This shift to the leadership of change is more than a shift in terminology and requires an updated set of knowledge and skills. So how are you keeping your ability to navigate fresh and relevant, in these extraordinary times?
Even after I qualified as a Commercial Ferry Captain, I had to go through re examination every few years with rigorous external assessment. This kept me current and gave me confidence that my skills and approach were still relevant and I was still learning. There was too much at stake to let such things lapse.
- How have you as a leader, been keeping up to date, your ability to navigate in the context of all the change we now face?
- How does this apply across all leadership, in your organisation?
In this post I consider how the leadership of change, needs to be re-examined in light of the shifts taking place through Digital Transformation, Data Analytics and in the economic restructuring that we are all experiencing..
Calling something ‘strategic’ doesn’t make it strategic! Putting AI in the text doesn’t make it cutting edge!
I was recently reviewing online leadership-training material being marketed specifically for these extraordinary times. The content was peppered with the words, ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘COVIVD 19’ to make it feel like cutting edge stuff. The reality was that it presented old and more importantly, very basic material, dressed up slightly differently. This might be OK as an introduction, but not for leaders operating in the complexity of today’s challenges.
I felt annoyed because our leaders deserve better than this.
As part of the training and development community we have to up our game. These areextraordinary times and we need to transform our material and approach. Technology is advancing at incredible speed and is redefining the nature of work. The Pandemic is amplifying this and reshaping how work is done and how international trade is conducted. The new economic equation is ‘Cost versus Resilience’. It’s of little help for the WEF to say that leaders have to ‘navigate uncharted waters’, if they have never been shown how to navigate.
As developers and coaches we need to show leaders how to find and steer a course through multiple choices and decisions that make up the unique context of today.
As leaders we need to be take time to reboot our knowledge and approach.
From the most recent evidence (Change-Ability Study conducted by Atticus), we know that change itself, is changing and a shift to cloud based technology means that it is no longer project based going from one transition to the next but continual and on going.
Is Digital an Enabler or a Driving Force of Change in its Own Right?
Digital offers incredible opportunities as well as presenting dilemmas:
- It continues to transform our world.
- The OECD says that DX will need to lead the world wide economic recovery.
- We know too that technology has to be systemically joined to ‘process’ and ‘people’, to fully deliver advantage. This has been talked about for years and now has to be acted on.
The current catastrophic failure rate of DX programmes alone, is 50% according to a senior EU evaluator because they are often delivered in isolation and without attention to the other critical factors.
So this marrying of effort has to be more than just a better collaboration of disciplines. It is much deeper and reflects a ‘new ecosystem of effort’. A colleague has described it as the shift from cooperation to collaboration through to concordance.
All of this requires a rethink of leadership approach and capability.
A Shift to Evidence Based Decision Making
Data analytics is also providing unique opportunities to build a systems view of operations, which is the antidote to Divisional and Departmental structures, and separatist patterns of behaviour.
It is revealing in most organisations that there are several hundred strategic units of information hidden from view of the strategic decision makers. So decisions are being made with incomplete data. Some decisions are little more than guess work. So Data Analytics is providing deep and joined up information, which should enable better evidence based decision-making.
The issue is that many leaders do not understand the data, defining this as “techy stuff” and throw it over the fence to ICT… who don’t get the strategic questions.
Along with the data are intertwined other information sources like experience and intuition. These are sophisticated processes that pick up a wider spread of information. These should be part of the wider sampling. However an issue arises when these are the only source, with leaders relying on ‘gut feeling’ alone. And then when it all goes wrong these same leaders use the excuse… ‘well that’s all very well in hindsight… but….’
Leadership of Change in Today’s Context
Navigating multiple decision points, whilst weighing risk and defining trade offs, lies at the heart of leadership. And what makes this challenging is that the complexity of the decision and sequencing is continually shifting at these times.
As mentioned earlier, many fail to understand that by shifting operations to cloud based technology you are in effect moving from, change as a project to project activity, to one that is continual, where digital becomes a change driver.
So the navigator needs to be able to ‘see’ with width and depth, whilst continually adjusting focus. Foresight is then used to extrapolate understanding over various time lines. This requires real mastery to deliver success.
An IBM study says that 20% of initiatives are highly successful delivering at least 75% of all projects with complete success. 35% are moderately successful whilst 45% are below average with a project success rate of less than 48%. (Making change work… while the work is changing. IBM Institute for Business Value)
So… many programmes fail to fully deliver. The leader’s ability to navigate these challenging waters lies at the heart of these figures and that is why developers and coaches need to support them with relevant multi-disciplined development and assessment. And leaders need to take time to develop and update. This gives personal confidence and a level of assurance to the organisation.
A Teleios Approach to Developing Leaders
Teleios with our tech partners, Cognition 24 and DX, plus our friends at itelligent-I and Henley Business School, have therefore been developing what we are told is a fresh and context relevant approach to the leadership of change.
We are using this currently with International change programmes with the most recent starting on the 22nd June 2020. Henley’s Department of Entrepreneurship is also integrating our material and methodologies with theirs on the Executive and Post Graduate Leadership programmes.
Our books and papers outline how to use the 3 core navigational principles in this Digital age.
We have also designed an organic ‘through life change architecture’ that contains what we refer to as the 6 ‘Change Genes’. These make up an organisations overall “DNA”. It is this ‘genetic coding’ that predisposes towards success and failure.
All of this can be used diagnostically and developmentally and we deliver online.
Our commitment is to serve our customers better by upping our game, which is why we are working with Technology Partners and Academia.
Over the next weeks we want to present this material in blogs and papers starting with an article called ‘Navigating in Uncharted Waters’ . This will be followed by a series of posts showing how the 3 principles of navigation lie at the heart of all change and can be used both strategically and operationally.
Author of ‘Navigating Change. A Leaders Guide’ and ‘Ensuring Change Delivers Success’ Report this
