How to deal with all that complexity and uncertainty

With the world all VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) things can get pretty scary for our teams, clients, competitors, customers… and ourselves.
 
Perception is...
I heard a comedian say ‘perception is nine tenths of the law’; a take on the adage that possession was nine tenths of the law.

But that's how we make our representation of the world... our perceptions. We need a map, a visual sense or a way of connecting some dots to understand what's happening. It gives us something to hold on to and helps reduce fear about unknowns.
 
So where the **** are we?
Author and Director of MIT’s Leadership Centre, Deborah Ancona shares the story of some soldiers lost in the Swiss Alps. Not knowing where they were, things got even more uncertain when it began snowing. Visibility dropped, landmarks were unknown. But later, one of the soldiers found a map in their pocket. Hooray! They worked their way through the map and found themselves out of the snow and clear to safety.
 
It turns out the map was of the Pyrenees, not the Alps! It shows that, as sensemaking elder Karl Weick says, 'any old map will do'. The soldiers had purpose, focus and they were heading somewhere. The map was just a start.
 
Ask these:
So two questions to ask to deal with uncertainty and complexity are:

• What’s going on here?
• Now what should I do?

 These questions help us make meaning about things. You’re more able to pick up on cues and clusters of information when you’re looking to connect some dots Wondering what's going on and what you should do will help.

Map it out
The best way to look at what the story is and what’s going on is to map it out. Do this for yourself on a piece of paper, on a tablet or a whiteboard and most of all... for the people you're working with.
 
This is 'making sense' and it often starts with chaos. Phew! That’s a relief, because we need sense making most when things are a tad crazy. Like VUCA crazy.
 
Sense comes after action
Don’t just sit and wonder or be all talk. Making sense is about action. Think, map and act and then think and map some more.
 
In sense making we are constantly iterating, changing, building, developing, growing and shifting our understanding. Things can’t help but be shaped and shifted when we talk about them.
 
In a VUCA world, things will never be totally ‘right’ or ‘all right’. There will always be more change. Get used to that and keep making sense by mapping it out.

The Rise of Authentic

It's refreshing to see books, journals and blog posts speak about how authenticity in leadership and communications matter. How vulnerability is the new black. That when a leader exposes their human underbelly, their teams will connect, be inspired and do the good work. 

But what's authentic? Gabrielle Dolan's new book Ignite takes a great hit at it. She says it's about being real. Real talk, real leadership, real results. She's spot on. 

Real. It's needed because too many leaders continue to :

• Deliver dull PowerPoint packs full of bullet points following a template
• Use 'insert chart' or 'draw table' commands to put boxes and shapes in presentation documents
• Spend days and days and hours and hours of theirs and other people's time trying to get a presentation pack looking just right before they send out the 34 pages of detailed, boxy, dot pointed drivel.

It's so fake it's unreal. 

The team isn't engaged and they're not really, truly listening. They're busy listening to and thinking other more interesting and inspiring things. Things that involve them, make sense to them and give them an insight to something else, something bigger. That hefty wad of information is not only lacking authenticity, it's dull, boring, uninspiring. They tune out. Yawn!

So how do you be authentic? Now, today and tomorrow?

Here's how:

• Show your people what you're thinking. Your thoughts. It might not all be finalized right now but show them a low fidelity outline, a rough sketch of 'here's how this could look.' 
• Be honest with them: 'This may not be the finished thing, but here's what I'd love us to think about creating'. 
• Get their input. What do they reckon. How do they see it? What could they do with it? How could they shape it, share it and drive it?
• Share your thinking, that's what's authentic and human.That's a start. It may not be the end point but it's the 'now' point. 

This is the vulnerable leader. They're saying via their behavior : I do not know all. I am relinquishing command and control, I am collaborative leader, leading a team of humans who all have skills, knowledge and expertise...so tell me what you think.

Your team, organisation and industry need to know who you are and what you think...now. That's authentic. 

Put it out there even if it's not finished, final and fully done. 

What happens next ...now that will be authentic! 

When seat kicking is a good thing

Lengthy meetings, short on outcomes can be frustrating time wasters.

You'd think we'd have the hang of how to make our interactions in groups work better for us...it's nearly 50 years since Bruce Tuckman's team performance model suggested we needed to form, norm and storm before we'd perform.

Oh yawn! Who has the time!?

No wonder we look for a digital drug fix on one of our devices in dull meetings and workshops. Zzzzzzzz!

Low levels of engagement and poor participation isn't 'their' problem... It's up to us to fix it, every time we are in a meeting that isn't working. In 2012, web conferencing company SalesCrunch, created a “Don’t Suck at Meetings” guide
based on more than 10,000 meetings hosted in their online meeting platform. The guide revealed
that people’s attention and participation starts to decline after the 30 minute mark and they begin to give 1/4 of their attention to something else. It also showed that 92% of the attendees
participate in the discussion if they are actively engaged.

Andrew Knight, a business school professor at Washington University in St. Louis, headed a study on the impact of standing meetings in 2014. He wired participants with small sensors to measure their physiological arousal - defined as how their bodies react when they get excited. Participants were asked to work together in teams for half an hour to come up with a new university recruitment video. Half of them collaborated in a standard meeting room, complete with chairs and tables while the other half worked together in a space with no seats.

Yes, it was seatless!

Knight and his team evaluated the results for their collaboration and creativity.  The results were dramatic. Knight found “teams who stood had greater physiological arousal and
were less territorial about ideas than those in the seated arrangement. Members of the standing groups reported that their team members were less protective of their ideas. This reduced territoriality, led to more information sharing and to higher-quality videos.”

It’s time to stand up.

Your meetings will be 34% shorter if you're on your feet. This kind of meeting is also widely used in Scrum methodologies and practices in agile technology teams. They're high on collaboration and killer at delivery!

We spend a lot of our day sitting so 30 minutes or less of standing won't hurt. And people who sit less have a lower risk of cardiovascular diseases.

So kick that seat.

Propel your meetings forward with productive, collaborative and creative action. A meeting with the team that's like that deserves a standing ovation.

Think. Build. Ship. Tweak.

Forget the days of heading to the CD shop to buy a CD – just stream what you want to listen to via an online service like Spotify.

So how does a business like Spotify get their sh*t together and take on a market, and an industry and revel in the opportunity to disrupt?
 
Henrik Kniberg shined a light on some of the leadership and management insights of Spotify at a conference recently - he's been working as a lean and agile coach.  

Go anti-silo and have squads and tribes
Henrik reckons a minimum viable bureaurcracy is the way to go…to group people into tribes; to have squads of people who collaborate with each other to find the best solution. These groups cut across the organisation. It’s somewhat of an anti silo strategy.

Healthy culture heals broken processes
Don’t try and scale your product or service – rather, descale the organisation. A healthy culture is what will heal broken processes. We’ve all felt the pain of a broken process when we’ve interacted with a business or organisation and things just didn't go well :-(
 
It seems that control is dying but not yet buried. In fact it’s trust that flourishes; it’s more powerful than control. Having autonomy across the organisation means you can move fast. Be agile.

What agility looks like
In Henrik's words, agility looks like this:

• Think it
• Build it
• Ship it
• Tweak it

Don’t you love it?
 
And it's alignment that enables the autonomy. Without people being aligned to the vision, plan and purpose, you’ll create fear, silos, yawn culture, and a host of flow on problems.

Fail fast ... and recover from it
You’ve got to let people make mistakes. To fail fast. But then recover from the failure.

I think too many leaders think they're encouraging failure yet secretly fear failure because it takes so damn long to recover from it – “hmmm, best to not go there at all,” they think.
 
Rather, go there. Fail it fast. But Henrik says limit your ‘blast radiance’ – limit the effect of the fail and how far it impacts around the organisation.

Are we learning anything people?

Leverage the learning from the fail. And further, you’ve got to then share the learning from the fail. Trust and support people.

Contemporary leaders of today have to let go and let their teams make sense of what needs to be done and how to do it. Community is what matters.
 
Move fast, fail fast, limit the blast.
Think. Build. Ship. Tweak.

Do you know what the future of work will look like?

Can you imagine the effects of teaching computers to understand? It's happening now... not just thinking computers but understanding computers. 
 

What will that mean for the future of our work?

At the REMIX Summit in Sydney recently, the focus was on the future and the intersection of technology, culture and entrepreneurship. There will be more freelancing - so how do you hold a culture together in that type of environment?

We'll need to be stronger leaders. 

Fast, small technology is proving to be both an enabler and a disruptor. Look at that 'smart' phone you've got there and what its capable of. 

 

Despite us not being able to exactly predict human behaviour, we've got to remember that work is about us... it's about people... humans.

A great deal of our work is knowledge work and knowledge knows no borders. In the future, you'll see your career as a lattice... not a ladder. Careers, opportunities, jobs, roles and pathways will criss cross and complement; they won't be straight up and down.

Workplaces will need to be more attractive experiences that bring people together, evolving into vibrant 24/7 precincts that aren't just about work. 

Pass me my bathrobe please!

 

One of the Remix Summit speakers suggested the 'hotel experience' would come to workplaces, where we feel welcome at work, where we are less of an employee and more of a guest. 

 

What does the future of work mean for leaders leading in these environments that are uncertain, changing and complex? 

Leaders will need to be sense makers... everyday.

At the heart of it, leaders will need to make quicker and clearer sense of things, for themselves, the people they lead and for others they interact with. They'll need to engage across even more diverse interests and cultures and they'll need to be aligning and realigning their teams to the strategic shifts that become constant and frequent. 

For some more detailed reading pleasure, CEDA the Committee for Economic Development here in Australia released their Australia's Future Workforce Report today and you can get hold of it here. 

How will you keep adapting for the future of work? How will you keep the team connected, the culture thriving, the workplace adapting and the competition afraid of your bold responses?

In a quote from the Remix Summit:

The work of the future will be at the edges of what we know.

Keep looking, learning and pushing the edges of your work. You're gonna need it for the future.