Now Lead The Change: Repurpose Your Career, Future-Proof Your Organization, and Regenerate Our Crisis-Hit World By Mastering Transformational Leadership

By Nick Seneca Jankel

"As a transformation guru, Nick Jankel's ideas are as relevant to the newest startup as they are to the oldest public institution." Head of White House Office Of Social Innovation; Special Advisor to President Obama

Now Lead The Change is a tour de force that brings toge

• Language: English
• Publisher: Switch On Books
• Release date: Jul 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781999731571

Nick Seneca Jankel

Nick is more than a coach; he is a change champion, a world-renowned innovation and leadership expert, popular keynote speaker and a Cambridge-educated philosopher. Everything Nick does is centered on ‘switching people on’ – helping individuals, teams and world-leading organizations to breakthrough old patterns and create a thriving future.

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PART 1

THE TRANSFORMATIONAL

LEADERSHIP IMPERATIVE

Natural selection acts solely through the preservation of variations in some way advantageous, which consequently endure…But we may go further than this; for as new forms are produced, unless we admit that specific forms can go on indefinitely increasing in number, many old forms must become extinct.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

Competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.

Freeman Dyson, Theoretical Physicist and Mathematician

1

THE VUCA WORLD

The world around us is changing fast and furiously. The transformations in all areas of our lives are both intense and dramatic. The world is changing at a rate with which few can keep up. Not only is the world around us changing, but the very nature of the change is changing, too. Changes are occurring quicker than ever; they impact us in more challenging ways; and the changes don’t stop or settle down—so life remains unpredictable and uncertain. The environment in which we’ll be operating in just a few years’ time is not only difficult to predict, it’s often beyond our imagination.

We see this when we look at business. For example, a decade ago, who could have predicted that:

•The autonomous driving unit of Google, called Waymo, was considered by analysts to be worth more (as a component of Alphabet, Google’s parent company) than the world’s most valuable car companies like Toyota, GM, and Ford. It has few products in the market; and little to no revenue after ten years.

•Uber, a company that only launched in 2009, would become the world’s largest transport company without owning cars, trains, planes, or buses. Then, in the year after its IPO, it lost almost half its value—in part because its ethics as a business did not fit with the way the world was heading

•The world’s largest hotel company, Airbnb, owns no hotels. It hasn’t paid for a single brick to be laid or had to train a single housekeeper. It never has to deliver a single hot room-service meal, yet it sells more nights of hotel stay than the largest hotel groups in the world. More interestingly, had you heard of it over a decade ago when people like me were putting our houses on it to rent?

•The world biggest media company, Facebook, gets its users to create the content and does not pay them a cent; nor does it take them out for lunch to hip new restaurants in Los Angeles, Manhattan, or London.

•The world’s biggest retailer, Amazon, has only a few hundred physical stores; and it makes c.63% of its revenues from selling cloud computing services to corporations.

Would any of us been able to predict this in the year 2000? When we understand how drastically the world is changing, it becomes clear that the management techniques developed over half a century ago to generate predictable returns in stable markets are no longer entirely fit for purpose to ensure businesses make it in the world that is rapidly emerging. In the 20th Century, managers operated in environments that were relatively stable, predictable, familiar, and clear.

In fact, management science was built on the premise that the world in which every organization operated was stable, predictable, familiar, and clear. Leaders learned to use tools to manage production processes and teams that were predicated on a stable, predictable, familiar, and clear reality. 10-year or 5-year strategies, line management, KPIs, yearly planning processes, Gantt charts, balanced scorecards, performance reviews, 60-minute meetings, and many more all emerged as tools to generate efficiencies, and so consistent profits for shareholders, in the Industrial Age; the age of machines.

Such tools, which originated in processes for making machines ever more efficient, only work optimally to manage organizations if the environment is stable, predictable, familiar, and clear and so all you need from your people is to do what they always did but a bit better, and a bit more efficiently, each year. Continuous improvements were enough to generate single-digit growth, particularly if it was through cost reductions that generated the same or more output but with less overhead (flashy offices, workers, managers).

But the 21st Century environment is anything but stable, predictable, familiar, and clear. In fact, it is quite the opposite. It is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. These four terms form the acronym VUCA, coined in the late 1990s by the US military to describe the nature of the environment that soldiers find themselves in today. It is increasingly being applied to the conditions all leaders must perform in within our fast- and furiously-changing world. Simply put, VUCA makes Industrial Age management tools ineffective at best; damaging at worst.

To explain VUCA: Our world is more and more volatile: things change very quickly, even overnight, and often for the worse. We can see this in the America-China trade wars, in the rise of populist movements, in the confusion of Brexit, and in the meteoric spread and explosive impact of Covid-19. Volatility has become a part of our existence, and it makes things difficult to plan for or control. The world around us is also increasingly uncertain (uncertainty is about ‘unknown unknowns’ as opposed to risk, which entails ‘known unknowns’ that can be figured out with metrics): the near future, even next month, is unpredictable. We don’t know the long-term impact of AI, blockchain, or robotics; we don’t know how new generations will affect the existing work force and the future of work; none of us know how quickly our world is going to heat up, how fast sea levels will rise, and what the implications are in terms of the price of homes, or our access to nutrition. No amount of data, which is always about the past, can help us with this uncertainty—it is unmeasurable and unknowable; rather than estimable and knowable and so be calculated in financial risk models.

We’re also experiencing more complexity than ever before: there are more connections among different systems—organizational, economic, social, and scientific—than any human being could ever get their head around. Even the CEOs of the world’s largest companies, and the presidents and prime ministers of the most powerful nations, cannot understand the complexity in their own system, let alone how their system interacts with so many others. Finally, the world around us is also fundamentally ambiguous: give different data to different people and they will take different things from it, creating different narratives and different levels of meaning. This makes getting clear information and insight into the future virtually impossible for any organization, however smart its strategy team is.

As leaders of any entity—of nations, of organizations, of community groups, of families, of relationships, of ourselves—we have to be able to upgrade how we make sense of this new kind of crazy in order to make decisions that future-proof our enterprise. The first step is radically to improve our sense-making apparatus so we can make sense of the major forces that are driving such profound changes in our shared human reality without overwhelming our brains with thousands of data points, and scores of urgent trends, that we simply did not evolve to make sense of.

2

THE 3D FUTURES FRAMEWORK

Geologists call our current era the Anthropocene. It is the first geological time period to be named after a species: anthropos, humankind. We are the only species to have impacted the geology and structure of the planet so profoundly. However, much as we have changed the planet, the material ‘hardware’ with which we have to work—the wetware of our brain and nervous system—is barely more developed than that of our ancient ancestors.

The late, great physicist and philosopher Freeman Dyson wrote: It has taken 200,000 years for our species to evolve biologically from its origin in Africa until today, [but] it has taken only about 200 years of cultural evolution to convert us from farmers to city dwellers and to convert a large part of North American forest to farmland. We all have to deal with Anthropocene angst (AI, Millennials, climate change, Covid-19, recessions, profound inequality) with Neolithic neurons.

Where our ancestors only had to hunt every few days, pick some berries, and tell stories to each other around a fire (and fell the occasional beast), we have to use the same hardware to deal with 300 emails, 6 meetings, and a to-do list the size of Greenland every single day. Not just that: we have to get everyday business done even as we must invent the future of our industry; and reinvent ourselves in the process.

The dubious honor of having a geological time period named after us can be seen as a mass wake up call for every human on Earth to use this turning point to adapt and recalibrate the software running on our biological hardware so we reduce stress and suffering; and increase equality, peace, and sustainable prosperity. Time is running out.

The fast and furious fluxes and fluctuations of the VUCA world can be bewilderingly labyrinthine; and intensely overwhelming. As I will go on to explore more fully, our brains and our bodies experience change, chaos, and uncertainty as painful. Without some kind of organizing framework to make sense of the vast shifts that are dissembling, and then reassembling, everything we know and hold dear about life and a future on this planet, we can easily get defensive and resistant. Instead of embracing the changes so we can forge the future we want to see, we push them away, discount them with a righteous-sounding narrative, and ignore them even as our organizations lose competitiveness, and our leadership style becomes obsolete.

To prevent us locking into a defensive position driven by our innate biological responses to confusion and complexity, I have developed an organizing framework that helps us make sense of the changes by making them simpler but not simplistic. It’s called the 3D Futures Framework and I have been piecing it together over the last twenty years of being a professional futurist and scenario planner.

It upgrades our consciousness to help our Neolithic neurons catch up with the endlessly tangled knot that is our Anthropocene Age. Rather than try and deal with a thousand trends in our business strategy—trade wars, crypto tokens, opioid deaths, gender fluidity, lean manufacture, fake news, veganism—the Framework allows us to parse the radical complexities of our era into three key domains: The Digital World. The Disrupted World. The Damaged World.

Almost all the changes you will encounter over the next few decades that demand transformational leadership will fit into these three domains. Rather than be constantly bamboozled by yet another trend or fad to which someone draws our attention, we can now peer at the world through three distinct lenses to gain insight on how it is changing. But, as I will explain in later chapters, we can then transform each lens into a prism to focus our creative genius through. Our minds become laser-like in both inventiveness and focus so we can then adapt our business models and operating models in a cohesive and congruent way.

In essence, the three intense and potent drivers and domains of change—the digital world with fast exponential technologies; the disruptive world with massive social changes; and the damaged world with global existential risks—are a triple threat that each of us must engage with as leaders if we want to future-proof anything.

3

THREAT 1: THE DIGITAL WORLD

The impact of the Digital World on our lives and businesses is hard to underestimate. Kodak, Blockbuster, and even tech company Nokia were all disrupted out of business by digital technologies. So, in many ways, was President Mubarak in Egypt’s Arab Spring and Hillary Clinton by Trumpian tweets. Any organization that doesn’t grok the threats and opportunities of the digital world cannot play a foundational role in the future.

The core possibility that digital technologies unlock is the capacity to scale ideas globally, into peoples’ homes and businesses, rapidly, and with very little additional cost. You don’t need to build a new factory to go from selling ten apps to ten million. Leaders can scale their offerings exponentially: 10× or 100×. This means they can scale their ROI exponentially, too. This is what ‘unicorns’ are focused on: growing to be worth a billion dollars or more in years not decades.

The exponential growth potential of digital tech can be brilliantly illustrated by the time it took different technologies—some analogue and some digital—to reach 50 million users (the kind of numbers a multinational needs to serve to be worth getting out of bed for). It took the telephone 75 years to spread to 50 million people. It took 68 years for air travel to become a mass-market phenomenon. It 62 years to go from the first few automobiles bought by the wealthy to 50 million people owning their own car. Radio took 38 years to spread to 50 million people and analogue TV took 14 years. In contrast, the internet took just four years to reach 50 million users. Facebook took just over 3 years. Twitter took 2. Instagram just over 1. The Angry Birds app took just one month to reach 50 million downloads.

This ability to scale an innovation through digital technology to reach this many paying customers or needy citizens so quickly is unprecedented in human life. As is said in Silicon Valley: software is eating the world, especially Industrial Age processes and business models. Digital technologies allow ideas and innovations to spread faster than our brains can often grok. They do not grow in a linear way, taking many years to scale and reach mass penetration. They follow what is known as an exponential growth curve: the speed of growth gets faster as time progresses, reaching extraordinary numbers very quickly. Digital technology spreads ideas, products, services, and even cultural ‘memes’ and ideals, exponentially.

Everywhere we look, we can see digital technology—now expanding from just the internet to technologies like blockchain, AI, the Internet of Things, and 3D printing in what is called the 4th Industrial Revolution—that would have been considered science fiction just thirty years ago. For example:

•In May 2019, design studio Fuseproject unveiled plans to build the world’s first 3D-printed housing community in an impoverished part of Latin America

•In 2018, Walmart started deploying blockchain to track the journey of foodstuffs so it could identify a source of food contamination and potential illness in just seconds instead of weeks.

•An experiment was conducted in 2017 pitting Artificial Intelligence against trained lawyers to review legal contracts. The results revealed that AI was 30% more accurate than the human lawyers, and completed the 92-minute task in just 26 seconds.

With the help of digital technology, we can now build houses in 24 hours instead of 24 months. We can use the driverless public vehicles, robotics, chatbots and gene editing. We can even print body parts for amputees. No one person can possibly understand the long-term impact of just one of the 4th Industrial Revolution technologies on organizations, let alone the combined effects of all the technologies landing: The Internet of Things; Big Data; wearables; sensors; 5G telephony; Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML); Artificial Life (ALife), CRISPR gene editing, nanotech, and bio-printing; robotics, machine-to-machine communication and automation; blockchain based platforms and currencies; the distributed web; chatbots; Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR); human-machine interfaces; manufacture-on-demand; advanced hacking and cybercrime…the list goes on.

Digital technologies are increasingly all around us. They are in our homes, our offices, our fridges, our doorbells. We carry them with us in our phones. We wear them on our bodies. They sense things around us that we cannot sense and create a virtual reality that we can barely detect. To survive, let alone thrive in, the digital world, we must transform the way we organize, produce, market, work, and lead.

However, this does not mean following the management temptation to shove new technologies into our existing business models and value chains just because we can. I have witnessed many organizations do this and fail to generate value—exponential or otherwise. Digital transformation requires more. Much more.

Instead, we must explore the unique potentialities for value-creation that each platform opens up in the adjacent possible—the space for new possibilities that arises around existing realities—and leading our teams on a journey of transformation to discover how we can deliver our unique business purpose and brand propositions through, and within, digital technologies. We are looking for unprecedented ways to provide value to new and emerging customers—and help them resolve real pain and problems that matter as the future unfolds.

Young or old, whether we have vertical power in the systems and organizations we operate in or not, the ever more digital world changes everything. Our own careers are at stake. We all have to contend with the advances of automation, robots, and AI into the workplace. Human irrelevance and obsolescence loom large.

If an AI already has a board position in a Venture Capital firm with an equal vote to the five human executives, where does that leave us? Where do we go from here if we want to compete for roles with the technologies we have invented?

Even if we retreat into the supposed safety of ‘perfect management’—optimized data models, brilliant number-crunching, epic report-writing, etc.,—AI algorithms that have taught themselves how to do routine and non-routine analyses far better than we can (and without our cognitive biases, frailties, sickness, and need for sleep) will eventually expose us as less good than they are at mechanistic thinking. We cannot hide in spreadsheets and charts.

4

THREAT 2: THE DISRUPTED WORLD

The second driver of dramatic change is an enormous shift in social and cultural mores and customs—particularly our ideas and ideals about how we live and work—driven by intense generational change. I see this shift being even more important for leaders to understand than the advent of exponential digital technologies. This is because whatever technologies we use to make and scale our products, they only succeed if people want them, need them, and value them.

Consumer perceptions of their pain points and needs are changing fast. Customers are becoming more empowered than in the past—and so able to meet their own needs without a business being involved. So leaders have to pay attention to new customer and employee types and needs even more than they do to digital technologies. Making this more challenging is that generational cohorts are getting shorter in length and are disrupting society sooner, and more radically, than generations in the past. So-called Millennials now make up the largest percentage of the workforce and are challenging every leader to step up and shape up. Generation Z, the generation that is now entering the workplace, is already disrupting companies with emerging needs as customers and employees. Gen Alpha, the generation coming after, will disrupt again.

For example:

•Whereas 60% of Baby Boomers (say those on the Board of a business) think having a tattoo shows questionable personal morals, 40% of Millennials (who make up the majority of staff and possibly customer-base too) have one.

•Of Generation Z, 70% have a Netflix subscription and 25% have already earned money online. In addition, 1 in 4 of them have already self-harmed—cutting (mainly girls) or burning (mainly boys) themselves—by the time they are 14. And those are just the reported numbers.

•Of Generation Alpha, those currently in elementary/primary school, 20% have already been to a protest and 50% have made a video online already. The oldest of them became 8 in 2020.

These emerging generations have a fundamentally different outlook on the world. All of us in positions of leadership need to understand what it is if we want to lead them as team members or the customers we must interest in our products. Most perspicaciously, we must understand what motivates them if we are to design and deliver work experiences and product experiences that tap into their deepest