#Future-fit leaders are needed right now.
by Lyssa Adkins
Time spiral by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
#Future-fit doesn’t quite fit. It sounds like we have ample time to prepare for the future when, in truth, we need future-fit leaders right now. In my view, we’re already a bit late, a bit unprepared, a bit unequal to the task at hand which is learning how to thrive, or at least survive, in the gloriously messy and precarious (business) world we have created. No matter. You start from where you are. Especially when you’re behind.
I’ll keep using the term future-fit because it creates a necessary distinction between business-as-usual leadership and what it takes to become prepared and equal to the task at hand. There are skills to gain, abilities to practice, and remembering to do so that we can be fit for the future, fit for complexity, fit for the challenges that are undesired, confounding, incessant and on a path of increasing intensity.
I am hearing stories from you, dear organizational leader, about a $30 million business line down to $11 million almost overnight and for no reason the experts can fathom. Or supply chains that still aren’t reliable years out from the pandemic and that pull the organization into fire drill after fire drill. Any one of these would be a regular business-as-usual challenge and fine to deal with on its own, or maybe even a few at once. It’s when they come at your organization incessantly and all at once that it gets to be a bit much. Waves and waves and waves of change. Waves and waves and waves. Most of it undesired and coming in faster and faster and faster. Faster and faster and faster.
It used to be that we could mostly keep up with the pace of change. There was even a time in the not-so-distant past that there were relatively stable periods between major changes. These were the days when we used to talk about freezing the org at the new state. Keeping it still, letting people get on with predictable work, cranking the handle on production. Everyone knew what to do. That's what a freeze was like, mostly.
This is no longer our reality, even though we still need to keep creating, producing, inventing, and cranking the handle. It’s not just that the waves of change keep coming. Many are saying that the pace of change will never be slower than it is today. Let’s slow that one idea down for a moment because it bears repeating. Many are saying the pace of change will never. be. slower. than it is today. That should be a terrifying prospect. Most people agree the pace of change is already too fast and yet we know in our bones that it’s true. It’s only going to get faster. In a reality of constant and accelerating change, our old strategies of keeping up, of getting ahead, of banking on a specific outcome will fail.
So if we can't rely on our old strategies, how do we do more than just keep our heads above water? Is it possible to learn how to surf waves and waves of change as they come faster and in increasing intensity? Is it possible to go to the depths of the water beneath the turbulence of the waves to receive a truly novel idea and then emerge at the surface with wholly new possibilities?
These ways of working with waves of change are just a few possibilities. What will be your strategy for working with incessant and accelerating change? For sure, it will be new to you. Something you have never done before. A way of being you have never been before. You will discern this new way of being and you will discover what to do (at least one wise step at a time) because you will make yourself future-fit.
You will do the necessary work to greet constant change, and even begin to see urgency as an ally. You will get tooled-up cognitively, emotionally, and energetically. As a result, you will have whole new categories of thoughts and perspectives, resulting in new options opening up to you. You will be free, unbound, and creative. And over time, you will become joyfully generative by working with whatever change comes.
You will take your sense of security from knowing that you have the skills to metabolize change, to get the nutrients from it. You will stop looking for your sense of security in pinning your success on a certain goal or keeping things stable.
You will begin to know that no matter what comes your way or how things turn out or how turbulent it all is, you are fundamentally okay. And so is your organization. You are all okay because you have built the skills to metabolize change no matter what it is.
This is just the beginning. As we go along, I’ll reveal more of what it takes to become future-fit, but I’ll give you a little teaser right now: it’s a job you do from the inside out.
References
Original article written by Lyssa Adkins and authorized to be published in the World Management Agility Forum by Lyssa Adkins.
Original article at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-fit-leaders-needed-right-now-lyssa-adkins-dt0ne/