Leaders can enable adaptive spaces and organisations through exploring and exploiting these alternative futures. This needs us all to adopt the ‘both/and’ mindset, of holding the paradoxes of the competing demands of the now and the future.
As we learn that the COVID-19 pandemic may be here to stay for years, it is not certain how our economies might ‘recover’ nor how consumer behaviours and social patterns are changed for good. Mostly leaders and business yearn for some predictability, consistency and certainty of a ‘next’ normal in the future as they grapple with how to keep the business afloat.
There are two pulls − one to refine, focus, prune, be austere. The other pull is to create a new way of working, new markets, new collaborations, to explore, expand, take risks, innovate and transform. And these pulls demand a different focus from and capacity of leaders. This is a challenge − to focus on meeting the pressures of surviving today, let alone think creatively to transform the business for the future.
What we see in businesses today is a strong focus on getting through the pressures and stress of the day-to-day business, a focus on the current work, the business-as-usual, the ‘as is’; with less talk of innovation, of possible alternate futures, of new ways of working, of new markets, collaborations and changing customer needs which can be served differently. Leaders need to enable adaptive organisations that have inherent and inbuilt capacities to continue to change as the landscape changes as well as to meet the needs of the day. This continued change is a certain. So, we need leaders who can build businesses that can create shared value for stakeholders and societies for the long game, as well as straddle the demands of the now. This is a ‘both/and’ leader, not one who looks at ‘either/or’. Leaders of organisations need to focus on both − not either.
‘By the start of 2020, the sense of uncertainty was so pervasive that many executives were doubling down on efficiency at the expense of innovation … And then the pandemic hit. Now the tyranny of the present is supreme. A lot of organizations have had no choice but to focus on surviving … decisions that leaders make now may have ramifications for years − or even decades … they need a way to link current moves to future outcomes.’1
Smith, Lewis and Tushman2 use the phrase ‘both/and’ leadership in a Harvard Business Review article to talk about the paradoxes of leadership. Here are some questions to consider:
- Are we managing for today or for tomorrow? How can we prepare for an unpredictable future while managing the urgent demands of the present?
- Do we adhere to boundaries or do we cross them?
- Do we focus on creating value for our shareholders and investors or for a broader set of stakeholders?
And the authors talk about needing a ‘both/and’ mindset − a paradoxical mindset that can embrace change and not simply chase stability.
They point out three strategic paradoxes that leaders work with now. These are not solvable tensions but rather polarities that you move between.
‘Tensions continually arise between today’s needs and tomorrow’s (innovation paradoxes), between global integration and local interests (globalization paradoxes), and between social missions and financial pressures (obligation paradoxes).’3
Both are needed, both the focus on today and the future. Leaders and organisations can build dynamic capability and futures thinking to build anew, whilst also meeting the demands of the now. Global integration is heightened in the times of the pandemic as new collaborations are more easily forged across digital platforms. And we concurrently see a shift towards local supply chain clusters. We see heightened social needs as inequality and mass job losses prevail, and social movements highlight societal and human needs. And concurrently we have financial pressures for the short-term financial needs. We must engage with both. Yet we often think we need to choose one, as an either/or dichotomy. This pressure leads to one-sided and often misguided or limited decisions that do not bode well for the sustainability of our businesses and our societies and planet into the future.
Leaders cannot minimise or plan complexity away, so rather leaders need to work with conflicting and multiple demands in dynamic balance. Many leaders we engage with are only focusing on the horizon of the next financial year, and even the next four months.
Alongside this they could be engaging with multiple perspectives, competing demands, futures thinking to see what alternate possibilities can draw on the organisation’s capabilities and networks. And have parallel investments and explorations which may be to craft completely new lines. Leaders can embrace multiple strategies and identities concurrently if they can shift their mindset to tolerate paradox and to engage experimentation.
To embrace paradoxical leadership also means having a culture of growth, curiosity, innovation and collaboration.
‘Overemphasizing the importance of successful experiments may encourage employees to focus on familiar solutions or those that they already know will work and avoid testing ideas that they fear might fail.’4
So, even those firms that may be exceeding expectations on revenues and margins, need to stay ahead the next wave of global disruption.
This may come in the form from the climate crisis as we see the melting ice caps, extreme weather conditions of tornadoes, storms, devastating fires, unseasonal weather patterns ruin produce and interrupt transport channels and working patterns. Especially if the business is performing excellently now, this is the time to be cautious of complacency and expanding with the mismatch of capabilities and structures. Many organisations are be restructuring, unbundling, merging, downsizing or expanding – either way check that you have both capabilities of leading into the future as well as meeting current demands.
The term ‘the ambidextrous CEO’5 has been used to describe CEOs who do find ways to hold the tensions and engage in multiple (and even conflicting) strategic agendas, for example running brick-and-mortar branches concurrently with fulfilling orders through a digital platform whilst also using machine learning to craft more personalised services. The one line may cannibalise the other and the astute leader tracks data and impact to keep course adjusting, experimenting and evolving strategies over time. Is this the same as innovation? Yes, this is innovation, as we have seen many companies pivot their services such as those now offering virtual events or creating new products such as masks and ventilators. The difference though is that we need ongoing in built adaptability and stretching beyond a single innovation in product or service. But how to build inherent capacity to scan, make sense of and adjust to ongoing shifts? The trick is to keep multiple strands of innovations and experiments afloat whilst executing on current operating models on an ongoing basis.
Enabling an adaptive organisation is supported when an organisational culture supports adaptability. So, if the culture fits efficiency and sole metrics on performance only, over flexibility, it will be neigh impossible to explore future possibilities.
The matrix of organisational culture in figure 1 is useful to see competing values. Plot where you see your organisation predominantly fitting. This matrix helps explains why leaders who may aspire to learning and innovative cultures may find themselves stuck in the reality of their existing culture of results hierarchy driven values for example. There are competing and seemingly contradictory pulls. Too often we bear witness to futures focused efforts being stymied by rigid bureaucracies, which are concerned with stability and security. And yet these complex times call for enabling adaptive organisations, which have multiple strands. So instead of trade-offs and compromises the ‘both/and’ leader holds a place for both, concurrently. This may require different capacities and ways of working, and both have a place.
Ambidextrous leaders recognise that there are multiple cultures across a business, and they can foster multiple cultures and ways of working, not losing one to the other.
A way to work with this is to craft an overall identity for the business.7 This captures the overall purpose of the business instead of citing the products made. One example cited is of a company that successfully reinvented itself for more than 100 years as it evolved from wooden buckets to glass jars to metal cans to plastic bottles as their overarching aspiration remained to be the ‘world’s best container company’. And the example of a company that went wrong by defining their business too narrowly as being in the ‘railway business’ instead of the broader possibilities of being in the ‘transportation business’. The portfolio mix is certainly a key strategic conversation now, and leaders can shift to consider multiple responses within an overarching purpose instead of feeling torn between trade-offs.
‘When leaders take an ambidextrous approach, they force their senior teams to abandon feudal battles and engage in forward-looking debate about the tensions at the heart of the business.’8
Leaders must build their futures thinking and strategic foresight capabilities to underpin crafting multiple possible futures. Scenarios thinking is one such tool, although the capacity needs to be inbuilt across the organisation to on an ongoing basis make sense of the context and shifts and adjust and adapt strategies and tactics accordingly. We are in a seemingly never ending marathon and we can lead with greater ease and impact as we adopt a mindset of being ‘both/ and’ leaders.
Notes
1 JP Sclobic, Learning from the future: how to make robust strategy in times of deep uncertainty, Harvard Business Review July−August 2020.
2 WK Smith, MW Lewis and ML Tushman, ‘Both/and’ leadership, Harvard Business Review, May 2016.
3 Ibid, p 67.
4 S Thomke, Building a culture of experimentation, Harvard Business Review, March−April 2020.
5 ML Tushman, WK Smith and A Binns, The ambidextrous CEO, Harvard Business Review, June 2011.
6 Adapted from Groysberg et al, 2018 ADDED HERE – B Groyserberg, J Lee, J Price and J Yo-Jud Cheng, The leader’s guide to corporate culture, Harvard Business Review, Jan−Feb 2018, in S Babb, Case study, EEMCS-02-2019-0043.R3, titled ‘What next for Tech SA? Aligning leadership, culture and strategy’.
7 Tushman, Smith & Binns, The ambidextrous CEO.
8 Ibid, p 80.
AUTHOR | Sarah Babb
