.A Leadership Perspective By Dr Thando Sibanda
It is inarguable that the 21 st century business landscape has changed significantly.The corporation is at a crossroads and innovation looks very different from the days of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Howard Hughes among other great inventors. In 1987, the U.S. Army War College introduced the concept of VUCA to describe the more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous multilateral world perceived as resulting from the end of the Cold War. Since the early 2000’s, that concept has gained traction in organisations and has become the buzz word in boardrooms, seminars and corporate hallways. It is evident that the rules have changed… Leadership ingenuity is the greatest asset an organisation can have. Futuristic organisations need to foster within their leaders, winning behaviors that incubate the ability to foresee, act and stay ahead of the curve. The stakes are too high to ignore. Organisational history is replete with behemoths that fell apart just because they never saw the change coming until it was too late. Over the next 5 articles, I will share the Five winning behaviors that thrive in uncertainty. Let me start with behavior 1. Imagination:
?IGNITE YOUR IMAGINATION
As a connoisseur of life, strategy, culture and business, I love to observe how things work.We know that bees create honey, oysters create pearls, worms create silk. And what do humans create? Well, among a myriad of answers, mine is that humans create futures. They do this through their ability to imagine. Everything we see in our world today, was once a figment of someone’s imagination.
Imagination is a unique attribute that exists exclusively in the mental faculty of human beings. It is literally what sets us apart from all other facets of creation. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines imagination as “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality” In essence, imagination is the capacity to produce images, ideas and sensations in the mind without any immediate input of the senses (such as seeing or hearing)
21 st century organisations desperately need leaders with Imagination. Leaders who are not just focused on the business of the day but can also tap into the business of the future. Disruption is no longer exclusive to the people in that line of business – It does not follow that your industry will be disrupted by those currently working within it. The disruption matrix is no longer industry based – It is now ideas based. A computer scientist like Reed Hastings is able to disrupt a Blockbuster chain and change the game through Netflix. It’s not enough for leaders to just have vision for where they want to go. The vision must be backed by a fully vibrant and engaged imagination that removes limitations of what is possible. I see vision as the convergence of ideas into a focal point, but Imagination is the divergence, the freedom of thought and ideas – the limitless ability of the mind to capture worlds unseen and bring them into the realm of the tangible. The world celebrates good imagination. That’s what makes innovators. Good leaders must have good imagination. Imaginative leaders remove boxes and parks from their organisations. Their people can think outside the boxes and they are not limited by park boundaries. How imaginative are you as a leader? The cold war may be over, but a bigger war of ideas has shifted into gear. In this 21 st century volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous business world, it is your divergence that may just save the day.