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Novel Challenges Require Novel Responses

The challenges are huge, no doubt – interrupted supply chains, declining revenues (or escalating demand), uncertain work, travel and trade rules, and a fast-and-furious stream of novel HR challenges. While the challenges are undeniable, much of the suffering executives and managers are experiencing could be the result of trying to address these new challenges with old decision-making practices.

You know the drill. The formal leadership team meets (via conference call or Zoom) to identify the problem, discuss options, decide on a solution, and then communicate “the plan” to the staff. It’s the bureaucratic structure that has dominated both commercial and non-profit organizations for more than a century. In this increasingly VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous – world we live in, however, conditions on the ground may change so quickly and vary so greatly from one context to the next that plans may be obsolete before they’re implemented. So what to do in the face of such uncertainty and volatility?

Many consumer-facing businesses with short product cycle times have adapted well. Restaurants have grown their takeout business. Clothing manufacturers have spun up fashionable face masks. The list goes on. Other organizations are becoming more flexible by adopting a multi-scenario planning approach – an “if this, then we will…” strategy, which can greatly increase organizational agility in response to emerging conditions. Even if the conditions aren’t exactly what was planned for, the very exercise of thinking through multiple scenarios deepens leaders’ understanding of their organization’s assets and capabilities. So what else can organizations do to boost resilience?

The degree of uncertainty from the current crisis is likely to persist for at least another 12-18 months, with recovery no doubt progressing in fits and starts. In addition, the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risk Report predicts that covid-19 is only one in a series of highly probable global challenges with broad impacts. To thrive amid such uncertainty and volatility, companies will need to adopt at least five additional mindset and practice changes to remain viable.

  1. Expand the “team.” Whatever team you’re on – C-suite, product development, procurement – reach out to those upstream, downstream, above, and below to participate in brainstorming, deliberation of options, and prototyping solutions. Lindsey Godwin’s post and Masha Gessen’s New Yorker article on including students in college re-opening deliberations both make a similar case. The same principles can be applied to return-to-office dilemmas, product portfolio changes, and distribution challenges. At a minimum, if you’re a team leader, don’t bear the burden alone. Let your team help you.
  2. Lead using principles, not plans.  As painful as the covid19 pandemic has been in both personal and economic terms, it has also been a stark object lesson in the limits of central control and standardization. The conditions on the ground are just too variable and too changeable for any single set of rules to apply everywhere. At the same time, people want guidance from their leadership. Providing a set of “guiding principles” and parameters for decision-making allows local managers and employees to move ahead with confidence while also adapting to local conditions.
  3. Build a dynamic infrastructure. What?! Manufacturing efficiency, clinical drug trial success, and dozens of other business processes and metrics depend on “consistency” and “predictability.” How can we possibly achieve our goals if things are changing all the time?! Good point, except that things are changing all the time. So we need to modify our strategies and redesign our operations to be more dynamic. Companies are doing this now to survive, but too many are seeing the current reality – weekly budget and strategy meetings, rapid prototyping of new product offerings, cross-functional task forces – as temporary measures. They’re not.
  4. Leverage all your team’s strengths. It breaks my heart to see the amount of untapped talent that goes to waste in organizations every day. Facilitation skills, relational skills, optimism, decisiveness, courage, critical thinking, and creativity go untapped because (a) we often don’t know what our coworkers have to offer and (b) we often restrict people’s contributions based on their role. For instance, a team leader may be prone to unintentionally shutting down discussion while one of his/her team members has great facilitation skills. For goodness sake, let the team member lead the discussions!
  5. Get good at letting go. One of the most psychologically challenging aspects of this new way of working will be the need to continually let go of what “no longer works.” What worked in Feb didn’t work in April, and April’s solutions may be feeling stale as we head for the latter half of July. We are participating in a dynamic, living system, so expecting and hoping for unchanging stability will be crazy-making. At the same time, our bodies seek “homeostasis” and our brains are pattern-seekers that become more efficient when identified patterns can be turned into routines. You’re not imagining things – it is physically, mentally, and emotionally uncomfortable to let go of beliefs, practices, and people that we have integrated into our personal routines and understanding of the world. And yet, let go we must.

This is already too long (TLTR as my techie friends tell me), so more on each of these principles in upcoming posts. Until then, if you’ve read this far, you will likely find it interesting and helpful to follow Nadyz Zhexembayeva at WeExist and Lindsey Godwin at the Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry who have both been instrumental in my own learning.

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