For senior leaders of global businesses, nation states and intergovernmental bodies, the 21st century is a harrowing obstacle course with some potentially deadly lessons. To lead their organizations successfully through the complex landscape, they need to take up a part-time role as the CEO of Planet Inc.
On the MIX, the moonshot “Redefining the Work of Leadership” is framed in terms of the need for leaders to become savvy social architects, “capable of building commitment and alignment without resorting to the traditional tools of bureaucratic control.” There is no doubt that this is an aspiration worth the prime grade attention from the MIX community (and, indeed, we ourselves have spent the lion share of our professional careers trying to help our clients land on that moon.)
Yet, when we step back and look at the notion of redefining the work of leadership in the broader context of the 21st century, when we look at what it now takes to lead a successful global business or nation, the challenge of becoming a savvy social architect starts to look like the easy part.
In 2010 IBM released a study, “Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study.” This study was based on face-to-face conversations with 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders who represent organizations in 60 countries and 33 different industries. In it, senior leaders describe the realities they face on the ground. We are now leading, they say, in a “drastically different world:”
“In a very short time, we’ve become aware of global climate change; of the geopolitical issues surrounding energy and water supplies; of the vulnerabilities of the supply chains for food, medicine and even talent, and of sobering threats to global security. The common denominator? The realities—and challenges—of global integration. We occupy a world that is connected on multiple dimensions, and at a deep level—a global system of systems…. Increasingly interconnected economies, enterprises, societies, and governments have given rise to vast new opportunities. Increased connectivity has also created strong—and too often unknown interdependencies. For this reason, the ultimate consequence of any decision has often been poorly understood. “
What should be the work of a leader in such a world? We think the central pre-occupation of a leader’s work in the 21st century should be to continuously make sense of the world, to understand the context in which his business or nation operates. Einstein is quoted as having said that if he only had one hour to solve a problem, and his life depended on the answer, he would spend 55 minutes defining the problem, and 5 minutes finding the solution. We think it’s a useful frame of mind to carry over into the leader’s work in the 21st century. It helps us quantify what we mean by “central pre-occupation” – spend 55 minutes of the leadership hour on making sense of the world.
The right frame of mind is a good start. Now what should the leader do with those 55 minutes? Where would he start in the ocean of data? How would he get started on grasping something as complex as our world in the 21st century?
The key to navigating in the ocean of data is choosing your perspective carefully and asking the right questions. Adopting the perspective that naturally arises from the leader’s role – be it the President of Brazil or the CEO of Cisco – is the wrong move. It will automatically bias how the leader discriminates between different data sets, what he picks out as relevant and what he dismisses as of little consequence for his organization. A much broader perspective is needed to make sense of the world in the 21st century.
We suggest trying out the role of the CEO of Planet Inc., an imaginary organization charged with securing survival and development of the human race. This is a much broader perspective that allows leaders to make sense of our world in terms of All of Us, not just a particular industry, a particular nation or a particular generation of humans (See both attached ppt materials for a longer set of instruction for making a shift to the perspective of Planet Inc CEO).
Now, what should be the questions the CEO of Planet Inc. should ask from that perspective? It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that once the leader has identified with this broad perspective, the questions he would ask are not altogether different from the questions a leader would ask when stepping into any new CEO role:
- What is the current state of affairs?
- What should be our vision for the future?
- What are the key challenges?
- What should be our strategy going forward?
- What do we need to execute on this strategy?
- What role should different people and organizations play in getting there?
The questions are familiar but the unit of organization the leader would be asking these questions about is radically new – it’s the world, it’s All of Us. Pursuing this line of inquiry should produce some idea of what our over-arching Human Project should be about, what the Evolutionary Strategy for the human race should be. With world data organized and interpreted in this way, the leader would have the proper context for leading his or her own organization. This line of inquiry also tends to bring about an important change in the leader’s mental frame – instead of thinking of one’s organization first and the world second, he/she starts thinking in terms of the Human Project first and the his/her organization’s contribution to the Human Project second.
Both the Evolutionary Strategy for the human race as well as the role of the leader’s organization need to be revised, rethought, re-imagined as the world moves on a daily basis – we would take the 55 minute suggestion seriously. The good news is, once version 1.0 is in place, the leader will have a straw-man, a structure to organize and make sense of the incoming data about the world, instead of being overwhelmed by complexity.
We like to think of it as an ongoing Planet Inc CEO “thought experiment,” or as leaders taking a part-time job as a Planet Inc. CEO.
The leader gets a grip on the complexity of the 21st century.
In the IBM Report, more than half of the 1,541 global CEOs, general managers, and senior public leaders stated that they “seriously doubt their ability to manage the complexity.” That is a self-admission on the part of our senior leaders that in many ways they are struggling to make sense of the world. It is not surprising because it is very hard to cut through complexity without re-organizing one’s thinking at a higher level. It is almost impossible when the leader’s habitual frame of analysis does not transcend the boundaries of an industry or nation, does not extend beyond 5 years into the future and is almost entirely dominated by an economic analysis. That frame is simply not big enough, long enough, nor multi-disciplinary enough to negotiate the 21st century landscape. Stepping into the shoes of the CEO of Planet Inc. is simply a license to think long-term and on a planetary scale. It forces the leader out of his/her comfort zone and confronts him with the challenge to understand, organize and prioritize the issues we face as a human race in the 21st century. It produces a narrative about the world that the leader can update as the world moves on.
The leader creates context for truly visionary change.
Crises – often brought about by accumulation of unforeseen or unintended consequences and contextual blindness – need not be the dominant mode for bringing about systemic changes. We believe that with 55 minutes spent wisely, anticipatory visionary change is a distinct possibility. The Planet Inc CEO thought experiment builds an ability to step outside the frenzy of making quarterly numbers and hitting poll numbers, so the leader can discern what is truly important—so he/she can track the predictable trends, assess the risks, stare the possibility of failure straight in the eye, and claim, “this is the future that I want for the world, and this is how we will make it happen.” Because let’s face it, 20 years from now it won’t matter whether you beat analysts’ expectations by 7%. What will matter is whether you came up with a zero-emissions car or a cure for cancer. What will matter is to what extent the leader’s organization advanced the Human Project.
The leader creates a proper relationship between his/her organization and the world.
Lenny Mendonca said it well, “Admittedly it's still more the norm that institutions and the people that animate them become caught up in internal matters and day-to-day concerns, losing sight of the wider world outside.” Having been on the inside of many global businesses and several governments, we have often taken note of the curious “the world revolves around our organization” mindset. We sometimes joke that it is the modern day organizational equivalent of the geocentric model of the universe, thinking that Earth (my organization) is at the center of the universe and other objects (world) orbit around it. The Planet Inc CEO thought experiment helps the leader re-situate/contextualize his or her organization in the world and relate it to the overarching Human Project.
It’s really simple. You can simply put a few hours to pursue answers to the questions we described in this hack from the perspective of Planet Inc CEO. If you want more detailed instructions, download the materials below.
If the thought experiment gets to you and you want to contribute to the overall thinking behind Planet Inc and to turning it into reality, contact us on Facebook!
There are many thinkers whose work has indirectly inspired us. Their thoughts and ideas ignited our own creative engines, even if we disagreed with some of their fundamental assumptions. However, the idea of the thought experiment (Planet Inc. CEO), its purpose and content is entirely the "brainchild" of the Source Integral team.
We received unexpected help from a few MIXERs: Eric Schillinger sent us the oft-quoted IBM report which helped us reframe our hack (that was a goldmine, Eric), and Lenny Mendonca's blog "The Most Important Question in Business Today" also inspired us to reframe our hack and think as big as the problems we are facing.
Other thinkers we have been following that have indirectly inspired us: Stewart Brand & Brian Eno (particularly their work at the Long Now Foundation), John Chambers, Bill Clinton, Peter Drucker, Albert Einstein, Thomas Friedman, Buckminster Fuller, Galileo Galelei, Bill Gates, Sumantra Ghoshal & Chris Bartlett, Al Gore, Gary Hamel, Robert Kegan, Ray Kurzweil, Socrates, Nicholas Stern, Adlai Stevenson, Marten Rees, Ken Wilber, Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Hello Annie,
I read through this hack and wandered away to ponder it. Then I came back and read the comments. You seem to be of the view that mind creates the man, man creates the System, therefore mind is dominant over the System. You have tried telling that to some government agency? You really believe the CEO can will the Systems too change in a trice? Even KGB trained Russian Presidents in the powerful days of the Iron Curtain lost to the System. That brings us to an interesting question: In these days of change, globalization, specialization, and technology would you give priority to training the mind of one man or to creation of a System that synthesizes the wisdom of a century? Perhaps that does not catch the seriousness of the question. I will have to put it bluntly: Does the 21st century demand a training of the leader's mind or his ability to unite Knowledge workers and deal with them? What shall be the defining ability?
Regards,
Dhiraj
Hello Anne,
A very lucid exposition of a powerful means to change the mind-set of leaders and develop in them the ability to listen and stretch their comfort zones. However, the conventional wisdom is that changing the DNA of an organization demands transformation of the System since attitudes are a produce of the System. Does the Planet approach rewrite this wisdom?
Regards,
Raj Kumar
Eric, Brenda passed on a couple of quotes from the IBM report. It looks like a gold mine. It is a helpful reference for us, so thank you for taking the time to point us in that direction. My favorite quote:
"Previously, CEOs recognized the need for business model innovation, but today they are struggling to find the requisite creative leadership to produce such innovation."
I think the Planet Inc. thought experiment might help them tap into a source of unavoidable creativity.
I'd like to help you in any way I can with the question you posed in your email for your project, but I don't quite understand it yet (the question and the purpose of the project). Would you like to schedule a time to talk?
Would be great, Eric. Thanks. Why don't you send the link to info@sourceintegral.com? Thanks again.
Hi Annie--
Great Article. Have you read the new C-level Suite report out from IBMs business value institute? The report contains results from 1541 interviews with CEOs around the world. The report talks about key leadership traits, the complexity of our globally interconnected world, and key business model drivers that have set apart top performers from the rest of the crowd.
Let me know if you would like the link to the report, and I'll send you an e-mail. Thanks, Eric Schillinger
Hello Annie
I have read your hack with the following criteria in mind:
- The need is to evolve out of Command & Control. Does the hack define an alternative?
- The alternative must be compelling. It must recognize the need to overcome the constraints of time, energy and motivation.
- An alternative without the use of technology is unlikely to succeed.
- The alternative must create a constructive collective by intrinsic means, i.e., desist from 'brain-washing' personnel for discipline and organization.
- I enjoyed chewing on your highly readable piece.
- It focuses on better thinking by select individuals. Perhaps thinking is not the problem with the 21st century.
- It may help in preparing Managers for senior assignments but perhaps not in transforming management thinking.
- Even for the few so trained, how will they acquire the ability to move minds, perhaps the single most important element for transformation? How will the organization personnel develop the discipline required for the transformation? Both, moving minds and infusing discipline, require tremendous conviction, organization and energy.
Hello Rohit,
Here is a response to your very first point, that the need is to evolve out of Command and Control. I would say it is A need, not THE need.
On the MIX, the moonshot “Redefining the Work of Leadership” is framed in terms of the need for leaders to become savvy social architects, “capable of building commitment and alignment without resorting to the traditional tools of bureaucratic control.” There is no doubt that this is an aspiration worth the prime grade attention from the MIX community (and, indeed, we ourselves have spent the lion share of our professional careers trying to help our clients land on that moon.) Yet, when we step back and look at the notion of redefining the work of leadership in the broader context of the 21st century, when we look at what it now takes to lead a successful global business or nation, the challenge of becoming a savvy social architect starts to look like the easy part.
In 2010 IBM released a study, “Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study.” This study was based on face-to-face conversations with 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders who represent organizations in 60 countries and 33 different industries. In it, senior leaders describe the realities they face on the ground. We are now leading, they say, in a “drastically different world:”
“In a very short time, we’ve become aware of global climate change; of the geopolitical issues surrounding energy and water supplies; of the vulnerabilities of the supply chains for food, medicine and even talent, and of sobering threats to global security. The common denominator? The realities—and challenges—of global integration. We occupy a world that is connected on multiple dimensions, and at a deep level—a global system of systems…. Increasingly interconnected economies, enterprises, societies, and governments have given rise to vast new opportunities. Increased connectivity has also created strong—and too often unknown interdependencies. For this reason, the ultimate consequence of any decision has often been poorly understood. “
What should be the work of a leader in such a world? We think the central pre-occupation of a leader’s work in the 21st century should be to continuously make sense of the world, to understand the context in which his business or nation operates. Einstein is quoted as having said that if he only had one hour to solve a problem, and his life depended on the answer, he would spend 55 minutes defining the problem, and 5 minutes finding the solution. We think it’s a useful frame of mind to carry over into the leader’s work in the 21st century. It helps us quantify what we mean by “central pre-occupation” – spend 55 minutes of the leadership hour on making sense of the world.
And I definitely think that thinking is a major issue in the 21st century. No doubt in my mind. In fact, our thinking appears so ill matched to 21st century challenges that it constitutes a foundational crisis. We have seen this crisis first hand, behind closed doors in boardrooms around the world, in the receiving rooms of royal palaces, and we have heard it from the mouths of Presidents and Prime Ministers. But don't take our word for it, from the looks of the struggling leaders cited in the IBM Report (see Hack), these leaders by their own self admission are in over their heads. Our contention is that many of the world’s greatest mind labs are still running on the 20th century gear—good for many things like producing the awe-inspiring scientific, technological and social progress of the last fifty years. Yet, even at its best, this gear is structurally incapable of coping with the new life conditions we are creating. It was simply never designed to process the complexity and the scale of the 21st century challenges.
Many of these challenges are planetary in scale, cross-generational in time and can only be understood by integrating human knowledge across multiple disciplines. Yet most of the world’s Chairmen, CEOs, Presidents and Prime Ministers think on a national, regional or industry-wide scale, they are not used to thinking on a planetary scale. They think in quarters and election cycles, they are not used to thinking in centuries. They routinely turn to disciplines like economics that can quickly and expertly simplify reality into a quantitative model, they are not used to reaching out across disciplinary boundaries in search of a multi-dimensional picture of reality. They are not used to thinking this way simply because they did not need to. They do now.
Ellen,
I appreciate your preoccupation with integrity and fairness and the implications for leadership and work place culture. Let me confess, I didn’t quite understand what you are asking me. I think you are asking about assessment and its relationship to integrity. Integrity is central to the role of the Planet Inc. CEO. Assessment, at least in this Hack, is not our preoccupation.
But I have to say, one phrase you wrote stood out to me. I would like to riff off that phrase and if I miss your questions, which I likely will, please help me understand the next time around.
You said, “supporting a wider community for the sake of all.” One of the central moves of the Planet Inc. CEO is “supporting a wider community for the sake of all,” and let’s walk through just how big of “an all” we’re talking about. As an advocate of play, Ellen, please play with me (liked that Hack, btw). You, Ellen, are now the CEO of Planet Inc. Seriously. Your mission is to ensure the survival and development of the entire human race. Who do you need to be to deliver on this mission? How big is your “wider community for the sake of all”?
Now regardless of what most leaders say, at the end of the day, most have not evolved to play for “all of us,” and there is no blame in that. The human race is a work in progress. It’s an evolving world, with evolving challenges. Instead, many leaders currently play for Team Organization, or Team Nation-state, or Team Public Sector, Team Private Sector, Team Women, Team Men, Team Developed World, Team Developing World… you get the point, I’ll spare you the repetition. But you, Ellen, as the Planet Inc. CEO, you are playing for Team Humans. You are playing for Team All of Us. What does that really mean?
And now let me explain why playing for Team Humans is one of the few moves that makes sense in the 21st century, in an open and borderless world. In the good old days it used to be that there were some people that were foreign and some consequences that were negligible or external to the decision-making process of Global CEOs, Presidents, and Prime Ministers; people and consequences that senior leaders could afford to ignore. But now that we are interconnected, now that there are so many of us, and now that we are pushing the planetary boundary, who is foreign? What is external? Now that we have entered The Great Interdependence, our crowded and often annoying interconnectedness has rendered concepts like “foreign” and “externality” functionally meaningless, at least at this level of leadership. There are not many consequences that we can push “out there,” or people who can’t affect us.
To keep pace with the nature of our challenges, leaders must expand their thinking process to internalize our larger context. They must, and excuse the repetition, think on a planetary scale; think at least 40 years into the future, and fill out their understanding with a wide variety of “hard” and “soft” expertise.
Sit and stare at the picture that thinking produces—that larger context—and it no longer makes sense for these senior leaders to each run their own show, because it is now clear that there is an overarching show. In such a world it no longer makes sense for leaders of government and business to look up at the planetary context from their small nation-centric or industry centric window with an eye to secure relatively more for “me and mine”. Instead, they must climb atop the larger, planetary context, look down at their nation or industry from that larger context, determine what makes sense for the world first, and then define their nation’s or industry’s role in delivering it (and doing so would also, by the way, be a huge competitive advantage). To tackle the challenges of the 21st century leaders must reframe their current efforts as an important work stream in a larger human project. Starting yesterday.
But let's get serious. Changing how anyone thinks is far from an easy task. People rarely change what they think, let alone how they think. It requires examining one’s own thought process, which is easier said than done. It turns out that the mind has a difficult time looking at itself. The process requires prime-grade attention, the very resource that is in short supply with the leaders we know. Their attention is usually fractured “out there” amidst hundreds of critically important issues. Their jobs are nearly impossible to begin with. For the leaders we work with, it is sort of like trying to take a look under the hood, run an engine diagnostic, swap out the engine for a more powerful one, all while remaining behind the wheel, driving exhilaratingly fast, and staying focused on winning Formula One. Not exactly a no-brainer.
We knew that if we wanted to expand the way leaders think—so more of them signed on to play for Team Humans—we would have to do far more than just describe a new way of thinking. We would have to help leaders look at and expand how they think. To examine their thought process. We would have to put "thinking about thinking" on the top of the Executive agenda. That is the reason that we constructed an elaborate thought experiment (here at the MIX we have a very abridged version. Admittedly, it is more powerful facilitated, but we don’t have that luxury here).
So, yes, integrity is central to the CEO of Planet Inc. And yes, it is about supporting a wider community for the sake of us all. And now that you have had a few sips of the Kool-Aid, Ellen, the job falls to you.
Hello Raj,
Great interacting with you too. I need to study your MIX contributions and understand more about your frame of reference to relate better to your comments. It's the weekend here in the Middle East, so I hope to catch up a bit. The supply of time, unfortunately, is totally inelastic.
As far as Erika Ilves's post, she is the Co-Founder of Source Integral. I am another Co-Founder of Source Integral. Her post has a slightly different angle in that she is advocating a flexible frame, one that can look at different levels of human organization and zoom in and out on them depending on the nature of the problem. The Planet Inc. CEO, on the other hand, comes with somewhat of a prescribed frame: planetary, long time horizons, methodological pluralism.
I am looking forward to studying your Hack.
Regarding fair and unfair assessments – and leaders who break habits for integrity! Thanks for this interesting case for finer leadership Annie, and special thanks for the way you tackle problems and possibilities associated with intrapersonal (or introspective intelligence). At the center would you agree that it is often linked to finding, or designing doable strategies that allow us to be visible and caring toward humans and toward supporting a wider community for the sake of all?
That means that leaders would act with integrity - and transparency in all matters. Let's just take Hacks and Stories here, for instance. We have been asked to rate other's work. That said, if we rate people fairly, it may put their work ahead of our own -- so at times folks rate others without any feedback - just a number that hauls them down numerically. Leaders with high integrity would rate Hacks high when they deserved it – and would also leave feedback to show they’d read and rated the work. To rate in hiding is to write no feedback – so you remain nameless to the author, and your numbers mean little to how they might improve or rebuild an area of your work.
After reading your thoughtful work – I wondered how it works with helpful vs destructive feedbacks from leaders to others? You speak of familiar notions that lead to tainted practices. It appears to me that pre-conceived notions of assessment at work, often lead to unfair evaluation, whereas leaders who remain open and honest can help others to implement feedback tools as genuine learning tools. What do you think?
Hello Annie,
You pressed the Build Button instead of the Comment Button to respond to my question. Consequently, your answer did not make it to my mailbox. Stumbled on it today. Now you can press any button!
I think I got what you said: Policy and Strategy is a different domain from Execution. My question was about Execution. Transformation of the System is relevant to Execution. Besides, when speaking on the National plain there is a realm beyond Policy and Strategy. Planet Inc CEO belongs to this realm.
I agree but with some reservations:
- Thinking will always gain significantly from collective give and take. Assured organization and drive of Collective Give 'n' Take will be of immense interest to any leader.
- Leaders come to their seats of power with great ideas of what they will do. They have a world view, they have the advisors to get a grasp of the methods and they are realists enough to appreciate that change will demand all their energy and will take time. Yet, if they pursue their vision sincerely, more often than not they founder and are termed as boy-scouts or something similar. They need to move minds. I was not clear whether Planet Inc. CEO prepares them to do that.
- In talking about Methods, the World Scale and the Time Line your approach of Planet Inc.CEO parallels the one adopted by Erika Ilves - Co-Founder at Source Integral. She has presented it in her hack "3-D glasses: A must-have in the management innovator’s kit". Apart from the benefit of a fixed environment and therefore superior preparation in Planet Inc CEO you also have the fourth bucket (lens): From Victim To Player. Erika has missed out on this. However, as a Player your participants cannot escape the System and its limitations of today.
A severe limitation of any System today is its near frozen DNA. And that is because Systems today are driven by personnel energy and hence a culture developed over years. But that is not the way it has to be. Basic to all Systems are conversations and if they can be managed by an external and compelling energy then the System becomes malleable and highly responsive to leadership in a shorter period of time. As a corollary, the leaders can also expect to be more attuned to Reality. This is the alternative I have developed over many years of R&D. It is presented in my hack. Given your supra-organizational view of reality it would interest me to have your response on my breakthrough.
I am making the assumption my work will be highly relevant to Planet Inc. CEO if it gets established on the national scale. God willing, I hope to prove my work on that scale for India.
Great interacting with you.
Regards,
Raj
RAJ's QUESTION: A very lucid exposition of a powerful means to change the mind-set of leaders and develop in them the ability to listen and stretch their comfort zones. However, the conventional wisdom is that changing the DNA of an organization demands transformation of the System since attitudes are a produce of the System. Does the Planet approach rewrite this wisdom?
ANNIE'S RESPONSE: Hello Raj,
Thank you for your comment. I think you pose an interesting question...
For me, I would not say that "attitudes are a product of the system." That statement is too black and white for me and obscures the relationship between how we think and and how we organize. Who, after all, created the system? The way we think and what we value determines the kinds of cultures and organizational structures we create. Those cultures and systems, in turn, advance and constrain us. Then we rethink how we are organized. It's a dialectic in my mind, not a chicken OR an egg. I do agree with you that many kinds, though not all, of organizational transformations will require systemic change. Such transformations will require some serious rethinking. Depending on the kind of organization, taking on the mind of the CEO of Planet Inc. would likely be invaluable in that rethink, because how we think is fundamental to how we conceive of organizing. So the Planet Inc. CEO thought experiment does not rewrite the wisdom you refer to... it supplants it.
Additionally, this particular thought experiment was not initially designed to effect change at the level of the organization. It was designed for CEOs of global businesses, Presidents, and Prime Ministers to ready them for particular kinds of challenges: 21st century challenges--climate change, the "terror and error" potential of our technological process, looming water, food, and energy shortages, just to name a few. Extra-organizational, extra-national challenges that are on a fairly tight timeline.
To solve them, leaders must first put on the hat of the Planet Inc. CEO in order to conceive of the problems, strategy, and execution at a global scale and on an appropriate timeline. Then they must begin think through how to influence the extra-organizational, extra-national space. To do so, their approach must be meta-systemic. Basically they will need to influence systems upon systems rather than focusing entirely on change within the organizational boundary. They will need to organize at a higher order, effect change from the "outside" by aligning specific, influential individual into multidisciplinary project teams guided by new purposes and aggressive targets.
I've read a couple of posts on this website that suggest an end to leadership. I do not see the end of leadership. I see an evolving role for the leader. I see a new, evolutionary agenda for our leaders, at least for the organizations we work with. Now that many (Western) organizations have achieved a good degree of organizational maturity, I think leaders (at least in global, regional, and nationally focused companies) will begin to function more as intermediaries between these extra-organizational and extra-national issues and the organization and the nation.
So in many ways, we are just focused on an entirely different unit of analysis than most of the hacks and stories on this website.
Thanks for your question, Raj.
Annie
Annie thank you for providing an excellent response to my build suggestions. We are totally in synch. I have little to add except to say that although people's ability to deal with complexity improves with age/maturity, according to Jaques, not all people have the same innate cognitive potential.
I also agree with you that much, in fact I would say most, of the complexity is caused by factors external to the organization. I think it is also important to distinguish between things that are complex and those that are simply complicated (if you have an account to McKinsey Quarterly Visitor Edition online, see my comments to Julian Birkinshaw's and Susan Heyward's article "Putting organizational complexity in its place" at http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Putting_organizational_complexity_in_it...). Although organizations do exhibit some complex dynamics, such as in a merger that often produces uncertain outcomes, they generally strive to eliminate them by imposing controls to produce deterministic outcomes. However, external forces are much more difficult, if not impossible to control. In fact, Roger Martin recently presented a lighthearted view of strategic planning in his HBR piece "Moving From Strategic Planning to Story Telling" at http://blogs.hbr.org/martin/2010/06/strategies-as-happy-stories.html in which he recommends we "Think about a strategic options as being just a happy story about the future." It suggests guard from falling into the trap of believing our own fiction (see my comments to the piece). It also contains one very insightful, but easily overlooked, observation (which he discussed in an earlier posting "My Eureka Moment with Strategy at http://blogs.hbr.org/martin/2010/05/the-day-i-discovered-the-most.html) that the most important question in strategy planning is "What would have to be true?" Which, I believe, is what your hack is really all about, because it allows leaders to create possibilities without boundaries which empowers them to think back about how to overcome the obstacles in order to realize their invented possibilities. Although the technique of "Begin with the end in mind" introduced by Stephen Covey is not new and is widely in use by strategic planning facilitators, the idea of inventing possibilities is novel, and is at the heart of what you, Roger Martin and Zaffron & Logan espouse.
Now I am tempted to propose another hack, "Leaders, Embrace Ambiguity - Shun Clarity!"
In my chapter on corporate governance, which I mentioned earlier (see http://trustenablement.com/index.htm#book), I introduce Aspirational Corporate Governance as a means of empowering boards of directors to help their organizations adapt through innovation, by creating new possibilities for delivering value in a complex, uncertain world. Specifically, I call on governance committees of boards to assume a leadership role. I am currently exploring opportunities to provide them with supporting resources to prepare them for that journey. I think your hack could be a very helpful early step in the process. We should discuss this offline, as I am planning a seminar for governance committees in September.
ALEX’S COMMENT:
"The essence of your hack is a means of taking leaders out of their short-term thinking paradigm to embrace a longer time horizon. I agree this is valuable. Your exercise is useful for creating awareness, but not necessarily for affecting meaningful transformations."
ANNIE’S RESPONSE:
Thanks for your questions as they give me the opportunity to clarify my views. I frame the essence of my hack as stretching the leader’s mind in two dimensions—stretching the scale of their view and their time horizon, which in my limited experience leads to a number of outcomes. I’ll describe more later in my response.
I guess it all depends on how you define meaningful transformation. What is meaningful transformation? What will it take to reinvent leadership?
I think that “meaningful transformation” is a dialectic, not a destination, between the evolutionary challenges we face and our “hard” and “soft” side adaptive responses to them. Does The Planet Inc. CEO thought experiment do it all? No. Does it play an important yet partial role in meaningful transformation? Absolutely. To explain the contribution of The Planet Inc. thought experiment, I need to frame the context.
First, the political and business challenges we are facing. Complexity is a major challenge. The report that Eric recommended (below) describes interviews with 1,541 CEOs, and summarizes the challenge well: 79% of the CEOs said, "The world's private and public sector leaders believe that a rapid escalation of "complexity" is the biggest challenge confronting them. They expect it to continue—indeed, to accelerate—in the coming years.”
What will it take to meaningfully transform leadership in this context? Some call for institutional reform. Some call for reinventing how leaders themselves think. The great thing is, both camps are right. We do need to change how leaders think. We do need to evolve our organizations. We need ALL of it to begin to change the rules of how we play the great game of business and government.
In this context, The Planet Inc. CEO thought experiment helps certain leaders on the soft side, “soft R&D” as we call it… it helps leaders shift their mind and that is a meaningful contribution to reinventing leadership. It was originally designed for CEOs, Presidents, and Prime Ministers (level 7 leaders)—and I’ve seen it shift a number of mental constructs:
FROM VICTIM TO PLAYER.
Much of the complexity that these leaders face is occurring outside of their organizational boundary, where no one person has any real jurisdiction or accountability and no one person really has formal authority. The Planet Inc. CEO thought experiment strips them of any formal authority by design. It is usually quite disorienting for them. When they recover, they start to think on their feet, get scrappy, and focus on all of the things that they can influence. They stop waiting around for institutional reform. They stop waiting around for permission from an entity that doesn’t even yet exist. Suddenly they see opportunities everywhere. Their focus then shifts, landing squarely on how they are going to convince others to join their game to make it happen. This mental shift also helps them default to “influence and inspiration” as their primary motivational tool within their organizational boundary. A decisive move from command and control to nudge and cajole.
FROM SHORT-TERMER TO LONG-TIMER:
I’ve seen it shift their time horizons in significant ways. They come to see that different problems require different time horizons to solve them. And they understand that they still have to grapple with the reality of the next election cycle or the next quarter. So some have resorted to double time horizons (e.g. What do I need to do to take advantage of these long-term opportunities AND deliver on shareholder expectations next quarter?) And if they don’t like the rules of the game, then they start wondering about what it would take to change the rules of the game and who they should team up with to make it a reality. It is the ultimate empowerment tool.
FROM “MY INDUSTRY” AND “MY NATION” TO A PLANET INC. VIEW:
Many leaders find it hard to move their mind beyond their industry or nation-state. Of course it is difficult for them, their jobs are predicated on reporting to industry-specific shareholders and nation-state constituents. When they put on the hat of the Planet Inc. CEO, an organization charged with the survival and development of the human race, even if they cannot get their mind around it, it expands their view beyond what it was. It forces them beyond their current conceptions in meaningful ways. As one Executive said, “From this view, so much of what I think about on a daily basis is just completely missing the bigger picture.”
FROM ONE LOOKING GLASS TO MANY
Once the thought experiment places leaders on the hook for nothing less than securing the survival and development of the human race, they run into the limitations of the methods that they use to make sense of the world. The traditional cost-benefit analysis all by itself just doesn’t seem to cut it. Although a cost-benefit analysis is a great tool and offers a tidy reduction of the world into neat numbers, so many important issues are lost in that reduction. Leaders who see this begin to actively search for additional expertise and additional scholars to come to the table to help them make sense of the world. They get genuinely interested in, for example, input from cultural anthropologists, futurists, systems theorists, adult developmentalists, and even cosmologists and science fiction writers.
Although some top teams and those that report to them (level 5 &6) in some cases might not need to handle as many global challenges, it doesn’t mean that they don’t benefit from the experiment. They experience similar breakthroughs as the ones above. They see influence as their greatest currency. They stop waiting around for the rules of the game to change and start thinking through the ideas and establishing the relationships that they need to change the rules themselves. It alters how they think about time, strategy, etc.
So The Planet Inc. CEO thought experiment certainly doesn't do it all... no tool does, but it's an innovative soft-side tool that will help in our efforts to reinvent leadership.
Hello Alex,
Thanks for the references. We seem to share some similar views.
ALEX’S COMMENT: Consider incorporating Elliott Jaques's requisite organization concepts and assessment tools. They deals with assessing and defining cognitive levels appropriate to various leadership roles in an organization (based on hierarchy). Not all levels of work require the same cognitive capacity, not even all CEOs need to operate at the same level.
ANNIE’S RESPONSE:
As far as the 7 levels of excellence go, I completely agree with this model and suggestion. We use a slightly different methodology than Jaques—the research from the field of adult development—but we use it toward similar ends. You might know about the field of adult development given your interests in the 7 levels and Logan (Logan's book Tribal Leadership and his work on culture is based on developmental research). Basically 30 years of research, mostly from the halls of Harvard—Kegan, Kohlberg, Cook-Greuter, Piaget, etc.—has led to strong academic consensus that the human mind organizes and develops in levels along predictably stable lines, levels and lines that can be measured. The mind develops toward greater complexity. At each level you are able to hold progressively more perspectives, able to solve more complex problems, and can visualize longer time horizons. These levels are not personality “types”; they are qualitative shifts in the complexity a mind can manage. For example, you could be any type in the MBTI system, at any level of development.
What are the implications for running a business or country? Likely similar to how you think, but let me know if it’s otherwise: You have to match the complexity of the mind with the complexity of the task involved. The only caveat I would add to what you’ve stated above (and I would be interested to hear if you agree), is that the amorphous thing we are all calling complexity is beginning to blossom outside of the executive suite, outside of the presidential office, outside of the royal palace, and so far there is no clear picture about how this complexity will spread and at what pace. From where I sit, it doesn’t look like the train is going to slow down any time soon. So although different roles require different levels of mental complexity, it is clear that progressively more complexity is coming down the pike and that there is, according to the leaders themselves, a dearth of “complexity bench strength.”
Thanks for the reference. I will check it out as soon as I get a moment. I'll respond to your other comments as I get time.
Also consider the work of Werner Ernhard and the book "The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the future of your organization and your life" by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan, and a forward by Michael Jensen (see http://www.wernererhard.com/threelaws.html). Chapter 4 deals with how leaders can create an "invented future". They have a powerful management technology that helps to unshackle leaders entering Planet Inc. from the realities of their past and present situations and gives them the tools to transform those visions into future realities. I highly recommend it.
The essence of your hack is a means of taking leaders out of their short-term thinking paradigm to embrace a longer time horizon. I agree this is valuable. Your exercise is useful for creating awareness, but not necessarily for affecting meaningful transformations.
Consider incorporating Elliott Jaques's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Jaques) requisite organization concepts and assessment tools (see also GO Society at http://globalro.org/). They deals with assessing and defining cognitive levels appropriate to various leadership roles in an organization (based on hierarchy). Not all levels of work require the same cognitive capacity, not even all CEOs need to operate at the same level.
In a chapter I recently contributed to a Wiley finance textbook on corporate governance (see http://trustenablement.com/index.htm#book), I introduce the aspirational corporate governance framework that is based on three pillars, one of which is requisite organization (the other two are requisite variety and adaptive capacity). For this long-term thinking to be institutionalized, I believe a new social contract is require between the state, corporations and investors. Boards of directors will need to play a pivotal leadership role.
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