Sunday 26 July 2015

The Changing Face of Leadership in the 21st Century: Part Three

Foresight – Facing Disruption with Flexible Determination

In the last post we looked at the vital role that Picture plays in 21st century leadership. Beyond imagining the future and what is possible, our 21st century leaders take immediate action to “step into” that picture and begin to live it as soon as they possibly can. These leaders do not stand by and point towards the future; they move there and act as a beacon to others to join them.

Disruption and Discontinuity – The Age of Volatility

So how do you do this when the world around you, geopolitics, the business environment, markets, the social context you operate in, is changing, not just rapidly, but in sudden bursts, leaps and twists that are impossible to consistently predict?

The type of climbing I am known for can best be described as Real Alpine Adventure. It is comprised of four elements: difficulty, danger, exposure and a high degree of commitment. Exposure means there is no possibility for outside help once you commit to the climb and it increases the higher up you are, the more remote your location, and the greater the difficulties encountered. The outcome is always uncertain, especially as in pioneering new routes, I am constantly encountering the unknown.

I asked my colleague, Global Trends Specialist Robert McGarvey** for his take on this: “If there is one key leadership take away from Jim’s efforts in the Himalayas it’s that success in conditions of dangerous uncertainty depend upon flexible determination.

“It’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen, but a leader should prepare for alternative futures that are much different than today. Complete your formal plan, of course, but more importantly become more strategic as an organization. That means have a plan B, C and even a survival plan D where the unexpected is modeled and adjustments are anticipated in detail.” 

On our Everest Light expedition, we had a plan A and a plan B, and a survival plan C. We were determined to bring everyone home alive, and so our Plan C consisted of keeping support climbers on the mountain within reach of the summit team, so help was available if they got into difficulty.

Our plan A was the west ridge direct route, which fulfilled our desire to pioneer a new route to the summit. As time ticked by, we realized this route was consuming our resources faster than we could afford – we would exhaust our supplies and human capacity before we could mount a summit bid. So we had a plan B in our pockets – still a new route, but bypassing the worst of the West Ridge direct route that was eating us alive.

Even with all our planning and preparation, we were constantly challenged to dig deeper and deeper for the determination to carry on. Getting the summit team into position for their one-day final push almost defeated us – it was so windy, so cold, and working without oxygen in the Death Zone so debilitating, thoughts of surrender were getting the upper hand. This is where our team approach came through for us – Kevin Doyle, who was climbing (and sometimes crawling) in support, declared he was not about to give up, having come this far, even though it meant he would have no chance to summit himself, and he was so fiery about it that he reignited the determination of the summit climbers and they got to the high camp site, set up the tent and tucked in for the night. The summit bid was back on track.

Summit day was long and gruelling, and Sharon and Dwayne got to the top very late in the day – they had to descend to their tent in the dark. Plan C came into play the next day when, dehydrated and exhausted, they were met on the way down by Laurie Skreslet, who brought them oxygen and hot liquids. Their chances of getting down to a safe altitude on their own were pretty slim. I have been grateful ever since that we remained committed to plan C


Plan C in action. Sharon and Dwayne, exhausted and dehydrated were met by Laurie who brought them hot liquids and oxygen and helped them get down to a safer altitude. Without this support they would have been at serious risk of dying.
For leaders at all levels, your organization will face adversity in the future, maybe orders of magnitude greater than you anticipate. To be among the winners you’ll need all the flexibility and determination you can muster. Now is the time to prepare your mind and your organization for success in a volatile future.

Learning for 21st Century Leaders in an Age of Disruption:

To foresee effectively in disruptive environments, the leaders’ mindset needs to embrace multiple awarenesses:

Process awareness -- attention to the ongoing work and what we are doing right now;

Situational awareness -- attention to the operating environment and the complex of active components that influence ongoing activity;

Emergent awareness -- attention upon what is emerging around the edges: the subtle signals that come quietly in on a tangent, that are hard to detect because we are not specifically looking for them–.

These three levels of awareness were in constant play for me on Everest – keeping the major goal in mind, addressing all the myriad operational details and the shifting influence of weather, snow conditions, the state of mind of each climber, the ebbs and flows in relationship among the team members, a constantly-changing constellation of challenge and opportunity.

But there is one more dimension to this arsenal of awareness and it is the key: self-awareness, attunement to self: a continuous attention to one’s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs and how one is reacting to changes in the environment, or to differing, even conflicting perspectives. A leader’s beliefs, often unconsciously held, have been reinforced by success. When circumstances radically change, the tendency is to fall back on the old success model, the beliefs and assumptions that worked in the past, often with disastrous results.

Lack of self-awareness has killed far too many climbers. Without self-awareness, we can become blinkered and overconfident, the key weakness of so many leaders.

For more about the role of self-awareness in leadership, check out my Leadership Coaching Model at: http://www.heroichearts.ca/site/leadership_coaching.html#page_top



** Robert D. McGarvey, Global Trends Specialist. Keep in touch with Robert’s latest thinking at: http://www.troymedia.com/tag/robert-mcgarney/

Sunday 5 July 2015

The Changing Face of Leadership in the 21st Century:Part Two

Making the Impossible, Possible.

Picture: Seeing a Shared Compelling Future
Picture is the first of the 5 Capabilities of Leadership.

The profile of Mount Everest stood stark and cold against the blue of the sky. Behind me the fire of my friend’s funeral pyre was burning.

I and the team I was with were tackling one of the great challenges in mountaineering -- getting to the summit of the world’s highest mountain. We all accepted that there would be risks. But my years of experience in the high places of the world had taught me about achieving great things safely. I knew there was a better way. And I was fortunate to know others who agreed with me. From that moment we began to formulate a new way of leading through pictorial alignment to reach our highest goals while remaining unwaveringly committed to bringing everyone home alive.
Retrieving Blair Griffith body after he had been crushed by collapsing ice in the Khumbu Icefall on Mt Everest.
He was the fourth to die among our expedition’s members in just a few days at the start of our 1982 climb.
Four years later we made the impossible, possible when we returned to Everest and climbed a new route (one that has never been repeated), enabled the first North American woman to reach the summit, and, most importantly, brought everyone back healthy. 

We were able to achieve this, I am convinced, because all the team members’ pictures were in alignment.

A compelling picture is an image of the future that draws us forward, that gets us out of bed in the morning to keep driving towards our goals. 

When we can bring our many individual compelling pictures together to form a group or shared picture, we can collectively achieve great things.

In a series of conversations over the months after our first Everest Expedition, my friends and I formulated a new approach to expedition climbing. Though we were hardly aware of it, we were painting a picture, a picture composed of our individual dreams and values, a picture rooted in our own experiences of climbing together.

This was not a quick or an easy process. One of the key insights I had gained from the tragic experience on our first expedition was that it is easy to assume alignment – only when you encounter the unexpected do you discover the underlying disconnects, just when there is no time to heal them. Ensuring alignment takes intention, good will and a willingness to work at it until everyone is in the picture.

In our case we took the time to make sure each new member of the expedition was in alignment as we recruited them. If they couldn’t see themselves in the picture we were forming, they didn’t qualify, even if they had stellar climbing credentials. They had to value bringing everyone home alive as a priority and they had to dream of doing a new route, and perhaps most important, they had to convince us their commitment included being willing to support any member of team to reach the summit. This proved to be enormously important as our small team engaged with the difficult challenges and suddenly shifting conditions of the climb.

Time after time I read of companies setting themselves the laudable goal of having a “zero-incident, zero-injury safety culture.” However, I seldom see the leaders of these companies grasping what’s necessary to achieve zero incidents. What is necessary is comparable to the way we made the impossible possible on Everest – significant investment in aligning everyone in a common picture and with a deeply-held set of shared values and principles.

Again, when we can bring many individual compelling pictures together to form a group or shared picture, we can collectively achieve great things.

We summited Everest by a new route, one of thirteen recognized routes on Everest and considered low probability- we were given a 17% chance of success, and to date, despite at least eight subsequent attempts, no-one has succeeded in repeating it .
I’ll finish with a short story. 

It was late in our second expedition to Everest when it became clear that time was running out, and a segment of our planned route was proving too slow and difficult. 

We had to make the difficult decision to modify our strategic picture by shifting our intended route. 

Everyone’s voice came into the conversation and opposing positions were vigorously expressed. But we stuck to our values of safety and life and kept the conversation going. 

We were a mature group with a high level of mutual respect, so we heard each other out and eventually achieved alignment. 

The changed route became part of our new compelling group picture. We all fully committed to the route change, and got ourselves back on track. Most to the point, early and strong advocates of the “don’t change it” picture became, in the end, instrumental supporters of our summit team on the new route.

This changed and shared clarity of purpose made a huge contribution to our success.

Leadership Lessons:
  • Leaders need to be able to align the pictures, values and perspectives of a wide range of stakeholders in our connected world of social responsibility;
  • Building a common picture from all the individual pictures is vitally important in maintaining the organization’s capacity to respond to unpredictable conditions and new challenges;
  • Ensuring that deeply held values like safety are part of the collective picture is essential to the highest levels of achievement for the team, the enterprise, the community.
To learn more about the Everest expeditions and how we applied these lessons to building a high performing safety culture: http://jimelzinga.com/dvdbook.html