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May 24, 2010

Discovering Leadership

Acuity may be the explanation for how leaders emerge from the complexity of ongoing operations. We expect leaders to be able to navigate; but often, after the goal-setting that dictates what should be IN the participants' points of view, the remainder of the task is largely delegated -- and this creates the risk and problem of losing awareness of what is AT the points of view. On the other hand, the successful navigator may acquire the leadership, gathering the role and position around them as they are found repeatedly, by others, at the right place at the right time -- a trick attributable to acuity.

Mythical leaders are most often soloists, but the complexity of modern organizations means that leadership teams are the rational way to assure that goals and navigation are not disconnected from each other. The purpose of the team is not to forsee the future, but to develop 20/40 vision of the present. Delegation into teams is a collaborative strategy that provides the bandwidth of attention to find the track to the goal and stay on it. And like all lines, the track is a collection of key points.

Image and full article Copyright 2009 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra

The track from current benefits to future benefits can be seen as a passage through various gates. Generally, four gates are along the way.

At the first gate, current pains are felt as a tradeoff accepted to sustain the currrent benefits. Because their impact extends beyond their causes and justifications, pains may become excessive and trigger a decision to find a substantial remediation, the second gate. This research for a course of action, usually fueled by analysis, will separate remedial action options into those that are mandatory and those that are not. With the weight of "necessity", these decisions or change mandates -- the third gate -- will drive determination of priorities going forward; and those priorities -- the fourth gate -- will in effect set the grounds and boundaries from which future benefits can develop.

For this pathway, it's often the case that leadership must reverse-engineer the course, finding and aligning the appropriate set of conditions at each gate. In this effort, acuity is paramount to determining if these conditions do, or can, exist. 

Said differently, the gates in this route are practical checkpoints in the assessment of an organization that presumes to form itself around the leadership and follow.

• Priorities correspond to culture. Culture is the primary factor constraining future benefits. 
• The requirement for changes that precede the culture corresponds to politics that, understood objectively, is the negotiations about the balance of risks between stability (quality) and progress (advantage). But it must be understood that because requirements are decisions, all needs are not necessarily requirements.  
• Preceding the change requirements, administration moderates  a competition for attention to needs;
• and administrative transparency may be critical to allowing the environment of operations to present its true current pains.

Building forward again, those issues can manifest on familiar management terms -- for example, terms such as quality, resourcing, policy, and governance. Other terms may similarly and respectively apply

But the more interesting aspect is this: the necessary ability to identify the path to future benefits within an existing organization suggests that from the perspective of the participating organization, real leadership may have to be discovered more than to be supplied.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at May 24, 2010 8:34 PM

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