Tag: Board Development

Curiosity and Perseverance

While clearing winter flower beds and trying to identify bulbs, serendipity found me listening to a radio broadcast by the Astronomer Royal, Lord (Martin) Rees. He was discussing NASA’s mission to Mars and describing the robots sent to gather scientific data on the surface of the red planet. The first, sent in 2011 was named Curiosity. It moved across Gale crater and Mount Sharp slowly in one direction. A successor named Perseverance was sent in 2220 and was designed to move around objects. 

Curiosity and Perseverance are two of the perennially cited strengths required for organisation and leadership success and certainly for gardeners.

Curiosity

Natural curiosity is the behaviour we admire in children and often blame external factors for limiting in ourselves. Perhaps we should ask ourselves if we are self- limiting our natural curiosity? 

To develop an organisation’s curious mind takes effort and active leadership. Capturing the imagination and energy of all by role modelling curiosity in action, encouraging and enabling the behaviour in others. In organisations with high levels of trust, individuals may have greater confidence to explore and an inclination to share discoveries with colleagues. 

Curiosity needs to be sustained in times of great uncertainty. Defined as ‘a strong desire to know or learn something’ the concept of curiosity is central to motivation. Strengths Profile assesses the extent to which you are ‘interested in everything, constantly seeking out new information and learning more.’

Perseverance

There are several aspects to perseverance. The current focus on individual and organisational resilience is just one. Resilience is the strength to take hardships and setbacks in your stride, recovering quickly from adversity. A second aspect is the strength to persist, to achieve success by keeping going when confronting difficulties. And finally, we see examples of individuals and organisations who use adversity to spur them on to greater efforts and achievements. They bounce back from setbacks.

Health check: 

  • Where do you look for new ideas?
  • How do you reflect on and apply new thinking? 
  • How do you acknowledge and share your discoveries? 
  • What and who helps you to keep going when you face challenges? 
  • How do you overcome setbacks? 
  • How do you use setbacks to spur you on?
  • What can you do now to nurture the enablers of curiosity and perseverence? 
  • What new habit would you like to develop? 

And for the curious gardeners, I have persevered and finally  found my garden planting plans. These tiny green shoots are snowdrops, transplanted last year to form new clumps.

Sources:

Curiosity

https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/How-to-think-like-a-CEO?utm_source=itw&utm_medium=NL20240125&utm_campaign=resp

Resilience

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/01/global-risks-2024-business-resilience-in-an-era-of-risk-turbulence/

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/01/building-resilient-tomorrow-concrete-actions-global-leaders/

Contemporary thinking?

How do I stay current?

Expertise takes effort to achieve. It can carry recognition, qualifications and position. The danger is always to rest on our laurels.

Our expertise must be relevant and relevance is impacted by changes to the context in which our expertise will be applied.

Staying current takes continuous and consistent effort.

September seems to be the month when clients ask me this question. Perhaps a Summer break has provided time to reflect and individuals have returned with a renewed appetite for auditing their currency. Quarter four will certainly be a busy one for boards with increased regulatory and legislative requirements to fulfil and contemporary thinking to apply.

Three habits to develop and nurture:

  1. Develop curiosity and healthy scepticism.  Many thought leaders highlight the importance of investing time in reading and listening. In a busy world with continuously shifting priorities and deadlines, protecting this time requires our active commitment and regular practice. We also need to avoid living in an echo chamber where only inputs which support our world view manage to get through the natural filters we apply.
  1. Recognise the changes which are material. Tools exist to enable us to focus on what is relevant for us now and for the future. These need to be imaginatively rather than mechanistically applied. When we set filters to help focus our efforts, it is important to recognise that they need monitoring. We also need to be realistic about our capacity to track changes and avoid noise. Our efforts are enhanced when we identify sources which provide aggregated and unbiased insights and learn to recognise patterns and interconnections.
  1. Seek relationships which will constructively challenge our certainties. In order to connect with people and sources who don’t think like us, we need to be open minded and willing to adapt our thinking. This habit is less comfortable than a natural gravitation to familiar communities. The value of cognitive diversity on boards is well publicised. Encouraging a wide range of voices to inform our thinking and decision making has been a feature of high- performance boards and individual directors.

Benefits:

  1. Continuous surprise. When we travel hopefully and take alternative paths to inform our thinking and decisions, we avoid boredom and dated or obsolete thinking.
  1. Ability to contribute valuable insights. With currency comes amplification of our voice and invitations to share insights with others.
  1. Network of sources and relationships. Collaborating and working in partnership to scan an increasingly complex world, builds trust and a wider understanding of our context. From tracking what has and is happening, our focus can change to discussing how change may develop in the future.

Where to start:

It is often said that making a habit takes 21 days while ensuring it is embedded takes 90 days. Choosing to develop the three habits mentioned above will also involve deciding what we are going to stop doing. A conversation with our coach, mentor or sounding board is a useful first step.