Leadership Development - On Broken Ankles and Leadership Transitions

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On Broken Ankles and Leadership Transitions By: Dave Schrader


In the last 30 years, the business environment has grown more complex than ever in our history. The pace of change (a la Alvin Tofflerʼs “Third Wave”) is old news. Now the critical challenge has become overwhelming complexity.


Overwhelming Complexity Disruption is the bane of the professional manager’s existence. The credo of the professional manager has been order, predictability, and control. With enough planning and forethought, we can make much of our processes into a machine-like consistency. In the old process, disruption was a problem to be solved, a problem that should have been avoided. To the person who longs for predictability, this development is not merely confusing, it’s deeply threatening. It threatens our existing ways of making meaning out of what we see in our world, as the patterns we’ve grown familiar with are up-ended .


We have a Choice. The complexity and unseen interaction of forces in our business and personal lives are always providing surprising intrusions that don始t fit well into our current framework for making sense of the world. We can ignore them, or we can choose to relax our grip on our expectations of predictability, and let the interruptions do their work.


We Have a Choice The old ways of solving problems don’t work when confronted with an adaptive challenge; one must adapt, learn and evolve in order to rise to the occasion. And if the challenge is big enough, it may call forth a fundamental restructuring of the way a leader sees herself, her role, and her world.


We Have a Choice We describe this restructuring process as a series of shifts, stepping from “reactive” to “creative” to “integral,” each one being a more spacious and open framework for making meaning of the world and our place in it. Each successive framework is more expansive, having the capacity to hold more variables, more complexity and more nuance; “either-or” gives way to “both-and.”


Leaders in all sectors need support to shift away from an anxious pursuit of predictability Predictability, order and control are necessary for the profitable running of business and society. And they are becoming a scarce commodity, a rarer and rarer source of comfort. Only as weʼre “on the way,” can we join our clients in their journey toward a way of leading that can handle the complexity, difficulties, and possibilities without going reactive.


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