Director skills – Cutting Through the Grey

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/

Strategic location, direction and path

After a busy month spent judging awards, in conversation with alternative thinkers and reviewing research from business analysts and academics, one key question emerges as preoccupying business leaders:

‘How do we think, decide and act in the long term interests of our organisation?’

Strategic thinking

Our attempts to imagine alternative futures require curiosity and creativity. We bring together a range of interested parties and share insights and dreams. When we encourage diversity of thinking, our biases and pre-conceptions are challenged. Shrewd boards ensure that they are composed of individuals who bring a range of perspectives to the exploration and discussion of strategy.

These ingredients appear simple but are complex to engineer. The currency and contribution of each thinker are critical. This raises complex questions about refreshing board membership and planning succession. Offboarding directors involves difficult but honest conversations in the interests of the organisation’s future. Onboarding directors is an art form, best tailored to the needs of each individual to ensure they can contribute as soon as they are ready.

Our ability to look ahead also requires us to understand our past. We therefore need to ensure that corporate memory informs our discussions but doesn’t prevent imaginative thinking beyond a simple extrapolation of our current approaches.

We are often reminded that listening to the business and its stakeholders is an essential part of any strategic thinking activity. When these conversations go beyond mechanistic process and take place in a culture of trust, they provide valuable intelligence.

Strategic decision making

Your governance framework identifies the roles and responsibilities for strategic decision making but ultimately the responsibility for the strategic direction of your organisation rests with the board. When your board is only used as a ratifier of strategy, valuable opportunities to contribute experience, challenge and stress test assumptions may be missed. A dialogue between horizon scanners and operational experts generally produces robust decisions.

Award winning organisations, projects and initiatives share a common factor in that they are able to clearly articulate ‘value delivered’ and ‘impact’ against defined criteria. Where decisions are made with no clear rationale or intention, tracking performance is problematic.

Among the decision criteria receiving significant attention are cultural fit and risk appetite. Strategic decisions which are aligned to the beliefs and values of your organisation are more likely to engage the support of those responsible for delivering them. Equally, those decisions which are perceived to be contrary to the shared understanding of ‘how we do things around here’ are likely to meet obstacles. Given that the Board are tasked with creating the tone in their organisation, the debate around whether a decision is ‘right for us’ is critical.

Having set the risk appetite of your organisation, the board can assess strategic decisions against clearly defined tolerances. The wise ensure that risk appetite is kept under regular review and does not constrain the selection of innovative options with the potential to deliver value.

Enabling living strategy

Strategy is merely window dressing if action is missing. Effective strategy formulation involves and engages those who are accountable for delivery. By the time the strategy is launched, a critical mass of enthusiasts can be ready to inspire and encourage their colleagues to deliver the required value and impact.

Effective monitoring involves tracking quantified performance metrics and listening to the real voices along your value chain. Together these practices create focus and sustain momentum. Importantly, they may provide early insight into strategy modifications required and, in some cases, obsolescent activities and initiatives which should be stopped. A continuous appraisal of resource deployment enables agile redeployment where appropriate.

It takes effort to provide opportunities for board members to be visible sponsors of strategy. ‘Walking the floor’ may result in valuable conversations when leaders encourage the transparent sharing of opinions and capture intelligence for discussed with their colleagues.

The potential for intrapreneurship is often neglected by organisations. If curious and creative individuals are not valued and nurtured, they go elsewhere taking their insights and dreams with them. There is merit in identifying individuals with the natural strengths to think strategically and generate innovative and creative ideas. By exposing them to board thinking, your organisation can increase the probability of retaining their talents.

A quick healthcheck

What contribution do you make to strategic thinking?
How do you enable other contributions?
Who encourages you to be imaginative?
What metrics do you use to evaluate different strategic options?
How do you stress test your strategic decisions before ratifying them?
Who ensures that strategic decisions, once taken, have collective board support?
How do you show support for those who are accountable for delivery?
What involvement do you have in tracking performance against strategic objectives?
When and how are strategic decisions reviewed and modified?

Sources:

Henry Mintzberg on Strategic Seeing

Nasdaq 2023 Global Governance Pulse

PWC Strategy and Business CEO articles

Intrapreneurial culture

Engage to transform

Governance Awards 2023

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:

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.

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.

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:

Continuous surprise. When we travel hopefully and take alternative paths to inform our thinking and decisions, we avoid boredom and dated or obsolete thinking.

Ability to contribute valuable insights. With currency comes amplification of our voice and invitations to share insights with others.

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.