Leaders in chaos create more chaos

Beware the 'chaos conveyer' leader. "They’re all over the place," was a description I heard from a team recently. Whether they’re hyped up on too much coffee (or energy drinks), lacking sleep or overwhelmed with too much of everything, the chaotic leader rarely makes sense.

They're described as ‘intense’; they interrupt, are impatient, shut things down and can have a distorted view of time, deadlines and scope. Then.... zzzzing! They're out of one meeting and dashing to the next, out of control.

The danger is, their chaos creates more chaos.

Their mood, energy and character creates uncertainty and chaos. No wonder people disappear and disengage; it’s all too much!

It doesn't make sense because they don't:

🙀think

🙀prepare or

🙀manage their state ... before lurching into a leadership situation.

They're often 'winging it', and not in a good, creative way.

Volatile times require leaders who can bring sense to situations, no matter what’s going on.

The 3 things we miss out on when we don't 'make sense'

I’ve been writing about the power of sensemaking; the Institute for the Future identified it as a top skill for these times.

Information overload, busy schedules, more meetings than we’d like - and we get swamped with information we need to make sense of.

Sometimes this is information outside of our domain of expertise so there's learning we need to do too ... as well as the sensemaking.

Individually we read things, listen and make sense, alone.

But there’s also the practice of being able to make sense of information together, as a team or group; this is collective sensemaking.

Unfortunately we tend to default to dated ways of working. You know, meetings that follow old style formats of 18th Century Parliamentary procedures with agendas, minutes, attendance, apologies, general business, meeting closed, next meeting ... blah blah yawn!

The problem with this linear, archaic way of working is that

1️⃣ Ideas get overlooked

2️⃣ Decisions don't get made

3️⃣ Problems remain unsolved.

A status quo remains. Then we try again at the next meeting.

*groan

You CAN make a cultural shift using Collective Sensemaking.

7 reasons why Collective Sensemaking is needed in workplaces today

1. The need and drive for collaboration; we are better together, but how do we 'do' collaboration?

2. The work to be done. What is it exactly? Help the team make sense of it and then get out of their way.

3. Those collaborative spaces in many workplaces. How do we make the most of the people and the space?

4. The increasing need to engage, consult and genuinely co-create with customers, stakeholders and communities.

5. Engaging the growing diversity in our communities.

6. How we can be ‘thrown together’ to work with others on a project and we need to start performing together well... immediately.

7. To validate our initial ideas and decisions, prior to giving more time, money and resources to them.

When our meetings don't work, people are uncertain and change is ongoing, we need to help people make sense of what's going on... and quick.

What do you think? Where and when do we need to make more or better sense of what's going on... together? Love to hear your comments below.

The waste of misdirected effort

Imagine working on a task or project and later finding that much of what you’ve done isn’t needed, that you'd kept heading down a path that wasn't necessary.

I noticed a colleague working on a project recently, spending hours and days preparing and producing some work and ... it’s not needed. It was never needed. They estimated they'd spent a week of time, at a minimum - all of it not needed.

Time could have been better directed towards more valuable activities.

We make many decisions every day about what we’re doing; I doubt we’re truly thinking about what’s the best use of our time. We get caught up in activities and tasks that we spend way too much time on - disproportionate to their value or their return to us or others.

The 'sunk cost fallacy' drags us in and we don’t want to turn around and head back out because we wrongly believe we need to stay the course and keep on down this path. But we don’t have to.

It’s never too late to call time on something that’s not right or not valuable or not worth it. No matter how far you’re along the 'wrong' path.

Be willing to call ‘stop’ or ‘time’ or say ‘hang on a moment; can we pause here?’ and then shift to the more valuable path.

Determine the minimum effective dose

What’s the least you could do, the least that’s required?

Some people think the world is going to ruin, that quality will drop if we don’t do our bestest of the very best of the best on every single thing we work on.

Oh sure, high quality and attention to detail matters, but not on everything! Keep quality for the things that really matter.

The whole minimum viable product (MVP) strategy is an example of doing just enough of the valuable stuff for a product or service to get it ready to put it out there.

So what’s the least you need to put in? Do that and then test or validate it.

Oh, and there’s the minimum effective dose strategy too. Medicos and pharmaceuticos know about identifying what’s the minimum amount of a drug or treatment that will ‘do the job’. (There’s the ‘do no harm’ mantra in there too.)

Let's play the same game. Stop doing harm to your self, your mind (and others) thinking you need a maximum dose of something (or everything) ... or that more will make it better.

Your good enough is likely good enough. Go test and validate it sooner than you think you can, to see how good enough it really is. That’s a minimum effective strategy that will bring some mega results.