Winston Churchill was the first to say “never let a good crisis go to waste.” If EU politicians can’t learn leadership lessons from thousands of migrants amassing on European borders, it will certainly be a crisis wasted.
But other executives can also learn from this crisis, especially those trying to lead in a more democratic and open way. Lurking behind today’s heartbreaking turmoil are fundamental strategic questions: whether and how to open a community of “insiders” to “outsiders?” And more specifically, “how open should an open community be?”
The Challenges Of Openness
These are timely questions. In today’s networked global economy, leaders are increasingly experimenting with openness, mixing, in different ways, “insiders” and “outsiders.” New combinations of talent, ideas and relationships are being pursued as never before, to spur innovation, reach greater scale or otherwise increase performance.
Next-generation leaders are building organizations open to a larger and more diverse world. They are launching cross-silo idea mash-ups and redesigning work to access skills and ideas of volunteers, experts and other contributors beyond traditional boundaries. Crowdsourcing and open source development have become mainstream; Gig economy companies (Uber, Lyft, Task Rabbit, etc.) disrupt closed industries with platforms to mobilize entrepreneurial workers networked to customers and each another. Product managers co-create new offerings with customers; businesses and civic organizations join strategic ecosystems, extending the influence of their home organizations.
Learning From Big Questions
But pioneering leaders know that working open is neither simple nor quickly done. Open has costs as well as benefits. Consequences of integrating virtual and more diverse workforces are tough to predict. How to “lead in an open way” is still a work in progress (thus Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, The Open Organization). So what might any leader learn from EU politicians wrestling with the historic crisis of openness now at their doors?
1. Get Clear About Why: European leaders clash about why recent migrants should be admitted to the EU or not. Stated goals are sometimes humanitarian; other times more self-interested economics drive the narrative (e.g. adding new skills and/or younger taxpayers to an aging population). Benefits and risks are hotly debated: diversity of talent for a more vibrant, innovative economy versus dangers of admitting terrorists or welfare abusers.
Overall, EU leaders are struggling with three fundamental “whys”: i) what would we accomplish by admitting new outsiders? ii) why do we believe those goals can be achieved? iii) why do we believe achieving them will benefit our community, beyond the risks and costs? All leaders must answer the same three questions if they want to “go open.” And more important, they must develop the answers—and a shared understanding—with members of their communities. Newcomers may promise various upsides, but incumbent members will have to support the intended integration—or open strategy fails.
2. Get Clear About Who: European leaders are now prioritizing asylum seekers (e.g. fleeing violence in Syria) over “economic migrants” (e.g. seeking better jobs and welfare). But categories about who will be encouraged and accepted, and who will not can be blurry and contentious.
The “classification issue” confronts all open leaders. Open strategies are rarely “come one, come all.” As a community develops goals, certain segments of newcomers will support a strategy better than others. Whom should the community accept as its own?
Successful leaders engage their communities to help decide. If we want more innovative products or services, what new skills should we favor? Is there particular experience to prioritize? Particular geographic or market relationships? And, then again, how open are we to serendipitous talent that we didn’t plan for?
Questions of “who” also raise issues about magnitude of social integration. As the EU crisis demonstrates, without some kind of quotas, absorptive capacity can be overwhelmed. Thus another lesson for any open leader—if you’re tapping new talent, outsiders, or non-traditional sources of ideas, how much “external” can your community take on?
3. Get Clear About How: One immediate lesson from Europe’s chaos is the importance of scalable processes for registration, decision-making, and integration of newcomers. Open leaders in any organization must similarly build scalable operations for “integrating the outside” (e.g. about intellectual property, inclusion in existing business structures, etc.) But open leaders must also scale some intangibles when external talent joins an enterprise.
One is trust—values and protocols that enable people in a community to work together, and hold one another accountable for performance, without fear or antagonism. In Europe today, tensions simmer among some that too many Muslims will undermine the community’s “European way of life.” Differing organizational cultures in business can collide with similar destructive anxiety.
Another intangible to be scaled is leadership itself. Successfully combining insiders and outsiders requires multiple leaders working together—vertically, and horizontally across the networks. Once again, learn from Europe. As a loose confederation, the EU lacks any collective leadership coherence right now. Active resistance of many EU politicians against Germany’s greater openness to asylum seekers hinders the development of common policy. Without more leaders developing a shared agenda, a unified open strategy remains elusive.
Leaders of other open organizations should beware. The complexity of integration always requires many leaders working together to effect productive transformation. Woe to the CEO who tries to go it alone when bringing outside ideas and talent into an existing community.
4. Get Clear About Learning and Adapting Along The Way: Outcomes of open strategies can harshly surprise a leader. Opposition to the growing hordes of migrants who answered Angela Merkel’s early September outsize welcome forced her to re-stiffen Germany’s borders later this month.
That said, open leaders must embrace learning from experience . Longer term consequences of open strategies often emerge slowly, but the impact can be big. Betting on open means betting on people who may or may not make a positive contribution over time; who may or may not fit with the values and protocols of a community after the initial welcome; whose contribution, in the end, may not produce enough benefits and competitive value to offset financial and social costs.
And yet well-integrated newcomers can also exceed all strategic hopes. Learning and adapting go both ways.
Savvy leaders will mitigate costs and risks by helping the community become more resilient as “open experiments” proceed. Open leadership is not just about adding new skills and talent from afar; it’s also about being open to being less open, when needed. Or sometimes more.
Originally published on Forbes.com