On leadership unbounding assumptions to create game changing opportunity
I had an interesting Facebook chat with our friend Connie this week. She said she was listening to me talk about resolutions in episode 205 and I said management was creating order from chaos bit leadership was creating chaos from order and she thought I must have misspoke.
Why would anyone want to CREATE chaos? Especially a leader?
Hyperbole aside, let me explain my rationale as I explained it to Connie.
If you want to build a house, or a car, or a bike you start with some goals and a plan. It becomes a series of tasks. The way you manage the tasks towards the goal is execution. You can do this effectively and efficiently. If you do it better than the competition you win business. If it happens to align with some grander purpose that’s good.
That’s all management. The outcome is defined. The tasks are known. The problem has been defined and the ultimate solution will be some sort of house. If it’s poorly executed, you still get a house. If it’s well executed you get a great house. But the solution is always going to be a house because you set that bound when you defined the problem.
However if there was no constraint on the outcome and the goal was not specific…a leader might come in and say “I know we build houses, but what we really do is create living space for humans.” the results would probably be different. You might not end up with a house. The management process becomes much messier because the goals do not define discrete tasks. The solution space (meaning the number of possible flavors of solution) is much broader, in some cases infinite. Humans and organizations don’t deal with infinite well.
This is where leadership comes in. Like Columbus, you are sailing towards the horizon and taking a bunch of scared people with you.
The advantage to exploring more solution spaces, unbounding the problem, is that the best solution may not exist in the solution space you have pre-defined with your original goals. You can manage the execution of the best house possible, but you are always going to end up with a house. If you toss out that constraint you could end up with some sort of amorphous-energy-cloud-space that is an excellent human living space that would never be found in the ‘house solution space’.
This is how evolution works. It mutates. It takes risks. Most of these mutations aren’t worthlwhile, but a precious few are a leap forward. This is a genetic algorithm. There is no defined end-state. There is what is known as a ‘fitness criteria’. You throw it all in a bag, shake it up and the fitter solutions come to the fore through an infinite number of generations. It’s never optimal. There is no end point.
No one is going to take these risks or survive the process without leadership. Someone has to get the people to venture forth into the unknown with no expectation of success. Someone has to navigate the chaos until a pattern emerges and a superior solution is found that change everything.
To bring it all back to the beginning; when I say leaders create chaos I mean that leaders unbound the assumptions thereby creating a broader solution space and creating the potential of a game changing idea.
Anyone can manage a known process to a finite set of results. It takes some leadership skills to lead people into the unknown with the risk of changing for the worse and the promise of change for the better.