Energizing leadership in living businesses
How we intentionally design the human experience in an age of transformation
It’s broadly acknowledged that our organisations and institutions are being reshaped by the impacts of significant macro forces and mega trends. This is an era characterised by accelerating change, interconnected opportunities and challenges, and altered expectations from employees and customers. This environment requires leaders who are in-tune with these forces and can muster their own energy and that of the organisation they steward.
Having recently spent a few days in Kingscliff, New South Wales, at the Leading Now Summit, I want to reflect on how I connected to some elements of leadership and the energy that this creates. To me this was the emergent theme of the summit, where leaders and their guides from around Australia gathered to explore how we intentionally design the human experience in an age of transformation.
In the face of external forces described above, many leaders find themselves overwhelmed, reactive and eternally busy. Jason Fox, author, leadership advisor and keynote speaker at the event, told us the most common theme amongst leaders he interacts with is they feel ‘busy’, the second most common was ‘challenged by change’. The problem with being busy is that it dampens our ability for cognitive flexibility and we default to default, favouring quick fixes, familiar approaches and often control of the status quo. These mental models are not helpful when change is the new normal and there is no longer ‘business as usual’. Within a leader this might be visible from the outside as someone who reacts, is agitated, low in energy or even lacks presence in a space. The same can be said for the organisation they lead, reacting, surviving and trending towards irrelevance.
New organisational patterns, systemic structures and values are needed that shape and are shaped by all members of the organisational system including leaders, partners and customers.
At Fjord, we are often asked to work with our clients to reimagine employee experiences or even the organisation and its purpose. I view this work as the craft of nurturing ‘Living Businesses’ that mimic some elements of successful ecologies. Our focus must be beyond organisations and be capable of designing any of the ‘vessels’ that will deliver the future experiences we envisage, including communities, cities or governments. But what about the people who will lead these service ecologies? Or the people who take up some form of leadership role. How do we design their experience or the system in which they deliver change? How might we help them move from the archetype of the ‘conqueror’ to one of ‘gardener’ or ‘explorer’?
A Living Business is characterised by a varying balance of personality, relationships, instinct and craft. The personality sets the tone for the rest of the essential elements within the organisation, it acts as our ‘advisor’ and informs us when we aren’t being authentic, conveys a sense of consistency, internal causality and distinctiveness. Personality is the characteristic pattern of our behaviours, thoughts and feelings.
“Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal condition of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination.”
— Carl Gustav Jung, 1934
A powerful and focused personality in an organisational context influences how it nurtures its craft, how it decides to act with instinct and how it chooses to leverage relationships. The metaphor for this interplay is like the alignment between our human neural-networks in our head, heart and gut. I will write more about how this can influence organisational design in another post. But for now, I want to reflect on how our energy connects these systems and how creating space can help alignment and balance needed for the essential elements. It also gives us a platform for dealing with the two fundamental elements of working in complex systems; emergence and leverage. To help explore these inter-relationships I want to look at two complex systems; 1) Ourselves as leaders and 2) Our Organisations as Living Businesses.
Lesson One: Observe the living system
The first step in fostering emergence is increasing awareness of the system so you can concentrate not on the building blocks of construction but the principles of organisation. Here the organisation can be seen as a living system.
The summit was kicked-off on the first night by Dr Louise Mahler, a leading expert in the psychology of engaging face-to-face, who gave us the first lesson in energy and how we use it. This session, and the previous coaching I have directly received from her, highlighted to me how our thoughts and energy are made visible in how we hold our bodies and express ourselves. Our organisations and their brands display similar traits, visible in the personality.
There is a voice of leadership that we identify externally as loud, low and deliberate, but this voice must come from within. The powerful voice comes from the space we free up, whether it’s giving space for expansion of our diaphragm in our bodies or space to employees in organisations to explore purpose. There are some ‘vital signs’ visible in the simple act of expressing ourselves to others that can highlight what is happening within us as leaders or organisations.
What are the words we are using? What shape are we projecting? What is the pitch and tone? What do people see when we make first impressions? How is our personality leveraged for performance? Think of these as system or organisational characteristics — made visible in individuals’ lived experiences. Reinforcing this example, we heard from a large multinational health and insurance organisation the story of how they are successfully anchoring behaviour in purpose (or personality) and making the work more human, creative and healthy.
The lesson Louise offered us was around watching our expression to identify how we are manifesting our internal tensions or revealing our power.
Lesson Two: Use purpose to foster network conditions and relationships
Another fundamental element of a Living Business is relationships. Here, organisations bring together a new series of relationships that are integral to their value proposition or purpose. Today’s businesses must define, facilitate and nurture each relationship in their ecosystem, continually innovating to bridge predicted gaps between their service and customer or employee expectations. However, the relationships that occur on every level are vital to the strength of the overall strength of the ecosystem. These connections cannot just be made at the highly visible, strategic level. Leading in this space requires tending to (gardening) conditions in which new behaviours and directions of the organisation emerge through interaction. This is especially important when the pace of change demands a network that constantly forms and reforms, learns and unlearns.
Ruth Allen, General Manager of People and Culture at Origin, a large, integrated energy company shared her experience in creating the space for their employees to swarm around internal people experience challenges, co-create the solutions and run with them. She shared how attending to the group dialogue and stories in their organisation revealed signals of ‘how things are’ that the typical organisational hierarchy may not have revealed before. Additionally, this also produced an understanding of how the organisational system will affect execution.
The result is an organisation that could figure out how to solve a previously ‘un-addressable’ conditions around diversity, inclusion and flexibility. The networked swarmed, solved the problem and made it happen. Leadership provided the boundaries, new dialogue and channels but resisted the temptation to control. The entire workforce benefits from this process and what it produces. In this case, it’s a world leading level of flexibility built into roles for that industry, or greater integration with the communities in which they operate, highlighting just two outcomes.
The lesson Ruth offered was we as leaders need to create space and energy around interaction and networking as well as the rituals which foster this work environment. We must allow behaviours of individuals to emerge, rather than trying to control them. Additionally, we cannot understand the whole by the sum of its parts but rather through the interaction of the parts.
Diagnosing this element of the living business, looking for promising or worrying signals, is deeply rooted in the stories and structures that emerge from the interactions.
Lesson Three: Operations need to courageously support quests
We know of instinct as an innate pattern of behaviour that allows us to respond to stimuli. Typical organisations have quite rigid patterns that don’t allow them to respond or adapt quickly. This results in missed opportunities to innovate, adapt or learn.
Dr Jason Fox worked with us to identify an alternate pattern of behaviour of leveraging curiosity and working our way towards progress. He shared how embarking on quests provides us with options and then we can experiment, which help us to form strategy that delvers meaningful progress (in the form of missions). This kind of process is not new to design thinking practitioners.
The achievement of a clear sense of progress is fundamental to employees feeling that they are doing great work. However, progress does not mean being rapid or busy. It means escaping the curse of efficiency and not taking short-cuts. It means using both our fast and slow thinking systems to create space. Escaping the routine of efficiency takes courage, which I think sums up the element of instinct perfectly. Courage comes from the gut, is represented as group intelligence and allows our organisations (or leaders) to cope with forms of emerging opportunities. It means we are not fearful of the unknown but have a mechanism of dealing with it, it also means we can mobilise our craft into action when necessary.
Leaders must be able to cultivate experimentation, novelty and prototyping; these support the emergence of progress and can become positive contrast to the ‘default system’. That is, they act to challenge the assumptions that may have brought the organisation to this point of success but could ultimately undermine its future (described as the inevitable decent into irrelevancy that occurs after the death of empathy and loss of sight of the market).
The lessons that Jason offered demonstrate the need for organisations to be mindful of their default habits that operate around the delusion of efficiency. Rather, we need to develop rituals that allow us time for sense-making as well as meaningful progress.
In an organisation, we may diagnose positive signals around balancing of thinking and doing, of pioneering and operationalising, of continually launching quests and learning from failure.
Lesson Four: Take care of energy and balance
Early on the first full day there was a keynote from Katherine Boiciuc, Director of Business Capability GES, Telstra. In that conversation she shared a witty observation that we take care of our devices fastidiously, making sure they are fully charged each night, yet we don’t tend to ourselves with the same care. The best leaders undertake surprisingly similar sets of routines to ensure their energy is in balance. For example, they often rise before dawn, have a daily exercise routine and mindfulness practice, and they read a lot (but not social media!). I think all of these routines are equally important for an organisational system, maintaining its vitality and alignment between personality, relationships, instinct and craft.
What practices does the organisation have that allows it to rise early? Finding that quite space to watch new horizons? What do we do that keeps us in shape and flexible? How do we practice internal mindfulness and focused attention?
I was reminded again this week of the need for a level of ‘disequilibrium’ that is needed in a healthy system. We must not try and seek harmony of all elements at once but rather play with them and foster emergence that is required for that organisation at that time. Leaders set broad orienting values and create conditions for the most appropriate or timely specifics. The Japanese concept in traditional aethetics of Wabi-sabi sums this up nicely.
Wabi-sabi “nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect” (Richard Powell).
A true Living Business nurtures its energy, leverages each of the core elements of Personality, Relationship, Instinct and Craft. Equally, whether its an organisation or an individual leader, I feel this energy must be applied knowing nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect.
Fjord Living Services
The Era of Living Services
https://livingservices.fjordnet.com
