“Do we still remember the question we are trying to answer? Or have we substituted an easier one?” -Daniel Kahneman Thinking, Fast and Slow
We really have to consider, what questions are we asking, of ourselves and of our organizations? And more importantly, what questions do we really need to be asking, but still aren’t? And if we aren’t asking any questions, why not? What is keeping us from asking the questions that we need to be asking, especially in the face of the current crisis we are facing?
In short order, what we’ve come to realize, is that there is no playbook for a pandemic, there is no binder for adapting effectively under uncertain circumstances, and there are no easy answers for pushing through the disequilibrium created by a crisis.
Which is why, unfortunately, much of our Type-A (Answer-Driven) leadership often finds itself ill-equipped and ill-suited for the ambiguity that arrives with the adaptive challenges we currently, and will continue to face in the future. The solution-nature of Type-A (Answer-Driven) leadership ill-affords itself the time and or space to ask the necessary questions, as well as engage the strategic stance needed to determine what is truly emerging amidst the chaos of the crisis.
In the midst of this dilemma-driven complexity, leaders have a tendency to become solution-focused, rather than question-centered. Which is unfortunate, as solutions tend to provide a sense of security, a sense of safety in the midst of chaos and calamity that these challenges can evoke. Even when that sense of security and safety is false. Answers placates. Solutions soothe. Which ultimately diminishes the creative and innovative thinking that is needed in the midst of these situations. It narrows our focus and converges, rather than diverges our thinking.
While solutions placate, questions stimulate and summon up the new thinking, new ideas, and new strategies and solutions that are needed to effectively meet the current challenge or crisis being faced in a much more open and diversified manner.
However, as answers tend to placate and solutions soothe, questions can create dissonance and evoke tension. Which means that leaders will need to learn how to allow themselves to stand steadfast in the midst of these growing tensions that these challenges elicit. In many ways, it necessitates that leaders become much more aware and intentional in effectively traversing the tension and chasm that stands between fast and slow thinking, between action and strategy. To walk this thin tightrope between order and chaos, knowing that moving too far to one side or the other has the real possibility for negative ramifications, often plunging our organizations into even more difficult circumstances.
Awareness and intentionality towards these tensions, though, can allow leaders and organizations to move more effectively in the chasm or space that separates each side from the other. Or as Peter Senge adds, “The key to success isn’t just thinking about what we are doing, but doing something about what we are thinking.” And vice-versa. It is in becoming much more comfortable with the uncomfortableness that these tensions place on our organizations and our leadership, both now and in the future.
It is in our willingness to exist in the midst of these tensions, to engage in the questions that they provoke, rather than solutions that placate, that we can ultimately begin to provide space for new thinking, new ideas, and new learnings to emerge.
We have to step back and ask ourselves what is emerging in the midst of this crisis? What are we learning and how are we evolving in response to this current challenge? How will these new understandings and learnings that are emerging give rise to the core competencies and capabilities that allows us move forward more effectively and relevantly into this new future?
Especially when we are facing a world that no longer resembles the world in which we lived in just a short time prior. Especially when our mental models are continuously pushing us back to a past that no longer exists. Or as Peter Senge shares, “Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see.”
Which will require new visions for the future.
Meaning that we will have to determine how we build up organizational learnings, effectively cascade new idea flows, and determine how to engage new capacities at scale, often through environments that no longer resemble past practices, processes and procedures. We will have to move to support our individuals and organizations in evolving in ways that allow them to shift and adapt more adeptly, to ideate and pivot more fluidly, and respond more aptly to the accelerated rates of change that continue to shift and shake the very foundations of what we once considered to be societal pillars.
When we come to the realization that the speed of change has not only accelerated, but has surpassed our ability to parallel pace it, we will also move towards the understanding that our ability to learn faster and to connect that learning in a myriad of new manners is vital to our individual and organizational futures. It is in that space that we can then begin to push our individual and organizational thinking towards a greater sense of inquiry, curiosity, creativity, and innovative behaviors that allow new questions and ultimately, new and novel solutions to emerge. Effectively, allowing not only new knowledge to spread through our internal and external networks, but ossifying itself in new ways of doing and being, thereby creating environments where new knowledge can not only be consumed, but also created.
Leaders who can learn to effectively manage these tensions, will better prepare individuals for organizational environments for a future that is more ambiguous and uncertain. In the midst of these tensions, individuals and organizations can learn to push past the lid, the lid that often binds us to future obsolescence, especially for those unwilling or unable to learn faster, connect quicker and wider, shift in a more agile manner, and eventually adapt more appropriately to context in constant flux.
“Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we re-perceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life.” -Peter Senge
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