Where there is no vision, the people will perish – Proverb 29:18

With spring now upon us, and with the longer, and slightly warmer days, I like nothing better than to get out for daily walks. The reason I love walking is more about the time to think, something I don’t get that much time to do, plus it is a good way to also shed a few of the extra winter pounds I gather up each year!!

As I walk and think, the thing that strikes me the most is just how challenging it is to lead organisations in the current climate. No matter the size of the organization, leaders around New Zealand are grappling how to:

-?????????Create a compelling vision and strategy for the future; and

-?????????Transform their businesses from where they are now to be sustainable, resilient, relevant to new ways of working and future fit; and

-?????????Run the operational performance of the business to the highest standard

All while doing this in the most volatile political, social and economic times we have ever experienced and as we sail into the greatest talent war ever none to the business world. Sheesh, as I write that down, it sounds even worse!

But the most important word in those challenges above is ‘and’ – i.e. we have to build our businesses to do all three of these at once whereas I think historically we have related to those as ‘or’ statements – i.e. you can have the future or you can have current performance. This has been made worse by the challenge of confronting current day issues such as our reaction to COVID, supply chain issues and talent shortages. This has made us even more shortsighted in our vision for the future and drives organisations more into a management path (risk management and adherence to plan) as opposed to a leadership orientated future (driven by vision and purpose).

In true kiwi style, we are tackling these challenges with a flurry of action. Throughout the land, new glossy strategies are being written, and expensive consultants are jetting into to design and develop beautiful transformation plans – transformation programmes, that the general employee doesn’t understand, nor care for, are filling our corridors and my fear is that nothing is going to really change.

The reason I say that is that despite the new strategy and transformation plan, the way organisations are approaching the new world is to put more effort into their current way of operating and are missing the need to fundamentally change the way they operate and build an operating model that is a match for the future they seek. When I talk about operating model, I am not talking about the actions we take in our transformation plans or changes to org charts – using our aspirational future to orientate from, I am talking about the way we lead, the way we govern, the ways of working, decision making approaches etc

The way we lead and govern is at the heart of any operating model because that sets the tone for the business as a whole. As an observer of this in many businesses over the last year, I see an interesting theme that when organisations are confronted by instability, the way leaders and governors react to that is to try to establish stability – i.e. we go back into our past and find things that have worked for us before and try and control the future with our past successes.

At a time when the board room needs to be at its most open to change, I see the opposite occurring where directors and execs are chasing themselves around on issues of the day, desperately trying to create stability on current performance or deliver urgent compliance at the expense of developing a sustainable approach to achieve the purpose, vision and aspiration.

Changing the operating model of the organization so we can achieve the future ‘and’ the current starts in the board room and starts with questions like:

-?????????How do we need to change the way we govern

-?????????How do we need to change the way we lead

-?????????Are we actually aligned on, and enrolled in, the context of the organization and how quickly it is changing

-?????????What mode of governance is required for each situation – i.e. are we board led, management led or are we in co-design mode – and are we using the right mode

-?????????What help do we need to change our operating model and how do we ensure that constantly refining our operating model is a key board room discussion

I titled this piece based on an old religious proverb – ‘Where there is no vision, the people will perish.’ While I am not a religious person, I think this short statement is more applicable now than ever before. Scherr and Jenson describe leadership as empowering others to act to fulfil visions, and produces results, outcomes, and consequences that otherwise would not have occurred. If ever we needed leadership of this kind, now is the time!