Becoming the Phoenix that Rises from the Ashes
One of the first articles that I wrote in this blog was about the VUCA worldthat we live in. Bob Johansen from the Institute of the Future introduced this term several decades ago referring to the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous context in which organizations operate nowadays. And what a clear example we have in this Covid19 crisis! In a couple of months, we went from a debate about when the next recession will hit based on economic figures in Europe and China, to a deep recession with a third of the world’s population in a home lockdown and an almost complete economic halt in the US, Europe, India and many other countries. I find it interesting that we will be coming out of this crisis during Spring time in the Northern hemisphere, during the rebirth of life, a time of change and new flourishing beauty. And for those in the Southern hemisphere, I love the fall time, a time to shed the dead foliage and get ready for future growth.
One of the bits of wisdom that Johansen’s research introduced, was the need to develop a Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Agility (the VUCA prime) to manage the VUCA elements of our worlds. This is, without a doubt, one of the first lessons to come out from this crisis. What is the vision for your organizations for the next few months? How are you planning to rejoin the world economy and how will you serve your customers? Do you have enough information to understand where you are currently operating and the new context in which you will be operating? Do you have a clear understanding on what your customers are going through and how to best serve them? Do you have a clear goal in mind for the next 3-, 6- and 12-months? What are you hoping to accomplish over the short and long term? And are you ready to change and adapt to the new environment?
And by the way, did you ask some of those questions about yourself as a leader? Did your definition of “success” evolve after this humane calamity that we lived through? Did you have a chance to define what you would like to be remembered for? What surprised you about yourself and other people over the last couple of months? What new joy did you develop during the quarantine and what new habits would you like to keep? Self-awareness is paramount for future success.
Lots of good food for thought there and it will be very important. Your employees will come out from their hibernationin a state of stupor, incredibility and anxiety, depending on their level of resilience and their mindset. Resilience is built by looking at things from a different perspective, seeing the good in the bad, understanding that any situation could have been made even worst that what it is, and that resilience is something that build by looking for the positive in life. Were you cultivating the growth mindset of your employees? Are they going to see this situation as an opportunity to grow and develop new skills as I mentioned last week? Are they willing to investigate new possibilities and see obstacles and challenges are opportunities to better themselves? If your employees and customers have a fixed mindset (instead of a growth mindset), they may stand in front of the new obstacle trying to apply the “old solutions” to the new problems and growing frustrated and tired of the resistance. After all, did you instill enough Candor in the values of your organizational culture to make individuals feel safe to bring up issues and challenges? Do your employees feel safe bringing up issues and new opportunities? Being able to speak one’s mind and feeling safe doing so is a good tool to fight the burnout that you will most likely be facing as people change gears and reincorporate into the daily work activities in this changed world. Are you making sure that people know how to best communicate, not just with you, but within their teams, functions, groups, within the organization? Is anyone looking at incivility within the organization? Most likely, uncivil behaviors may grow as people come back from working in their home, working behind a screen and with greater privacy. As a leader, set the example yourself acting with humility and asking for recommendations, opening channels of communication and optimizing the diversity of your teams.
Don’t forget that when we talk about diversity, we are going beyond the concept of race, ethnicity and gender. We are also looking at educational background, personality types, age, economic background… we are seeking differences among individuals that would provide us with as many different perspectives as possible. This is the best way to cease new opportunities in a creative way and to grow our employees. We are now talking about vertical development, being able to grow your own people from within, not just providing them with more skills (horizontal development). As a leader, you are going to have to cultivate creativity through inclusiveness to really “think outside the box”, and come out with new solutions that would move you from the red ocean into the blue ocean. Clayton Christensen mentioned that there are two types of innovation — the sustaining innovation, that comes from making whatever your services or product better for your current customers, basically, becoming more focused and better at what you were already doing, and the disruptive innovation, where you discover new solutions by not serving your current customers but by seeking new opportunities among your non-customers. Those disruptive innovations will bring you into the blue ocean, a competing place where the competition is irrelevant, and you are able to bring a new value to new customers that no one had delivered before.
To move into that disruptive innovation, into that Blue Ocean strategy, the innovation will result from internal disagreement which should be fueled by diversity and inclusion. In an article entitled “ Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change”, [1]published in 2000, Christensen and Overdorf argued that in order to innovate and come ahead of the competition on our changing world, you need to have an organization, opened to change, with a set of values that allow employees to prioritize orders and objectives based on the current context, customer needs and ideas, providing the employees with the commander’s intent, the idea that leadership will point the overarching priorities but not the “how” to get there. Commander’s intent is at the root of the Clarity from the VUCA prime that we spoke about at the beginning of this article. Supported by an inclusive diverse culture that invites employees to actively and safely participate in the decisions of the organization, leaders need to candidly involve all employees to investigate the new needs of the market that they have ignored. Do not forget that most organizations aim to become more effective at doing what they have already mastered. So, push people outside their comfort zone, seeking to understand what are the new resources that may be needed in this new world that we will face after this pandemic and how we can better support that innovative effort, from the perspective of changing or creating new teams, new structures and new processes to innovate.
After all, challenges are but opportunities waiting to be had. Those that seek those opportunities would bloom again in the new business world that would emerge from this pandemic.
[1] Christensen, C. M., & Overdorf, M. (2000). Meeting the challenge of disruptive change. Harvard business review, 78(2), 66–77.
