Given all the strategic meetings I have been involved with during the last six months before COVID-19 hit us like a tsunami, I want to share two more insights I have gleaned from the experience. First, I have come to the same conclusion as John Paul Lederach in his book, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005) that “The past lies before us.” Since we can not see or know to any degree of certainty the future what we know the most about is the past. In essence, as Lederach explains “we walk backwards into the future.”
From my vantage point, as a leader or an executive team initiates change, we begin walking on a sigmoid curve, a normal pattern of organizational change. This curve is driven by four things:
- Remembered history, i.e. the stories we learned from others, and the selective way we remember history.
- Lived history, i.e. the experiences we personally lived through.
- Shared history, i.e. the experiences we personally lived through with others.
- Current and/or recent events, i.e. the experiences that are happening now.
All four of the above can create the narrative we tell ourselves and others about what is happening now and the why is it happening in a particular manner.
In particular, I think the challenge is that most leaders want to answer the WHY question and talk about mission and/or purpose. However, many are not very good at it. Sometimes, their answers are simplistic at best. This happens because they do not understand the history of the organization. To be very specific, they have not created the space to develop a shared history, a shared sense of clarity and a shared understanding. As a result, the narrative is incomplete or not helpful to those who are trying to make change happen.
As John Paul Lederach points out, “We have the capacity to remember the past, but we have no capacity to fully predict much less control it. Not even God can change the past…. We have the capacity to imagine a different future, but we have no capacity to fully predict much less control it. Try as we might nobody controls the future…. The web of life is juxtaposed between these realities of time, between memory and potentiality. This is the place of narrative, the art of re-storying.”
This reminds me of something Jim Mattis wrote in his book, Call Sign Chaos: Learning To Lead (Random House, 2019): “I was out to win their coequal “ownership” of the mission…”. For me this happens, when we develop a shared understanding and collective set of experiences which strengthen who we are, what we believe in and how we work together.
My second recent insight related to strategic planning is that relationship building is a big part of strategic planning. While most people focus on goal setting and document creation, I think we undervalue the relationship building part of the process. The keys to planning in widely unpredictable times, notes Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky in their book Leadership On The Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), is to “commit to the importance of relationship building and community building.” When we find new partners and maintain old partnerships, we understand that these “partners provide protection, and create alliances with factions other than your own”.
Furthermore, I believe we need to respect complexity, rediscover emergence, and understand that there are times when a bridge plan is the best plan to purse. At the same time, we need to provide safe space for the creative thinking and action to occur, have the willingness to talk about risks and risk management, and be willing to accept pain (physical, spiritual, financial, mental) so others with less can do better.
Nevertheless, the challenge right now for so many leaders is organizational “amnesia”. We have forgotten our history. We have forgotten our roots. We have forgotten our story up until this moment and we have forgotten our past strategic choices. All of this results in weak, non authentic relationships and ultimately weak communities. This “land of forgetfulness” creates relationships which do not have the capacity to trust, deal with risks, or generate creative responses to extraordinary and complex challenges, notes John Paul Lederach.
Given the above in mind, adaptive leadership and adaptive planning involves four key activities say Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky. They are as follows:
- observing events and patterns around you which involves collecting data and translating it into useful information.
- interpreting what you are observing with the assistance of others so your interpretation is not a guess.
- designing interventions based on observations and interpretations to address the adaptive challenges you have identified.
- implementing what you have designed.
Just remember that in the realm of adaptive leadership, such as what we are experiencing right now with COVID-19, you have to believe that your intervention is absolutely the right things to do at the moment you commit to it. But at the same time, you need to remain open to the possibility that you are dead wrong.
In short, we need to engage above and below the neck, i.e. head and heart, and remember that people prefer status quo to doing things differently. We also need to remember that the lone warrior myth of leadership is a sure route to heroic suicide. We need partners.
For those of you who like to read, I suggest you explore the following two books on this subject:
- Heifetz, Ronald, A., and Marty Linsky. Leadership On The Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading, Harvard Business School Press, 2002.
- Heifetz, Ronald, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, Harvard Business Press, 2009.
Both of them are full of good food for thought and reflection.
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