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Effective senior leaders of agile organizations play an integrating role across multiple systems, bringing coherence and providing clear, actionable, strategic guidance around priorities and the organization’s North Star purpose by providing frequent feedback and coaching that enables people to work autonomously toward team outcomes.  Pushing decision making out to the edges of the organization allows people to proactively and immediately address issues without needing to wait for manager approvals.  In essence, we are shifting ourselves and others from reactive to creative and engaged mind-sets.

 

Changing our mind-set—or adjusting it to address a complex context—is not easy.   Reactive, or socialized, mind-sets are an outside-in way of experiencing the world based on reacting to our circumstances and other people’s expectations of us. We typically default to this mode when challenged which limits our perspective, focuses us on what can go awry, and causes feelings of fear, anxiety, frustration, and stress.

 

Creative, or self-authoring, mind-sets are an inside-out way of experiencing the world based on creating our reality and way forward through tapping into and expressing our authentic selves, our core passion and purpose. Being “in the creative” expands our perspective and focuses us on the positive, and we experience joy, fun, love, and flow.

 

Most adults spend their time “in the reactive,” and as a result, traditional organizations are designed to run on the reactive. To build and lead agile organizations, leaders must make a personal shift to run primarily in the creative. Think about your typical day. Do you (and your team) spend most of your time reacting to problems and your boss’ requests, seeking to control others, and working to deliver perfect outcomes?

Or do you spend most of your time pursuing your purpose and passion, trusting and empowering others, and exploring new, and sometimes messy, possibilities?

 

There are three fundamental reactive-to-creative mind-set shifts that have been found to be critical to foster the culture of innovation, collaboration, and value creation at the heart of agile organizations: from certainty to discovery, from authority to partnership, and from scarcity to abundance.

 

▪  From certainty to discovery: fostering innovation. A reactive mind-set of certainty is about playing not to lose, being in control, and replicating the past. Today, leaders need to shift to a creative mind-set of discovery, which is about playing to learn and get better, seeking diversity of thought, fostering creative collision, embracing risk, and experimenting.

▪  From authority to partnership: fostering collaboration. Traditional organization design tends toward siloed hierarchies based on a reactive mind-set of authority. The relationship between leaders and teams is one of superior to subordinate. Designed for collaboration, agile organizations employ networks of autonomous teams. This requires an underlying creative mind-set of partnership, of managing by agreement based on freedom, trust, and accountability.

▪  From scarcity to abundance:   fostering value creation. In stable markets, companies maximize their shares at the expense of others. This win–lose approach reflects a reactive mind-set of scarcity, based on an assumption of limited opportunities and resources. Today’s markets, however, evolve continually and rapidly. To deliver results, leaders must view markets with a creative mind-set of abundance, which recognizes the unlimited resources and potential available to their organizations and enables customer-centricity, entrepreneurship, inclusion, and cocreation.

 

While there is a lot of organizational development and change work that has been done exploring distributed leadership, employee empowerment, continuous learning, restructuring and the like, it generally starts with “doing”.  What is done, how it is done, how to do it better, who does it, how to find the optimal balance of resources (labor, capital, etc.).  I was trained that labor (people) was an input or factor of producing (“doing”) goods and services.  Other factors could eventually be found to substitute for labor (people), depending on the projected cost of the various factors over time.  People generally start out as being viewed as assets, but over time could come to be seen as liabilities.  And liabilities are something to be reduced.

 

In this view of the world, what we do and how we do it determines who we relate with, and how.  With who we relate and how, often defines how others see us and how we view ourselves.  In essence, our self-worth as a person is ultimately determined by what we do.  In complex environments, socialized behaviors that come out of this train of thinking can impede rapid learning and co-creation by implicitly empowering certain people and viewpoints over others (while also creating fractured and compartmentalized lives).

 

My journey of awareness and addressing the contradiction of my belief in people versus systemic practice can be visualized in my traveling the “U” of the following figure.  It incorporates the African concept of Ubuntu and wholeness with Otto Scharmer’s work to identify blind spots in perspective and to allow “emergence” of the new (or new perspective).

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