When the going gets tough, the tough get to thinking like start-ups, not islands.
“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.” – Leon C. Megginson
When was the last time your professional convictions – earned from years of experience and problem solving – were bulldozed by unforeseen circumstances? Think the Alan Greenspan circa 2008 kind of bulldozed, where the beliefs we hold true about our area of expertise and the world, turn out to be catastrophically wrong.
Earthshattering reputational blights of this magnitude probably aren’t happening to us all that often, thank goodness. But it seems like every day, new and unexpected problems or crises are emerging to challenge what we believe about managing risk in our respective industries.
Let’s say, for example, your supply chain is still facing disruption due to an unprecedented global pandemic. A natural disaster is preventing an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) from being able to fulfill a promise you recently made to a customer. Your employees are pushing for a hybrid or remote work arrangement that seems incompatible with your business model. For extended examples of how VUCA has been wreaking havoc in the business world, click here.
What do we do when things go awry and we – the decision makers of a business – feel unable to lean on our hard earned but situationally irrelevant experience?
Think like a start-up.
The ubiquitous phrase is often hailed as the answer to quick recovery because it reflects a mindset with these fundamental qualities:
Innovation
Collaboration
Flexibility
By virtue of their instability, start-ups tend to defy the kind of safe predictability and structure of more established companies. In business, we crave and value predictability because it enables us to create projections and predict outcomes. But that cognitive bias – and it is a bias – opens us up to all kinds of risk. Namely, the risk of being bulldozed by the latest VUCA curveball.
To make it big – whatever that means to an individual business owner – start-ups must be able to pivot at a moment’s notice so they can meet the dynamic needs of dubious consumers and solve new or ongoing problems better than the competition. We see evidence of this with companies like Uber and Airbnb which, coincidentally, were both also disruptive VUCA events to the taxi and hospitality industries.
Thinking like a start-up means adopting a VUCA approach to risk management. Essentially, this means we treat the intensifying, adversarial and hostile environments of our industries and our world as opportunities.
Confront the agony of this ever-increasing pace of change by flipping the script like Jeffrey B. Rubin, author of The Art of Flourishing, recommends. For him, “it would be a pity to waste a good crisis.” Rubin believes “times of duress provide the best opportunity for growth because old ways of being [and doing] are breaking down and not working.” To get to a state of betterment, we have no choice but to acknowledge something must change. What matters most about our experiences of struggle are how we respond to them. Are they a sad ending or a new beginning?
Making good decisions quickly at the point of performance is a crucial risk management tool. When we reframe our understanding of risk to anticipate volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA), we open ourselves up to asking more open-minded questions that ultimately, help us overcome our bias for safety. We move away from entrenched modalities and begin thinking like a start-up.
But learning to roll with the punches is easier said than done and adopting a posture of response rather than reaction takes time and practice. How do we cultivate these skills in a rapidly changing environment while also being realistic about our capacity for endless instability?
Showing up as the fearless leader your business and/or team expects is a daunting task, one we can’t explicitly tell you how to do. Sadly, VUCA readiness isn’t one size fits all. But we can say that navigating the murky waters of uncertainty hinges on our ability to be open-minded and self-reflective – like a start-up. It does not rest on impressive resumes or a high-profile reputation or, least of all, willful confidence that shuns outside perspectives.
Enhanced VUCA leadership looks like:
Bouncing back quickly from adversity
Thriving in challenging circumstances
Being comfortable with agile planning
Great start-ups get this right by relying on the innovative and collaborative potential of diverse teams. They foster ongoing learning, are committed to psychological safety and they avoid pitfalls like wishcasting, conservativism, base rate neglect, confirmation bias and an overreliance on hindsight.
When in doubt about your ability to keep leading, remember what preeminent English poet John Donne had to say about humans acting like islands:
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.”
This is to say, resist the urge to isolate yourself and weather the storm alone. Instead, look bravely to your team, be curious about the incendiary potential of their diverse experiences and invite meaningful dialogue for a more innovative and agile approach to collective problem-solving.
To learn more about cultivating this leadership style, we recommend you check out our Introduction to Decision Dynamics program designed to help teams make collective decisions faster and act together with grace and accountability. You can also peruse any or all of the following VUCA-centric, start-up-esque blogs:
The more you know, the better you are at dealing with a polycrisis. Kind of.
Where do we work when there is nowhere left to work?
What do high art, The Last of Us and VUCA have in common?
“We must take the current when it serves or lose our ventures.”
Can you see the forest for the trees?
Are you and your business rolling with the punches? Or getting knocked out?