When will the business environment settle and stabilise?
If you’ve been asking this question for a while, then you’re not alone. Like you, tech executives across Asia Pacific are also swamped by technology hype, geopolitical upheavals and deepening regulation for digital operating models. These forces are making executives’ unease worse, making the value and risks of strategic decisions more uncertain. Stability gave way to volatility; certainty to ambiguity.
A quote from a recent conversation resonated on that theme:
“In a world where change comes faster than certainty, people (not tech) decide who wins.”
Although recent, that quote could easily have emerged in 2022, 2020, 2011, 2007 or 2000. Yes, technology advancements are creating new possibilities. But the ability of our people, operating models, governance structures and scenario models to absorb and account for those possibilities is in doubt.
So, how can IT leaders create visibility and options for an uncertain future?
commanding gives way to coaching and wayfinding
Upon these rocky seas our role as the ship’s captain will change. In the past, centralised command with deep confidence about the prevailing headwinds and tailwinds allowed us to navigate by experience. This will not work in an increasingly volatile and uncertain environment. Successful captains lead differently.
These leaders recognise that choppy waters are now the default and don’t wait for the storm to pass. Instead, they empower those around them to spot the icebergs early and raise them without fear. Achieving this doesn’t happen by accident: it requires authentic leadership. By modelling vulnerability, balancing evidence with collective instinct and rewarding open thinking, these captains are creating a culture geared for success, not just survival.
Creating that cultural change with teams is more profound than tech done to teams.
Culture crafted together is stickier, employs all the sensemaking of your teams and embeds a critical shift. Enabling the ship to tack when winds change involves a shift away from controlling the ship’s operating rhythms towards wayfinding with individuals. By enabling agency in operating model change we build deeper links with our teams, customers and constituents. This agency enshrines the psychological safety needed for our people to understand and create a future operating model that is flexible, robust and evidence based. Feeling safe to critique helps identify unintended risks to people and the organisation while facilitating conversation about the future scenarios made possible by these changes.
Leadership consistency is critical for success. Consistently showing up authentically creates the permission structure for our people to critique, consult and, importantly, communicate about the potential opportunities of disruptive innovation.
Coaching and wayfinding create optionality
All of that creates optionality for the organisation. That optionality transcends reacting to each disruption, individually. Embedding agency, safety and authenticity by design proactively builds organisational resilience. This shift is necessary in a world where disruption has become the norm, not the exception.
So what does that all mean for the modern technology leader?
The earlier quote reminds us of the differing role of a captain in calm compared to choppy seas. When things are calm they have clear vision to a distant horizon. Little obscures their view and, consequently, our scenario models are robust. Navigation under uncertain skies, by contrast, has more risk. Scenarios and underlying assumptions in this environment diverge wildly, requiring more options to help us find the safest route home.
In this way, wayfinding with collective sensemaking rather than commanding and controlling enables faster decisions for safety at speed. It allows us to truly play the role of captain – tough at the best of times – by empowering those around us to excel in the roles to their fullest potential.
Environments that demand such optionality are exemplified by the course charted by John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. His seminal Rice speech expresses the need:
“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained … for the progress of all … [and] not because [it] is easy, but because it is hard.”
Thus: ensuring the progress of our firms is of redoubled importance when decisions are hard. Authentic leaders are a beacon on those seas. By enabling optionality, they equip their crew to navigate a future that is stranger than we can imagine. Stranger as the past is so different from the new knowledge and growth just beyond our foresight. And ready, always scanning the horizon for the first zephyrs of the oncoming tempest.
The price of passage on these new seas is the shift from the steady state of yesterday to embedding the operational resilience required for tomorrow. That ticket then buys us the ability to cope then capitalise when the storm does surge. Being an authentic coach encourages our people to seek and solve for disruption. All of this to simplify operations and build a modular and resilient organisation, one able to participate in ecosystems that broaden customer reach, affinity and relevance.
A new wormhole emerges; demands courage
All of that to say that the playbooks we developed in 2020-21 have renewed purpose.
Back then, the imperative was to deliver digitally for our colleagues, customers and constituents. But these shifts were ‘made digital’ rather than ‘born digital’ – the latter completely redesigned for a new operating environment. And while some chose to pause and react as restrictions changed, another smaller group emerged. Those mavericks opted to accelerate the digital business models that would remake value creation and capture for customers – not just the organisation. Those mavericks grasped a ‘wormhole’ moment, where they benefited from a slingshot effect by their acceleration and others’ hesitancy.
A new wormhole is emerging. While its cause differs the consequences and actions are similar. Will you lean into authenticity, empowerment and wayfinding? Do you have the organisational sensemaking, psychological safety and cultural norms that will set you up as a disruptor – or a follower? And, crucially, would your team regard you as a coach or a controller?
And this last quote from a well-known CEO from elite sporting organisations may have resonance for you:
“People don’t experience your intentions; they only experience how your behaviours make them feel. Good leaders make their people feel good about themselves; they see their potential. But being a good leader comes from the courage to face the truth about who we are as leaders.”
We are constantly choosing which kind of leader we will become. Like the captain on choppy seas, we can choose whether to find the right way with our teams. This choice allows us to do more than survive; it enables us to succeed through disruption. We mustn’t leave it to chance. That way lies the broken ships washed up on the shores of outdated operating models, brittle enablement structures and adverse cultural conventions.
Integral Advice helps organisations like yours to benchmark the leading and lagging indicators for value creation, not least in leadership, execution, culture and operating model change. If you’d like to discuss this or any of the topics raised in this article, then please get in touch.