Our societies are changing rapidly from those based on structures of hierarchies and standard answers to ones that are constantly changing (even volatile), interconnected, networked, ambiguous and increasingly complex. Our leadership models must adapt to this new world.

One the experts doing significant work on trying to understand what leadership should look like in these turbulent times is Prof Ron Heifetz of Harvard. He has suggested a model he calls ‘Adaptive Leadership’. To explain the concept, he contrasts his model to traditional leadership (the type most iconically taught on MBA courses around the world – including Harvard). The traditional model might be called ‘Authoritative Expertise’.

In a world where the problems are known and the solutions clear, what we need is a leader who can “get the job done”. We need a leader with authoritative expertise who can deliver the desired results, using an agreed set of methods to deal with a clearly defined issue. You want these types of leaders when you have a crisis: the airplane’s engine is on fire; or when you’re doing something life threatening, like open heart surgery. Or during times of “business as usual”. These leaders know what they’re doing, they have experience and we should do what they tell us to.

But what about those situations where the solutions are unclear, or even unknown. Even more difficult: what about those situations where the problem (or set of problems) is not clear? In this environment, authoritative experts can actually do untold damage. In these environments, we need adaptive leaders.

Heifetz makes these points about adaptive leaders: The point of “adaptive” leadership is to do for an organisation what adaptation does in nature. In nature, a successful adaptation results in an organism being able to thrive in a challenging and changing environment. Survival is not enough. Organisms that are merely surviving will die the moment the environment becomes a little challenging. To survive, you must thrive. You can then handle challenge and stress by quickly developing a new adaptability in order to maintain itself in that stressed environment. In nature, there are three main tasks for adaptation: what DNA will we keep; what DNA will we discard; what innovation do we need to deal with the change around us. This is a metaphor for what leaders need to do today.

Here is a video based on the principles in his book, “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership” (buy from Amazon.co.uk or on Kindle) was captured from a lecture series he ran in Australia. It’s an hour, but well worth the time:

Professor Ronald Heifetz Adaptive Leadership Presentation from Jimmy Tsang on Vimeo.

In the video, Heifetz identifies seven mindsets of adaptive leaders:

Conserves essential values and capacities: recognises what is valuable and worth keeping, while adapting those things that need to change.

Experiments pervasively: everything is open for trial and error investigations.

Scans 360 for new challenges: they don’t wait for challenges to come to them – they go looking for these challenges. This is not just formal ‘environmental scanning’ – it is a way of thinking rather than merely a process.

Improvises responsively: fast-paced improvisation, which requires taking a lifetime of experience and bringing it together to respond to unique new circumstances. I think one of the best works on this topic is Strategic Intuition by William Duggan (read our summary here).

Model consistent, orienting values: showing what values mean by their real-life expression is invaluable; wall-charts with lists of values are empty words.

Have a stomach for losses: accepts that change will entail loss as well as gain, and that you have to move on from the past to create the future. Leadership is hardly ever a win-win game, and leaders have to take tough decisions – but also “hold people tightly”, with compassion and clarity, through the changes.

Distinguish leadership from authority: when you have the know-how and a technical problem presents itself, then authority is all you need. But in an adaptive situation, we need leaders: people who know what to do when no-one knows what to do.

Our work at TomorrowToday leads us to add a few more items to his helpful list – maybe things that are slightly more practical:

Seek the right questions rather than The Right Answer: too many leaders are trapped into thinking they must provide all the answers. Good adaptive leaders will ensure we’re asking the right questions. They know the answers will change, but that if we have the right questions we will continue to be able to keep up with these changing solutions.

Comfortable with paradox: right-right thinking: they recognise that sometimes you have to choose between a right and a right; and that sometimes is no one single correct solution. It’s not about finding the win-win or compromise, but recognising the competing solutions and either making a call to choose one, or finding a way to hold them all in tension. Systems-thinking provides helpful frameworks here.

Embrace difference: adaptive leaders actively seek to create environments of true diversity – unlike the environments we have now which are often happy to simply create variety, but without pushing forward to an interacting ecosystem that is truly diverse. This is particularly important when it comes to putting teams together.

Promote dialogue and collaboration: we need people from every part of an organisation to engage with adaptive problems, not waiting for the authoritative experts to show them the way. We need leaders who create this type of environment.

Focusing on the need for Self-Organization, emergence and feedback loops: this is a lesson taken directly from chaos/complexity theory. As a dynamic organisation adapts it will often do so as a result of unpredictable forces, and much of the change will be unpredictable. We cannot pre-programme the rules beforehand and anticipate every issue that might arise, and so we need to learn to lead and respond without dogged rules and regulations. In their place, we need processes of dialogue and engagement. Ideas, strategies and actions will emerge as a result of generative dialogue. Rapid testing of ideas, strategies, systems and actions, and then feeding back the results will allow any person, team or organisation to change direction and adapt to a changing context.

Engage in new ways of learning that are risky, uncertain and messy: almost all leadership and management development programmes are designed to be safe, to have predictable outcomes and consistent processes. My South African business partner, Keith Coats, recently wrote about this on his blog.

Introducing Future Trends: unless a futures context is developed, any strategy for any issue will be based on traditional tools of experience. Although only demographics can be predicted with accuracy, identifying future trends will allow those involved to build scenarios to anticipate the impact of these trends. It is vital to have as many people as possible involved in thinking about the impact of future trends.

Prepared to unlearn: they hold their truths lightly: leaders who see themselves as the learned may very well discover that what they know equips them for a world that no longer exists. We need leaders who comfortable knowing that they are learners.

This is a starting point for your investigation of this issue. I hope it’s inspired you to move towards adaptive leadership as a model for yourself and your team.

“The thinking that created the problems we are
facing will not generate the solutions that we need.”
. . . Albert Einstein

1. Big data becomes useful (my addition: and integrates cloud computing, the internet of things and massive data processing power – I don’t think these are separate trends, see below). The key is making sense of the data.
2. Cloud computing that is open, federated, automated and client aware
3. The Internet of Things
4. The client continuum – from device centric to user centric computing. The device dies, and the interface becomes more intuitive and pre-emptive, including .
5. Security – 5 million new malicious websites are launched every month, and the malware ‘industry’ is worth double as much as the global drug trade.

By the way, it costs less to build one intel processor than to grow one grain of rice.

The blurb of the show says:

In their work, Graeme Codrington and Dean van Leeuwen have conducted extensive research, working to address the emerging issue of generational differences that can cause problems in the workplace today. Graeme and Dean have worked to bridge this gap in theory, implementing it in practice in many companies. Anna Elwood, Director of Operations, was one of ZocDoc’s early employees who helped shape this company. ZocDoc has seen a work model emerge naturally; one that focused on the uniqueness of generational needs rather than focusing on differences to “divide and conquer”. It works on principles that demonstrate Graeme and Dean are not talking about “pie in the sky”. Here is a company that is practicing what it takes to “bridge the gap” and succeed together.

This extract is especially worth reading if you’re one of our clients engaged in what Seth so vividly calls “the Internet-fueled challenge to lower prices, find cheaper labor, and deliver more for less” – a race to the bottom indeed. Too many of our clients and partners see this as their only hope of survival. It’s soul destroying stuff when you get caught in this downward loop. Seth has some great suggestions about how to reverse this, and start a race for the top.

Toward zero unemployment

A dozen generations ago, there was no unemployment, largely because there were no real jobs to speak of. Before the industrial revolution, the thought that you’d leave your home and go to an office or a factory was, of course, bizarre.

What happens now that the industrial age is ending? As the final days of the industrial age roll around, we are seeing the core assets of the economy replaced by something new. Actually, it’s something old, something handmade, but this time, on a huge scale.

The industrial age was about scarcity. Everything that built our culture, improved our productivity, and defined our lives involved the chasing of scarce items.

On the other hand, the connection economy, our economy, the economy of the foreseeable future, embraces abundance. No, we don’t have an endless supply of the resources we used to trade and covet. No, we certainly don’t have a surplus of time, either. But we do have an abundance of choice, an abundance of connection, and an abundance of access to knowledge.

We know more people, have access to more resources, and can leverage our skills more quickly and at a higher level than ever before.

This abundance leads to two races. The race to the bottom is the Internet-fueled challenge to lower prices, find cheaper labor, and deliver more for less.

The other race is the race to the top: the opportunity to be the one they can’t live without, to be the linchpin we would miss if he didn’t show up. The race to the top focuses on delivering more for more. It embraces the weird passions of those with the resources to make choices, and it rewards originality, remarkability, and art.

The connection economy continues to gain traction because connections scale, information begets more information, and influence accrues to those who create this abundance. As connections scale, these connections paradoxically make it easier for others to connect as well, because anyone with talent or passion can leverage the networks created by connection to increase her impact. The connection economy doesn’t create jobs where we get picked and then get paid; the connection economy builds opportunities for us to connect, and then demands that we pick ourselves.

Just as the phone network becomes more valuable when more phones are connected (scarcity is the enemy of value in a network), the connection economy becomes more valuable as we scale it.

Friends bring us more friends. A reputation brings us a chance to build a better reputation. Access to information encourages us to seek ever more information. The connections in our life multiply and increase in value. Our stuff, on the other hand, becomes less valuable over time.

Successful organizations have realized that they are no longer in the business of coining slogans, running catchy ads, and optimizing their supply chains to cut costs.

And freelancers and soloists have discovered that doing a good job for a fair price is no longer sufficient to guarantee success. Good work is easier to find than ever before.

What matters now:

• Trust
• Permission
• Remarkability
• Leadership
• Stories that spread
• Humanity: connection, compassion, and humility

All six of these are the result of successful work by humans who refuse to follow industrial-age rules. These assets aren’t generated by external strategies and MBAs and positioning memos. These are the results of internal struggle, of brave decisions without a map and the willingness to allow others to live with dignity.

They are about standing out, not fitting in, about inventing, not duplicating.

TRUST AND PERMISSION: In a marketplace that’s open to just about anyone, the only people we hear are the people we choose to hear. Media is cheap, sure, but attention is filtered, and it’s virtually impossible to be heard unless the consumer gives us the ability to be heard. The more valuable someone’s attention is, the harder it is to earn.

And who gets heard?

Why would someone listen to the prankster or the shyster or the huckster? No, we choose to listen to those we trust. We do business with and donate to those who have earned our attention. We seek out people who tell us stories that resonate, we listen to those stories, and we engage with those people or businesses that delight or reassure or surprise in a positive way.

And all of those behaviors are the acts of people, not machines. We embrace the humanity in those around us, particularly as the rest of the world appears to become less human and more cold. Who will you miss? That is who you are listening to.

REMARKABILITY: The same bias toward humanity and connection exists in the way we choose which
ideas we’ll share with our friends and colleagues. No one talks about the boring, the predictable, or the safe. We don’t risk interactions in order to spread the word about something obvious or trite.

The remarkable is almost always new and untested, fresh and risky.

LEADERSHIP: Management is almost diametrically opposed to leadership. Management is about generating yesterday’s results, but a little faster or a little more cheaply. We know how to manage the world — we relentlessly seek to cut costs and to limit variation, while we exalt obedience.

Leadership, though, is a whole other game. Leadership puts the leader on the line. No manual, no rule book, no überleader to point the finger at when things go wrong. If you ask someone for the rule book on how to lead, you’re secretly wishing to be a manager.

Leaders are vulnerable, not controlling, and they are racing to the top, taking us to a new place, not to the place of cheap, fast, compliant safety.

STORIES THAT SPREAD: The next asset that makes the new economy work is the story that spreads. Before the revolution, in a world of limited choice, shelf space mattered a great deal. You could buy your way onto the store shelf, or you could be the only one on the ballot, or you could use a connection to get your résumé in front of the hiring guy. In a world of abundant choice, though, none of these tactics is effective. The chooser has too many alternatives, there’s too much clutter, and the scarce resources are attention and trust, not shelf space. This situation is tough for many, because attention and trust must be earned, not acquired.

More difficult still is the magic of the story that resonates. After trust is earned and your work is seen, only a fraction of it is magical enough to be worth spreading. Again, this magic is the work of the human artist, not the corporate machine. We’re no longer interested in average stuff for average people.

HUMANITY: We don’t worship industrial the way we used to. We seek out human originality and caring instead. When price and availability are no longer sufficient advantages (because everything is available and the price is no longer news), then what we are drawn to is the vulnerability and transparency that bring us together, that turn the “other” into one of us.

For a long time to come the masses will still clamor for cheap and obvious and reliable. But the people you seek to lead, the people who are helping to define the next thing and the interesting frontier, these people want your humanity, not your discounts.

All of these assets, rolled into one, provide the foundation for the change maker of the future. And that individual (or the team that person leads) has no choice but to build these assets with novelty, with a fresh approach to an old problem, with a human touch that is worth talking about.

I can’t wait until we return to zero percent unemployment, to a time when people with something to contribute (everyone)  pick themselves instead of waiting for a bureaucrat’s permission to do important work.

Source: Seth Godin’s blog

But please do update your records.

This video of Graeme Codrington was recorded by our partner at Your Business Channel as part of their ongoing work to capture the best business insights in video format. See more video at our TomorrowToday TV channel.

We have a presentation and can run workshops on Africa: The Last Frontier. Please contact us for more information.

The key message is that Yahoo wants to become “the very best place to work”, and wants to do this using “communication and collaboration” and “working side-by-side”. But then, the real intent is clear: Yahoo wants to be “more productive, efficient and fun” and says that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home”.

The response from a world that is assuming that more remote working is the future has been loud and incredulous. Is this really the way forward? Has Marissa Mayer made a huge misstep here? Or does she know something we don’t?

What’s going on?

We know that Mayer is under pressure to produce profits at Yahoo, and does not have much more time to deliver a fairly radical turnaround. We also know that she has a fairly forceful leadership style. Business Insider resported a few months ago that an unnamed staffer told them of a team of Yahoo’s product designers who pitched a new product to Mayer. She approved the product on the condition that they get it to market months ahead of their own schedule. Then Mayer supposedly told them they had exactly one week to figure out how to get the product out by the end of the year, and that they would all be fired if they couldn’t get it done.

The stated reason behind the move by Mayer is that she had done an analysis of the VPN (virtual private network) data of remote workers, and Yahoo employees working from home were not logging into the system for enough hours during the day. Supporters of the move have largely pointed to two things: the fact that work from home people can slack off, and the need to have everyone in the office if you’re going to effect quick culture change.

The second reason may be right, but the first one seems spurious. Most remote workers are unlikely to be constantly on the VPN, especially if the system itself is not as user friendly or helpful as it could be. And if you’ve employed a bunch of slackers, you can bet that they’ll slack off in your office almost as well as they could slack off at home. The only difference is that you’ll have lost some productive hours due to traffic and commuting time.

Studies on telecommuting are conflicted right now, mainly because it’s a nuanced thing. It works well for some functions, but not others. It works well for some people, but not others. However, it seems that, in general, in increases productivity, wellness and motivation for most people.

So, why did she do it?

There are four possibilities, we believe.

The first is a very cynical view, but certainly is possible. Yahoo needs to reduce headcount. Maybe there are no “right people” to get rid of at this stage. This plan by Mayer may simply be an easy, quick and cheap way to reduce headcount, because there is no doubt that a fair proportion of the flexible workers will look elsewhere for employment fairly soon. And if there is staff bloat at Yahoo, and some remote workers are just not getting their jobs done, then why not measure their outputs (rather than the VPN login time as an input) and fire people based on performance?

The second is that this is an example of corporate “we have to do something” actions. Being seen to do something big and bold buys time in the corporate world, and maybe doing something was better than doing nothing. I don’t think this is what happened here – I think Mayer is too clever for that. But it is at least a possibility.

The third is that Mayer’s vision of what she wants Yahoo to be and the culture she’s trying to create require her to have her team together and in the same physical space. Changing a culture is tough work at the best of times. Trying to do so when a good number of your key players are not in the room is almost impossible. Mayer might have a very specific cultural change piece in mind right now, and feels she can fast track this by having everyone together. She’d probably be correct if this is her goal, and she may find that a few years from now, with a new culture in place, she can open the doors again and allow flexi working.

If this is what is happening, it doesn’t make any sense why she hasn’t said so. The reasons she’s given all have to do with something that feels very outdated and reeks of the corporate control that I for one hoped was dying out with the digital age.

Some Yahoo employees who are already leaving have indicated that if Yahoo offered systems that supported their personal lives, such as high-quality on-site day care, they’d be more inclined to stay (although Mayer herself built a nursery next to her office to house her young baby). Mayer has implemented some of these support systems, including free food in the cafeteria (she did this in her first week) – although some argue that’s more about giving people a reason to work longer. But apparently not enough. There’s a big danger right now: that Yahoo will be full of ex-remote workers who don’t want to be there. This will do nothing to remedy the productivity and collaboration problem Mayer seems to be concerned about.

The fourth alternative is that Mayer is desperately trying to recreate the conditions that she remembers at Google, in the hope that this will replicate the success she had at Google. This is very dangerous. Google famously have created exceptionally funky office spaces and expects people to work long hours while there. Mayer herself was well known for being one of the Google employees who racked up the most hours per week. It seems from the outside that Google employees want to work in their offices precisely because of the special office environment. It might have been better for Mayer to work on creating the type of office that employees want to work in, rather than mandating the move.

My understanding of Google is also that have a lot of really useful digital collaboration tools. A VPN is not one of these. Maybe Mayer has looked at the wrong metric to make this decision. Mike Stopforth of Cerebra thinks so, identifying Yahoo’s lack of a social business tool as a key problem for the company. I tend to agree with him.

Is Mayer right?

Simply stated, I don’t think so.

Farhad Manjoo, of Slate, sums up my viewpoint:

The larger problem with the ban is its apparent cluelessness about how creative work occurs. Marissa Mayer is said to be a devoted office worker. Both her admirers and critics call her a workaholic, a woman who’s gotten ahead not just through talent but also by working longer hours than most other people. Yahoo is a Web and media company, a firm teeming with engineers, designers, writers, and editors—people whose work not only can be accomplished remotely, but also people who may find working at home to be a better way to get things done. This decision suggests that Mayer doesn’t understand one of the most basic ideas about managing workers—that different people work in different ways, and that some kinds of pursuits are inhibited, rather than improved, by time in the office. The working-from-home ban also reveals that Mayer doesn’t know how to measure her workers’ performance.

How should you respond?

I suppose the real question is: is remote working good for you and your company? One of the best articles in response to this question and Yahoo’s recall of remote workers was published in FastCompany by the lead developer of StackExchange, David Fullerton. Read his seven great reasons to encourage remote working here.

One of our clients made an interesting suggestion as we discussed this. She said that she felt that people should not be allowed to work from home before the age of thirty. She felt that you needed to get an understanding of what an office culture was, and how face to face connection worked in an office before being allowed to leave. In that way, you knew what you were missing, and would work hard to replicate that while working from home. This also fits well with general life stages as well: you have more time and space in your life to devote yourself to long hours and gruelling office culture when you’re younger, and more demands from home and family in your mid thirties to forties. I like this thought. A lot.

Managing virtual teams requires a different approach to leadership, a different set of metrics and a different approach to organisational design. I like Todd Nielsen’s take on it and I found McKinsey Quarterly’s case study on Symantec an interesting read. It isn’t for everyone, but it is most certainly the way of the future.

I am sure Yahoo will find this out. The hard way.

Our company, TomorrowToday spends most of our time and effort on the second type of prediction, seeking out the disruptive forces and trends that are shaping the world around us, and especially the future of work in the next few years. Part of our research methodology includes meta-research as we track other researchers, futurists and insight companies.

Here is a selection of some of their recent insights into the forces that are causing change in the world. Read the articles we’ve linked to for much deeper analysis.

Clem Sunter was for many years the resident futurist and scenario planner for Anglo American. He recently wrote an article suggesting ten key megatrends for the 21st century. Clem brings both a first and third/developed and developing world viewpoint to his work:

1. Populations are ageing
2. More economies will return to a steady state (no growth, no decline; 0-1% growth)
3. We have moved from the Age of Knowledge to the Age of Intelligence
4. It is more about defending your wealth than growing your wealth
5. Education is out of sync with the job market and changing nature of work
6. We are witnessing a second scramble, and potentially more dangerous scramble, for resources
7. Wars will continue to be fought as weapons become more sophisticated
8. Like black swans, natural disasters will come out of the blue
9. Dictatorial regimes will become rarer, but what replaces them is not necessarily democracy
10. The work/life balance is now even more elusive

Greg Satell on the Forbes website suggests five trends that will drive the future of technology:

• No-touch interfaces (voice and gesture driven)
• Native content (home grown, channel specific content to attract attention to a delivery channel, such as Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, etc – using entertainment to attract attention, or creating your own advertising platform)
• Massively online
• The Web of Things
• Consumer driven supercomputing (natural language interfaces to Big Data databases for a better end user experience)

Not sure I fully buy into his titles or categories, but I think he’s on track with the detail he provides.

Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, suggests three specific ways in which technology will change the future of business:

• Data Analytics Will Revolutionize Decision-Making
• The Social Network Will Drive Value
• Consumer Segments Will Cede To The Individual

Gerd Leonhard is a futurist and speaker, CEO of The Futures Agency and is currently based in Switzerland. He has recently written a two part article on the next five years of disruption (see part 1 and part 2):

1. The end of offline
2. The global consumerization of IT (individuals with better computers than the companies they work for)
3. A true revolution in data-input methods
4. Business will be socially driven
5. Big data everywhere
6. Data flows and fluid data (data is constantly filtered, sifted, changed)
7. The Internet of Things
8. The cashless society
9. 3d printing
10. Increased use of mobile devices
11. Emerging markets
12. Digitally-native innovation (products and services that only work online)

This is not the end of his list. He promises a third list next week. I like his list because it shows that these days the task of the futurist is not to surprise or come up with new insights only. In the past, this is what people expected. Almost like a new season of a TV show, people expected more shocks, something new and different in order to keep their interest. This is not the best contribution for a futurist to make. Sometimes we need to keep telling people what is already evident because telling/hearing is not the same as understanding/responding.

For example, you know 3d printing and driverless cars are coming. But how will they affect your industry and your job and your life? And what have you started to do differently already in anticipation of these changes? You know both of these things are coming, but what are you doing about it?

Finally, here’s a link to two really great images/infographics about future technology. Take some time to absord what each one is telling you:

• 40 Technology Predictions For The Next 150 Years
• Expected technologies in the next 50 years

I’d love you to add to my list. Which futurists do you follow? What have been their latest predictions? Please let us know in the comment fields below – even if you just put a link to their webpages.

The question for you is simple: how do these principles play out in your products and services? The message is simple: you must do more and more of these things. How are you doing?

The principles for success in the digital age that I outline in the video are:

• Mobile (Convergent)
  
• Community
  
• Social (communal)
  
• Customisation
  
• Immediate (Current, contiguous)
  
• Conversation
  
• Consistency / Constant
  
• Clever, quirky, fun

This is not a comprehensive list. What would you add to this list?