The person with the most spontaneity wins

As leadership evolves from command and control to consultative/coaching and beyond to facilitative, those who can handle what happens are well placed.

We can’t predict what people will say, what will happen at a meeting, how a client will respond or what the board might ask for, so we may need to respond in the moment.

Spontaneity is a strength that's incredibly powerful in times of uncertainty. We can spend so much time though, rehearsing scenarios trying to cover all of the possibilities, to try to prepare for the future.

Do we fear we wont be able to handle things, that we will lose control?

Maybe we don’t trust ourselves to handle what happens.

But improvisers have known it for decades: we have incredible resources in us and we need to trust that we can handle so many situations. Could you be more spontaneous, you know, go with the flow? Responding to what happens rather than trying to control what happens?

🔆To build spontaneity, notice your response when things DON'T go as you hoped, expected or planned. What you do next is spontaneity. And it's a SUPER SKILL for the uncertain future. 

Be CURIOUS

Being a risk taker and explorer in times of uncertainty can feel like it’s a great risk, but it can also reap huge rewards. It means stepping into uncertainty, unknown and unsure.

But go, step into it. Be intrepid. To be otherwise is to be timid, weak, pusillanimous – yep, that’s a big word that will stop you being able to work with uncertainty.

When we are fearful of uncertainty, we get smaller ideas, take smaller risks and try to stay in 'safe and same'.

Businesses that support risk taking can achieve some mighty innovative things. So to work in uncertainty, we simply need to be curious.

And if we are scared, curiosity becomes the opposite of fear. Be CURIOUS. Wonder. Enquire.

Be intrigued and interested and you'll be just fine working in uncertainty. 

Collaboration, co-creation and working with others

Co-locating, buddying and pairing people can make awesome stuff happen - learning, problem solving, knowledge sharing.

Better than if we have to face uncertainty alone.

Why do we sit in stables, stalls, pods and cells all on our lonesome? Share a desk and go co! There's a reason why software developers sit next to each other and do 'pair programming'. It's efficient, engaging and enlightening!

In the modern workplace, alone time is good, but collaboration is a benefit. It's a 'co-brainer'.

We need to be working with others at some time. I like the Agile Manifesto's: 'Choose interactions with individuals and groups of individuals, over working on processes and tools.' It's easy to bury down deep in the work of designing systems, tools and processes. But could we be more human, more collaborative... not clichéd collaboration, but engaging, productive and enjoyable collaboration?

Working with other humans enables us to find solutions we may never have found alone.

Q: What's a collaboration or co-creation you've worked on that ROCKED?

Try something else - EXPERIMENTS

Experimenting helps us refine, edit and alter our offers, services, designs and ideas. It's rare for a product or service we use to not be shaped by experiments. It's about seeing what works as well as what goes wrong.

Working with a global manufacturer over a number of years, I would often walk past a room labeled ‘Test Kitchen’. It was where clients, customers and users of their products were brought in and let loose!

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is big on experimenting. He said, ‘If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you're going to double your inventiveness.’

So get your ideas out there so people can have a taste of some of it sooner, rather than waiting and giving them the whole finished thing later ... which they may not like the taste of. Imagine all that time working on something that wasn't to their taste. Put something out there, reflect on it, adjust it, put out another version of it, testing that… and onward.

Q: Are you much of an experimenter? Let me know in the comments below.

Like Surprises

I'm posting this week on Working in Uncertainty. Once you’ve started before you’re ready and in motion, exciting things will happen. There will be unexpected, unknown and uncertain. Yes more uncertain.

You may think starting wasn’t a good idea, but you're in motion and have momentum - that's going to make you more able to respond than being at a standstill.

Welcome spontaneity into your world instead of being all control-freak on things. Spontaneity is a natural tendency or impulse of being unconstrained and unplanned. Our daily actions can't follow a script. A guide or to-do list or a structure, yes, but we can't know totally what someone else is going to say, how they'll react and what will happen when all these differences collide.

We need the capability to improvise and the first thing is to welcome surprises, unexpected things. Stay open and wondering. You'll be easier to work with, more open about what to do next, and able to find other possibilities and solutions.

Q : So, are you a bit of a control freak or willing to welcome surprises? Let me know below.