Can your teams work with uncertainty? Can you?

Last Friday I caught up with Katherine Templar-Lewis, one of the world’s leading experts on human uncertainty, fellow Transformation Architect, and overall lovely human.

As her research heavily overlaps with the work I’ve been doing in The Transformation Code, we quickly geeked out and the conversation turned to how in our days of AI and meta-change, uncertainty tolerance has become a leadership superpower.

It’s not really new.

Strategy implementation has always been half art, half science. The best leaders have always been those who understood the alchemy of letting transformation emerge instead of forcing it into existence.

But something has changed.

Yesterday the challenge for a leader was to set a future direction and make it real. Today, changes come so hard and fast that transformations - and even strategies - have become continuously moving targets.

You may set out in one direction, but your people, your operational reality, your market, or an AI techie in a Silicon Valley garage throws you a curveball that requires changing direction even before the proverbial PowerPoint ink has dried.

This requires a different type of leadership than many of us have been trained in.

While textbooks described models of situational leadership, yesterday’s career reality was that if you wanted to make it as a leader, you “described a future, turned it into a detailed plan, and made it happen”. While today - if we’re honest - reality feels more like “pick a general direction, take some first steps, and feel your way through what comes next”. Letting go of the illusion that we can controle reality in any shape or form.

It’s not easy.

In my heart - I never really believed in the full confidence transformation theatre performed by major consultancies and some executives. But when facing a team - or client - that looks at me for answers, I also feel the pull to be “the man with the plan”. The guy who makes things happen.

After all, it’s not a great career move to say that: we have a plan, but while we thought about it a lot, we don’t know if it will work and what the exact outcome will be. Though it will probably differ from whatever we imagine today.

Still, it may be exactly what is needed.

Not just because it is more honest. But because it helps us let go of prematurely locking our ego and investments in any given direction. By assuming strategies, plans and roadmaps need constant calibration and validation, we get to:

• better decisions, allocating resources only for as far as we can see

• higher agility, by paying attention for signals that don’t fit our own world view

• better results, by giving the teams that need to implement the strategy the autonomy to do what is right in the face of reality, rather than any inadvertent PowerPoint or workshop delusions we have imposed

So is this of relevance to you and your business?

Probably. Katherine’s research shows that:

65% of executives (n= 3159) would rather appear certain and be wrong than admit they don’t know and turn out to be right.

Interestingly enough this bias doesn’t live at the top. 70% of the C-Suite can handle the ambiguity that comes with change.

It’s the senior leadership teams and manager layer underneath that struggles the most. I.e. the people that make or break any strategy and transformation

Which means stepping into uncertainty.

In my book, The Transformation Code I call it Dancing with Chaos. The realisation that whatever I do, things will not go as I imagined. There will be happy surprises and sh*t. And all the stuff in the middle.

The best I can do is make assumptions and adapt my plans to reality as I go.

Every single day.

This also means admitting to my teams, my clients, and myself that I don’t have all the answers, and neither do they. That we all need to rely on each other to continuously challenge assumptions and blind spots. Look at strategy cascades as directional indicators which should be changeable at a moment’s notice. Useful for the moment, yet never set in stone.

In a way, leadership has become less about certainty and driving results, and more about surfing the waves of transformation to a future that is better, more resilient, enjoyable or profitable than the current one. Even if we cannot 100% describe how that future will look or how we will get there.

But it is “the way”

Yes, strategies, plans and financial forecasts matter. Still, even our precious KPIs never tell the complete picture. And everything we think we know today, can be out of date tomorrow.

But we can make transformation happen by:

• crafting the Story of a commercially relevant future

• ensuring it Resonates with customers, teams and shareholders

• and creating the conditions for change to Flow.

Continuously sensing and adapting as needed. Letting the future emerge.

I know, I don’t really like it myself.

But if you’re a C-Suite executive, we already saw there’s a 70% chance I haven’t told you anything new. Though - like me - you may still want to improve.

The more important question is perhaps how your own uncertainty tolerance translates to your organisations and teams. Are they still trying to cascade and implement a set strategy, or are they able to let it emerge?

Do you, your colleagues and your strategy consultants give them the freedom to do so?

Think about it.