Category: Leadership

Are there too many “alternate facts” and “decisions-by-Twitter” in your company? Do you need more people who can pick apart a specious argument? Weigh the pros and cons of a vendor’s pitch? Analyze constructively assumptions behind next year’s strategic plan?

Maybe your enterprise is suffering from a serious lack of critical thinking.

If so, how do you find, hire and develop more good people who can think that way?

Everybody’s Asking That Too

First, welcome to the club.  Leaders everywhere are seeking sharp critical thinkers. Advertised job postings requiring the skill have doubled since 2009. And a recent Davos World Economic Forum report lists the same capability as #2 in the top ten skills for the global economy in year 2020 (up from #4 ranking in 2015; and both lists have “complex problem-solving” as #1.)

So just as you already know, and probably were afraid to hear: critical thinking is only becoming more critical.

Some help in making sense of it all is now on the way: The Critical Advantage, a lively and informative book  about critical thinking by William Gormley, Professor of Public Policy & Government at Georgetown University. Mercifully concise, this volume (published by the Harvard Education Press) is a sparkling read that’s both big-picture and practical, with bite-size samplings of history, a little brain science, and well-guided tours of critical thinking in education, work, and civic life. (Don’t be deterred by a misleading subtitle emphasizing “schools”–the book goes way beyond educational reform.)

Why Now?

I began my recent conversation with Bill Gormley by asking, why now? Why the urgent need for critical thinking today?

His answer invoked the familiar cocktail of accelerating technological and socio-economic change.

“Today’s global and interconnected society is exposing us to more different people, with different views, and mounting amounts of new information. We need tools but also the human capability to sift through it all, and evaluate everything coming into our lives. And it’s not just about assessing this or that argument. We also need critical thinking to help set priorities and be adaptable to all the change coming at us.”

“In the age of Twitter, our attention spans are getting shorter. Better critical thinking can help us preserve something fundamentally precious: serious human conversation.”

Alarm bells appropriately sounded, I next asked the Georgetown prof to elaborate on his book–and provide some “application specifics”  for building more critical thinking into organizations. Here’s what I learned.

A Road Map

1. Begin by understanding what critical thinking actually is. No, it’s not just criticizing other people’s ideas, or being a smart aleck. It’s a generative contribution to good decision-making, and more.

Gormley’s capsule definition is a mouthful, but every piece counts: “An open-minded but focused inquiry that seeks out relevant evidence to help analyze a question or hypothesis.”

Which is to say, critical thinking is about asking tough questions, considering and re-considering your own views in light of evidence presented, and connecting what you know to what you’re learning as arguments unfold. So if you sit through someone’s Powerpoint prez, what gets you to your final judgment—“That rings true,” or “Frankly, I’m not really convinced”—is your critical thinking. You use it to question the presenter, understand the assumptions, test and revise in your own mind what might make the best answer.

You do it every day, and probably don’t think about it enough. And some people do it better than others. Do you?

Gormley distinguished critical thinking from other cognitive abilities for the workplace. “It’s a complement to creative thinking, which is much more about novelty and inspiration, vs. analysis and weighing of arguments. Both have to be brought together to do problem-solving. Problem-solving typically leverages critical and creative thinking to find a solution to a particular issue. In the end, it’s helpful to imagine an overlapping Venn diagram among different kinds of thinking. The best performance results from  harnessing all three of them.”

(Note to readers: You might enjoy comparing and contrasting this discussion with my previous posts on creativity and problem-solving).

2. Mindset matters as much as intellect. We moved from definitions to more serious implications when Bill further peeled apart the concept.

“By my view there are three elements of critical thinking: doubt, self-doubt, and the search for good evidence.”

His first element was obvious enough: “doubt” means being skeptical, or  “recognizing flaws in arguments, pointing out weaknesses in a particular case, being willing to speak up and point those out.” Doubt pairs nicely with his third element too: “distinguishing good evidence from bad, evaluating the sources of evidence, and the like.”

Gormley’s real breakthrough was his second element: not just “doubt” but “self-doubt” too. Here the concept borrows from theories of emotional intelligence and embeds leadership behavior of a special kind. “To be a great critical thinker you also have to be humble, and open-minded about your own views as much as those you are listening to. You have to be willing to admit you might be mistaken, and that what you believe might have to change—if the evidence warrants it.”

Note also another subtle reference to leadership behavior in the first element, about being doubtful of others. If you’re going to make a challenge, voice a specific critique, you have to have organizational courage–and that  sometimes means “speaking truth to power.”

3. The real challenge today is forging collaborative critical thinking. As Gormley continued, he added another all important nuance. Criticism must be both civil and constructive.

“When you challenge someone else, raise doubt about their conclusions or evidence, you have to do it respectfully. Self-doubt is  important because you need to communicate you’re not making a personal attack—that you too might be wrong, just as you think they could be wrong.”  The Georgetown professor stressed the point because so much work is now done collaboratively. Thus the real trick is to operate with critical thinking across teams and groups, building a culture of people using it as a shared–and respectful–problem-solving tool.

“The old model of critical thinking was something like the Rodin statue—man sitting on a rock, alone, head bent over, deep in thought. But just as great ideas are increasingly the work of group collaboration, critical thinking also has to become a group capability. The new leadership challenge is how to socialize ‘constructive doubt’—for yourself and your entire team.”

4. Use simulations to screen job candidates for the skill. Though The Critical Advantage is not an HR handbook, the author had a few crisp ideas about harnessing his concepts to the search and hiring of critically-competent talent.

“First, absolutely mention the specific skill in your job postings— and the more you can actually define what you’re really looking for, the better.”

“Once you have candidates, screen them for their actual critical thinking abilities. Various written tests exist, but they tend to be narrow and academic. Better instead to engage would-be hires in a situational interview.”

“For example, ask candidates to talk about a decision or challenge in their former job, or more generically, something they wrestled with earlier in their life. Best of all might be to give them a specific challenge in your business today—and then ask how they would break it down. Listen for how they think about evidence, how much skepticism and also self-doubt they admit as they work through the situation for you. Focus less on their overall ‘answer’ than the thinking process they follow, and the style and personal demeanor they bring to the discussion.”

5. Use your own leadership practice to model and shape the capability. Gormley implicitly invoked the classic wisdom of “be the change you want to see,” emphasizing the all-important role for leadership.

“Whether you hire new people or are developing existing team-members, start by modelling the behavior yourself. Show doubt, self-doubt and respectfully challenge others. Ask about evidence and sources for an argument or plan. Make sure your own presentations highlight and evaluate evidence when driving to a conclusion.”

“When someone you work with does the right thing, praise him or her to show the way. And watch out for critical thinking that gets personal and negative. You need to correct that right away.”

“There are other organizational strategies to follow, too. For example, organizing skill-building workshops (e.g., the role play methodology of different thinking styles called ‘DeBono’s Hats’); creating evidence-based templates and protocols for presentations and meetings; and even organizing the layout of your office space to encourage more mixing of different people. Steve Jobs famously set up the bathrooms in Pixar so the engineers and artists would bump into each other more often—which built some new relationships, enhanced both the creative and critical thinking of the organization.”

6. Don’t just hire for the skill—build a longer term talent pipeline. Having done a lot of research on public schooling, Gormley was quick to underscore the value of education—and why building skills for critical thinking ideally starts at a young age.

“Schools are the rock of Gibraltar for this skill. Nobody spends more thinking time with kids than their teachers. Unfortunately, most of what passes for skill-building in classrooms is tasking the best achieving kids to analyze literary or historical texts—and it ends there. That can be valuable—but it isn’t reaching as many kids as it can, and what’s missing so often is building critical skills directly related to workplace needs.”

“There’s no reason that has to wait until people join the workforce. In many ways that’s too late. Apprenticeships, internships, career academies (schools within schools that deliberately blend academic and vocational learning), and other educational connections between companies and schools are great ways to bring the critical thinking needs of a job into a school, and school-based learning to the work of business. The most strategic companies are investing in bridging the realms of work and education to build and access the future talent they need.”

7. Strengthening the capability strengthens our society too.

Gormley finished by reflecting upon the benefit of better critical learning for America’s civic culture.

“Social media is now wrapping us all in cocoons of belief systems that we share only with other people like us. We’re getting more polarized and losing the self-awareness to ever doubt our own opinions. Nor can we respectfully critique—and learn from—others. We need to free ourselves from the technologies that are imprisoning us, and emphasize technology that liberates us. We have to do that somehow, if we’re going to think critically with one another as citizens in a democracy.”

Originally published on Forbes.com

To: Mr. Donald Trump

Dear  Sir:

I didn’t vote for you, and like many others, I was surprised by your electoral victory. But now that you’re about to become my president, I hope you’ll succeed. I’ll be the first to agree that Washington has its swamp-like characteristics that could use some cleaning up. And America’s place in the world certainly needs repair. Godspeed on all that, for sure.

But I’m not writing you today about policy. This note is about becoming a more effective leader as president. I’ll cut to the chase: you’re going to need to get really good at learning on the job.

I know you’re having all sorts of advice thrown at you, but trust me: this bit of coaching is about as important as anything else you’ll hear.

Learn Or Fail

Why? Well let’s be blunt: your success as this nation’s chief executive is not guaranteed. There’s a real risk you could fail. Since November 8, maybe you’ve been dreaming about becoming another Lincoln or FDR. Maybe, maybe; but I can also imagine tomorrow’s textbooks could end up ranking you with James Buchanan or Warren G. Harding. Nobody even remotely civic-minded today wants that for you.

I know what you’re thinking: “If I weren’t already good at learning in real time, and everything else about being a leader, how do you think I made myself a billionaire and then got elected president?”

Common Protests Of Successful Leaders

Other successful leaders often protest the same: “There’s nothing I have to learn in my next gig because I already know how to win.”

But this new job is unlike anything you’ve ever done, and one way or another, every recent president has always confessed the same thing– nothing they did before ever completely prepared them for this ultimate elected office. The successful ones all learned and improved as they did the work—and the lessons they learned were often painful. The best presidents grew in their jobs, intentionally reflecting and acting to make themselves better leaders, month after month.

Look, in terms of your readiness to learn on this job, I see plenty of red flags. By various reports, you have a pretty big ego, don’t like to admit to any failure, and you tend to “go with your gut” instead of doing a lot of detailed planning and analysis. Not a great recipe for continuous improvement and consistent performance breakthroughs.

Yeah, you can get by with winging it, and a lot of the time, just barging your way through. And obviously you have your victories to show thus far. But even just speaking as a gambling man, I might ask: why not hedge your bets a little more for this next mega-big roll of the dice?

Mr. Donald Trump, just imagine if you amazed the world, by every month by getting smarter and better as President…

Abandon The Myths About On The Job Learning

OK, so what do I propose concretely, to help you get better at learning on the job?

Well,  you can get started by abandoning four classic myths.  These are the dangerously seductive beliefs that bring down many proud leaders like you whenever they take up a big new position.

1.“If you’ve already been successful in something, you’ll be successful in anything.” Success builds confidence, and fuels your willingness to take on new challenges. And doubtless much of what you’ve accomplished and know about building hotels, condos and golf courses will carry over to big plans you’ve been talking about. Like renewing our nation’s infrastructure; and doubtless the famous wall with Mexico. But it’s doubtful whether it can help you with reforming Obama Care, shoring up our national security, charting our strategy with China. You gotta understand a whole lot of different stuff to do that.

Oddly enough, the success you’ve had in business may not just be irrelevant to such challenges; it might also cloud your judgment about finding good solutions. One of the treacherous aspects of past achievement is that it teaches leaders to see patterns that might seem suitable for lots of other situations–but that really aren’t. Sometimes those patterns apply, and sometimes they don’t. And when you wrongly compare past apples to new oranges, the results can be, as you’re fond of saying, “a total catastrophe.”

Successful CEOs stumble this way frequently. Rick Thoman failed miserably as the freshly appointed CEO of Xerox in 2000, when he tried to apply his experience from a celebrated IBM turnaround to the deeper culture and more complex power dynamics of the copier company. Apple’s retail store wunderkind Ron Johnson brought JC Penney to its financial knees in 2012 when, as its new CEO, he wrongly tried to apply the pricing and brand strategy of the computer company to the low-cost chain.

And remember—both those guys were confidently transferring lessons across what was still one business to another. Presidents have to move laterally a lot more broadly, from arena to arena, frequently and quickly, each more different than the next.

And so not surprisingly, presidents are also not immune to applying the wrong lessons learned to the wrong problems. George Bush’s appreciation of democracies around the world offered false hope to him that the invasion of Iraq would spawn a sturdy culture of self-governance among warring Shiite and Sunni tribes. It didn’t turn out that way.

The Dangers of Outsourced Thinking

2. “All you need to do is hire the right experts.” Yeah, of course expertise around you matters—and it looks like you’re working hard to find some knowledgeable people for your cabinet. But beware: when leaders start handing over responsibilities to this or that guru, sometimes they end up micromanaging—and missing the opportunities of taking real advantage of the superior knowledge they were proud to hire.

But even worse, a leader will get intellectually lazy. I know you’re busy but you also can’t just outsource your thinking to a bunch of clever and experienced subordinates in the cabinet or the West Wing.  Or to people who just like you. You’re not hiring them for flattery or facts, you’re hiring them for problem-solving. And that always requires analysis, debate and collaborative innovation.

It’s your job to make that happen—which means you’re going to have to learn enough about the critical domains to ask your experts the right questions, and ensure they’re hitting the right issues. And when they disagree with one another, you’ve got to resolve the conflicts and find a way to get them working together once the best answer is identified. To do that, you’ve got to know enough to be confident to understand that answer, and be ready to challenge substantively—or even fire–any expert that’s holding back progress.

A quick example from a great president. At the start of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, with little military experience, relied heavily on  General George McClellan to plot and conduct the Union campaign.  The results were disastrous. But behind the scenes, Lincoln was working steadily to build up his own understanding of military strategy. Eventually he achieved the confidence to replace McClellan—turning instead to the more determined and savvy Ulysses S. Grant who went on to defeat the Confederacy. The smarter Lincoln became about things military, the more he saw and trusted the genius of Grant.

3. “Homework is for wimps.”  It’s often said that your preferred mode of learning is not reading, but instead talking to a lot of different people, with different perspectives. Talking and listening to others is fine, and the more varied your sources the better. But the work of a president is magnitudes of complexity more than you’ve known in your life—you’re not going to be able to get by without also leveraging the economy of the well-presented written word; and also being a lot more intentional and disciplined in tackling what you don’t know.

Here again the story of Lincoln in the early Civil War. As the battles raged, and while he also wrestled to keep the government together in a time of national crisis, the sixteenth president was furiously doing his homework to get smart about conducting a war. He studied books of military doctrine, sought the advice of former generals, created maps and discussed campaign ideas with a stream of different visitors to the White House. And his homework included more than just talking and reading. Lincoln went on personal tours of the battlefields, and over time led the decision-making in key elements of Union strategy, learning from setbacks as well as the gradual successes.

Lincoln entered office as a military novice and completed his first term as an accomplished war president. He had plenty of help from great generals like Grant, but he never stopped building his own capacity to lead the overall cause.

Beware Pride

4. “Humility is for losers.”  You’re a proud man and have much to be proud of. However, you don’t seem to like people who attack or even challenge you. You fight back when they do, and it’s made you tough and strong. One can fairly say it’s a big reason you’re now our president-elect.

But your pride may be the biggest barrier to your longer term success. Deep learning can only be achieved by first admitting and understanding your mistakes—which will come, sooner or later, to your presidency. Similarly, no valuable counsel can ever be gained from others unless you are ready to concede they may have something to teach you. It’s not about weakness or acting meek like a a loser. It’s about getting smarter faster, in a world that’s changing more quickly all the time.

A White House Photo-Op To Remember 

Last week, when you visited the White House, the nation for a brief moment saw you sitting next to President Obama, the man you had so regularly insulted during the campaign. Both of you smiled, shook hands, and you projected a sense of someone suddenly in awe of the job you had just won. Mr. Obama spoke quietly and courteously to you, and you did the same with him. He seemed to respond to the modesty you showed, like a fellow comrade fighting to protect the Free World.

Those of us watching thought, “Hey, Donald Trump might actually be open to learning in this new job. He’s got his pride and power, but it looks like there might also be a real streak of strategic humility. Whatever else you think of the guy, that might be some good news.”

Mr. Trump, remember that moment, that feeling, that mindset. You’re going to have to call on it many more times in the next four years.

Originally published on Forbes.com

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face off Wednesday (October 19) for their final presidential debate. What should we expect?

No, I don’t mean, in despair, what do we expect to happen? I’m asking, in aspiration, what should we expect of the two would-be leaders of the world’s greatest democracy? When some two-thirds of  citizens think our nation is headed in the wrong direction, and the political discussion has become a slugfest of uninspiring lows, isn’t it time to really go high? To force these candidates to reach for some strategic loft about their presidential intentions?

Bigger Picture For The Right Track

Like many other people today, I’m wondering: What, dear candidates, is the big picture plan for getting the nation back on the right track? And what  do you think “the right track” actually is?

Calling Chris Wallace, our moderator for Debate #3! Please throw Clinton and Trump the kind of questions that democratic-style leaders in every context—businesses, virtual networks, non-profit organizations, as well as traditional political systems—must answer, to earn the right for a turn at bat.

Beyond Groping And Hoping

Let’s remember how leaders of any self-governing community ultimately succeed. They don’t command and control; they mobilize members with vision and plans that people want to sign up for. To do that, they don’t spend a lot of time tweeting insults about their foes or issuing reams of disembodied policy papers. Nor do they hide behind bumper-stickers or the explanations of pundit surrogates. They face all the people head-on, offering a specific vision for some positive transformation, with the right combination of imagination and practical detail that taps into a spirit of can-do. They offer leadership that promises we can collectively change things for the better. And they show respect to their fellow community members by explaining how they believe that will come about—and how they will help make it so.

Their explanations are many things in parallel: inspirational—this is what we can become and why our new work is good for who we are; transparent, offering enough honest detail to make it real—this is what our new work will be, and the choices we must make; personal—this is what the new work will mean for all of us and each of you. And for me, your auditioning leader.

In sum, though their manners will differ, great democratic leaders ultimately help every stakeholder understand an essential complement of critical ideas: Who are we as a community? What will our future success look like, and how will that success help us realize our purpose? What must we do to achieve this kind of success? Why am I the right leader to do this now with you?

What We Shouldn’t Be Afraid To Ask 

Mr. Wallace, go into the debate on Wednesday with noble determination. Don’t referee a prize-fight of personal punches. Instead, please demand that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump tackle the core strategic questions for a self-governing community whose people desperately want change—and are grappling to know what that should and could be. Help citizens see the differences about each candidate’s deepest thinking. Ask them this:

1. America’s purpose: “Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump: why does our nation exist? What in simple summary do you believe America offers to all of us as citizens? To the rest of the world? What is your view of what is special and distinctive about what we stand for?

2. Your vision of our success: “Mr. Trump, you say you want to ‘Make America Great Again.’ Mrs. Clinton, for you ‘We’re Stronger Together.’ Explain to our listeners what a fuller picture of that looks like in your mind. When you leave office at the end of your term, what specifically will be different and better for all of us versus today?”

OK, Then What’s The Strategy?

3. Your plan for our nation to reach that success: “Candidates, the specific policies and programs you support are available on your websites, and you have spoken from time to time about many of them. Please now speak about an overall strategy for your administration, in more general principles and themes—what’s the kind of blueprint you will follow to guide the nation in the next four years, to reach the sort of success and vision you have just sketched for us?”

“I notice both of you pausing. To get started, why not begin by laying out the handful of the most important problems we as a nation must solve today? And how you think we’ll tackle those most important problems? You might also speak about what you see as the most promising opportunities to build the better nation you envision. I know the time is brief, but summarize as concisely as you can. People are eager to hear a concise synthesis of how you would actually move America forward.”

Realizing Purpose And Choosing A Leader

4. Advancing our common purpose. “Candidates, for the benefit of the audience now, let’s be sure we’re connecting all the dots. Please go back to the higher purpose of our nation that you first spoke about—and explain now how the problems and opportunities you want to prioritize—and the overall plans for building greatness you’ve spoken about—will revitalize that purpose. How, stated otherwise, will your vision and strategy specifically strengthen why we exist in the world as a nation? And for our citizens themselves? ”

5. Why you? “Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump, you are both to be congratulated for earning your party’s nomination, and reaching this final phase of a long and difficult campaign. Soon the voters will choose between you—and we hope some of the reason that the winner will prevail will be based on the vision and strategic thinking you’ve shared with us tonight.”

“And so, let’s us then finish with this: why are you now the best leader for our democratic community? Why are you particularly qualified and committed to leading us on the journey for renewed greatness that you’ve been explaining? Why you—Mrs. Clinton, or you Mr. Trump— as our nation’s best hope, to make the vision and strategy of tonight’s discussion come true?”

Originally published on Forbes.com

If you’ve triumphed by building a revolutionary networked organization in the theater of war, can you help leaders do the same in the corporate arena? Can “business commanders” take advantage of organizational lessons of fighting terrorists– to build more agile, networked enterprises too?

Stan McChrystal thinks yes. For the past five years the retired general has been pursuing questions of how. McChrystal Group, his business consultancy of researchers, practitioners and former military officers, helps companies today become smarter, faster and flexible, akin to how the general’s networked coalition of Allied forces thwarted nimble Islamic jihadists in the post 9/11 Middle East wars.

Translating Warrior Networks For Business

I caught up with Stan and few of his colleagues to discuss how they’re translating warrior network techniques to the profit-making world.

McChrystal retired from the military in 2010, after his pioneering counter-terrorism effort helped turn the tide against Al Qaeda. McChrystal’s command, chronicled in his engaging memoir-cum-handbook Team of Teams—dramatically reduced Allied losses and killed the jihadist mastermind, al Zarqawi.

As I earlier wrote, this general’s battlefield achievements were less about traditional leadership prowess than “unlearning command and control”—letting go of authority as he developed a largely self-governing, cross-organizational warrior and intelligence network that functioned rapidly, flexibly and with deadly entrepreneurialism against the terrorists. McChrystal’s “team of teams” innovation was twofold:  building a community of “shared consciousness” and mission among formerly disparate military and civilian units; and redefining leadership and culture to enable quick action at the front line, with little or no oversight.

“So how do you adapt,” I asked the former general, “the military ‘team of teams’ to a business?”

A Model–But Not A Template–For Network Organizations

“Coming out of JSOC [The Joint Special Operations Command which McChrystal led in Iraq], we had a model potentially applicable to corporate clients. But it wasn’t a one-size template: the approach would have to be tailored in different commercial settings, and suited to their immediate problems.”

For context, I asked the general and his colleagues to first explain relevant similarities and differences between military and business organizations today.

McChrystal began with an overarching commonality: “In Iraq and Afghanistan we adopted a network approach to fight the network that Al Qaeda was beating us with. Businesses today are also fighting networks—customers and competitors are more and more interconnected—constantly shifting relationships, product preferences, strategies. At war we had to build a more agile and intelligent organization to keep ahead of a fluidly networked enemy. Companies now have to do that too. And building networks that operate like an extended team requires a completely different kind of leadership, whatever the setting.”

But as his colleagues chimed in, they called out some important differences.

What’s Not The Same

Several McChrystal Group consultants stressed how business clients lag behind the military’s practiced collection and analysis of intelligence. The JSOC “team of teams” depended on everyone taking advantage of what the network was constantly gathering and learning—the shared consciousness of situation and opportunity for performance. As Tom Maffey, a former Army Ranger and Brigadier General—and now McChrystal Group COO—reflected, “Most companies don’t have a significant intelligence gathering capability. In fact, JSOC showed you don’t actually have to build up a huge staff—the innovation is turning the entire organization into the capability. We help our clients do the same.”

A related difference is many corporate leaders’ lesser ability to shape the information gathering they need, based on the requirements of strategy. “In the military,” commented McChrystal Group Chief Growth Officer David Gillian—a former Brigadier in the Australian Army and experienced intelligence officer—we have the concept of ‘commander’s intent’: directional guidance that helps everyone understand what leadership is trying to achieve, at a level above situational operations. That then guides the information and learning needed. We find that many people working in corporations lack any clear idea of a ‘commander’s intent’—and then have their strategy distracted by the daily flow of information. They lose track of the big picture, and the critical questions they really need to seek answers to.”

Eyes On, Hands Off

Stan McChrystal offered an interesting counter-point. “Ironically today’s technology can undermine the historical value of ‘commander’s intent.’ The concept was devised to guide soldiers’ local decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, beyond an officer’s reach. Because any leader today can follow a network’s minute by minute activity, he or she will be tempted to micro-manage. The real agility of team of teams stems from leaders able to monitor rapidly changing situations but ultimately trusting others to decide about front-line action. The slogan is ‘eyes on, hands off.’”

But for a leader to be “hands off”, members of a network must be skilled, problem-solving, collaborative people. Unfortunately, talent development towards such goals in many corporate organizations lags best-of-class military capability. McChrystal Group Managing Partner Rachel Mendelowitz commented “a very large part of what the military does is training and developing leaders. You can’t build an agile fighting force without an intense focus on people.” Mendelowitz also noted corporate organizations struggle with how to reward people in a new era when both goals and the strategies needed to reach them are constantly shifting. “Promotion and career paths for soldiers are less dependent on static milestones.”

Pressure, Tempo, Commitment

As discussion continued, the consultants also pushed back about two “war versus business” differences I had assumed.

“Isn’t it much harder to rally a civilian organization to work together flexibly, when the stakes aren’t as high as, say, a do-or-die fight against terrorists?” I asked. Gillian replied quickly. “I don’t want to downplay the pressure of war to create teamwork. But any leader, to be successful, has to commit to help their organization perform collectively at the highest possible level, whatever the challenge.”

I replied asking about another assumption I had made. “But doesn’t the ongoing threat of action in war also impose a faster tempo than corporate business?” Mendelowitz countered again. “In the military, the fighting is intense, but it tends to be separated by long pauses of reflecting and preparing for the next battle. Many of our corporate clients are plagued by ongoing, low-level distraction and day-to-day firefighting. So they don’t take time to think and plan long term. They sometimes have trouble focusing on key moments of performance because of that.”

Team Of Teams Lessons

So what overall has McChrystal Group learned about building a networked “team of teams” for corporate clients? Seven further themes emerged.

1. Get clear upfront on the performance challenge. Chris Fussell, a former Navy Seal and now Managing Partner underscored one big lesson that McChrystal Group had to learn the hard way: “We developed some great partnerships with clients in the early days, but it took some back and forth before we really understood the challenges the clients needed help with. Our approach critically depends on that shared understanding, and we focus on it much more quickly now.”

2. Beware the leader without real commitment to change. McChrystal offered another insight forged by some earlier bitter experience: “Before we take on work now, we are much more intentional about assessing leaders’ willingness to change their organization—and also themselves. Many don’t realize how much personal change building a team of teams will mean for their jobs and identities; or they’re not really willing to commit to the necessary transparency, trust and giving up power. Unless we believe they’re ready for those things, we are reluctant to help.”

3. To build a better network culture, start with the networks and culture you have. McChrystal Group now structures most engagements around the findings of a tailored diagnostic—survey, social network analysis, and contextualized interviews—to understand barriers and opportunities for moving towards “shared consciousness” and a more agile culture.

As Managing Partner and former U.S. intelligence professional Jess Webb explained, “Our Organizational Performance Analysis has helped us better articulate the different elements of team  of teams for ourselves—for example distinguishing among different kinds of trust in relationships—but it’s also a tool to raise awareness among our client  leaders of the real underlying  barriers to their strategy implementation. We use it to build a road map with clients, to leverage or unblock the information sharing and energy in place that’s fundamental to shared consciousness.”

4. Build trust with leader behavior and transparent processes. McChrystal reflected on the transformational coaching he offers leaders, for example his recent work with a financial services CEO. “I’ve been helping him see that team of teams requires a much higher level of trust across the organization. When his organization was small, he could do that through personal relationships. As it grew, he had to shift his role, to help people start trusting ‘things’—ensuring processes of decision-making, compensation, and the like are fair, transparent, open. As organizations get bigger, leaders have to embed trust in actual operations.

5. Break silos with cross-boundary engagement and value. Silos are the enemy of shared consciousness and empowered decision-making. McChrystal Group helps clients integrate both horizontally and vertically, by developing “keystone forums” which institutionalize cross-functional meetings and problem-solving as part of regular work.

Keystone forums regularly convene members from across business units—to assess situations, share insights, and innovate together—all in search of higher performance. The idea is modeled on what McChrystal developed with JSOC, in the form of daily, large-scale virtual communication and conversation involving thousands different soldiers and intelligence contributors from across the Middle East and Washington DC. As these “Operations & Intelligence” briefings matured, shared consciousness about the why and wherefore of learning and helping one another at war grew stronger.

Such forums can become culture-building successes for a business if they similarly help surface opportunities to create new value across silo boundaries. Partner Howie Cohen created an “ah-ha” collaborative breakthrough at one client when he helped competing directors see the savings when everyone agreed to start using the same supplier for a critical operational need. Over time, as the company found further synergies among its different units, a more uniform strategy for the enterprise began to emerge. “The CEO was able to literally increase the stock price for the company because he could now explain to investors more clearly how all units of the company working together would increase end-to-end customer value.”

6. Appreciate the multiple strata of cultural change. Shared consciousness requires every member of a network to better understand—and accept—cultural differences across its community.

McChrystal explained further: “The dimensions of cultural integration can be very subtle. In some of our global clients, we’re helping members bridge differences among functional cultures—say engineers, sales, marketing, each with their own jargon and assumptions—but  also across geography and nationality, for example customs and language differences among Chinese versus Latin American units. Shared consciousness requires leaders to work on all aspects, and be sensitive to multiple layers of integration.”

7. Embrace incrementalism as required. I challenged the group whether team of teams was necessarily all or nothing for an organization. Gillian offered a practical reply. “You have to make progress where and how you can. We sometimes have clients that aren’t ready for full enterprise transformation—but one unit may want to become more agile and better networked to increase its effectiveness. We might help them with more localized keystone forums or similar, and look for opportunities to bring other parts of the enterprise in later.”

Looking Ahead

Stan McChrystal added a concluding reflection. “We continue to learn and adapt the model—and there’s a lot we still don’t know. We’re also seeing lots of organizational innovations that are pushing our thinking—for example hybrid models combining hierarchy and networks, and governance mechanisms that are almost leaderless.”

“But leaders are not going to disappear. They just have to change how they lead, in step with all the changes of how networks themselves are evolving.”

Originally published on Forbes.com

Saul Perlmutter, the Nobel-prize-winning astrophysicist spends most days thinking about supernovas and the expanding universe. Yet, at his recent college reunion, as his classmate Amy Edmondson told me, “he shared that he’s now worried by a more earthly, life-changing set of questions: ‘How will we—as a civilization—collectively pursue the world’s biggest problems? How can we understand how people of all different backgrounds and knowledge will work together and innovate to find solutions?’”

How indeed? Harvard Business professor Edmondson was stunned to hear the astrophysicist’s comments—because she’s been pondering very similar questions for many years. Her new book, Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation (co-authored with journalist Susan Salter Reynolds) offers Edmondson’s latest thinking on the topic, and a promising framework to guide leaders aspiring to this “Perlmutter challenge.”

It’s a timely contribution. The world is in desperate need of more leaders who can mobilize cross-industry, multi-knowledge collaboration. And making it happen doesn’t come easily to most people—so Edmondson and Salter’s perspectives on  what they call “big teaming” are welcome.

Think about today’s headlines. So many problems, so little large-scale collaboration—among the many who must contribute to find a solution. Innovation lags because all the different stakeholders for any big issue inevitably have trouble working together. Where are the leaders of the “big teams” needed for progress?

Addressing climate change? It’s going to take scientists, politicians, environmentalists and citizens problem-solving together in new and better ways. What kind of leaders can provide the vision and operational integration for that? Fixing broken health care systems? Won’t happen without doctors, researchers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and more—somehow co-creating new solutions. But under what kind of leader’s guiding hand?  Or think about beating back global terrorism. More cross-border, cross-functional innovation needed: bringing together international intelligence agencies, national police forces, religious practitioners, community leaders, citizen watch groups. Who can forge that meta-collaboration?

What kind of leaders can aggregate and coordinate the right talent, and bring human solutions to massive scale—form the really “big teams” to save us from the ravages of mankind itself?

A New Leadership Model?

Building the Future is Edmondson’s newest attempt to articulate a leadership model for such challenges. In the book she and her co-author back into the topic through the lens of a particular set of civilization-shaping issues: the development of future cities amidst rapid environmental change, growing populations, and increasing urban dysfunction. Her “lens on the lens”–which focuses on  leadership per se— is a deep case study of an entrepreneur and his urban development enterprise, an ambitious and often chaotic start-up called Living PlanIT. Building the Future is the prescriptive outcome of Edmondson and Salter shadowing the company, and its visionary founder (Steve Lewis) for some six years.

Their investigation pursues three concentric topics in parallel: how can cities of the future become more livable, sustainable, and innovative? What’s the nature of leadership to effect such a transformation? And finally, more generally, what are the lessons from–and for– any leader trying to catalyze the necessary “big teams”– entire systems of large scale “audacious innovation” in any realm?

Smart Cities And Beyond

As the authors write, Living PlanIT’s initial vision was “to build a brand-new sustainable high-tech city from scratch [in Portugal], to lead the way to building more such cities around the world.” Lewis and his company believe that urban innovation for the future springs from “smart city” technology—interconnected systems (“Internet-of-things”) that continually collect, analyze and harness big data across all dimensions of daily life.

The smart city theory is that, with the right platform and architecture, innovative solutions can be developed dynamically for urban dweller needs: cleaner, cheaper and more sustainable environments; buildings that self-manage recycled heating, cooling and resources; renewed public and private spaces that foster better human interactions; modulated traffic flows to minimize delays and optimize energy consumption; housing plans that self-regulate for changes in population and lifestyles; etc.

But, as the book chronicles, for all the worship of technology, Lewis and Living PlanIT often struggle with “people issues.”  The bold-thinking entrepreneurs discover that big  dreams and interconnected  data do not in themselves forge collaboration among all industry professionals needed for urban innovation—real estate developers, architects, construction leaders, engineers, transportation consultants, government policy makers, and many others.

Thanks to Salter’s journalistic flair, a major thread of the book is a lively, if not always surprising, narrative of the up-and-down journey of Lewis and company in pursuit their ever-evolving vision. (Like many start-ups, Living PlanIT  has progressively scaled its ambitions down, becoming more of a data platform company for the smart city projects of others.)

Big Teaming Leadership Lessons

The storytelling provides the case detail for the more compelling dimension of the book:  Edmonson’s synthesis of five leadership “lessons learned” during the Living PlanIT journey, as it struggled to create large, cross-domain teams for “audacious innovation.” Predictably, some of these lessons are informed by Ms. Edmondson’s previous organizational research, as well as familiar management advice—start with big vision, leverage specialized expertise, learn and adapt via small steps and concrete actions along the way, etc.

But two of the five lessons in the framework reflect some exciting and distinctive thinking for what leaders must do to create large, collaborative ecosystems of innovation.

The Nuances Of Big Teaming

The first — “foster big teaming”—underscores the nuance and difficulties of building collaboration from wholly different industries—each with their unique conceptual assumptions, working approaches, jargon, and specialized knowledge. The leadership challenge of forging cooperative production among people from, say, the construction, real estate, political, and technology sectors (all needed for an “audaciously different city of the future”) is a quantum leap beyond any internal collaboration most leaders face today, e.g. a CEO trying to get his marketing and sales units to find common ground for serving enterprise customers.

The book suggests that to build a collaborative culture across a multi-dimensional ecosystem, one of the most critical skills is empathy. Big-teaming leaders must develop an almost anthropological appreciation of what makes people in different industries tick—the language they use, assumptions about how they define success, the mindsets of how different practitioners learn and earn membership in a particular sub-community, etc.

Edmondson’s chapter detailing this “clash of cultures” sparkles with human stories that highlight vividly why empathy matters. We learn a lot, for example, when the authors contrast how technologists differ from construction partners about the process and horizon of “time to completion”; or how different practitioners in different sectors build professional legitimacy among their peers.

Influence And Innovation

A second notable advance is the book’s framework lesson about how future leaders must think and act to “balance influence and innovation.”

On the surface, that tension seems obvious—major transformation requires leaders who can externally sell its vision but also make progress at home, managing the step-by-step creation of something pragmatically new in support of the changed future.

The Advocacy Trap

But the authors argue persuasively the balancing act is actually a deep cognitive trap. Influence and innovation can be complementary–but for many visionary leaders they are diabolical enemies. Why? Because, as Edmonson and Salter observe throughout the case, the passion  of “selling a vision” actually makes a leader resistant to criticism, and less observant of other (helpful) ways of seeing the world. As Edmond later elaborated: “Pushing your bold ideas can, ironically, make you ‘anti-learning’—just when you need to be acquiring and adapting other perspectives around you.”

Looking Ahead

When I challenged Amy Edmonson about longer term implications of her findings, she offered a few additional insights:

1.Future big teaming will combine “closed” and “open” approaches.

Living PlanIT was conceived as a network organization, but (in the book’s telling) Lewis always seemed to have a clear sense of “them” vs “us” as the company developed its partnerships. Edmondson acknowledged that “this company was probably less of an open model than it should have been. They didn’t go far enough to tap ideas of broader networks and people in the cities themselves.”

“But there is a trade-off. Closed, and top-down approaches are easier for leaders to leverage particular expertise; also if work requires more ‘designed-ness’, a top-down approach may be better.”

“If a platform is really good– right governance, transparent decision-making, common language, etc. — open development can work. But it’s hard to achieve. Future big team innovation will likely combine open and closed. Leaders have to become ‘both/and in building and managing an ecosystem.’”

2. Any leader can develop big teaming skills.

When I asked Edmondson how leaders today might develop their own big teaming skills, she offered a practical list of strategies.

“Start by getting closer to people doing this kind of work—leaders with big, change-the-game aspirations– and look for opportunities to join their efforts. Seek high challenge, high uncertainty projects, and learn from them—knowing that some will not work out.”

“Also, spend time with specialized experts—we call them ‘mavericks’ in the book– who challenge the ordinary way of doing things. They’ll reshape your thinking too.”

“And in your ongoing development, strive to become a ‘T-shaped professional’: building a spike of expertise, complemented by ‘breadth across the top.’ In big teaming, this breadth across the top of the ‘T’ should now be in a diversity of different industries and knowledge domains.”

“For urban developers that might be ecology, infrastructure, design, materials, technology. As you move across fields, force yourself to learn new languages, new thought models, and appreciate the differences. Similarly, get to know cross-cultural ambassadors—connectors and interpreters among different work communities. Tomorrow’s leaders must have those skills too.”

3. Big Teaming leadership is a still evolving model.

Unlike most business books, Building the Future doesn’t offer prescriptions based on documented best practice. Instead, Edmondson and Salter watched and hypothesized in real time, analyzing a visionary leader who was sometimes succeeding, sometimes struggling. Even today, Living PlanIT remains an unfinished story.

Edmondson conceded that her “living case” approach was “an uncertain experiment,” an extrapolation from immediate experience, somewhat analogous to agile style development of software. But for a still largely unexplored leadership model, the experiment makes compelling reading.

Edmondson reflected that in the future more “compare and contrast” will be needed. “To more deeply understand this kind of emerging leadership, we’ll have to put more research eggs in more baskets, looking for patterns across several living examples in parallel.”

I for one hope Amy Edmondson does just that, and has plenty of other company in the quest. Leaders who can mobilize wide-ranging collaboration to build a better future for all are desperately needed. The challenge voiced by Saul Perlmutter should haunt every one of us.

Originally published on Forbes.com

By prophesy, the kingship of ancient Asia was promised to the solver of a legendary dilemma. In the city of Gordium a nobleman’s chariot was lashed to a pole with a devilishly intricate knot: who, pray tell, would undo it?  The tangled strands had thwarted countless attempts, until a self-confident Macedonian appeared. Drawing his sword, he simply sliced the knot asunder. Problem solved– by the future Alexander the Great.

Continuing Knotty Problems

Business leaders lack such brisk solutions for their problems today. Global competition, networks, and stakeholder empowerment are transforming former manageable, bounded challenges into endless Gordian knots. Shut down a business and face angry customers, employees, and communities. Roll out a global product and you’re haunted by second-guessing investors, supply chain weaknesses, or “suddenly appearing” regulations. Small wonder “complex problem solving” is listed by the World Economic Forum as the top workforce skill for 2020—as it was for 2015.

Understanding Best Leaders’ Approach

Put your sword aside: today’s challenges are too big and messy to be solved by one person, no matter how clever. The critical skill is now less about raw, “Rubik’s cube” IQ of any individual leader, and more about enabling savvy humans to collaborate and find solutions.

So how do the best leaders do that?

Talking With Dr. Kate Isaacs

I put the question to Dr. Kate Isaacs, an experienced researcher and facilitator who’s been studying complex problem solving for over a decade. She now splits her time between the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation, and The Center for Higher Ambition Leadership

Kate began with some background on complex problem solving, whose methodology first developed in the environmental and international diplomacy arenas. She then turned to the example of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, highlighting how certain leaders had catalyzed treatment breakthroughs.

“The history of AIDS illustrates the evolving science of tackling hyper-difficult and complicated problems—so-called ‘wicked problems.’ ‘Wicked’ means hard to diagnose and involving multiple stakeholders and domains. Such problems are also relentless: solutions are temporary, as issues keep morphing into new problems.”

Wicked Spreading

I interrupted: “Can we say then that more problems business leaders face today are ‘wicked’ too?” Kate paused.

“Well, to a point—there are plenty of well-bounded, short-term issues that don’t need large-scale collaborative solutions. But complexity, unintended consequences and the unrelenting nature of many problems are now a growing part of every business leader’s decision-making.”

“Consider why. Proliferating networks push many problems to touch others, further and further afield. Connectivity and information transparency makes us more aware of how any issue can affect other institutions and populations. With democratization of power in this connected, transparent world, more people also feel empowered to advocate—or oppose—company actions. The cliché of the butterfly wing rippling effects around the globe is truer than ever.”

I returned us to the core question: “So how do great leaders tackle these challenges now?”

“There’s no universal blueprint—different leaders vary in style and effectiveness in different contexts. But a few behaviors are still best in class.”

“Be clear,” she cautioned, “leaders can do everything right and the problem still may not get solved. But if they don’t think and act in a few particular ways, chances of progress will be slim. And missteps can actually aggravate the problem.”

Listening to Kate, I heard six winning practices.

1. Bring the whole system to the table.

“Because wicked problems affect multiple stakeholders, all constituencies must be represented—authentically—in the process. Great leaders see challenges in system terms—and do homework to get the right people involved, with the right perspectives represented: doing stakeholder analysis, understanding dependencies, key interests, etc. The big mistake is thinking you can make faster progress by just ‘working small.’ Those left out won’t contribute their valuable knowledge, and may even sabotage the solution.”

“Thus the example of AIDS: Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, ‘expanded the table’ in the early days of the first outbreaks. Against all advice—and blistering public criticism– he pushed to include AIDS patients in a collaborative effort to develop treatments. He rightly saw that unless patients’ experiences and concerns were heard, the approaches of the researchers and regulators would be incomplete—and ultimately fail. It was a critical turning point in the saga.”

2. Your first job is not devising the solution—it’s to build and sustain trust around the table.

“Many leaders are accustomed to being the ‘solution hero.’ Ego mistake!  The winning role is facilitating the best answer to emerge, collaboratively, from all relevant stakeholders.”

“Trust is the social lubricant. Great problem-solving leaders build that in many ways—making agendas transparent, fostering relationships among stakeholders (‘offline’ and one-on-one, as well as during group sessions), developing behavioral guidelines for workshops, acting with personal integrity, employing third-party facilitators, etc.”

“The MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation has created a multi-stakeholder partnership (NEWDIGS) to improve drug innovation, to get new (and safer) treatments to patients faster. The director, Dr. Gigi Hirsch, a trained psychiatrist, is skilled in building bridges across diverse members: researchers, payer organizations, patient groups, clinicians, regulators, and pharmaceutical representatives.”

“In its early days, she invited company members to present live case studies of promising new drugs, for feedback from other stakeholders. It was risky for pharma representatives to ‘open the kimono’ to competitors and powerful regulators and payers. Gigi asked everyone to agree to ‘safe haven’ rules to protect confidentiality, ensure personal safety, and mitigate power abuses. She kindly but firmly upheld the rules when tested.”

“Her leadership paid off. People learned to trust the process and each other. As actionable ideas were developed, trust deepened further. It was a virtuous cycle.”

3. Your next job is ensuring short-term wins for all, on the way to the longer term system solution.

A complex, collaborative problem-solving process involves time, effort, and resources from everyone at the table. Leaders have to preserve the interest and will of the group to keep going.

“People vote with their feet. Even with good intentions, members fall away if they don’t see personal benefit, relatively soon. Dialogue fatigue has killed many would-be collaborations. You have to manage a delicate tension to keep the process alive—ensure participants achieve near-term value for themselves even as they’re working on a shared problem that might not pay off for years.”

Dr. Isaacs referenced NEWDIGS again. “The NEWDIGS case study method was an ingenious way to create short-term value and achieve long-term goals at the same time. Companies got unvarnished advice from people they wouldn’t normally interact with, and they could use the insights right away back home. The cases also provided a window for everyone to see how the whole system needed to change, to get drugs to the right patients faster. That was something everyone wanted, so people stayed engaged.”

“NEWDIGS’ work inspired a European multi-stakeholder pilot that is now working on broader system change for drug approvals. Gigi’s leadership approach created the ongoing will for a years-long effort to achieve that.”

4. Build ongoing, adaptive learning into the process.

“Wicked problems by nature keep mutating—but people just like to finish things. Problem-solving leaders counter this human impulse by setting expectations that the group’s solutions will always be incomplete. But they stay optimistic and build paths forward, by intentionally integrating learning and learning systems into the process from the get-go. That builds sustainable capacity for inquiry and adaptation in light of new information and issues that inevitably arise.”

Kate offered another example from AIDS research.

“In the 1990s, another breakthrough came when the Surrogate Marker Collaborative Group—a partnership of pharmaceutical companies, federal researchers, and regulators—agreed on a faster and simpler marker of drug effectiveness: measuring HIV virus in a patient’s body. Building consensus about this marker vastly accelerated research and drug testing because everyone could see more quickly whether a new therapy was working. But because AIDS is so complex and therapies affect patients differently, they couldn’t stop there. So the group continued research to keep refining the measurement system.”

5. Be aware of your power, and share it responsibly.

Complex problem-solving requires leaders to know their appropriate role—sometimes to step forward with initiative, sometimes to hold back for others to lead.

“Leaders in these situations can’t issue commands as usual. Yet they do have power to influence partnerships. That power might be coercive, financial, or exercised through social influence. Different situations call for different applications. Sometimes that’s restraint from exercising any power, or sometimes it’s sharing it with others. Protecting trust demands leaders be self-aware of how and why they exercise their authority.”

“Dr. Fauci’s leadership in the HIV research also exemplifies sharing power responsibly. Not only did he invite patients to the table, he ensured they got an official seat on every committee and working group. It wasn’t just lip service: the patients were granted real decision rights, just like everyone else. When Fauci reversed his initial bias to keep patients at arms’ length, it had great symbolic significance. It was a key step in creating a successful collaborative culture in the overall effort.”

6. Manage relationships at home in tandem with those of your problem-solving community.

Building collaboration among many stakeholders to find “win-win” solutions can be all engrossing. But if you take your eye off your own constituency back home, you can lose your ability to implement actions agreed by the common group. Or worse, face a backlash that undoes progress.

Kate referenced some of her earlier research.

“A large coal-burning power company formed a partnership with environmental groups and socially conscious investors to develop more sustainable policies. It got off to a good start, with a lot of trust, and progress on many fronts. But then a major setback occurred.”

“During partnership discussions about certain regulations, a separate division of the power company unilaterally began a lobbying campaign to eviscerate the proposed regulation. When this was leaked, all the historical trust was destroyed overnight—and shared problem-solving ground to a halt. Some of the environmental organizations launched a vicious public campaign in retaliation, which infuriated the company people in turn.

“Both sides had elements that acted counter to stated intentions and good will of the people collaborating at the table. Leaders had failed to ensure alignment of some key constituencies back on the ‘home front.’  It took years to rebuild constructive momentum after that.”

Looking Ahead

Kate Isaacs finished by reflecting on the humility needed by any problem-solving leader.

“The American humorist Josh Billings once said: ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.’”

“His quote really applies to messy, complicated problems: what you think you know often doesn’t apply—and it can even get you into real trouble.”“Great leaders humbly suspend much of what they think they know—about the problem, other stakeholders’ needs, what a final answer might be. But my research tells me that great leaders do know a few things about how to inspire and steward the necessary collaborative process. The six practices we discussed aren’t the whole story– but they’re certainly a good start for anyone’s next ‘wicked’ challenge.’”

Originally published on Forbes.com

If you cut your finger, reach for a Band-Aid. Wake up with a headache, grab two Aspirins. But quick remedies aren’t a regime for managing overall health. Nor for managing a career. You can power pose like Wonder Woman to boost your self-confidence, or  tweak your mornings to be more productive. Helpful stuff, but not the same as a conscious, long-term plan to develop professionally over a lifetime.

OK, how to think about that?

I recently put that question to Kathy Gallo, Founder and Managing Partner of the Goodstone Group. Kathy has developed business professionals for some twenty years, and now oversees a global network of 65 professionals who coach leaders at all levels, in companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 50 corporations. She answered with an eager smile.

Learning From Patterns

“Well, we shouldn’t paint with too broad a brush. Everyone must build their own plan over time. But you can learn from patterns, for example how winning professionals manage their careers through lifetime eras—early, mid, and later career, or roughly speaking, in your 20s, 30s, and then 40s and beyond.”

Gallo began with a few cross-cutting themes. “Throughout a career, three leadership competencies are always a focus: problem-solving, executional capabilities, and people skills, especially “emotional intelligence” (leaders’ ability to read other people and connect it with what’s inside their own head and heart.) Then context—being aware of your organization’s culture; and changing it for the better when you can. Great performers work on all of these in every era.”

Because It’s Different Today

Listening to this prologue, I had a whiff of Mom’s apple pie, and asked: Is professional development really different today? The Goodstone Managing Partner pushed back. “Yeah, it is. The best jobs are much more competitive—twenty top-qualified people are going for every good position. And candidates are already well-coached—it’s how they excelled in college admissions, sports, music lessons. The most successful are now constantly improving themselves in a fiercely intentional way.”

So how does the game change as you move through the three eras?

Kathy described the classic matrix pairing consciousness and competence. “The best competitors co-develop self-knowledge and capabilities. At each step they are working to understand more about themselves and their goals, and the skills and knowledge needed to get there.”

Your 20s: Building Baseline Awareness And Competence

“Imagine a child first learning to walk,” she continued. “Not only does she not know how to tie a shoe, she doesn’t understand that shoes need to be tied. In your early jobs, you’re both learning what success in a would-be career is going to take, and then assessing your assets and gaps against that. The average performer bumbles along, trial-and-error. The top professionals are much more intentional.”

Kathy elaborated. “The rising stars relentlessly clarify expectations for winning. They are metrics-oriented, and constantly seek feedback, from supervisors, other colleagues, even clients. They develop a picture of success, then go after it. They ask, ‘if I want to head a sales division, what do l I need to do?’”

Are You Ready To Hear The Feedback?

But it’s not as simple as it sounds, she added. “Most organizations are not very good at giving feedback— timely, critical, actionable—which is what you need to raise your personal performance. In most cultures you have to work hard to get that kind of feedback. Women and multicultural talent usually have to work even harder for it.”

She offered a further warning. “Younger professionals often don’t want to hear the answer if it’s negative. They aren’t emotionally ready to hear anything less than ‘awesome.’” So success in your early career depends on learning both to seek and take feedback. And then building the discipline to act and improve upon what you learn.”

Gallo then noted the importance of recruiting sponsors, informal or otherwise. “As you start to grow, you need someone with power and credibility in the organization who can advocate for you—to get you staffed on the right projects. As with getting feedback, this is particularly critical and often more difficult for young women and multicultural professionals.”

But even enlisting support has its pitfalls. “Millennials are so social-media-wired, they’re always reaching out for help and suggestions. But they can lack discrimination—they don’t realize that some sources aren’t as reliable as others. Or that friends may not be totally candid. It’s a big issue for young CEOs. They buttress their managerial inexperience with all sorts of advisers. But they aren’t critical enough in choosing or using them. Great professional development in your twenties depends on learning how to judge and leverage the right people.”

Your 30s: Rounding Out Your Skill Set

Kathy continued the metaphor of the newly walking child. “So in the next era you know how to put on your shoes, you can loop the laces and tie them on your own. Now you want to get good at it, so it becomes automatic.”

“In your middle career,” she went on to explain, “you’re now established in at least one of the three leadership competences; and you’re clearer about aspirations and what it will take to get there. You develop plans to better leverage your strengths, and also address your particular short-comings.”

I pressed this coach for the real headline.

“For most people,” Kathy continued, “this middle phase means strengthening EQ. Typically they’re getting their first 360 evaluations. And they’re shocked to learn that maybe they have a reputation for being difficult, uncaring, or communicating poorly. It can be a real wake-up call—but the winners hear it and work on the problems.”

It’s also in this middle era that the best professionals start to look beyond themselves. As Gallo explained, “Even if people work on their EQ, progress can be limited by the culture of the organization. Some companies don’t care if you run over people to get results.”

So what then?

Kathy continued: “Losers are complainers. Winners face reality. You don’t have to be a jerk to succeed, but you do need to understand the cultural context. Sometimes that means getting better at playing the game (authenticity can be over-rated!); or better yet, changing the culture by bringing in more like-minded people. If necessary, they’re willing to leave for another company more suited to their values.”

Your 40s (And Beyond): Impact And Still More Self-Knowledge

Great maturing professionals don’t sit back and smell the roses—they continue the self-improvement that’s by now second nature. They seek out new assignments, different experiences, and look for innovative ways to “sharpen their saws.”

But, Gallo cautioned, they now face a different set of challenges. “Accomplished leaders are under more pressure to create impact; they have to project a certain gravitas, inspire talent, excite and align stakeholders, as never before. It’s a world of maximum transparency and like it or not, leaders today must have some level of charisma. And not just CEOs—everyone on their way to the top too.”

I asked the enduring question—can charisma be learned?

“Yes, up to a point,” she offered. “You can do a lot by working on public speaking, posture and style. But charisma can mean different things. The real strategy comes down to finding and developing the right version that suits who you are. If you’re more introverted or analytical, for example, you can get better in projecting confidence and impressing stakeholders with your expertise; or learning to speak more openly and firmly about yourself. If you’re an internal candidate for a top job, you can seek out a particularly difficult assignment, to show your courage and skill for tackling a big problem. That’s worth more to a board search committee than ‘flashy showmanship.’”

The Potentially Isolated Leader

Kathy continued with a final warning. “Another challenge for senior professionals is difficult and even dangerous. Successful leaders can become isolated without knowing it. People shy away from disagreeing with them, or won’t ‘speak truth to power.’  So suddenly these leaders are back to where they started twenty-five years before: they’re ‘unconsciously incompetent’, they no longer know what they don’t know—and nobody is going to tell them. If the world is changing around them, or they’re creating dysfunction in the organization they lead, they might be totally oblivious. They think everything is fine, when it might be catastrophe. Great leaders force themselves to keep learning, including the hardest of truths about themselves.”

Kathy finished by reflecting on one particularly effective CEO she knows. “He’s at the top of his game, but he won’t let up, even though he realizes more self-knowledge could be pretty painful. I’ll never forget what he confided to me: ‘If I want to be the best possible leader, I have to be willing to travel to the ‘Dark Side’—the part of who I am that I really don’t like. And then commit to improving that too.”

Originally published on Forbes.com

I recently profiled the talented theatrical director Ethan McSweeny, as a case example of Creative Economy leadership. Three insights from that post can apply to any leader pursuing innovation: design your product in a contemporary competitive context; construct it as an overall experience; and develop a distinctive “theory of value” that powerfully differentiates it.

A fourth insight from the previous post, equally applicable, focused on the “how” of  McSweeny’s leadership: fostering an emergent process of creation with others. I came to understand that his sparkling dramas result from messy but deliberate experimentation, and iterative collaboration among many people, both behind and on stage. Today’s post elaborates on his process approach.

Probing The Emergent Creative Process

1. The Creative Leader sets up the opportunity for success. Ethan’s discussion about starting a project reflected a keen sense of strategy and self-knowledge.

Work begins when he pursues a directing opportunity. Beyond predictable questions about schedule, budget and prestige, he looks for at least two of three drivers of creative impact:  “Is it a play I want to do? Is it a theatre or producer I want to work with? Will there and can there be other talented people involved (actors, technical staff) whom I trust and am excited to collaborate with?”

2. The Creative Leader builds a team around a core operating philosophy. The engagement of actors and technical staff for live theatre is a complex, multi-layered process. McSweeny pursues arrangements that build a shared understanding about how he wants the team to work. People join the production clear about a particular (and proven) way of working.

His beliefs embody an operating philosophy, a set of under-the-surface behavioral assumptions to support high-performance collaboration.

Core Beliefs

First, that although financial constraints must be respected, good art is what drives commercial success, not vice versa. “Too many plays today are hollow, designed backwards from producers’ guesses about audience or critics’ desires,” he avers.

Second, that the creative process must foster experiment and discovery. “I build a team that together will create magic–but we won’t know all of it on day one. I’ll have a preliminary vision, but it will evolve. My mantra is ‘plan relentlessly and be totally open to accident.’ Accidents spawn breakthroughs.”

Third, that all team members are responsible for success as “full citizens.” Adam Green the actor recalled early meetings of cast and crew in McSweeny productions. “He communicates that everyone in the room is important to the show, and will be trusted to do their best. He delegates well, doesn’t micromanage, and will frequently step back for someone else to lead. His rehearsals are pretty damn swell.”

McSweeny later commented: “My main goal is simply to get everybody operating at peak creativity. I’m not the racehorse, I’m the jockey. I have to get the real athletes ready to run the race of their lives—all at the same time.”

Project, Talent, Culture

3. The Creative Leader guides production as both project and process of talent and culture development. “Staging a play,” McSweeny noted, “is a left and right brain exercise.” For this director, left brain oversees a tight management schedule: recruiting, organizing, designing, and integrating the work of different sub-teams (acting and technical) into a final, polished production. Milestones and budgets must be met; the company tracks progress weekly, and together addresses problems if something is “still not working.”

But right brain is also always flashing—developing ideas, and nurturing creative impulses, both the director’s and his collaborators’. Concepts emerge through ongoing experimentation by different professionals, and the freedom—within a structure—that McSweeny encourages. Joe Smelser, his Shakespeare Theatre stage manager told me: “Ethan understands this is an art where ‘the paint talks back.’ He encourages people to speak up, try new things, and to keep developing their own craft.” Jenny Lord, Assistant Director for the Midsummer production agreed, observing that “theatre is an extremely collaborative art form–it’s very rare for anyone involved to be able to look at anything in a production and say, ‘That’s there because of me.'”

Adam Green explained that “much of what Ethan does is editing— ‘heightening and expanding’ what company members improvise during rehearsals.” McSweeny himself talks of “licensing actor’s experiments,” because “people own the idea better if it’s theirs. As the play moves from rehearsals to performances, you want the product to deepen and improve, while still maintaining structure and form.”

Right-Brain Messiness

Exploring accidental ideas is a messy, right-brain process. As the production marches forward, McSweeny also works with the company to circle back and retrofit creative concepts that have emerged. Ethan recalled that “In Midsummer Night’s Dream, we decided to portray the lover’s quarrel as a playful mud fight in the forest. It wasn’t working until the third week of rehearsals, when Adam suggested Puck  play a mischievous role in sparking the chaos. But then we had to redesign all the movements, and the prop and costume departments had to try different mud mixtures and washable clothes.”

A major right-brain imperative is dealing with fear. McSweeny was adamant: “What actors do is very, very hard; they know I know that. They’re constantly afraid of failing before an audience. When you invest the whole company with responsibility, they all have fear too. Fear is the ultimate killer of creativity. Removing fear is one of my biggest jobs.”

McSweeny further reflected:  “I signal that everyone will be respected. I learn each person’s concerns. I build confidence bottom up, starting with different sub-teams, so they find comfort in a smaller group before facing everyone in full rehearsal. We also do early rounds in deliberately informal settings—around a table, just reading; and then later in a dedicated rehearsal hall that’s not the main stage. It reinforces ‘it’s ok to try something that might not work out.’”

Storytelling Too

McSweeny also builds team culture with storytelling. “In table readings, I invite people to talk about personal experiences, perhaps with family or colleagues, or maybe a television program from the night before. It starts a safe discussion about ideas to try. I also share some of my own vulnerability. That also builds trust.”

Personal coaching is constant. In rehearsals, McSweeny will walk on stage, to help a particular actor or small group to improvise something not playing well.

“In The Tempest, we needed a flying Ariel. We had an actress perfect for the role—but it turned out she was deathly afraid of heights. We worked on that fear, at first privately, and then on stage with other actors. She went on to perform brilliantly— suspended from a cable 40 feet in the air.”

The Tempest Montage

Closing Open Doors, Slowly

4. The Creative Leader curates the final product by “opening and then closing doors” at the right time.

The step-by-step development of a play—recruiting and casting, rehearsing different designs, sounds, characters and action—follows a classic project management funnel. You start wide, and get more focused as ideas gel. Narrowing the funnel requires making decisions that stick. So when there’s an ethos of experimentation, and “the paint talks back”—how do you move the company towards final creative choices?

McSweeny’s answer is by “opening and then closing doors.” At first, he’s all about opening: inviting any actor or technician to propose different ideas, or a new take on a scene or character.

But as the schedule advances, he forces inflection points. “I remind people every week where we are, and what comes next—which they like. And timing is everything. You need to build a sense when exploration ends. But not all at once. You use intuition; and also the text of the play—a source of authority, beyond just ‘what the director wants.’” After a while I’ll start closing doors, and then converge the team around a final answer. Cutting actors off too soon kills their creativity. Let debate flourish too long, actors then lose their way. Structure is freedom.”

Stretch And Capacity

5. The Creative Leader stretches for higher collective performance, and building future capacity. McSweeny summarized a leadership approach simultaneously nurturing and challenging. “I’m open to ideas from anyone but also have the self-confidence to critique them, as long as the team understands it’s to make them and the show better. I respect people’s views, and admit my mistakes. But I also expect them to do the same for me. If an idea isn’t working—whether it’s mine or someone else’s—we have to be willing to discard it.”

This leader also challenges himself and his team by recruiting a mix of both known and unknown talent for every production. “I start with a core of people I know and trust. But I always add some new people I don’t know—a designer, certain actors, or other contributors whom I’ve never worked with. It keeps all of us from falling into familiar patterns. It adds risk, but we all benefit from more innovation. It also keeps expanding my networks for future productions.”

Banishing Ego

6. The Creative Leader builds self-awareness through practice. Ethan McSweeny closed by reflecting on his own professional growth. “When I was younger,” he smiled, “people would naturally challenge my authority. I was more dictatorial, out of insecurity. Now I lead by example. In a collaborative environment, it’s really the better way. I still have to work on managing my own fear-based reactions. Those come out as frustration, or even anger sometimes. I’m getting better at ‘counting to 10’—and recognizing the frustration when it’s coming.”

He finished with advice for any Creative Leader. “The key thing with creative people is to understand where they’re coming from, and simply focus on what will get the best result –regardless of what you think you want. To do that well, you have to manage your ego out of the equation. Ego is right next to fear in killing creativity.”

Originally published on Forbes.com

As my colleague Steve Denning writes, we all now work in a Creative Economy. Creative is surpassing traditional business and financial economies, with its innovation-seeking “ethos of imagination, exploration, experiment, discovery, and collaboration.”

It’s not just media, advertising, and movie studios. Every enterprise is trying to make, sell and do things more creatively. Leaders are hustling to become more creative too. Gone are the Mad Men days when the high pay-graders in suits simply cracked the whip and pushed bearded artists and quirky writers to come up with the ideas the company would sell.  Now leaders have to develop their own creativity, and also cultivate the chemistry for innovation all around them.

So what does a Creative Economy leader do to create creativity?

To answer that, I got creative myself. Instead of benchmarking the usual corporate exemplars, I thought, why not learn from a leader of unambiguously creative experiences?

Enter, Stage Right

I found a willing subject in a brilliant theatrical director, Ethan McSweeny. Today internationally acclaimed, McSweeny has been a rising star since American Theatre hailed him in 2006 as a “wunderkind with a Midas touch.”  Enjoying critical and commercial success on Broadway, regional and institutional theatres around the world, this 44 year-old- talent has directed some 75 plays (classics, musicals, new works), from Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Shaw to experimental off-Broadway productions. He’s now moving into film and opera too.

Last autumn I attended his production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. With its lyrical acting, imaginative staging, and awe-inspiring dream sequences, this rendition of the romance was hands-down best I had ever seen. When I later heard McSweeny talk about staging the play, I realized his creation was not just his own clever ideas; it was also the collaborative harvest of many talented contributors he had nurtured as a “creative leader.” I wanted to know more.

The Tempest – Puppets

A Dialogue Begins

We began a dialogue about his craft and leadership. I saw a couple of his other productions and a rehearsal of his A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I interviewed members of that show about working with Ethan (Adam Green, who played Puck; Joe Smelser the Washington Shakespeare Theatre’s Resident Stage Manager; and Jenny Lord, McSweeny’s Assistant Director on the production).

Through it all, I was probing the mindset and practices McSweeny brings to “creative leadership”; and also gleaning more general lessons for leading talented people to develop innovative products or services.

The insights that emerged addressed two critical questions: First, “the what”: what makes for a great creative product or service? Second, “the how”: how should a leader work with different creative people to achieve that?

What follows summarizes my findings for question #1. Question #2 will be the subject of a future post.

What Makes For A Great Creative Product/Service?

Four principles emerged from our conversations. They’re applicable for any leader developing a creative product or service:

1. Creative Leaders situate their product in a broader and competitive context. In earlier times, live theatre was literally “the only show in town.” Today, multiple visual, auditory, and other entertainment experiences compete for attention of potential audiences—television, YouTube, video games, even texting with your friends: “No theatre director should ever forget,” Ethan noted, “that we now live in a multi-mediated age. You have to stage A Midsummer’s Night Dream as a worthy alternative to someone’s experience at home watching Downton Abbey or playing War of the Worlds with friends.”

McSweeny sees today’s richer (even intrusive) media environment as opportunity as much as challenge.  He strives to fuse live performance and digital, technically-delivered content and effects, as part of his signature style. As he reflected, “I have a reputation for ‘visual, large-scale stagecraft’—because I bring powerful images, across-the-stage-movement and high impact design to my work. As a child of the digital revolution, I‘m comfortable integrating video and specialized sound and music with visually-inspiring settings. But it has to be done in a way that honors the text and story.”

His comments did faint justice to the gripping sensations I had watching his productions: an Elizabethan romance reinterpreted as lovers’ folly in a noisy and louche Havana sugarcane plantation of the 1930s; a fantasy wedding of The Tempest symbolically represented by luminous 40 feet-high puppets; fairies and spirits of Midsummer Night’s Dream cavorting on chandeliers, dressed like 19th century French cabaret players, rhythmically swaying to music blended of romantic and surreal electronic sounds.

For McSweeny, visual stagecraft helps position live theatre against competitive offerings of cinema. “In a film, the director’s camera forces you to look at certain things moment by moment. In a theatre, the audience can—and does—look wherever it wants, seeing more than this or that actor talking.  The theatre director can provide dramatic and visual engagement more richly, high, low and sideways across the stage picture.”

Creating Experience

2. Creative Leaders configure their products as an overall experience. The shift of businesses towards experience-driven products and services has been underway for some time. But what in fact is “a creative experience”? And how does a creative leader construct it?

When Ethan McSweeny directs live theatre, he builds an experience holistically, in often surprising ways: “I put a lot of attention into the ‘entire package,’” he commented. In fact, the “package” goes well beyond visual and auditory stagecraft.  He pulls in multiple elements to support “the central premise of theatre: the actor speaking on the stage.” The play’s story, for McSweeny, is all important, and informs the auditory experience of live people speaking to one another.

But McSweeny mixes in still other ingredients, for example the contemporary conversations and narratives that people bring into the theatre with them. “They all are reading the same newspapers and watching the same events that I and the actors are. We look for opportunities to bring that wider world into each performance.”

And the timing of speech and action adds further to “the package.”  Live theatre exists in time with its audience, Ethan explained, but what spectators sense and feel from performance must also “lift them ‘out of time,’ to a heightened, and exceptional realm.” The pacing and rhythm of the production are tools to create an experience both of the moment and beyond it.

Even the physical space of the theatre plays an experiential role. “We look at the shape of the stage, arrangement of seats, acoustics, how close people are sitting next to each other. We consider them all to create an intimate, group experience.”

Director Ethan McSweeny’s Cuban “Much Ado”

A Central “Theory of Value”

3. Creative Leaders build the overall experience on a central “theory of value.” To deliver a distinctive and emotionally meaningful experience, the creative leader must offer a specific “theory of value” (my phrase). For McSweeny, the actual text of the play, and the way the actors project and bring its multiple stories to life must be the center of everything. The experience should radiate out from that core.

That is perhaps not surprising. What gives his “theory of value” a special edge is the unusual constellation of ideas be believes (and trades on) to make great drama compelling.  First, he explained, successful live drama must make vivid human behavior and emotions: “we attend a play to see a mirror held up to human nature itself.”

Second, what the mirror shows must be enhanced by story – but story that explores status-clarifying interactions among people. Ethan suggested that “great drama is not simply characters seeking wealth or power or similar. It’s a picture of human relationships in dynamic hierarchy, people struggling with each other to work out some pecking order, like the animal kingdom. It might be about wealth or power, but also about emotions, or romantic interest, or someone validating his intelligence relative to a foe or a friend. We’re fascinated to see that aspect of the human condition unfold in the language, gestures, and voices of actors.”

Bringing In The House

The theory of value extends beyond the edge of the stage. It rests also on portraying nature and status to touch the prejudices, anxieties and hopes of people watching. McSweeny directs his plays to enmesh both actors and spectators in the same moment of human emotion.  “The actors and I always look for ways to spark laughter or other feelings collectively among people sitting together. Their joy or sorrow has to play off each other’s, and also that of the actors. The best experience is shared together.”

“Yet at the same time,” Ethan elaborated, “great theatre must also make members of the audience each feel as though they are being spoken to individually. Universal emotional truths are understood by any audience person’s specific circumstances. They become real for different people in different ways.”

Building Culture and Process

4. The Creative Leader builds the experience as an emergent process. Though McSweeny described clearly his goals and beliefs about great theatre, he was also adamant that realizing those is a team sport. Actors, stagehands, prop people, costumers, technical directors and many more all play a role in what the director facilitates. It is an iterative and collective process that the creative leader must cultivate. Through his or her guidance, all together discover a collaboration, and find a shared rhythm of group creativity. All must believe and behave so that the talents of many people sum to more than individuals working alone.

*****

This final proposition looks ahead to my next essay: about the “how” of Ethan McSweeny’s creative leadership. Please watch for it in a future post.

Originally published on Forbes.com