Even allowing for the effects of the financial crisis of recent years, organizations of all kinds probably spend more time and money than ever before thinking about and developing leaders. Given the challenges of doing business in just about any sector, this is understandable. However, there is a growing feeling that, for all this effort, there is a gap between leadership and strategy. In short, not enough attention is being paid to strategic leadership.
In part, this is a holdover from a simpler, gentler time, when it was possible to come up with a strategy (after a suitable amount of time on assessing the situation and weighing up options) and then set about deciding how to execute it. Now, as nobody needs reminding, the environment is different. In time-honored fashion, the military has the terminology for the predicament in which we find ourselves – VUCA. The acronym – for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity – became popular in the 1990s as the armed forces came to terms with the shift from the more traditional conflicts of the Cold War era to those they are currently fighting against less formally organized opponents, such as militias and terrorists. According to Steven Krupp and Paul J.H. Schoemaker, authors of Winning The Long Game: How Strategic Leaders Shape the Future (Public Affairs), businesses “are increasingly encountering VUCA conditions as well”.
But there is another factor. There almost seems to be a sense that the ability to be strategic is something people either have or do not, in much the same way that certain sports players are deemed to be especially skilled at anticipating what will happen, or “reading the game”. Krupp and Schoemaker allude to this as well when they talk early in their book about how a young manager is urged to be more like Wayne Gretzky, the fabled ice hockey player who made up for “unimpressive stature, strength and speed” by skating to where the puck was going to be and doing the right thing at the right time.
The good news, as Krupp and Schoemaker put it, is that people do not have to believe that they are inevitably lacking in this area. They can learn to be better at it. As executives with Decision Strategies International, a consultancy focused on making leaders more strategic and organizations more adaptive, they are convinced that “every leader can become more strategic”. They just need to develop the right habits, attitudes and capabilities. Research among more than 20,000 leaders over more than two decades has led Krupp and Schoemaker to decide that there are essentially six disciplines that determine whether leaders will thrive in a situation where relying on what worked in the past was highly likely to lead to failure. Accordingly, strategic leaders need to:
- Anticipate changes in the market environment by staying closely connected with customers, partners and competitors, rather than become disconnected and reactive.
- Challenge assumptions and the status quo by surrounding themselves with people who think outside the box and are open to new ideas.
- Interpret a wide array of data and viewpoints rather than look only for evidence that confirms their prior beliefs.
- Decide what to do after examining their options and then exercise courage to get it done rather than prevaricate or become bogged down in the decision-making process.
- Align the interests and incentives of stakeholders, based on understanding different views, rather than rely on their power or position.
- Learn from success and failure by experimenting, making small bets and mining the lessons from both the good results and the bad ones to create speedy learning cycles.
The disciplines are “multiplicative in nature”, add the authors, so that when used together they “mutually enrich a leader’s situational awareness and strategic aptitude”. The idea is that they make leaders better equipped to deal with a VUCA world because in this environment success is less about having a detailed plan and more about adopting a general approach based around “capabilities that can be constantly adapted and reapplied to changing circumstances”.
All the disciplines are important, but it is the first – which Krupp describes as “see sooner and scan wider” – that is perhaps the key. After all, the others are in one way or another covered by more traditional management and leadership training. It is clear, however, that whether the disciplines are used to advance a leader’s vision or to help him or her develop a new one, they must be applied “with purpose and rigor”.
