Uncertain World Requires New Leadership Skills
An “uncertain world” will require significantly new leadership skills for leaders to succeed, according to futurist Bob Johansen, keynote speaker at The Future of Leadership: The Next 30 Years event hosted by MDA Leadership Consulting on October 27, 2011. More than 100 MDA Leadership clients, employees and friends of the firm attended the event.
The dilemma, according to Johansen, is that many leaders have been experiencing significant volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) in their roles, but their responses are not constructive. Some of these leaders, he said, judge too soon and make simplistic conclusions; others decide too late and pay a price for their lack of action or courageousness.
Successful leaders in the ”VUCA world” must have vision, convey understanding, seek clarity and provide agility to their organizations, said Johansen, based on his current 10-year forecast for business. “Volatility leads to vision, uncertainty yields to understanding, complexity leads to clarity (even if it’s wrong) and agility comes from ambiguity.”
Johansen is a board member and past president of the Institute for the Future, and helps organizations prepare for (and shape) the future by providing them with business forecasts (“not predictions,” he says). Among his clients are Proctor & Gamble, Disney, Kraft Foods, Hallmark and Cisco. All guests who attended the event received a complimentary copy of Bob’s book Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World (2009).
According to Johansen, the next 10 years will be “the most challenging, but also the most potential-filled” in his career. His principal future forecasts for leaders:
- “Digital natives” will think differently and make very different futures – A “digital native” is anyone age 14 or less, who has grown up from birth completely immersed in a digital world. “If you’re age 25 or less, the definition of a ‘generation’ is about 6 years,” Johansen said. “If you’re a 20-something, you’re extremely hip with today’s social media, but you’re extremely out of touch with today’s 19-year-olds. Nineteen-year-olds are more cool and more hip than 25-year-olds, but they don’t have a clue about the 14-year-olds. And the 14-year-olds are the ones who will change the world. Whatever media ecology you experienced as you become an adult will shape the rest of your life.”
For leaders, the challenge of working with the digital natives – who know they can connect with anyone on the planet, and who are adept at “continuous partial multitasking” – is that unless opportunities are found for them, a great portion of them will be “hungry, hopeless, educated and connected,” said Johansen, which will be a potentially dangerous mix (as evidenced by the civil unrest among young adults in northern Africa, upset about their lack of viable job opportunities).
Leaders need to specifically “reverse mentor” digital natives, and learn from them, to better understand where they are coming from, and how their expertise might be beneficial. - Cloud-based computing, and specifically, reciprocity-based innovation in the cloud, will be the biggest innovation opportunity in history – As opposed to today’s transaction-based online media (e.g., Amazon, eBay) and relatively crude forms of social media (compared with what is to come), the cloud “challenges you to give away what you have in surplus, and trust you will get back even more, in return.”
Tomorrow, the “currency of the cloud” will be reciprocity, according to Johansen. For instance, IBM, rather than selling “big machines for small margins,” now gives away software and sells services for very high margins, he said. “The reciprocity is what IBM calls the ‘Smarter Planet’ initiative, which we saw in the ‘Jeopardy’ contest in which the supercomputer Watson defeated two human contestants.”
According to Johansen, leaders need to ask, “What do we have in abundance that we could give away, and what might we get back in return?” It’s a business model rooted in our brain chemistry. “According to psychologists, the happiest people are those who give; the happiest of the happiest are those who forgive; and the least happy are those who carry a grudge,” he said.
- Biology and the global well-being economy – While unhealthy behaviors among leaders may have been tolerated in the past, in the future, top leaders will need to be physically, mentally and spiritually healthy enough to lead effectively, Johansen said. Companies will expect their employees to maintain a high quality of health.
In the future, according to Johansen, there will be elaborate bio-based “dashboards” to monitor personal health, including caloric intake (compared with physical activity) and amount and quality of rest. He believes that 10 years from now, many people will be equipped with “body dashboards” that will dictate the type and amount of foods they should consume.
Johansen’s presentation generated spirited discussion in the small group exercises and gave attendees much to contemplate as they plan for their organization’s future leadership. After the presentation, attendees joined in the 30th anniversary celebration of MDA Leadership Consulting which featured hors devours, cocktails, and of course, a cake.