Powerful Practices for Leaders
Here’s a tough scenario: Yolanda just became the head of a government agency responsible for placing children in foster care. It would be a great gig, but the agency is a mess. In her first year on the job, multiple children are hurt or go missing.
She does everything she can to solve the problem. She commissions reports, internal investigations, and fact-finding missions. In the end, all this research turns up tons of information but no answers. There are just too many variables to consider and no patterns to be found.
The key message here is: Our complex world requires new approaches to leadership.
The world is a very different place than it used to be. There are more people, more ways to communicate, and everything from supply lines to personal networks can now span the entire globe. All this intricate interconnection gives rise to a set of conditions we can abbreviate to VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
VUCA poses a particular challenge to leaders, a category that includes everyone from the heads of big businesses to parents and teachers. Leaders have traditionally made decisions about the future by examining the past. However, in our VUCA world, the past is no longer a great predictor of what is to come.
Think about it. 500 years ago, there were only a handful of careers to choose from. Today, choosing the right course of study means anticipating a career that might not even exist yet.
Under these conditions, an effective leader needs to cultivate three crucial mental habits.
First, they need to practice asking different questions. You should always ask questions that broaden your thinking rather than narrow it. For instance, if something goes wrong, don’t just ask “what happened?” also ask “what else could have happened?”
Second, leaders need to take multiple perspectives. Don’t simply rely on your own point of view. Make an effort to understand how others see a situation. Even if you disagree, the difference in thinking or reasoning could provide valuable insight.
Third and finally, leaders need to see systems. This means taking a step back and looking for unexpected connections. It’s easy to look at the world as a series of single causes and effects, but it’s more accurate to see the world as a web, where each action has multiple causes and multiple effects.
Let's look at how this all plays out in action.
Simple Habits for Complex Times (2015) is a guide for leaders looking to navigate today’s ever-shifting and always uncertain world. Rather than presenting one-size-fits-all solutions only suitable for static problems, this management manual teaches the art of nimble thinking.
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Blink 3 von 12 - Eine kurze Geschichte der Menschheit
von Yuval Noah Harari
