The relentless twin demands of executing for today while reimagining for tomorrow, mean that leaders are grappling with an accelerated phase of business disruption, with more than $41 trillion of enterprise value at risk. But is enough being done to strengthen trust and creative resilience, which I define as the curiosity to learn and the courage to unlearn? Learning helps us evolve and unlearning helps us as the world evolves. 

The writer George Orwell, best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, would have relished these times. Fake news, false facts, meme warfare, data breaches, tainted food and digital skulduggery – it’s not your imagination. More companies are operating at the edge of ethics and the commercial and human implications of truth decay are significant, with the impact on businesses alone estimated at over $7 trillion globally in lost productivity. According to Hack Future Lab’s Truth Decay study, 10 out of 15 industry sectors have reported a collapse in trust over the last three years, and there are plenty of examples to explain why, from the collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges with a market cap of $32 billion, to the culture of intimidation and secrecy at Theranos Inc., a biotech startup that was once valued at $10 billion. 

Volatility on steroids

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) marks the biggest US bank failure since Washington Mutual during the 2008 financial crisis. With multiplying and overlapping disruptions on the rise, how can business leaders rebuild years of eroded trust and resilience? According to Hack Future Lab, 67% of the population do not believe today’s organisations are fit for purpose, and one-third of workers think their job will not exist in a few years, because of AI, robotics and automation. The politics of deglobalisation and global labour supply problems favour ChatGPT, Bard AI and the strategy of ‘AI everywhere’; mentions of AI in investor calls across 9,000 global companies have reached a new high. Now is the time to replace a ‘wait and see’ strategy with an ‘explore and disrupt’ one. 

One of the clearest signs of creative resilience is reframing and rethinking our assumptions about what stays, what changes, and what goes. This matters because the complexity of issues is outstripping our human capacity to respond — leading to a high leadership tax (less time to focus on value creation, productivity and growth) and record levels of overload, distraction and risk of burnout.  Creative resilience is a form of future readiness and an accelerant for turning volatility into a tailwind for strategic courage and trust.

Trust is your creative resilience multiplier

Money is the currency of transactions and trust is the currency of creative resilience. Trust-focused leaders champion the ‘spirit of trust’ principle by going big on context- and direction-setting and sense-making, starting with asking deep human-centric questions that make workers think hard rather than feel good.

• Is trust our #1 value? If not, why not?
• Do we minimise or maximise trust and responsibility?
• Do we commodify or humanise trust?
• Do we obsess over trust, not just metrics?
• Do we make the invisible visceral?
• Do we enable wise trust-based choices, not just the fastest?
• Do we prioritise trust alongside growth and scale?

The trust focus of companies such as Patagonia, Lego Group and Apple enables workers to explore early-to-exploit knowhow sooner and is the secret to a productive, flexible and happy workforce. It is defined by four DELTAs (Distinct Elements of Trust and Agency) which are: 

1. Inclusion Trust: Do I bring my unique and authentic self to work?
2. No-Fail Trust: Can I take trust leaps into the unknown?
3. Challenger Trust: Do I speak up (play to win) or stay silent (play to lose)?
4. Team Trust: Are we better and wiser than the sum of our parts?

Scaling creativity over conformity is a shortcut to being forward-looking and adaptable in nature – yet leaders always overestimate the risk of trying something new and underestimate the risk of standing still. “Creativity is essential to resilience – it brings the new and unexpected ideas so necessary in times of disruption,” maintains Tim Brown, Co-Chair of IDEO. 

No-regret decisions

Regret of inaction outweighs the regret of action by 3:1, and two of the biggest regrets are insufficient boldness and insufficient trust. Let’s not waste one of the biggest reframing opportunities of our lifetimes. As global growth stalls and organisations struggle to retain top talent, trust and creative resilience are key to building a sustainable and human-centric future. Leaders who want to harness the upside of disruption should reflect on whether their existing cultures, structures and leadership are built for trust and creative resilience. To change the game we need to make game-changing moves. Start by asking what ‘Future Success Headlines’ we want to be written about us and how we will make trust and creative resilience a central pillar for leading and thriving in an age of discontinuity.

Registration for Creative Resilience: Leading in An Age of Discontinuity at the Global Peter Drucker Forum, Nov 30 + Dec 1, 2023:

http://www.druckerforum.org/home/ 

About the Author:

Terence Mauri is the founder of management think tank Hack Future Lab, Entrepreneur Mentor at MIT, and Adjunct Professor at IE Business School where he speaks on leadership, strategy and culture. His latest book The 3D Leader: Take your leadership to the next dimension

Interview with Terence Mauri, Founder of Hack Future Lab, MIT Entrepreneur Mentor and Visiting Professor at IE Business School 

While leaders all over the world are rethinking the future of work, talent and leadership what are the top success headlines for 2023?

The big story for leaders in 2023 is “Forever Beta”, which I define as leading and embracing perpetual learning. I was recently invited to speak at the Nordic Business Forum about the future of leadership and how many leaders are currently stuck between the certainties of the past and the unknowns of the future. I believe that a change in perspective is worth at least 80 IQ points,  because current perceptions are grounded in past assumptions. Re-perception — the ability to see, hear or become aware of something new in existing information and notice the blind spots that we are blind to — is at the heart of leadership and is crucial for sustaining vitality for the long term.

One of the clearest signs of a high learning orientation is rethinking your assumptions and updating your opinions.  It’s about directionality (clarity of mind) and materiality (activation). Operating at the edge of uncertainty, context becomes key. Leaders need to strengthen their context-setting, culture-setting, and belief-building to ensure future readiness. This means prioritising:

• context over control;
• curiosity over conformity;
• resilience over fear;
• speed over certainty;
• and simplicity over complexity

Leading and embracing perpetual learning inspires leaders to challenge the status quo and reject taken-for-granted norms. It starts with the curiosity to learn and the courage to unlearn. Learning helps us evolve; unlearning helps as the world evolves.

What are the biggest leadership challenges for 2023?

If there’s one challenge for leaders in 2023 it would be to remember that data isn’t the new oil. Attention is the new oil. Attention to culture and talent. Attention to sharpening the growth and value agenda. Attention to adopting new agile ways of leading. And attention to redesigning work that prioritises belonging (care and connection), becoming (growth and opportunity), and believing (radiate purpose and trust).

Research at Hack Future Lab shows that attention—and leadership attention in particular—has been blown up into millions of fragmented pixels. The accelerants have been technology and the changing nature of skills, talent and sustainable performance.

• 93% of leaders believe that their leadership attention is key to growth, while only 27% believe it’s a strength.
• 68% of leaders report either themselves or their teams are at risk of overload and overwhelm.
• 63% of leaders say that business decisions made today are more complex than they were even two years ago.
• 41% of leaders can link decision-making to enterprise value and strategy.
• 28% of leaders responsible for executing strategy could only list three of their company’s five strategic priorities.

The #1 takeaway is that leaders are tired. Zoom fatigue. Meeting fatigue. Collaboration fatigue. Solution fatigue. Brain fog. With over 41 trillion dollars of enterprise value at risk and 93% of leaders expecting significant industry disruption over the next three years, leaders should ask which leadership mindsets and behaviours are emerging, enduring and eroding? 

Can you share your team’s new research on the “tragedy of the horizon”?

I recently got to speak at a leadership conference on leading from the future,

alongside Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England.  A key moment of truth was the “tragedy of the horizon” – a leadership blind spot that most leaders suffer from. It means a failure to lead from the future versus leading from the past. Leading from the future means pursuing curiosity over conformity, resilience over fear and agency over “fake empowerment”. When we lead in outdated ways, it’s a tax on human potential and future potential.

Which is worse: “We saw the trends on the horizon”; or, “we saw the trends on the horizon and didn’t act”? Research at Hack Future Lab shows that to lead from the future, leaders should bring the future to the present to take action today. That’s how to solve the tragedy of the horizon.

A useful starting point is to ask human-centric questions that amplify sense-making and choice-making. What are the boldest questions you will ask in 2023? 

Do we practise bold and focused leadership?
Do we minimise or maximise freedom and responsibility?
Do we commodify or humanise the work experience?
Do we obsess over values, not just metrics?
Do we enable wise choices, not just the fastest?
Do we strengthen existing human brilliance?

Most organizations fall short when it comes to strategic alignment, too. No one knows your strategy. Not even your top leaders. Leaders should focus on three priorities and have a ‘No’ strategy to separate the signal from the noise and make things happen.

1. Who we are (strengthen identity)
2. How we operate (empower agility)
3. How we grow (build scalability)

Finally, what’s your biggest call to action for 2023?

As leaders respond to sticky inflation, supply-chain shocks, Green Swan events, recessions and the war in Ukraine, there is anxiety and fear but is enough being done to spark bold leadership around the things that matter: value creation, human vitality and resilient growth for the long-term. I challenge leaders to BE the change in 2023 and explore two big questions.

1. How will we capitalize on the disruptive forces of the last few years and empower others to lead and embrace perpetual learning with bold intentionality? 

2. Do we have the right mindsets, culture and behaviours to make this happen? If not, why not?

About the author:

Terence Mauri is the founder of management think tank Hack Future Lab, Entrepreneur Mentor at MIT, and Adjunct Professor at IE Business School where he speaks on leadership, strategy and culture. A new publication Building Resilient Organizations co-written with the world’s leading business thinkers in partnership with Thinkers50 and Brightline Initiative is out now.

When leaders consider the one thing they could do differently today to help their organization be future prepared, where do they start? With economic headwinds and tech disruption an everyday reality, the best solution is to embed what Peter Drucker called a “spirit of performance” that empowers workers to solve the biggest problems in the organization, calling out blind spots that leaders can’t see and making trust leaps into the future. One of the clearest signs of performance-focused leadership is reframing and rethinking assumptions about what stays, what changes and what goes. This matters because the complexity of issues is outstripping our human capacity to respond, leading to a high “leadership tax” (too much leadership time spent on shallow impact versus deep impact matters).

Performance-focused leadership is defined as a way of leading and managing that inspires workers to challenge the status quo and unlearn the always-done ways that have expired like yoghurt in the fridge. Too often, we value knowing above learning and prioritise doing over thinking. Leaders who care about cultivating a spirit of performance go big on better sense-making and choice-making and ask human-centric questions. 

Do we: 

• practise performance-focused leadership?
• minimise or maximise freedom and responsibility?
• commodify or humanise the work experience?
• obsess over values, not just metrics?
• make the invisible visceral?
• enable wise choices, not just the fastest?
• bind trust to freedom and responsibility?
• nurture mindfulness?
• nurture existing human brilliance?

Performance-focused companies such as Tata, Moderna, Hermès, Ocado and Estée Lauder are championing the “spirit of performance” by sharpening their performance agendas for culture, people and talent and building meaningful new ways of working despite their complex legacy businesses.

Performance-focused leadership

• Lead from the future, e.g. start writing your future success headlines, today
• Reskill and upskill workers with future-fit skills, e.g. bold thinkers and courageous doers
• Strengthen agility to maintain business continuity and resilience
• Engage workers by aligning opportunities to their individual sense of purpose
• Democratise career development and increase talent to value ratio
• Go big on truth, trust and transparency, e.g. trust is the ultimate human currency for unlocking a spirit of performance 
• Provide dynamic reward and recognition incentives for high-performing mindsets and behaviours that model ‘a spirit of performance’.

To spark sustainable performance that matters, leaders should reject “present forward” ways of thinking that simply extend existing assumptions, mental maps and performance frameworks to the future. A failure to reimagine performance is a failure of leadership. Instead, leaders should avoid empty slogans and emphasize binding together the Five R’s: reskilling, recruiting, rewards and recognition, retention, and reinvention.

In Performance, We Grow

As global growth stalls and organizations struggle to retain top talent, performance that matters is a source of resilience and future growth. Leaders who want to outpace the forces of disruption and strengthen human brilliance should reflect on whether their existing cultures, structures and work models are built for performance-focused leadership or conformity-focused leadership. Conformity-focused leadership is a way of leading that deters workers from challenging the status quo. It’s silence over speaking up, fear over freedom and “fake” empowerment whereby workers have the job title but not the power or autonomy to make decisions that matter. It demands deference and downgrades human potential. Hack Future Lab, a London-based think tank, took the pulse of 1,000 leaders globally. An overwhelming 84% agreed that performance-focused leadership is critical for business success and 68% agreed that it is the best way to boost contribution, engagement and retention. The bad news was that more than half the group reported that conformity-focused leadership was the norm and was not even on the C-suite’s agenda as a challenge to be tackled. The bottom line is that performance is seen as incredibly important, but is mismanaged and undervalued in most organizations.

You can’t explore a new world with an old map

Drucker said: “The only real difference between one organization and another is the performance of its people”. What’s clear is that people desire to thrive in human-led, psychologically safe cultures that elevate what makes them more human: believing (meaning), belonging (connection) and becoming (learn and grow). Data at the Mayo Clinic suggests that if less than 20% of your work consists of things you love to do, you are nearly seven times more likely to suffer from burnout (cognitive and emotional burnout) or “boreout”, i.e cognitive underload. 

Every company starts as an act of imagination, but to sustain vitality for the long-term requires reimagination, the human force that can push through inertia to create a better future. The disruptive trends that threaten to upend and reshape every vertical over the next five years — disintermediation of supply chains, erosion of traditional economies of scale advantages, and more companies dying younger — will only accelerate. The question is – as leaders how do we capitalize on the disruptive forces of the last few years, and become performance-focused leaders that balance empathy with economics and human maximization with profit maximization?

About the author:

Terence Mauri is founder of Hack Future Lab, an Entrepreneur Mentor at MIT, and Adjunct Professor at IE Business School and a specialist in leadership and change. His latest book, The 3D Leader: Take your leadership to the next dimension is out now.