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Day One (Published on April 13, 2021 on LinkedIn)

I am launching my own leadership development business--New Coast. Today is day one. There, I said it out loud. Scary, but exciting.

Why focus on leadership? Because that journey is also scary and exciting--people in leadership have the potential to make a significant impact on others and throughout the world. However, we’ve all been there ourselves or seen it happen time and again. Great managers with high potential get promoted into leadership roles and then struggle to maintain the same caliber impact and engagement with their now larger teams.

At New Coast, we help good leaders become great leaders and we help new leaders make the transition to leadership through a unique support structure of executive coaching paired with just-in-time tactical tools and skills development to address current business demands.

If this sounds like a challenge you’re facing, let’s connect: rich@newcoastconsulting.com.

Rethinking

Leadership Beyond Clairvoyance and Hubris

by Rich Vincent

Framing the Moment

Sixty years ago, in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific progression “is not evolutionary, but rather a ‘series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectual revolutions,’ and in those revolutions ‘one conceptual world view is replaced by another.’”

Kuhn elaborates on what happens when people underestimate the foundational significance of a scientific discovery, and what happens when people do realize the significance and what it threatens, and how the subsequent revolution transpires.

There’s a parallel here to the world we’re living in today. Orienting ourselves in critical moments of transformation, we must ask: How do we prepare? What do we need to learn? What is the profile of an effective leader? We can ask these questions of ourselves in both our personal and professional lives.

Building for Robustness: An Adaptive Strategy

Leaders prize agility, but often they don’t know what the target is. The hardest habit for leaders to break is that they’ve been trained on certain skills and abilities with a view toward predicting the future. They’re supposed to be brilliant strategists who are borderline clairvoyant. But that’s silly. If you seduce yourself into thinking you’re smart enough or clairvoyant enough, you’re going to get yourself wiped out. In a world of rapid change, it's assuming you know something that gets you blindsided. What you are certain couldn’t possibly happen is where you never bother to look and it’s exactly what nails you.

What’s important in an adaptive strategy is that you build for robustness, not clairvoyance.

Clairvoyance is saying to oneself: “I’m going to build the strategy because the world is going to look like this.” And the truth is, many of us have been taught to strategize like this. But in the times of uncertainty, many different worlds may emerge. Only the fool thinks he or she can place a bet on what that looks like. So, is there a strategy that not just survives but excels in wildly diverse worlds?

We have to shift our strategy in tandem with the world that is emerging today. But who shepherds us through this period and what is our strategy?

A Lesson on Building for Robustness

Many years ago, a graduate student at a prestigious business school, in association with their executive education program, wanted to find out: How do you tumble into the future successfully?

A group of executives was handed a list of questions, the answers to which weren’t immediately clear, but not so far-fetched that they couldn’t be uncovered. The test consisted of 10 questions such as: How many gas stations are in an average city? Approximately how many stars are in the Milky Way galaxy? How many manhole covers are there in a city of five square miles?

The execs could give their answers as a range, as narrow or wide as they wanted. But there was a catch: They had to be 90% certain that the right answer would lie within that range. Not complicated.

Before taking the test, the execs were asked to predict their final scores, which you might think would average at 90% since that was the level of certainty required. The predicted scores, however, averaged at 94%, meaning a few of the execs thought, “I’m nailing this at 100%.” The execs then took the test, and once they finished, they exchanged the tests for each other to grade.

Now, what was the mood in the room as the test answers were announced? Shock. Dismay. Resistance.

The average score of these senior executives was 23%. So, what was the mechanism at work here? There was an obvious strategy of how to get the right answer: You set your range as zero to infinity, and you’re right 100% of the time. Easy.

That doesn’t account, however, for the value placed on guessing with a certain amount of precision. We’ve been reinforced our whole lives in business to think that precision equals accuracy. It is very hard for executives to not feel overconfident when precision is what they’ve been prepared for; they feel pressured to provide an answer that’s more precise than some wild guess any amateur off the street could give.

Part of the transformation of strategy that we must adopt is recognizing the premium of setting a fairly wide bracket. A robust strategy is one that accommodates a wide bracket. That's not what happened in our story about these executives.

Combining Adaptive Capacity with Robustness

It’s not always just about setting the wide range. The wide range is simply a robust strategy in that it can survive if different worlds emerge. But as you arrive at key vista points along your journey — as you tumble into the future — you do see and learn certain things if your eyes are open. You have to have the ability to be agile once things are known within that wide bracket. The ability to be consciously agile as you journey into the future is marrying adaptive capacity with your robust strategy.

Here’s how most people are used to approaching strategy. They stick a flag out at some point in the future, and because they're a very smart person, it’s essentially thought of as a sure thing: That is where they’re headed. And because they’re gifted, they can take a series of steps back from this flag and map the strategy it takes to hit that point.

Now, as they get a few steps into the future, they realize that the flag’s location isn’t exactly right. So they think, “Ok, if I land instead within certain boundaries, I’ll still get credit. The flag is basically right!”

As they get to the next vista point in their journey, they see and learn some more things, and realize that their bracket isn’t quite right either. So they broaden their bracket. It’s a little humiliating, but they push on. Now that they know more, they adjust the breadth of what they think will accomplish the goal of, quite frankly, proving that they were right about the flag’s placement in the first place. (Remember the business school story!)

The thinking here is that they’re committed to this strategy, but they’ll never admit that sticking to a set strategy might be an outcome of executive hubris. As we’ve gotten to a new vista point, and because fate is cruel, the bracket widens again. Rinse and repeat. The whole strategy is anchored by the hubris of the first guess. You keep broadening from this initial flag to accommodate reality as it unfolds.

What have we surfaced here? Even though it may sound like semantics, it’s exactly the opposite. We ought to say, “we’re going in with a wide bracket and we’re 90% sure; we’re building the strategy for robustness.” We want strategies that succeed (or at least survive) if any of widely divergent worlds emerge. Now, we tumble into the future and get to a vista point, and because of our adaptive capacity, we can instead narrow the bracket.

What this means is that we must be here to learn. We must be agile.

The probability range of what can happen is constrained by what has already happened. With each vista point, we can refine and focus our strategy, as the world becomes a little less unknown. The strategy is actually getting narrower and narrower as facts emerge, instead of getting broader and broader as our guesses are proven wrong.

Now, none of this works, if you don’t have the humility and rationality to accept a broad bracket — accepting that you don’t know what you don’t know. The core aim is to preserve your future opportunities through robustness, as opposed to arrogant clairvoyance, and the critical capability here is the agility to accommodate reality as it emerges. You get to a vista point, you see it for what it is, and you adapt. Zero to 100, 100% of the time. That’s the way you play this game.

A Final Note: Generous Mercy

If leaders don’t know this approach, it’s not their fault. Rather it’s the fault of the premium we all place on expertise. For leaders and experts — everything in our life has taught us to value precision, and our experience has reinforced it. In a fundamental sense, conventional knowledge has flipped in a time of crisis.

The things that brought us victory in the past are, quite possibly, the things that will upend us in the future. In an uncertain world, certitude is what gets you killed. Instead, we need to expand our capacity to learn and adapt. This is what true leadership is: The ability to be agile, to focus on a north star but be adaptive along the way.

https://youtu.be/bddZFZTL_-s (Published on June 30, 2020 on YouTube)