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Leadership: The unspoken truth
Leadership: The unspoken truth

June 20, 2022

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Many leaders are living a lie. The leadership sector, including head heading / recruitment and executive education, is propagating this lie. Hollywood and Bollywood in many respects serve to keep this lie alive.

In fact there are two lies, both driven by fantasy.

Lie #1 - Leaders are in control

Over the last few centuries, the powers that be did a good job in creating what might be called ‘synthetic certainty’. This was needed to ensure the social and economic conditions were sufficiently predictable for the ‘factory’ to flourish. The industrial era was perhaps the final chapter of the Anthropocene; man had finally tamed Nature.

But this synthetic certainty is fraying thanks to a myriad of macroenvironmental forces, including technology, geopolitics and resources security that are compounding and conflating to make the future essentially more volatile and unknowable. 

Despite this new reality, many leaders continue to  act as if they have it all under control. They tell us that they can deliver on their political promises or that the quarterly forecasts are accurate. Such manifestos and strategic plans are simply a growing genre of fiction.

These lies will eventually lead to social unrest and economic collapse. The uncertainty and volatility we are witnessing today is simply a warmup for what is likely to happen. Disruption is only just taking off its tracksuit.

Lie #2 – Leaders are superheroes

Does it make sense that the CEO of McDonalds earns over 2,000 times the median salary of its staff? Yes of course it does. But only because the operating model suppresses the cognitive capacity of everyone else in the organisation. Centralised leadership guarantees that we squander the human capital available. This lack of asset management might be considered a dereliction of fiduciary duty.

This idea of a CEO simply being 2,000 times more valuable than their workers is not only ridiculous but tends to generate CEOs whose primary capability is being politically adept at getting into this leadership ecosystem and staying there. Such leaders often leave a trail of value destruction and/or widespread mental unwellness. Those of us who are not in this leadership ecosystem/club are forced to adhere to the operations manual and suppress our natural urge to be curious and creative.

Many of the business schools provide the foundations for this exclusive club. It’s not about education, it’s more about meeting future members, for a hefty fee. Mastering administration made sense in the process-driven industrial era. Making administration a priority in the post-industrial / digital age is a sure-fire way to drive an organisation into the ground. Process is important, but it is not enough. We need masters of innovation, not administration.

I am of course generalising as there are many purpose-led leaders in the public and private sector. But even so, their tendency is to squander human capital. Their blind adherence to Taylorism ensures that people are merely an adjunct to the machine.

The truth

Disruption is making the world unknowable. An unknowable world requires an innovative response. Algos and robots are not sufficiently mature to be creative. Hence (free-range) humans are critical to engaging with an unknowable world.

Harnessing human cognition requires a more decentralised leadership model. It requires a culture of trust and risk taking. This is anathema to the industrial model. Imagine an industrial leadership approach to playing football. You would see both captains trying to keep up with the ball in order to issue instructions to their players closest to the ball. Fortunately that is not how football is played in practice; whoever is closest to the ball is the captain at that moment. We might call this approach ubiquitous leadership.

The infinite game

Ironically perhaps, my football analogy describes a very rules-based environment. Everyone knows what they can and can’t do and how success is measured. The reality is that we are moving into a world that is less like a football match and more like a jungle. In the jungle there is only one rule – stay alive. This is the infinite game. It doesn’t require planet-destroying growth. The trick is to establish what is the optimum size for the organisation, ie at what point does the associated increase in demand for energy deliver little by way of increasing survivability.

What should we do?

We need to think of our organisations less as inert soulless factories and more as living organisms. Sensing, deciding and acting are key to survival. This is the very definition of a smart organisation.

In my view, smart technology service providers will focus less on business process engineering and more on building living organisations, where the integration of people and technology, or natural and artificial cognition is key.

 

 


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Ade McCormack was the opening keynote speaker at your recent Future of Work event. He is the founder of the Intelligent Leadership Hub - https://www.intelligentleadershiphub.org/

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