The Leader's Task
Seth Godin's 27 December blog raises the question of how far into the future one prepares for business challenges; e.g., things that are relatively far into the future--beyond our time in leadership--seem far less urgent and meaningful than those right around the corner. This is probably adaptive from an evolutionary perspective; best to respond to the immediate threat than the hypothetical one down the round. But, it becomes problematic and even destructive when the task at hand is envisioning future strategy or even adapting to large-scale environmental change.
We encounter this issue almost every time we facilitate a strategy-making process. Some on the board, on the planning committee, among the faculty, and definitely among the parents have a hard time seeing beyond the immediate--even beyond the current academic year. Others prefer thinking so far beyond the present that their ideas seem disconnected from reality. Reconciling these preferences is its own challenge, and failing to do so results in a less than good strategic road map.
During board retreats, we inevitably find that some members prefer to apply a quantifying analysis to every issue. Hard numbers and mathematical algorithms are necessary for these individuals to be able to think and talk about problems. At the same time, others in the room prefer a narrative, allegorical or even visual approach to describing the challenges facing their school. Again, these perspectives must be reconciled into a holographic image for the board to do its work.
As we see time and again, the way this plays out in the real world is polarization--the pulling apart of one faction from another within a board, a faculty or a community. Our colleague Mario Moussa, co-author with G. Richard Shell of The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas tells us that he sees divergent perspectives on time and tolerance for ambiguity emerge in conflicts between research and development and manufacturing in the pharmaceutical industry. Leaders are continuously facing rooms full of divergent ways of thinking about the world, and talking with individuals who see the same issue through such different lenses as to barely be talking about the same thing. This is why leadership is so difficult and so hard to master.
We are sometimes asked what the "right" time horizon is for strategy-making, or whether issues are better conceptualized through quantitative or qualitative perspectives. These questions ignore the reality that both matter tremendously. Decades of psychological research into cognitive styles demonstrates the durability of these ways of thinking over time--in fact, one way of defining "cognitive styles," is as ways of thinking and operating on thought that persists throughout a lifetime. Leaders can bemoan the inability of followers to spontaneously converge on a way of thinking or they can accept that it is their role as a leader to build metaphoric bridges from one perspective to the other.