Bob Johansen’s 10 Leadership Skills For The Post-Normal

I am downplaying ‘futures’ in favor of design thinking these days, but the old-school futurists still have a great deal to offer, like Bob Johansen:

Four Practical Ways for Leaders to Make the Future by Deepa Mehta via Institute For The Future

Bob Johansen recently published the second edition of Leaders Make the Future. In the book, Bob presents an expansive ten-year forecast about the key future forces that will impact our world in the decade ahead, pointing to the shift towards the global well-being economy, the growing impact of digital natives, and the emergence of cloud-served supercomputing. Bob reminds us that we live in an increasingly VUCA world, characterized by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, and that the VUCA World presents both danger and opportunity.  

Leaders who make the future will make sense of the VUCA world and transform Volatility into Vision, Uncertainty into Understanding, Complexity into Clarity, and Ambiguity into Agility.  What skills will allow future leaders to thrive? With four decades of wisdom and knowhow as a ten-year forecaster at the intersection of technology and society, Bob identifies ten new leadership skills for the future. He brings each skill to life with personal stories and examples from around the world.  The ten-year forecast and ten skills point to the Why and What of successful leadership in the future.

In all the write-ups about this book — all of them written in a dreary marketing speak — none of them lists the ten skills. I finally captured them from a self test, here:

Maker Instinct

Exploit your inner drive to build and grow things, as well as connect with others in the making.

Leaders are very clear about what they are making, but very flexible about how it gets made.

Clarity

See through messes and contradictions to a future that others cannot yet see. Leaders are very clear about what they are making, but very flexible about how it gets made.

Dilemma Flipping

Turn dilemmas—which, unlike problems, cannot be solved—into advantages and opportunities.

Immersive Learning Ability

Immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments to learn from them in a first-person way.

Bio-Empathy

See things from nature’s point of view; to understand, respect, and learn from nature’s patterns.

Constructive Depolarizing

Calm tense situations where differences dominate and communication has broken down—and bring people from divergent cultures toward constructive engagement.

Quiet Transparency

Be open and authentic about what matters to you—without advertising yourself.

Rapid Prototyping

Create quick early versions of innovations with the expectation that later success will require early failures.

Smart Mob Organizing

Create, engage with, and nurture purposeful business or social change networks through intelligent use of electronic and other media.

Commons Creating

Seed, nurture, and grow shared assets that can benefit other players—and sometimes allow competition at a higher level.

Sounds like being a Taoist sage, actually.

That gives me an idea: I will have to reread the Tao Te Ching from the perspective of an operating manual for the post-normal world.

Source: iftf.org

31 July 2012 9 Permalink

Unveiling the new Jaiku Client for Nokia - Part 2

Steve Rubel is following the lead of many others into Toffler’s “information overload is driving us crazy” tarpit. He’s in good company, joined by Herbert Simon, Tom Davenport, and Linda Stone: the Attention Economists.

[from Micro Persuasion: The Attention Crash]

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.

[…]

With this philosophy in mind [Tim Ferliss’s 4 Hour Workweek], I have trimmed projects, RSS feeds and emails to hone in on the 20 percent that’s most important. It’s also why I am not trying every new site that floats in my inbox and deleting pitches that are clearly off topic w/o even reading them.

My attention has reached a limit so I have re-calibrated it to make it more effective. I think this issue is an epidemic.

No, I think we need to develop new behaviors and new ethics to operate in the new context.

Most people operate on the assumption that the response to increased flow is to intensify what was working formerly: read more email, read more blogs, write more IMs, and so on. And at the same time motor on with the established notions of what a job is, how to accomplish work and meet deadlines, and so on.

In a time of increased flow, yes, if you want to hold everything else as is — your definition of success, of social relationships, of what it means to be polite or rude — Steve is right: you will have to cut back.

Alternatively, we can start to shift everything, let go of a lot of the old ways, and operate on a new, pre-industrial, pre-agricultural footing.

1. It’s OK not to respond to emails, vmails, or IMs. There is no possible way that you can live a public life, open to the world, and respond to every request that comes along. The same holds even if it is a friend, or colleague. People have to pick and choose: it’s a big world.
2. It’s sensible to have a nomadic reading style: if something is important it will show up in a variety of places. Don’t be a slave to RSS readers: throw them away. (I have always hated RSS readers that emulate the email inbox, for exactly this reason: they make everything seem equally important… or equally unimportant.)
3. Unlike Steve (or Tim Ferliss), I don’t know exactly how to trim out the 80% of everything that is junk, as Tim Ferliss suggests. I do fire clients that make things difficult, unpleasant, or unrewarding, but it’s not statistical. I constantly gravitate to projects and people that I think offer the greatest opportunities for growth, which means constantly leaving other things behind. But this is just another kind of flow, not a one-time triage: it is a constant attrition and acquisition.

Instead of the 4 Hour Workweek, though, I suggest that people read the Tao Te Ching:

9

Fill your bowl to the brim

and it will spill.

Keep sharpening your knife

and it will blunt.

Chase after money and security

and your heart will never unclench.

Care about people’s approval

and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.

The only path to serenity.

The answer is not becoming obsessed with attention as a limited resource to be husbanded, or thinking of our cognition as a laser beam to be pointed at only at what is important.

We need to unfocus, to rely more on the network or tribe to surface things of importance, and remain open to new opportunities: these are potentially more important than the work on the desk. Don’t sharpen the knife too much.

14 June 2007 Permalink

Steve Rubel Becomes Another Attention Economist

Steve Rubel is following the lead of many others into Toffler’s “information overload is driving us crazy” tarpit. He’s in good company, joined by Herbert Simon, Tom Davenport, and Linda Stone: the Attention Economists.

[from Micro Persuasion: The Attention Crash]

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.

[…]

With this philosophy in mind [Tim Ferliss’s 4 Hour Workweek], I have trimmed projects, RSS feeds and emails to hone in on the 20 percent that’s most important. It’s also why I am not trying every new site that floats in my inbox and deleting pitches that are clearly off topic w/o even reading them.

My attention has reached a limit so I have re-calibrated it to make it more effective. I think this issue is an epidemic.

No, I think we need to develop new behaviors and new ethics to operate in the new context.

Most people operate on the assumption that the response to increased flow is to intensify what was working formerly: read more email, read more blogs, write more IMs, and so on. And at the same time motor on with the established notions of what a job is, how to accomplish work and meet deadlines, and so on.

In a time of increased flow, yes, if you want to hold everything else as is — your definition of success, of social relationships, of what it means to be polite or rude — Steve is right: you will have to cut back.

Alternatively, we can start to shift everything, let go of a lot of the old ways, and operate on a new, pre-industrial, pre-agricultural footing.

1. It’s OK not to respond to emails, vmails, or IMs. There is no possible way that you can live a public life, open to the world, and respond to every request that comes along. The same holds even if it is a friend, or colleague. People have to pick and choose: it’s a big world.
2. It’s sensible to have a nomadic reading style: if something is important it will show up in a variety of places. Don’t be a slave to RSS readers: throw them away. (I have always hated RSS readers that emulate the email inbox, for exactly this reason: they make everything seem equally important… or equally unimportant.)
3. Unlike Steve (or Tim Ferliss), I don’t know exactly how to trim out the 80% of everything that is junk, as Tim Ferliss suggests. I do fire clients that make things difficult, unpleasant, or unrewarding, but it’s not statistical. I constantly gravitate to projects and people that I think offer the greatest opportunities for growth, which means constantly leaving other things behind. But this is just another kind of flow, not a one-time triage: it is a constant attrition and acquisition.

Instead of the 4 Hour Workweek, though, I suggest that people read the Tao Te Ching:

9

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

The answer is not becoming obsessed with attention as a limited resource to be husbanded, or thinking of our cognition as a laser beam to be pointed at only at what is important.

We need to unfocus, to rely more on the network or tribe to surface things of importance, and remain open to new opportunities: these are potentially more important than the work on the desk. Don’t sharpen the knife too much.

13 June 2007 4 Permalink