Futuring Architectures.
a New Approach to Leadership in the 21st Century
Hundreds of chief executives from the Business Roundtable, including leaders of Apple, JPMorgan Chase, Pepsi and Walmart, issued a statement on the “purpose of corporation” arguing that companies should no longer focus on maximising shareholder value, but instead commit to the broader ecosystem of stakeholders such as customers, employees, suppliers and communities. Organisations are opening up. Reasons, numbers and statistics do not hold any information about the depth and strength of the relationships between people. The more relationships there are the more complex the network, and the inherent complexity needs to be understood. This shift in thinking is happening and the change in perspectives calls for a new approach to leadership to be adopted.
Everyone has their own unique view and sees things differently. If we subscribe to systems thinking, we could say that our identities are a messy collection of the contexts we are participating in. This kind of perception reveals an abundance of information we are continuously processing in order to make sense of our world. What happens in our brains is a mess and in order to master that mess, the ability to connect the dots appears to be more crucial than ever. The result of this is the way we express ourselves. We tell stories by connecting those dots, all the time. I am telling a story right now. That’s how we have always been communicating, we use stories in many forms to shape and articulate our perception of reality: graffiti, music, paintings, but also presentations or any other reporting activities.
It is fair to say that businesses play a vital role in our realities. They create jobs, opportunities, foster innovation and provide essential goods and services. We can observe the predominance of technology companies, which have driven major societal change through their role in every aspect of our online activities. Business and technology are integrated, one can’t exist without the other one, they are not pull-apart-able from each other.
And success of the businesses, especially those that had embraced software earlier than most of the others have only understood, goes hand in hand with the leaders that run those businesses. Some of them have been more influential, the others less. But essentially, it’s the leaders that connect the dots and pull everything together to create a cohesive organisation. It’s exactly the ability of connecting the dots that becomes critical when it comes to perform in a complex environment such as these companies do and are.
The Bottom-Up Force and Open Structures
Digital ethics continue to take on new complexity as technology evolves. Suddenly, people have voice and they are not afraid of using it, the most daring example being the protest at Google against its controversial collaboration with the US Department of Defence (Project Maven). We are witnessing the times when traditional organisations feel being increasingly pressured and challenged by new players. They have been focusing on controlling and stabilising organisational structures for the sake of maximising value for shareholders throughout the past century.
This behaviour fit less and less the current paradigm. What got us here won’t get us there. As the world becomes more connected and dynamic, the managerial belief that made us break complex issues down into their component parts does not keep things simple anymore. What we can learn from this belief is that the opposite of complexity is not simplicity.
Clearly, brand experiences that are adding to the bottom line and support actors that are not necessarily on their payrolls hold a globally leading position. There are 20 million registered developers on iOS that have collectively made about $100 billion in revenues. Airbnb enables access to 7 million unique places to stay in more than 100,000 cities, and all of this just in 10 years. Amazon hasn’t been contracting all the suppliers that come to its marketplace to offer products. They just show up and here they go. It’s not Marc Zuckerberg who is creating all the content on Facebook. It’s also my mom. And the list of open companies goes on…
Organisations gradually focus on establishing platform strategies to integrate business and technology for growth and impact, and especially for evolution of the current and future ecosystems, for a good reason. The necessity to come up with new business models that include a broader view on business ecosystems is inevitably of primary concern for everyone who wants to sustain and thrive.
This is a shift about understanding and learning from the interrelationships that integrate complex systems, and not about controlling them. People seek meaning and purpose, and if you are not able to fulfil that need, they’ll leave and go elsewhere, or start a business on their own. Because how difficult is it to start a business nowadays? The command-and-control leftovers of the management century become less relevant and woven into the way people work. Unleashing the immense potential of people is the new driver of evolution. The question naturally follows: What kind of leaders will serve this need?
Unleashing the immense potential of people is the new driver of evolution.
Setting the Context
Michael Lurie and Laura Tagelberg suggest four key attributes of successful leadership of the 21st century: visionary, architect, coach and catalyst. It is interesting to see the overlap of these qualities and the qualities of today’s enterprise architects that they naturally evolve towards. It’s the architects’ mission to translate the business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change. They enable enterprises’ evolutions by creating, communicating, and improving the key principles and models that describe its future state. As visionaries, they empower people by providing them with tools so they can translate for themselves what their position in their ever-evolving environment is and could be.
It’s the architects’ mission to translate the business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change.
The architecture is driving technology enabled business. Digital business brings about opportunities for architects to expand beyond to the role of innovator that understands and continuously tracks new emerging technologies. This is what makes the role of architects more and more critical for the enterprises’ evolution. They connect the dots by integrating other’s perspectives with their own original thinking in form of actionable recommendations. As such, they are increasingly rethinking their position as internal consultants to serve other leaders and rapidly deliver business outcomes. By giving people the right tools and showing best practices, they ensure that the organisation is resilient and capable of responding to any disruptive forces coming from outside-in.
If there is one emerging leader that is to envision the future state of your organisation, it’s the architect that sets the context for people to participate in, towards that future state. Here’s where story-telling as the primary leadership skill certainly shapes the emergence of a clear, compelling purpose and vision that resonates throughout the organisation and ecosystem of all stakeholders that it eventually commits to. The contexts add new information to the collective identity of the organisation and to the identity of each participant that makes sense of its own world.
Unleash the potential. Nurture the people. Tell stories.
