Leadership Post-Pandemic - Sorting the Puzzles from the Mysteries

Future leaders will build their skill-set and mind-set to move beyond solving puzzles towards exploring mysteries. Whilst this may sound like the stuff of fairy-tales I base my view on hard won experience supporting business leaders faced with real big questions about the future survival of their team and business, to say little of their career.

I recently experienced a meeting of minds on this with leadership guru Dave Ulrich. I don’t use the word guru lightly or often but Professor Ulrich is ranked #1 guru by Business Week and is profiled by Fast Company as one of the world’s top 10 creative people in business. It is an honor to collaborate with Dave and he prodded me here and there to enable us to distil the essence of our message which resulted in the article you can read here and can discuss with others.

Underpinning the practical approach I have developed over the past 20 years is the 4x5Q method which enables individual leaders or senior leadership teams to define and work on their future challenges. This is built on the solid foundations of theories and practices of action learning and OD.  You can see in our article how the 4x5Q method is structured around 20 key questions grouped into 4 stages: 

Scoping - working out what your real leadership challenge is and framing this as a question 

Knowledge Mapping - researching at three interconnected levels: Sky, Ground, Underground

Action - taking action in the real world of your team and business

Learning - reflecting on what you have learned about yourself and the business.  

As I apply this methodology in working with various business sectors (government, healthcare, a regulator, digital telecoms and retail technology) I am noticing certain patterns in the behaviours, emotions and thinking of leaders:

• They carry the weight of believing followers expect them to have all the answers 
• They tend towards a knee-jerk reaction to a crisis by framing it as a puzzle or series of puzzles
• They feel islotated, and often are.

Let me provide the picture of a business which I have imagined based on my experience with several organisations recently.

An executive decision is taken to reduce costs in the business over the next 3 years as part of the post pandemic plan for recovery. The CEO initially sees her role as driving through the cost reduction by instructing the executive team to present their plans for reducing costs by 7%, 5% and 4% over the next three years. A root and branch exercise is conducted to examine opportunities for cost reduction and this highlights a number of proposed actions: reallocate where certain costs are accounted for, reduce dependency on agency labour, review sourcing agreements, increase home-working by 30%, halve the number of internal meetings (remote or in-person) and reduce printing by 30%. 

In order to arrive at these decisions functional leaders have been busy examining current costs and trying to solve the puzzle in order to arrive at the known solution i.e. the 7% cost reduction.  It is admittedly a complex puzzle and takes some good accounting skills and ability to look at the business strategically. What makes this a puzzle is the fact the solution is predetermined from the start. It is like doing a Rubik’s cube.  You may be well practised in which case you can solve the puzzle quickly.  Or you may be new to this sort of puzzle in which case you might learn as fast as you can using some youngsters on Youtube to show you how. In order to solve the puzzles fast you will be well advised to allocate subject matter experts to work in their own professional fields. 

I don’t mean to in any way demean the role of puzzle solving. Complex and interconnected puzzles are intellectually and professionally challenging, however if the intention is to effect sustainable change through a business, the greater challenge is leading change through people. This is where the role of the leader as a Mystery Explorer becomes a priority.  

So at the point of having decided to reduce costs by 7% there remain several mysteries such as: 

• How will team members in the business react?
• How will the senior leadership team members embrace this challenge?
• How will existing and potential customers interpret this? 
• How can we introduce new routes to market that are more cost effective?
• How can we ensure sustainable engagement from team members in customer-facing roles?
• How do we ensure consistency of practices across different regions?

Tackling these questions is the stuff of future leadership. Those organisations using the 4x5Q methodology are able to differentiate the puzzles from the mysteries and turn these into focused questions which are tackled collaboratively by teams. Whereas puzzles are best solved by subject matter experts, mysteries are best explored collaboratively by cross-functional groups. 

I realise it may feel uncomfortable for leaders to formulate business challenges as mysteries, not least because this implies the leader does not know the answers. Often I see an implicit collusion between leaders who believe they need to be able reassure their people that they have the correct solutions and team members who expect this of their leaders. The breakthrough comes when the leader acknowledges there are important unknowns, when they embrace the not knowing and use this as means of engaging people in collaborative problem solving. 

The 4x4Q methodology provides a structure to help leaders and businesses to do this.

I welcome thoughts here from those who have used this approach or if you are interested in finding out more then I look forward to discussing this with you.

Richard Hale, 29/4/21 www.knowcanwilldo.com