Leadership agility - new ways of thinking

This is a 5 minute read 

 Thanks for reading the blog series –‘Launching your speed boats’. I am delighted to see the overwhelming feedback and encouragement from friends and colleagues. 

Speed boat series  

 https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/business-agility-launching-your-speed-boat-step-1-over-prabhakaran/ 

 https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/business-agility-via-data-do-you-have-speed-boats-prasad-prabhakaran/ 

 I am sure it is a testing time for all business and services, with new priorities ensuring current strategies are still relevant to the context and new ways of working etc... Having said that, this is also a great opportunity to reflect, unlearn, and be more agile. 

 One of the critical factors that influences business agility is the way senior Leadership think, understand, identify and validate hidden assumptions in the key strategies that move organisations forward.  

Most Leaders understand the importance of agility, but few prioritise the development of this crucial skill. 

 A global survey and study conducted by the UK magazine, The Economist,  came up with two findings of particular note. 

 ‘While environmental turbulence makes it more difficult to compete and grow profits, companies with higher levels of agility have a distinct competitive advantage that leads to higher profitability.  The study also found that organisational “resilience”, a related adaptive capacity, which correlates highly with agility, contributes significantly to business performance in turbulent environments. Resilience, as defined in this study, refers to an organisation’s ability to resist, absorb, and respond to highly disruptive changes.’ 

 In an increasingly unpredictable world, one thing we can confidently predict is that the pace of change will be faster next year and even faster the year after that. Agility is not simply about speeding up in response to rapid change. Whether applied to organisations, teams or individual leaders, it is the ability to take sustained effective action amid conditions of accelerating change and mounting complexity. 

 From our experience, one of the biggest barriers to increased agility is the Leadership culture.

We have seen time and time again that businesses whose Leaders operate with higher levels of agility are more agile as organizations.

Leadership agility is the ability to take “reflective action” – to step back from one’s current focus, gain a broader, deeper perspective, and then refocus and take action that is informed from this wider perspective. As Leaders become more agile, their capacity for stepping back deepens and broadens, and the frequency with which they move through cycles of reflection and action increases.  

 Agile leadership, then, is not just another tool for a manager’s tool kit. It is a core capability, a “meta-competency,” if you will, that affects how leaders deploy all their other competencies. 

 How do we help our Leaders with this ‘meta-competence’? The key is to have a Leadership culture that embraces new ways of thinking - continuous reflection of the riskiest assumptions in the strategies and the plan.

Based on our research and experiences Red Team Thinking provides a structured approach to Leadership with the techniques that enable ‘Leadership agility’

Bryce G. Hoffman, in his Book on RedTeamThinking* explains 

 ‘Red Team Thinking gives individuals and organizations the tools they need to create winning strategies and make better decisions in today’s complex and rapidly changing world. Based on powerful techniques developed by the military and intelligence agencies, Red Team Thinking will help you and your team challenge your assumptions, pressure-test your plans, identify hidden threats, and uncover missed opportunities.’ 

 Red teaming is a systematic way of making critical and contrarian thinking part of the strategic planning process of any organization - core to Leadership agility. It provides a robust set of tools designed to challenge your assumptions, expose hidden threats, and identify missed opportunities, and stress-test plans and strategies. 

 Holley Holland has partnered with RedTeamThinking to help Leaders to regain their Leadership agility - ability to take “reflective action” – to step back from one’s current focus, gain a broader, deeper perspective, then refocus and take action that is informed from this wider perspective. Drop me a note to know more about Leadership agility – Ways of Thinking and Ways of Working, looking forward for your feedback and point of views

*Red teaming is a system developed by the U.S. military and intelligence agencies to make critical and contrarian thinking part of an organization’s strategic planning process. In 2015, Hoffman became the first civilian to graduate from the U.S. Army’s Red Team Leader Program at the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.