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Observe your team and look for signals from the outside.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the need to diagnose challenges in order to lead. Last week I wrote about the behaviours you are seeing from customers. This week I want you to think about the behaviours you are seeing in your team. There are clues there about the “system”. The economy, how the government might act, how the populace might act as our world rapidly changes.

What behaviours do you see? Do you see fear, hubris or something in between

Some problems are seemingly intractable. One for you right now might be: “How do I plan for August when the current easing of social distancing and isolation restrictions may get reversed in a week, in a month or in the last week of July?”

One answer is to use Design Thinking, to work smart in addition to remaining agile. Design Thinking is a way of identifying new and innovative ideas. Sometimes to develop new products or services. And just as often to identify solutions to problems, especially

Laid out in front of you are a range of scenarios as to how the coming months might play out. You have already been shocked and surprised since our world got turned on its head. How many more surprises are coming your way? What might you do about them?

The answer is assumption busting. Identifying and clearly articulating the assumptions underlying each scenario and asking how you can test those assumptions to reduce uncertainty. Let me give you an example of how assumption busting works in pract

“Never Mistake Motion for Action” is a quote attributed to novelist Ernest Hemingway. This is poignant in the current environment because motion affects results while action effects results. Said another way, if you create motion, something will happen. If you take action, you plan something to happen.

A few weeks ago I wrote about tooling for Adaptive Leadership. I was asking you to consider the analysis tools you have available to you to help you be adaptive through a time of much greater uncer

My blog a few weeks back encouraging you to slide back down the maturity curve and grasp Adaptive Leadership with both hands, has lead me to consider the analysis tools we have available and which would be most useful when looking to be adaptive.

There are a bunch of tools I use regularly. They include Stakeholder Analysis, PESTLE Analysis, Porter’s Industry Five Forces, Unique Value Proposition, Value Chain Analysis and my very own Capability Analysis (templates for most of these are available w

Being courageous with your decision making is key to adaptative leadership which I have been writing about for the last couple of weeks. Easy to say, yet you and I both know that courageous decisions are full of risk and opportunity. Will it work? What will it cost me? What unforeseen problems am I creating? Yet, the need requires the risk, or the opportunity is simply too significant to pass up.

Take the manufacturers turning to supply plastic face masks with 3D printers or the ones now producin

S-curves are beautiful things. They are wonderful for helping to decide where we are and where we want to be. From what I have heard and observed this week, it is time to slide back down the curve a bit. Let me explain.

The figure below is the one I show to boards and executives when I describe for them the value of a strong approach to risk management. You move from feeling or being vulnerable and exposed, to adaptive, to resilient. And if you are very, very good, you become agile – making rapid

Categorising beyond Type 1 and Type 2 decisions that I wrote about in my last couple of blogs can help decision makers. And right now, decision makers across the world can do with all the help they can get given the recently declared pandemic.

The four Cs are Core, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic. The person behind this type of thinking is David Snowden and his Cynefin Framework shown below. The only difference is the category I call Core, he calls Obvious. As in decisions for which the answer s

FaB (Faster and Better) decision making is possible through the right categorisation. Without the categorisation used at Amazon between Type 1 consequential irreversible, and Type 2 reversible decision making that I wrote about last week, we run the risk of either undercooking or overcooking our decision making.

Fab named their washing powder for its “fabulously clean, fabulously fresh and fabulously fragrant” qualities. My use of FaB is for Faster and Better decision making.

STOP. Don’t hang up the phone. You and I know that you and I are great decision makers…..and everyone else has the problem… right? So. This is not about your decision making. It’s about helping THEM. THEM being the people that work for you or the decision makers you are trying to influence.

Fab’s Fresh Frangipani has 15 key ingredien

In recent blogs I have been urging you to stand in the shoes of those you wish to influence. Recently I read a blog by futurist Gihan Perera that gave another reason to urge you on. In his blog There’s an ‘I’ in Team he reminds us that the young new entrants to our workforce have a very different WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) than new entrants of past decades. Gihan talks about their wishes including the need for identity and personal development. 

So they won’t care what you think unless you can

In my first book, DECIDE: How to manage the risk in your decision making, I made the statement “…in my experience, an acceptance of mediocrity and an acceptance that projects (and decision making) are difficult are the norm in the vast majority of organisations.”

Last week my blog was about the need to tap into board experience. Today I write about how boards need to be asked the right questions to provide their experience, to lead. Executive teams should ask their boards quite explicitly:

• About Risk – What risks do they see with the strategy? What emerging risks to the organisation do they see from their experience outside of the boardroom.

• About Opportunity – What opportunities do they see to improve the strategy? What opportunities do they see that the