The Idea in Brief
- Are you waiting for things to return to normal in your organization? Sorry. Leadership will require new skills tailored to an environment of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty—even after the current economic crisis is over.
- You’ll have to:
Foster adaptation, helping people develop the “next practices” that will enable the organization to thrive in a new world, even as they continue with the best practices necessary for current success.
Embrace disequilibrium, keeping people in a state that creates enough discomfort to induce change but not so much that they fight, flee, or freeze.
Generate leadership, giving people at all levels of the organization the opportunity to lead experiments that will help it adapt to changing times.
- You won’t achieve your leadership aims if you sacrifice yourself by neglecting your needs.
It would be profoundly reassuring to view the current economic crisis as simply another rough spell that we need to get through. Unfortunately, though, today’s mix of urgency, high stakes, and uncertainty will continue as the norm even after the recession ends. Economies cannot erect a firewall against intensifying global competition, energy constraints, climate change, and political instability. The immediate crisis—which we will get through, with the help of policy makers’ expert technical adjustments—merely sets the stage for a sustained or even permanent crisis of serious and unfamiliar challenges.
