Leadership

What Can Leaders Learn from Improv Comedy?

Premise It was a Sunday evening, and we had decided to go attend a theatre performance. It was not a typical performance, well rehearsed, with carefully scripted dialogues, choreographed movements or a strong background music. Instead, two people walked onto a bare stage and asked us, the audience, some simple questions to come up with a scene, a place, some characters and a situation. There was no script. No rehearsal. No safety net. They had to act out the scene and move the situation forward. An actor starts the show and says something absurd (since it is a comedy show). […]

Leadership

Shifting From Human Resources to Human Beings

Premise Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found that globally, employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% in 2024, matching the size of the drop seen at the height of COVID lockdowns. This level of drop has only happened twice in the last 15 years. Even a single percentage point increase in engagement can lead to millions of dollars in productivity gain. This made me think about the reasons for this drop and I believe that the answer is hiding in plain sight. It lives in two words. Two words that have become so deeply embedded in the vocabulary […]

Leadership

What Can Leaders Learn from Genetics and Epigenetics

Premise: Have you ever wondered why there are more and more re-orgs all around us. As a leader, you yourself might have restructured the org. You have updated the strategy. You hired better people. And yet — the same behaviors persist. The same challenges continue to plague the organization. Have you ever slowed down enough to think deeply about why this is the case? And how can we change this? Genetics and Epigenetics It is in this context that I think there is a lot that we can learn from the field of genetics and epigenetics. For decades, people assumed […]

Leadership

Exploit, Explore and Empower

There are three kinds of activities that we can do as leaders. Exploit: Engage best practises when you want to make the most of what is well know. You look to optimising for efficiencies. Explore: Identify next practises when you want to understand what works and what doesn’t. The end goal of all activities in this area is to end up in the exploit zone. You look to optimising for effectiveness. Empower: This is the high-leverage activity for a leader. When we develop the judgement needed to know the right time to delegate the power of this decision (to exploit […]

Leadership

Strategic Foresight – The Skill that Every Leader Needs to Learn

Premise: For most of the 20th century, leadership has been about managing the known about optimizing for efficiency and reducing variance in every sphere of work.  But today, we live in a world where variance is the norm. The pace and scale of change around us mean that optimizing for efficiencies is a lost cause, maybe even a doomed cause and a recipe for disaster.  Leaders who succeed in the future will be those who make the shift from extrapolating the past to preparing for the future. One can’t really predict the future; one can only prepare for it.  And […]