Has there ever been a more telling test of leadership than the past nine months? It is hard to remember a time when the values and purpose of an enterprise have been thrust more sharply into the spotlight.

In the wake of global lockdowns, enterprise leaders had to quickly protect employees and pivot business models to ensure a prosperous future in the face of myriad challenges. In many cases, it was a success. Work continued uninterrupted; often productivity increased.

But we are well beyond grappling with a new normal – this is a new beginning.

This presents us with a chance to use the technological strides we have made in recent decades to win in a new age of work. Here, some key behavioral and organizational shifts will be required. These fall into four key areas: enterprise agility, the supervisory model, collaboration and culture, and human talent.

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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1. Enterprise agility Breaking work into manageable packages with a clear output – each designed to be accomplished by small teams – is a foundational principle of agile. In the future, it will be an essential approach.

Its success rides on a combination of factors. Well-organized knowledge workers will need to have an artisanal focus on the quality of the output and how it will be used. And these small, tight-knit teams must be empowered to do their best work and accountable for the results. Powerful collaboration tools will provide the environment for this work to happen.

2. The supervisory model

The pandemic has shown us technology’s effectiveness in measuring output, and this will lead to a paradigm shift in how people are managed. Significant supervision over teams will be eliminated. And in its place? A new cohort of “playing captains” will replace the traditional management function.

3. Collaboration and culture Of course, collaboration is key to the success of any organization. As such, enterprises will need to be able to construct mechanisms to replicate the ambient awareness inherent in physical work into the digital world. Leaders will have to encourage trust from those missing the lack of physical proximity – and the non-verbal cues and understanding it brings.

This might not be as big a challenge as it seems. Today’s digital-native young adults already effectively parse many non-verbal cues in their interactions on social media. So, it is likely that any concerns in this area reflect a lack of understanding rather than structural challenges in the nature of remote working.

4. Human talent

The pandemic has opened up the talent pool. The working world now has access to a global ‘talent cloud’, which provides equal opportunities and recognition of talent and human ingenuity, beyond   boundaries defined by the brick and mortar offices As workplaces are getting reimagined, a position in Boston could now possibly be filled by an employee in Brussels. This, combined with the fungibility of talent, and the deep contextual knowledge will be the game changer in the future of work. It paves the way for organizations and employees to derive exponential value through maximizing opportunities and embracing risk.

As we move into agile working and new models of supervisory responsibility, underpinned by collaboration technology, many workers who have been unable to commit extended hours to the physical office will be allowed to participate more effectively.

As we stand at the door of this new work order, we are looking into an era of limitless opportunity for those that hone the right culture and skills.

About the Author:
Milind Lakkad is the Executive Vice President & CHRO, Tata Consultancy Services

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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There are some things we’ve learned in the past seven months that make sense to carry forward into the next normal. Chief among them is that the amount of partnering among firms occurring to combat the pandemic, the neighborhood tie-ups to support small businesses, and bubble quarantines in learning groups as well as professional sports teams, requires a collaborative leadership style. 

Collaboration is a buzzword that everyone thinks they know what it means, but few truly do. It is typically thought of as a simple skill we all learned in the sandbox, a value to be trumpeted, or technology that allows people to work together electronically. These are all elements of collaboration, but they fail to adequately define it.

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Collaboration defined

Collaboration is a risk sharing and resource leveraging strategic behavior that necessitates coordinating activities and exchanging information for mutual benefit. It requires trust, transparency, and respect. It is a comprehensive way of thinking and acting that takes proficiency in multiple skills.

Developing the necessary capability—the mindset, skillset, and toolset for intra- and inter-organizational collaboration—is a work in process for most organizations. This is because of both a failure to build the capability and the collaboration paradox—the systems, processes, and policies that helped companies be successful in the past that today impede their ability to collaborate. Until companies evolve the leadership system to encourage and support leaders, true collaboration will not happen.

Leadership systems

Leadership systems usually aren’t talked about much, but they influence how leadership can be exercised in an organization. They are the spoken and unspoken elements of culture that influence decision making, leader selection and development, accountability, the power of informal networks, and resource allocation. The multi-faceted pandemic-related management challenges provide the opportunity to reshape a company’s leadership system to be collaborative.

Collaborative leadership

This is the ability to rally people and their resources, around the strategic purpose of collaborating defined by the value it brings to customers and collaborators.  This is the North Star. Collaborative leaders create the environment in which activities can be prioritized and coordinated, and information exchanged in pursuit of that North Star. These leaders accomplish alignment with strategic purpose absent of traditional levers of control and instead they help would-be collaborators understand why it is in their interest to make their resources and relationship currencies available for mutual benefit. 

The leadership system has to support the variety of different roles that collaborative leaders play:

• Entrepreneurial catalyst— Guide people to learn fast, to make assumptions about how collaborators might achieve a desired outcome; to put those assumptions into practice; learn if it works and if not, why not, and to iterate assumptions and try again
• Discerning orchestrator—Bring customers, partners, and stakeholders together to create and implement solutions that provide desired outcomes and experiences for all concerned, bridging differences and aligning interests to reach the North Star
• Empathetic coach—Use listening and speaking skills to understand motivations, interests, and challenges collaborators have in navigating the environment that works against collaboration, and helping the collaborators solve problems in a manner that produces a fair and efficient distribution of value,
• Enthusiastic evangelist—Advocate for collaborators, helping them attain and leverage resources, evolve culture, build trust, and champion the collaboration with relevant stakeholders
• Diplomatic influencer—Help people see that it is in their best interest to make their resources and relationship currencies available to their collaborators, or to do something differently, so that there is a mutually beneficial outcome

Thus, as organizations carry forward the learnings of 2020, leadership systems must necessarily evolve. Internal governance structures will take into account external partnering commitments that must be considered when allocating resources. Employees will have more rewarding careers when they discover new opportunities to create value with third parties, or learn to turn competitors into cooperators. Boards of directors will require holistic accountability to all stakeholders. The behavioral norms of an organization will mean that inclusiveness, transparency, and openness to new ways of thinking and acting that lead to creating the “bigger pie” of collaborative outcomes is the next normal.      

Leadership everywhere

Collaborative work requires everyone to be leaders. What leadership means is different if you are in the executive suite, the front lines, or the middle of the organization. Executives must demonstrate the behavior they expect, foster the right environment, provide the resources required, and effect the necessary leadership system changes. The leaders in the middle of the organization are at the tip of collaborative leadership. They are the coaches of the front lines—the people who engage with customers and partners daily and who make or break any collaboration. It is the leaders in the middle who must play the multi-dimensional role of change agent and orchestrator, all the while building the capability—the mindset, skillset, and toolset—and breaking the collaboration paradox for good.

About the Author:
Jeff Shuman, CSAP, PhD is the principal of The Rhythm of Business, a consulting, training, and advisory firm with core expertise in alliances and collaboration.

© 2020 The Rhythm of Business, Inc.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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“The end of certainty means the possibility of novelty, of evolution.”
Ilya Prigogine

A critical function of leadership is to ask questions and not settle for answers. This protects uncertainty as a space for curiosity and imagination. When there are too many answers provided and too few questions asked, things stagnate and the atmosphere stifles. Protecting uncertainty is akin to keeping a window open for light and fresh air, maintaining a sense of opportunity and the ambiguity that keeps the spirit of humanity as a search for meaning.

We believe leaders inspiring others to superior performance works best when people pursue opportunities to innovate as a natural part of their daily work, when openness and playfulness become as valued as structure and reason. Yet we have found leaders struggle mightily with this simple premise. They have traditionally seen their role as shutting the window and eliminating all the mistakes. Here´s why!

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The Baggage of Uncertainty

There is a core idea that aggregated things have lower variability than individual components. For example, while individual air molecules behave chaotically, the air in a room can have a stable, ambient temperature as it takes on the aggregate behaviour of all molecules.

The notion of aggregation is central to insurance where the pooling of individual risks creates a more stable aggregate that can be priced. The same idea operates in financial markets where securitization pools debt obligations to create a synthetic reconfiguration into tranches sold to investors with different risk appetites.

In the same way, every innovation project has a large degree of uncertainty that cannot be eliminated: we cannot know all the outcomes of our actions, the consequences of those outcomes, and the meaning of those consequences. This represents an irreducible tension between doing and knowing. We need to know in order to do, but we also need to do in order to know.

Commitment serves as a mechanism for projecting certainty and clarity onto a project´s desired outcomes. Yet it comes with baggage, the humility of not knowing everything. All the uncertainty surrounding what could happen needs to be bagged up and set aside. The more we commit to one particular unfolding of events the heavier the  bag containing the possibility of being wrong.

The Leader´s Role

When commitment and baggage move together, the baggage serves as a constant reminder of the need to focus on learning and to maintain the flexibility to change direction. No certainty is assumed. The illusion of certainty emerges only when the bag of uncertainty is hidden from view or otherwise detached. We argue that leaders must ensure the two always move together, for the future is often hidden in the bag.

However unintentionally, in many organizations the hierarchical relationships of accountability produce a separation between those facing uncertainty and those evaluating performance. Being accountable to someone is about being watched and judged, yet without them considering the uncertainty inherent in deciding what to do next. Practically, the uncertainty of outcomes sits on one side of time, while judgment and evaluation await on the other. Remember, action in the face of uncertainty is about doing before knowing. Judgment, on the other hand, is about knowing after doing.

Unhitched is organizational undoing

This is where something interesting happens in organizations: commitment and its counter-baggage of uncertainty get separated. Unhitched, the commitment slowly rises upwards, ultimately bringing a false sense of certainty to top management. In the meantime, the bag of uncertainty is left behind and settles on the shoulders of the middle managers or frontline staff. No matter how hard they try, they are left holding the bag. In short, as organizations pool frontline commitments they create synthetic certainty at the top at the expense of anxiety and stifled curiosity elsewhere.

Leadership facilitation

Over time, organizations accumulate all this baggage with pent up questions. Leadership is about slicing them open and facilitating meaningful discourse. The leader is a protector of uncertainty as intellectual humility and must be present anywhere innovation is taking place. Unlocking the potential of entrepreneurship is about replacing the quest for certainty with a quest for meaning.

About the Authors:
Joseph Pistrui is Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at IE Business School in Madrid, and co-founder of Kinetic Thinking.

Dimo Dimov is Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Bath University in the UK, and co-founder of Kinetic Thinking.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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When US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg succumbed to cancer recently, the headline race was on once again. Instead of pausing for a moment to honor a great personality for her leadership and stamina in the quest for justice, most of the news media didn’t miss a beat. Who would President Donald Trump nominate as her successor, and how would that reshape American society? Reporting instantly took second place to speculation and opinion, drowning out the announcement of the 87-year-old’s death in a sea of noise.

The predominant frame for interpreting today’s world is winning and losing, and the media has bought right into it. Being faster, smarter, delivering yet another interpretation, speculation and judgement – a certain breathlessness has always been inherent in journalism. But in pre-digital times, news media only competed against each other. The difference now is that they are up against everything an average smartphone holds. The battle for attention shapes their very existence. And readers are responding by leaving in droves. According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, one in three people now regularly avoids the news. A rising share of audiences find journalism too overwhelming, too negative, too opinionated with too little relevance for their daily lives. And they believe it can’t always be trusted.

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This is bad news – for democracy. In a world of noise, propaganda and misinformation, leadership by independent media that provide the facts is needed more than ever. Studies show that voting turnout is higher, more people run for office and public money is spent more responsibly where local news media keep citizens informed and hold institutions to account. But business models are broken. Platform monopolies have gobbled up advertising money and optimize for attention; too often the media has followed suit.

Now there is no way that media companies can outsmart Google, Facebook and the like. News media have to go where their audiences are. But when opinion is everywhere, quality information becomes a critically important currency. Covid-19 has demonstrated that people crave trustworthy journalism. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, in the first weeks of the pandemic more people relied on major news organizations than on government agencies or even their own friends and family for information. This is a huge responsibility, but what to do with it?

First of all, listening to audiences is vital. Many journalists still spend more energy on beating the competition than attempting to find out what their audiences need. Among these are more explanation, more solutions, a clear distinction between facts and opinion, less noise, clickbait and talking down to people. Instead of indulging in thumbs-up, thumbs-down journalism, more constructive reporting is needed.

The news media cannot go it alone, though. The political sphere needs to secure press freedom; supporting the economic viability of the industry is part of it. And the platform companies that shape today’s communication infrastructure have to take responsibility too. Their algorithms have to optimize for quality content.

Yet blaming Silicon Valley for everything that is going wrong has been the easy way out for too long. A recent study by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society confirmed what other research has already pointed out: the mass media are much more responsible for spreading misinformation – for the most part thought up by political leaders – than social media is. This is bad news and good news at the same time. Bad news, because journalism has not lived up to its potential. Good news, because the media still has plenty of agenda-setting power. Instead of blaming platform companies or foreign meddling for spreading “fake news”, the news media and its leaders should confidently reassert their historic mission to lead through a world of information confusion: that is, to deliver the facts, be transparent about their quest and stimulate serious public conversation. The health of our societies depends on it.

About the Author:
Alexandra is a journalist, media consultant and professor for media transformation at University of the Arts in Berlin. She also teaches “Leadership and Strategy in the 21st Century” at TU Munich and is a Senior Research Associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Her most recent book is Mehr Wahrheit wagen – Warum die Demokratie einen starken Journalismus braucht [Dare more truth: Why democracy needs strong journalism] (2020) 

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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These months have proven to be emblematic of the dangers of a hyperconnected world. Coronavirus cases continue to grow and grow fast, and asymmetries rise around the world at a pace we may have not imagined when 2020 started. Yet the digital nature of our hyperconnected world may prove to hold some of the critical solutions needed to scale novel approaches to the problems associated with the pandemic. The issue is not the virus alone: it’s more about the reactions to the virus such as information on the resources we need to allocate or an understanding of the wider consequences for businesses trying to respond.

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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AI solutions

Among these digital systems, few are being more heralded more than AI-powered solutions. Despite its current novelty, AI is anything but new. The marked increase in experimentation in the pandemic, and the ensuing interest from governments and corporations alike, represents a new global conversation on AI.

Novel cases of AI use are quickly spreading across international media, such as rapid assessment of patient scans at scale for improved covid-19 detection, improved accuracy for global case tracking and prediction, wide review and collection of online articles relevant for awareness and assessment, and advanced chemical analysis to assist vaccine creation. Want some examples? From the BlueDot’s predictive awareness to Alibaba’s AI diagnostics ranging to transportation with the Hong Kong Mass Transit’s autonomous robotic cleaners and the herald of health-care AI with Boston Children’s Hospital’s HealthMap program, these programs have demonstrated a superior form of utilization of machine learning. Also noteworthy are DeepMind’s AlphaFold as well as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s assessment bot to finish with Facebook’s social network safety moderating. The icing on the cake comes from application with inherent ethical norms, such as BenevolentAI’s drug screening program.

The marked increase in experimentation in the pandemic, and the ensuing interest from governments and firms alike, represents a new state of affairs in the global conversation on AI.

As overwhelming this list of applications is, it demonstrates a broader public hope and commercial awareness for the increasing potential of AI as a fundamental piece of the modern technology landscape.

Reality before experiments are scaled

But a dose of reality is needed as the demand for experimentation grows into a demand for scaling. As not all problems demand AI solutions, nor are all existing AI solutions up to the task of many highly uncertain problems, so not all organizations are advanced enough to effectively deploy and leverage such solutions without creating second-order effects. While solutions at scale are needed, and new practices and means are in place to experiment, we need to be sure that organizations looking to put these experiments into play have a thorough understanding of what the “job to be done” really is. As with most transformations, such agendas are sometimes less about the technology than the culture, work, and mental models being changed such that new productivity, opportunities, and social advancement is actually achieved and made sustainable.

AI concerns

This concern extends to the question of how national  and municipal governments look to leverage these emerging technologies to help improve the speed, scale, and sophistication of responses to high-impact, low-probability events like large-scale systemic shocks. Whether it is governments looking for strategic investment for AI competency or for firms looking for proven AI applications, similar concerns need to emerge. For a more mature conversation, we need to move from what we want AI to do towards a more real, deeper conversation on what we need from AI in order to respond to crises while not generating a fundamental, deeper vacuum of rights.

We need to go further, as despite the innovativeness of those cases mentioned, broader strategies are needed for engaging with foresight into the principal and value-driven challenges brought on by AI. This will include creating the means for effective conversations on, amongst other things,  whether to sacrifice privacy to ensure health-care capacity, whether data ownership should be private or publicly managed, and whether the potential inequality from some applications outweigh the benefits.

What is the value of AI? As states look to AI to reshape their post-pandemic response, we need to have hard conversations on what the value of AI really is. All of this begins with a real appreciation for what AI can and cannot do when subjected to the demands of operational improvements at scale. These conversations need to happen together, and now to build better frameworks of use. Otherwise the huge potential of these technologies will be to no avail for the betterment of society when we need it the most.

About the Authors:
Mark Esposito Co-Founder & CLO, Nexus FrontierTech, Professor, Bestselling Author, Advisor to National Governments. 
Terence Tse is professor of finance at ESCP Business School and co-founder of Nexus FrontierTech. 
Josh Entsminger is a doctoral student in innovation and public policy at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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It is high time to rethink our parameters for dealing with the pandemic. What we need are leaders with judgment and common sense.

We are currently seeing an alarming new twist in the Covid narrative: while at the start of the pandemic the aim was to prevent our healthcare systems from collapsing, the goal now seems to be to stop anyone at all becoming ill. But the situation today is in no way comparable to that of spring. It is true that in much of Europe infections are again on the rise. Yet on the whole rising case numbers are having little effect on hospital bed occupancy or even on intensive care units. We are in a new phase of the pandemic, not a repeat of the first one. For now the collapse of our health systems is not imminent, nor, according to experts, is one anticipated.

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The reasons for this are multifactorial: on the one hand, a growing proportion of those affected in the new wave consists of the young, who mainly present with mild symptoms; on the other, better therapies are becoming available to treat more severe cases. Last but not least, it is being suggested in some quarters that as the virus becomes more infectious, it is also weakening in potency.   

Meanwhile, the collapse that we are actually suffering is that of the economy. According to OECD forecasts, Europe can expect to feel the greatest blow to its prosperity since the second world war, in which the first wave with its lockdown is set to leave much deeper traces (France and the UK more than -11%, Germany -6.8%, Austria -6.2%) than the second, which in turn may be morphing into something more like a “permanent wave”. This means that even if the health crisis were to worsen again, it would have to be weighed against the social and economic consequences. For one thing has become clear: even if a vaccine is forthcoming, it will not magic the problems away at a stroke. 

What we need from leadership today is clear thinking, sound judgment and common sense. That means being able to take the best insights from different kinds of expertise and blend them into decisions that are balanced and above all pragmatic, as Roger Martin, Julia Kirby and I outline in our HBR article on the approaches leaders should bring to different types of problem. Those who focus on counting infections while turning a blind eye to actual hospital admissions and deaths, let alone the enormous collateral damage currently being inflicted on the economy and society as a whole, are committing errors of thinking that do society a grave disservice. “If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. The authorship of this quote is disputed, but no one can doubt that in the current situation it hits the nail squarely on the head. It is high time to bring a different set of tools to the task of dealing with the pandemic.

About the Author:
Richard Straub is Founder and President of the Global Peter Drucker Forum. The 2020 Forum will take place on October 29 & 30 in the Vienna Hofburg Palace with the general theme: Leadership Everywhere – A Fresh Perspective on Management.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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In the midst of the perfect storm, driven by a global pandemic and the concomitant economic crisis, managers have to deal with an abundance of challenges popping up day to day. “No time for strategy and planning” is a frequently overheard claim in executive offices and boardrooms these days. Many leaders like to address the pandemic as a “Black Swan”. A nice try to excuse oneself from thorough and critical thinking.

In his book of the same name, US risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines a Black Swan as an event determined by three criteria: it is extremely rare, very impactful and can only be explained in retrospect. In this sense, the animal has also established itself as a popular mythical creature on the list of justifications for bad decision-making.

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Facing up to dangers: a question of will, not ability

Yet the truth is that most of the time we are not dealing with a Black Swan, but with a “Grey Rhino”. To see it is not a question of ability, but of will. US author Michele Wucker describes the rhino as a phenomenon that embodies the dangers of our time. Anyone who dares to take a closer look will recognize it.

Such is the case with Covid-19. In 2012, a risk analysis study by the German government presented  comprehensive documentation of a possible “pandemic caused by a virus Modi-SARS”. The Robert Koch Institute, the country’s disease control and prevention organization, together with other federal authorities developed a scenario of six million Germans falling ill at the peak of an imagined crisis. The rhinoceros thus identified has stood unnoticed ever since. 

US tech entrepreneur Bill Gates warned in a 2015 TED talk that the greatest threat that mankind faced was a virus epidemic. And as recently as 2019, US government agencies ran a full-scale simulation code-named Crimson Contagion bearing a frightening resemblance to the coronavirus crisis. There it was again, the big grey animal, in plain sight.

Ask the right questions

One lesson of COVID-19 is that leadership will need to change dramatically to face up to such threats in the future. The coronavirus might be a particularly severe crisis, but in an unstable world it certainly won’t be the last. As the pandemic recedes, it will leave dire economic, social and political consequences in its wake. The environmental crisis is not far behind. Managers relying on the Black Swan as an excuse for lack of anticipation will and should no longer be let off the hook. Whoever sees themselves as an animal tamer in a business suit should forget Black Swans and focus instead on the Grey Rhinos.

Taming them requires the will and inner readiness to derive the necessary conclusions and make the right decisions, led not by answers but by tough questions: Is there someone you can call in to talk to in a spirit of trust to walk through decision scenarios? Is there someone in your own team who can tell you what you don’t want to hear, but definitely should? And is the team that is involved in the decision diverse enough to think about options from different directions and put them to the test? 

Answer these questions with “yes” and you are at least prepared to face the Grey Rhino. Those who still believe that leadership expresses itself most impressively through lonely despotic decisions in a public display of one’s own magnificence will soon feel the animal’s sharp horn between their ribs. And the rhinoceros will trample not only the careless leader, but also many people entrusted to their care. Companies will go under and entire sectors of the economy collapse. This is how systemic risks arise from management and decision-making crises: so no more excuses – look the future straight in the face. 

About the Author:
Miriam Meckel is founding publisher of ada, an education initiative for the future of work and socio-technological change, and Professor for Media and Communication Management at St. Gallen University

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Reversed leadership makes organizations more resilient. The need for resilience has never been greater than now. As Peter Drucker said, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” How can management go beyond yesterday’s logic? By practicing reversed leadership.

Leadership has little to do with hierarchy and everything to do with exerting influence that brings about change. Exerting influence and playing a reversed leadership role is grounded in two fundamental behaviors: practicing wise ignorance and listening to the edges.

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Practice wise ignorance

Leaders need to live attitudes of wise ignorance, learning to say, “I don’t know”, inviting questions and debate. They need to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity, knowing that no one has all the answers. They must be able to admit they do not know everything. And by encouraging everyone in the organization to do the same they create a culture stronger than one based around agreements and consensus. Trying to build consensus decreases resilience because it limits the number of opinions and options when a crisis comes, and decisions are needed.

The diversity of thought and ideas that result from wise ignorance and an open and participatory leadership style enable the organization to be better prepared when a crisis happens.  Unfortunately, few leaders understand this.

In my annual global surveys, I asked approximately 300 organizations if their leaders had an “open and participatory” leadership style. In 2013, only 13% “strongly agreed” and in 2018 that proportion had barely crept up to 19%. If we include people who replied “somewhat open and participatory”, we only reach approximately 50%. These figures are discouraging. They stagnated as shown by four surveys over a six-year period and indicate that top leadership in most organizations is stuck in a hierarchical, command-and-control mindset. When unexpected events occur, their automatic reaction will be to look at best practices and benchmarking–all based on the past–and unlikely to be suited to the present context.

Listen to the edges

Staying in touch with the present reality means being close to the action. People on the edges are often customer-facing and see more of the external world than do people in the inner parts of the corporation. They are the organization’s eyes and ears, picking up signs of disruption and changing needs faster and earlier than their more internal colleagues. These front-liners are usually far from the decision-making center, and the reality they see is too often blurred by management filters. Understanding the constantly evolving context requires connections and interactions between the edges and the center.

Act with today’s logic

Peter Drucker’s message rings stronger than ever. Leaders must go beyond yesterday’s logic and act with today’s logic. This means building a new work culture that encourages questioning the status quo, continually scanning the horizon and listening to different voices that challenge ingrained practices. The wealth of information, diversity of ideas and new energy that flows from this style of leadership leads to new, unimagined opportunities. This approach personifies reversed leadership. People are mobilized to influence change from wherever they are in the organization. A foundation is built for proactive resilience that prevails through turbulent times and beyond any given crisis.

Do you have reversed leadership?

Ask yourself these four questions to see if reversed leadership exists in your organization:

1. Are people regularly encouraged to give input to business goals and plans?
2. Do people feel free to challenge business models and work practices, to question the status quo, and to propose new ways of working?
3. Is it relatively easy to get a new idea to someone at the senior executive level?
4. Are there systems for getting input from the edges, such as from the customer-facing colleagues?

About the Author:
Jane McConnell, author of The Gig Mindset Advantage: Why a Bold New Breed of Employee is Your Organization’s Secret Weapon in Volatile Times, (available in April 2021) and has conducted 12 years of research on organizations in the digital age.

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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