At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much in common between knowing how to ride a bicycle and leading an organisation during uncertain times. However, watching a short video about how much we don’t really understand about how we ride a bicycle made me realise how much there is in common between this and leading an organisation in uncertain times.
First things first, I would highly recommend that you watch this video and then we can continue this conversation.
If you are anything like me, you’ve known how to ride a bicycle for years yet did not truly understand the mechanisms involved in our riding a bicycle. We intuitively understood how to ride, learnt to balance by trial and error (sub-consciously) what we need to do to not fall off and maintain our balance while riding.
And to think of it, a bicycle is a pretty simple system. Once we put conscious effort to understand how it works or someone teaches us how it works, it is pretty easy to understand and remember. On top of all this, we can be absolutely sure that this is how it will work every time we or anyone else rode that bicycle.
The fundamental working of the bicycle will not change based on who is riding it, time of the day or the place on the earth. We can expect it to behave the same way, until someone tinkers with the design of the bicycle.
Now think of your organisation or your team. The chances are that just like we did not truly, consciously understood how a bicycle works and how we ride them, we do not truly, consciously understand all the dynamics of how our teams and organisations function.
In addition, how our organisations run can change based on the market conditions, our moods, moods of the individuals who make up our teams and on the assumptions we make as individuals and as a collective. Given this is the condition, it is quite likely that we are leading based our past observed patterns and what worked in certain conditions in the past.
When it comes to riding a bicycle, it would work every time because, the fundamental principles dont change. However, due to the dynamic nature of an organisation, it is not enough to just lead based off of our past experience. It is even more critical when the environment in which we operate is as dynamic and changes as rapidly, as we have seen it in the past few years.
So, the question then is, what can we, as leaders do, to lead our teams and organisations to do well and achieve our goals.
Here are a few thoughts:
1. Being aware of this blind spot is the first step in the right direction, Knowing that we have this blindspot, we can plan and adjust for the same.
2. If past experience alone is not enough, what else do we then need? I believe we need to cultivate our imagination, of what could be. One of the things that Ann Pendleton-Julian and John Seely Brown talk about in their book Design Unbound as “Pragmatic Imagination”.
They talk about imagination as the full spectrum thinking including Perception, Reasoning (Deductive, Inductive & Abductive), Speculation, Experimental and Free Play. You can find their 6 principles of pragmatic imagination here.
3. In addition to developing our imagination, we also need to learn how to come up with hypothesis and run experiments to explore and understand how the systems respond and do more of what moves the system in ways and in the direction that we want them to move in.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, as with many things in life, there is much that we understand and there is much that lies underneath that we don’t yet understand. We need to continue to explore the boundaries that separate what we truly understand and that which we do not yet understand. This requires us to cultivate the ability to look at things with a bit of doubt and not be absolutely sure of anything.
This ability to not be absolutely sure of anything can do us a lot of good. The thing we need to guard against is not to make this doubt all consuming and stop us from continuing to explore.
Many an organisation have been led astray by leaders who were too sure of the future and what they had to do and many an organisation have been led to their downfall with their leaders allowing their doubts to cripple them into inaction.
Most of leading in highly complex organisation is about maintaining this balance between using doubt to move forward and allowing doubt to cripple us.
