For a year my website blog and LinkedIn newsletters have been exploring:
The world → the work of leading in it → the human capacity the work requires
When talking about the real world we are facing, I’ll begin with a quote from Michael Pollan’s book, A World Appears. He is writing about the distance between what science can explain and the richness of human experience:
“No scientist or philosopher has charted a plausible path from the intricate gray-and-white folds of the cortex to the felt experience of an early winter’s day at the end of fall semester, an experience that layers perception and memory and feeling—all that information—with something that seems so much greater than information itself, a purely subjective quality that feels rich beyond words and indelible.”
There is more to reality than information.
And we are entering a world in which that matters enormously.
Step into the world we are facing.
Artificial intelligence expands what we can know and create, moves healthcare forward at extraordinary speed, saves time and resources, and opens possibilities we are only beginning to imagine. At the same time, some of the people building the most advanced AI systems warn that the technology could pose a threat to human survival.
A company adopts AI to increase productivity and discovers that the same technology may eliminate a third of the jobs performed by the people who helped build the company.
A geopolitical conflict thousands of miles away can, within hours, affect employees, customers, supply chains, energy prices and financial markets.
And none of these things happens separately.
The world moves.
One thing alters another. Effects circle back and change their causes. Technology changes people as people change technology. Decisions made in one place surface somewhere no one anticipated.
What looks separate turns out to be connected.
What appears stable reorganizes.
Possibilities emerge through interaction that weren’t sitting there waiting to be selected.
AI changes how work gets done. That changes jobs. Changing jobs alters organizations, families and communities. Governments respond. Markets respond. Competitors respond. People change how they use the technology, which changes what the technology becomes.
A war is no longer simply “over there.” It enters an organization through a disrupted shipment, a cyberattack, a government sanction, a frightened employee whose family is in danger, or the sudden disappearance of a market.
And even then, there is no single reality arriving neatly at the leader’s door.
People inside the same organization can look at the same event and see entirely different things. Their experience, expertise, responsibilities, interests, fears and values shape what they notice and what they believe it means.
And yet there is another side to this world.
A world that is nonlinear and not fully predictable is also emergent, surprising, generative, alive. New possibilities can arise through interaction that no one could have planned in advance. Something genuinely new can come into being.
There is uncertainty in that.
But there is wonder, too.
If the future cannot be fully predicted, it cannot be fully predetermined either. Possibility is real.
Meanwhile, the amount of information available to make a decision is almost limitless.
Certainty is not.
And the leader isn’t standing outside all of this, looking down at a complicated system.
The leader is in it.
Participating in it.
Changing it while being changed by it.
That changes the work of leadership.
A leader is expected to move quickly—and pause long enough to understand what moving quickly might set in motion.
To deliver results now—and build for a future that cannot yet be predicted.
To use increasingly powerful technology—and determine where human judgment must remain.
To provide direction—and remain open to discovering that the direction may be wrong.
To act with individual responsibility and authority—and recognize that almost nothing consequential can be accomplished alone.
We built many of our ideas about leadership around a world we believed we could observe, analyze, predict and control.
That world is disappearing.
Increasingly, leaders must act while events are still unfolding. They must perceive what is changing before its meaning is clear. They must recognize relationships among things that once appeared separate. They must live with competing realities without rushing too quickly to decide which one is right.
And sometimes they must notice something they cannot yet explain.
This is not a future world.
It is the world leaders are already leading in.
Knowing more about it will not, by itself, make us capable of leading in it.
Because if the world we are leading in is changing, interacting and reorganizing while we are in it, leadership cannot simply be a matter of acquiring more knowledge or adding another set of skills.
Something in the leader must be capable of growing as well.
The capacity to perceive more of what is actually happening.
To remain open when the answer is not yet apparent.
To hold complexity without forcing it prematurely into certainty.
To discern what matters amid almost limitless information.
To recognize a signal before we completely understand what it means.
And to act wisely when certainty may never come.
The world → the work of leading in it → the human capacity the work requires.
That is the territory I’m continuing to explore.
