Unpredictability is always present in business, and agility and flexibility are essential for successful leadership. Increasingly, we're operating in uncharted waters, and for business and leadership to succeed long-term, we need to create a whole new mindset and implement new methods.
Leadership requires more than just completing tasks and achieving goals. We must develop and nurture innovative, sustainable leadership practices when change comes hard and fast.
The form of those practices can vary widely.
Work on fostering more profound and more enduring collaborations:
As our world becomes increasingly challenging, we must rethink how we collaborate. New problems require creative ideas which come from outside the usual channels. It is essential to build a team with diverse backgrounds around a central motivating factor. This is an approach that helps them focus on both the core nature of the business as well as the issue at hand.
Being relentlessly innovative:
The past may not have been clear about the future, but we knew - or thought we knew - what it would be like. Today, we are faced with uncertainty as businesses have become more complicated and complex. The way complicated things work is often linear, and patterns can be seen and controlled. In complex environments, efficiency is your friend. But complexity is a beast that requires creativity and innovation more than anything else.
Embracing adaptability:
Adaptability and agility make leaders comfortable with being uncomfortable. Agile leaders are resilient when faced with adversity and don't get discouraged by disruption. Instead of hiding or waiting, they must learn to honour these moments to drive change and innovation.
Leadership and business are always about inventing the future, which is not something that can be predicted.