A Cup of Leadership CaffeineFar too many leaders that I encounter lack awareness of the broader forces swirling around their firms, their customers and those shape-shifting clusters that we describe as industries.

Given the hurricane like market and societal forces buffeting our globe today, a strategy of boarding up the windows and hunkering down is tantamount to committing corporate suicide. Yet, mostly by the sin of omission, this is exactly what I’m observing inside too many organizations.

I cannot rationalize why some firms lack the systems and cultural elements that encourage environmental scanning, assessment and action formulation, but I can empathize just a bit.

The world is a complex place and increasingly, planning and managing businesses for value creation has become a “Wicked Problem” where the volume of contradictory and conflicting information is overwhelming.  Ignoring this complexity and focusing on controllable issues and digestible problems is an understandable human response.  In many cases, taking an Occam’s Razor approach is much better than falling victim to the malady of complexity induced organizational paralysis.  However, in cases where a firm marches along oblivious and/or unresponsive to the swirling forces constantly reshaping the world it is a wholesale failure of leadership.

There are no miracle cures or silver bullets for making sense out of the chaos, other than the hard work of paying attention, assessing and either reacting or pro-acting as the occasion merits.

Building a learning culture is essential to survival, not just success. For real-time examples of firms that don’t and did not get it, pick up any newspaper.  And while the smaller firms in our economy don’t grab the headlines, the failures and the failing are epidemic here as well.  At least part of this epidemic stems from a failure of top leaders to comprehend the destructive power of the broader market forces until right after these force have flattened their firms.

How the Lowly Carp Fits Into this Story:

The physicist and author, Dr. Michio Kaku uses the following personal anecdote to challenge people to think beyond the confines of their current four dimensions into the possibilities of a much more complex and much larger universe:

“When I was a child, I used to visit the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. I would spend hours fascinated by the carp, who lived in a very shallow pond just inches beneath the lily pads, just beneath my fingers, totally oblivious to the universe above them.

I would ask myself a question only a child could ask: what would it be like to be a carp? What a strange world it would be! I imagined that the pond would be an entire universe, one that is two-dimensional in space. The carp would only be able to swim forwards and backwards, and left and right. But I imagined that the concept of “up”, beyond the lily pads, would be totally alien to them. Any carp scientist daring to talk about “hyperspace”, i.e. the third dimension “above” the pond, would immediately be labeled a crank.

Today, many physicists believe that we are the carp swimming in our tiny pond, blissfully unaware of invisible, unseen universes hovering just above us in hyperspace. We spend our life in three spatial dimensions, confident that what we can see with our telescopes is all there is, ignorant of the possibility of 10 dimensional hyperspace.”

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While fascinated by the opportunities and possibilities of 10-dimensional hyperspace, the comparison in this post is to those that operate in the confines of their firms and traditional industry boundaries, without sticking their heads out of the pond to observe the broader world and the impact that it is having on their personal pond.

9 Suggestions for Not Becoming A Carp (Or Improving Your Team’s External Awareness and Chances of Survival):

  • Establish the audacious goal of creating a cultural evolution to increase your team’s/firm’s external awareness AND ability to act.  Many of the following support this goal.
  • Let people know that it is their job to monitor…customers, competitors and partners.  Reinforce this by creating systems to do something with the lessons learned and insights.
  • Create forums to discuss the external world and ensure that these forums don’t succumb to the powerful gravitational pull of internal stuff.
  • Challenge business units and leaders to define “learning” strategies. Challenge IT to create systems that enable collection, translation and dissemination.
  • Ask and require answers to the question: “What does this mean for us? Our customers? Our future?
  • Connect external factors and internal hypotheses to improvement and innovation actions and then measure and report the results of these efforts.
  • Run strategy reviews with an emphasis on connecting what’s happening externally to how resources are being used/invested internally.  If there is no connection, blow up the project.
  • Recognize the need to use the tools of management…especially structure as a means to create value out of changing forces.  While your current processes and culture might not support responding to change by building the product that will cannibalize your business, a dedicated project team, a spin-out or an acquired firm might enjoy a higher probability of success.
  • Seek out varied perspectives. Constantly. Remember, asking another carp in the pond about the world outside the pond will only get you another perspective from the pond.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This topic invariably invites debate and a fair amount of criticism, especially from top leaders that feel that my observations are an indictment of their efforts.  And while I am most definitely offering criticism, my primary purpose is to encourage you as a leader to live up to your billing as a sentient being.  While a carp may perceive the outcome of an environmental change, you alone plus your team members are capable of assessing and taking action to survive and ideally prosper.

Vow not to become a carp this year or any year.