I remember when I met Marshall Goldsmith.
I was at a meeting with about 50 CIOs a decade ago in Los Angeles and he had been flown in to talk to the group. If you don’t know him, Goldsmith is a world renown coach to executives at some of the biggest companies in the world, and the author of numerous books.
But at this meeting, he was there to discuss his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.
His message to the gathered executives was that many of the same skills that had enabled them to climb the corporate ladder would hold them back from achieving their objectives now that they were at the top — and that they would have to adapt their leadership skills as a result.
It’s a powerful and still-salient message.
But if you’re like those executives and think the transition to leadership was tough then, well, you might want to sit down. It’s about to get much tougher.
While Goldsmith was talking about the shift in skill set required as you rise to the top, his broader message is just as applicable in a broader context — even if you’ve already adapted your leadership skills.
The reason is twofold. First, we are in the midst of a period of unrelenting and ever-escalating change. What got you here is becoming irrelevant because today’s world looks nothing like the one you came from.
Second, in the face of this type of earth-shattering change, the natural reactions you’re most likely to have will almost certainly work against you.
Fun, right?
To help, I’m going to walk you through the pitfalls headed your way and lay out a plan for how you can come out on the other side in one piece.
A Time of Unrelenting Change
The reason the leadership challenge is becoming so acute is because of the unrelenting pace of change.
On the one hand, I expect you require no convincing of this fact. You’re living it every day. On the other, however, I suspect that like the proverbial frog in a pot of soon-to-be-boiling water, you may be underestimating exactly how quickly things are changing — and how entirely unfamiliar they’re going to seem on the other side of this period.
The truth is that over the next decade or so we are going to be witness to fundamental shifts in how everything functions within the enterprise.
Haim Israel, Bank of America’s in-house futurist, points to a future of continual and rapid change driven by everything from rapidly shifting demographics, to what he calls “techcelleration,” to the emergence of 5G, to the evolution of “smart everything.”
As Barron summed up his view on the changes we’re about to live through, “We haven’t seen anything yet.”
And in case you missed it, almost everything on Israel’s list is either driven by technology or will directly impact how organizations use and deploy technology. Interesting times for the digital leader!
The point is that as an enterprise leader, much of the way you lead today is based on your knowledge and expertise learned from years coming up in the world of IT. But happens when that world no longer exists?
The Danger of Availability Bias
The challenges of this unrelenting pace of change will be compounded by something called availability bias.
“We tend to judge the likelihood and significance of things based on how easily they come to mind. The more ‘available’ a piece of information is to us, the more important it seems,” explains Shane Parrish in The Availability Bias: How to Overcome a Common Cognitive Distortion. “The result is that we give greater weight to information we learned recently because a news article you read last night comes to mind easier than a science class you took years ago.”
As he goes on to explain, however, availability bias is also triggered based on how unusual or sensational something is and by our personal experiences.
Put this all together, and the reality of availability bias means that you’re going to find yourself on the wrong footing because the information you have “available” to you is going to be wrong.
This bias is going to cut two ways.
First, your personal experiences.
“Personal experience can also make information more salient,” Parrish explains. “If you’ve recently been in a car accident, you may well view car accidents as more common in general than you did before. The base rates haven’t changed; you just have an unpleasant, vivid memory coming to mind whenever you get in a car.”
Your personal experiences are all based on a world that is slipping away. As anyone would, you’ll be likely to view today’s threats and opportunities through the prism of these past experiences and your availability bias will lead you to believe that they will lead to similar outcomes. But because of the unrelenting pace of change, this bias will lead you astray.
Ironically, the second way availability bias is going to impact you is going to come from the other direction. In this age of digital disruption, there are countless pundits, analysts, and so-called thought leaders who make their living by filling digital pages full of sensational predictions about the future (the irony is not lost on me as I sit here shaking my head in shame!).
And while we deserve some credit for doing our job of gazing into the future to provide you some perspective, the reality is that we’re wrong about things at least as often as we’re right.
The challenge, however, is that because we are collectively bombing your email inbox and newsfeeds with our attention-getting viewpoints, the combination of their frequency (and, therefore, recency) and their designed-to-be-shocking nature will make it much more probable that it triggers your availability bias, making you sure that our predictions are more likely to occur than any other.
But, as Parrish points out, “there is no real link between how memorable something is and how likely it is to happen. In fact, the opposite is often true.”
Put it all together and you have a situation in which you may be completely sure that you know what is happening and why — and be completely wrong.
The Danger of What You Do When Threatened
This misalignment that availability will create will eventually lead to a point in which your world, seemingly unexpectantly, comes crashing down around you.
When that happens, you are likely to do what most of us have been trained to do: clear away anything that is not critical to your response and focus all of your attention on leading your organization out of the morass.
And that may be your fatal mistake.
Recent research is demonstrating that in some situations, particularly those in which we are faced with unknown or unfamiliar circumstances, focusing our attention may be the exact opposite of what we should do.
“Taken as a whole, these results suggest that, sometimes, attention can mislead us about the world,” says Henry Taylor of the University of Birmingham in the UK. “This is not to say that attention always distorts our knowledge of the world, but it does suggest that it might not be the unproblematic guide to knowledge that we originally thought. In order to unravel the complex link between attention and knowledge, we might need to change the way we think about both of these faculties.”
The point is that our brains are wired to process incomplete information and, in the context of our past experiences, create a world in our minds that matches our experiences. Focusing your attention actually reinforces this process and can cause you to not see the bigger picture, especially when what you’re seeing does not conform to your past experiences.
Instead, you need to be able to step back and take it all in. Otherwise, your hyper-focus may undermine what you’re really trying to achieve.
The Intellyx Take: Rising to the Challenge
You probably don’t believe it, but I really don’t like writing pieces like this one. I mean who wants to be the guy who tells you that everything you know and everything that got you here may be working against you — and that what you’re likely to do in response is going to be messed up too?
Still, it’s what needed to be said.
But while this isn’t a pretty picture, it doesn’t mean all hope is lost. In fact, there are several things you can do to help prepare yourself for what’s coming.
First and foremost, you need to accept that this is all untrodden territory, and stop pretending that you have all the answers. I know that it can feel that your team (and everyone else for that matter) expects you to have them, but what they really expect is for you to lead — and leading sometimes means accepting that there are no ready answers.
Second, you need to do your best to be aware of the risks of availability bias, not to mention things like confirmation, distinction, and optimism bias as well. Understand that your desire to get hyper-focused on a solution may also lead you astray. And to combat all of these, get really comfortable collecting and relying on data.
Finally, Parrish has some great tips that can help mitigate this situation. He says that these five actions can help keep you in the right mindset:
- Always consider base rates when making judgments about probabiliy
- Focus on trends and patterns
- Take the time to think before making a judgement
- Keep track of information you might need to use in a judgment far off in the future
- Go back and revist old information
By taking these steps, you will help protect yourself from the biases and tendencies that may otherwise lead you astray. By doing so, you’ll prepare yourself for the continual changes you are already living through — and that show no signs of abating — and be prepared to lead your team and your organization into a tough but winnable future.
