Thinking the Unthinkable: A new imperative for leadership in the digital age (Gowing, Nik; Langdon, Chris)
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
Gowing, Nik, and Langdon, Chris. Thinking the Unthinkable: A new imperative for leadership in the digital age, 2018.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
This is not just an era of change; it is ‘increasingly a change of era’; in a world where the unthinkable is already happening, we need to up our game and stop using Zombie Orthodoxies that do not reflect reality. This book is passionate and convincing call to challenge conventional wisdom.
PREFACE
new normal of disruption globally?
There is a hunger among leaders to discover why they feel so overwhelmed and even scared by the new disruptions. There is an anxiety among millennials that leadership is out of touch with the new realities of the new purpose and values that they expect.
FOREWORDS
When we have to cope with or respond to difficult or damaging large-scale disruption we will do far better if we have previously thought about its possibility, about why and how it might occur, and about how we can shape the forces at work.
When the crisis occurred, powerful reaction from citizens took a long time coming. But it did come after nearly a decade
Those benefiting from what looks like a stable status quo are those who have the strongest belief in its stability. They are in most need of this book.
we must think differently.
leaders have to redefine themselves for the new disrupted, ‘non-normal’ world that we now live in.
we’re not moving in the right direction. I think people are becoming less independent-thinking and more conformist in order to get on and keep a way of making a living.
live in a world where the unthinkable is not just possible–it is happening.
There has to be the total transformation in the global energy system in the next 40 years–in a way that we’ve never done before.
hundreds of millions of refugees per annum leaving North Africa and the Middle East.
1: RED ALERT…FOR UNTHINKABLES
end to the conformity that got them to the top.
The aim must be to thrive on change, not be derailed by it. Your aim should be to disrupt yourself. Your ambitions should create a new culture, mindset and behaviour, with new purpose, values, courage and humility.
conformity which gets leaders to the top disqualifies most of them from gripping the scale of disruption and knowing what to do about it.
time of ‘zombie orthodoxies’
‘We must adapt and not in nostalgic, sentimental ways.’
executives or officials cannot see what is obvious to you?
fast-growing leadership community of what we call ‘lily pads’.
trying to break down today’s challenges in the expectation of neat solutions misses the point.
no immediate or obvious solutions, because nobody can agree on what the problems are in the first place,
2: ‘OUR MAGIC IS FAILING’
challenge the comfort zone of a political and economic status quo that has benefited many, but which huge numbers of people believe is failing them.
Then extraordinarily, the prize for 2018 was cancelled to ‘safeguard the long term reputation of the Nobel Prize’.
#MeToo reinforces our overarching focus, which is clear and broad. It is about culture change.
Yet remarkably, the vast majority of people–those conditioned to believe that there is natural entitlement to a better life and improved fortunes–somehow still assume that such upheavals are a blip. They cannot accept there is a new normal that is marked by a profoundly different shape and reality. Somehow they continue to assume that the old normal and a new optimism will return,
The rate of change is not gradual and measured. It is ferocious, rapid, harsh, destabilising and above all unexpected. The moral and institutional compass of good governance and a certain predictability has been imploding.
potentially overwhelming scale of the changes we are facing.
new normal is an existential threat to both corporates and systems of government.
So under sometimes-acute pressures from unthinkables, all too often the default is to assume you can return to the way it has been.
This is not just an era of change; it is ‘increasingly a change of era’
should not conveniently be assumed to be a projection of the recent past.
‘Do not forget for an instant what happens when fear about economic circumstances is exploited by rank demagoguery and a combination of sectarian, ethnic and religious distortion.’
‘It is not just a generational divide. It is about the bias of those who are comfortable with power as it is currently exercised. People get invested in the old ways of doing things, because in part that is where their power has come from,’
one thing that is difficult to do is achieve change when there is no particular burning platform or reason to do it.
have built-in assumptions that things will conform to what we expect from the present and our recent past.
last 70 years have not been a normal situation. Instead, the growing signs are that they have been disruptions
global governance has ‘catastrophically collapsed’.
don’t want to belong to a generation of sleepwalkers
The norm we have taken for granted for 70 years ‘is in defiance of human nature’.
Normal nations don’t have global responsibilities
3: THE NEW WORLD THAT’S ‘COMING RIGHT AT ALL OF US’
‘Recognising that the world is changing, and engineering a very complicated systemic change to the basis on which we power our prosperity.
we don’t believe there are neat, easily defined ‘solutions’.
Audit the external reality.
Audit the internal reality.
Address your challenges.
Thrive on change.
Steve Schwarzman. He leads one of the world’s largest and most cash-rich companies. He is Chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Private Equity Group,
new, embedded culture of change.
the 3am Group. It advises CEOs who are willing to air their new anxieties that
So our systems reward “Keep calm, don’t make a crisis.” Our systems don’t reward Cassandras. Our systems don’t reward whistleblowers. Our systems punish them. Our systems don’t reward people who say, “This could be much worse than you imagine.”’
The fear of making a CLM–a career-limiting move–was cited time and again as a massive psychological swerve for those below the leadership level to negotiate.
‘de-responsibilisation’. Too many shared with us how ‘de-responsibilisation’ heightens fears that the personal cost of standing ground on facts and arguments is real, and therefore a big limiter for first imagining then tabling any unthinkables.
changes needed in mindset, culture and behaviour
4: BLACK SWANS, BLACK ELEPHANTS AND BLACK JELLYFISH
The project title Thinking the Unthinkable was inspired by Herman Kahn’s thought experiment from 1962 and beyond on the possibilities for nuclear war.
‘thinking the unpalatable’ is probably more appropriate
‘Black Swans’ or ‘unknown unknowns’
‘Black Elephants’ are usually well known
‘Black Jellyfish’. They seem to be a recent additional creation of fertile minds within NATO. It is ‘all about scale’. Black Jellyfish are ‘simultaneous, predictable developments
causing disruption when [they] converge through innovation’.
Black Swans are flying around out there; Black Elephants have their giant trunks wrapped around institutional processes; and Black Jellyfish are lurking ready to emit their toxins to generate a painful and surprise sting.
5: THE ‘GREAT WAKEUP’ AND A ‘NEW WARTIME’
‘The rate of change we are going through at the moment is comparable to that which happens in wartime. We have change at war rates, yet we think we are at peace. The global pace of change is overcoming the capacity of national and international institutions.’
events during and after 2014 apparently not even been thought about by those at the top, or those working for them?
2014 was turning into the year of ‘the great wake up’.
The world was being increasingly inverted by a whole series of challenges to normality.
Islamic State
outbreak of Ebola
Unthinkable events continued through 2015, 2016 2017 and then into 2018.
tsunami of refugees and migrants into Europe from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
political exploitation of public anger by newly confident radical and nationalist forces
unexplained unthinkable of cyber-penetration of the US Democratic party during the 2016 election.
credibility of the huge German automaker VW was shattered by the defeat device system
6: THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE: WHY US?
independent NGO, Oxford Research Group. His professional passion is how to foster reconciliation in global trouble spots through the use of video and other media.
anticipate in an article published on 1 June 2016 that a majority of voters in the UK would vote for Brexit.
7: ‘ASKING A TRACK ATHLETE TO BECOME A WRESTLER’
Klaus Schwab in his concept of a Fourth Industrial Revolution.
‘Winter is coming and approaching fast. Is Europe prepared?’ asked Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of the Munich Security Conference. His answer was ‘a categorical “No!”’ Do the public get this? Again, the answer is ‘No’.
‘The biggest obstacle [to change] is mid-level leadership,’ confided
‘Humility can be such a painful virtue,’ wrote
The former president of the International Crisis Group and former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans confirmed the scale of difficulty. He has always insisted on describing himself as an ‘incorrigible optimist’. He accepts that his optimism is now under extreme stress.
normally incorrigible optimism has felt very corrigible indeed.’
8: BLAZIN’ SAFARICOM: FIGHTING BACK AFTER BEING LABELLED A ‘THIEF’
The unthinkable was that Safaricom had failed to understand the very different moral compass of the next generation. And that generation was angry. Not only did the millennials and Generation 3.0 view Safaricom as ‘the brand of their parents’ which was out of touch with them. They were alienated and had very different views to Safaricom’s board and shareholders about what the telco’s purpose and values should be.
next generation viewed Safaricom as screwing them financially.
young people who regard a phone and its services like SMS texts as indispensable as human rights.
There was no guarantee that any fall from grace could be reversed.
Unidentified campaigners described as twitter ‘trolls’ started blaming the CEO’s new marriage for the ‘fast-depleting data bundles’.
initiative for 18-to 26-year-olds. In Kenyan patois, ‘blaze’ is colloquial for ‘What’s happening?’
In a blunt recognition of everything the millennials blame it for, BLAZE describes itself as ‘more than a tariff. … We realised that a tariff alone wouldn’t cut it.’ Instead BLAZE would be a ‘whole new youth network powered by Safaricom’ which ‘supports unconventional journeys to success, and will empower youth through Be Your Own Boss [BYOB] Summits, Boot Camps and [a] TV show’. The main principle? ‘You can do–and be–so much more than any other network allows.’
‘We know that your needs are different. How? You told us!’
the company refunded one million shillings because ‘reputation trumps revenue every day’.
had to be more than being loved for organising a concert. ‘They said: “Sure, thanks. But I am not going to love you because of that,”’ Collymore told this us. The engagement had to be ‘relevant’ and ‘deeper than that’. It must be an all-in package: ‘BLAZE enables the Youth to get access to the “Be Your Own Boss” mentorship summits, shop with BLAZE Bonga,
if two or three complain, then it becomes a mass complaint. We are held hostage by just two or three people.’
There was a core theme: GRIT–Greatness Requires Internal Toughness.
9: WHAT GOT US HERE? WHY IT MATTERS
Had global affairs returned to whatever constitutes ‘normal’ then our research work for Thinking the Unthinkable could have been wound up in a few months. Instead it has grown and expanded exponentially in scale and capacity.
Since 2014 unthinkable events have become increasingly traumatic
‘The end of liberal international order,’ arguably caused by the West itself? Indeed, it was asked, ‘will the West survive?’
war games scoped an increasingly possible military or cyber war between Europe and Russia.
Western governments had misread Putin’s warnings, such as his speech to the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. He could not have been clearer about his intentions to restore Russia’s spheres of influence.
The conformity that qualifies leaders for the top in many ways disqualifies them from appreciating the enormity of disruption, its implications and the kind of radical new approaches needed.
10: THE COST OF CONFORMITY
Overcoming the capacity of the institutions which we expect to sort things out! And you did read comparable to what happens in wartime. Both issues have become the source of extreme stress and vulnerability in this period of new ill-defined normals and unthinkables.
11: THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE: HOW WE TESTED IT
Our original interim findings, published in February 2016,184 were based on our impressions from the data. They were:
· Being overwhelmed by multiple, intense pressures
· Institutional conformity
· Wilful blindness
· Groupthink
· Risk aversion
· Fear of career-limiting moves (CLMs)
· Reactionary mindsets
· Cognitive overload
· and dissonance Denial
Now three important additional issues have been added: the pressures for new Purpose, Inclusivity/ Diversity (with equal number of mentions), and Behaviour. These are an important confirmation of a direction of travel
12: ‘PEOPLE DON’T KNOW WHETHER TO BE EXCITED OR PARANOID’
the critical time, no national intelligence agency within NATO’s member nations shared actionable evidence which pointed to a probability that Russia would act so dramatically.
alliance’s inability to realise what was unfolding. Officials and military officers ‘were immediately outside their comfort zone,’
He warned leaders, and those who serve them, of the end to all they assumed professionally about a certain global order and normative political practice.
number of ‘unthinkable’ events had multiplied while leaderships were still struggling to understand and get a grip on the enormity of what was unfolding.
‘We are experiencing a new normal,’
widespread sense of astonishment, bewilderment, impotence and anxiety. It usually morphs into fear.
rather ugly word which sums up that process: de-responsibilisation.
They might not have seen or been able to predict the details. But they might have been able to see that something big was coming.’
13: ‘THE HEAP IS ROTTING’ DO LEADERS GET THAT?
VUCA world that is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.
14: LE MOUVEMENT: MOVING CORPORATE MOUNTAINS AND CULTURE
The company is the giant phosphate producer OCP and the initiative is called ‘Le Mouvement’.
We have smartphones. But we have no professional applications on our smartphones.’
move from a technical discussion to a mindset discussion and put digital in the heart of business transformation of OCP. [We had to] convince our top management that digital is … not about technology; it’s about ways of working; it’s about new business models; it’s about a new mindset, new ways of collaboration etc. And the technology comes at the end to support these digital initiatives and make them possible.’
‘In order to have a good grade from your manager you had to be visible. So you had to show yourself.
15: ‘IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED AND YOUR PANTS ARE DOWN, YOU ARE REALLY GOING TO GET WHACKED’
PwC Global Chairman Bob Moritz reported that CEOs who are claiming unprecedented levels of confidence don’t know how to handle ‘threats the business world is not used to tackling directly by itself’.
that includes geopolitics,
In believing that Russia would want to become like the West, the USA ‘ignored 400 years of Russian history and tendency’.
16: PESSIMISM? REALISM? OPPORTUNISM?
But one of the toughest global business leaders was emphasising the need for leaders of companies in particular to define their purpose. This was reinforced by the findings of our updated data
17: PURPOSE…WHAT PURPOSE, AND WHY?
feeling is explicable, but it does not make it any nicer. A feeling that the old elites in all these countries have somehow failed. They have also been self-interested.
19: ‘YOU FUCKED UP THE WORLD’ LET’S TALK ABOUT FIXING IT
‘We are slowly thinking the fact that the world is now more fragile,’ confirmed Kristalina Georgieva, CEO
Red Team is an expert group which role-plays how an adversary tries to counter all that you do.
‘The readiness to take dissent … has to come from the top.
21: A ‘NEW WARTIME’ THAT NEEDS NEW WEAPONS
Leaders who made their way to the top in a period equivalent to ‘peace’ now find themselves wrong-footed and flat-footed by this existential ‘war’.
Those who have made a career from examining and advising on leadership realise that the framing which has made their reputations may increasingly no longer be appropriate.
22: THE NEW GANDALF: ‘HOW TO ENSURE THE SWITCH GOES ON’
confronted a culture of complacency, innovation inertia and myopia towards global realities.
‘The world was changing around us.’ But the bank was not changing.
super successful GANDALF corporations–Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, LinkedIn and Facebook.
The transformation process is not driven as a convenient ‘nice to talk about’ by a couple of irritating has-beens in a forgotten corner of a distant office. It is driven personally from the very top by the CEO through a Chief Transformation Officer, Paul Cobban.
‘One of the big challenges we are facing is to create this psychological safety net.
culture of Silicon Valley in the US, where failure is a badge of honour, although
DBS stopped spending money on ‘fancy business school training for our top senior talents’. They were put through the hackathon experience instead.
first time they experienced this startup culture, which was the intent,’
using hackathons to hire staff
23: CONSORTING WITH THE FRENEMY TO SURVIVE
As a result DNB has reduced the number of walk-in branches from 520 in 2007 to just 57 in 2018. ‘You cannot get cash in any of our branches,’ says Bjerke. They keep no cash under the carpet or in a safe. ‘We just need showrooms like for car sales.’
24: ‘TOASTED, ROASTED AND GRILLED: A DARK FUTURE?’
In 2015 there was a powerful call for what was labelled an Intuition Reset.
is just as Moises Naim warned so perceptively in 2013 in The End of Power. He wrote: ‘The reactions to my probing always pointed in the same direction: power is becoming more feeble, transient and constrained.’
‘Old power–top down, jealously guarded, held by the few–is giving way to “new power”–bottom-up, participatory, peer-driven’ argue Henry Timms and Jeremy Heimans. 325 Power is being disrupted. The future is becoming mighty different. Who will the future leaders be? ‘Those best able to channel the participatory energy of those around them–for the good, for the bad, and for the trivial.’
The predicament is just like an aircraft where the engines have been cut by volcanic dust and the plane keeps gliding smoothly assisted by gravity and optimum use of air currents. But it cannot do so indefinitely. Eventually forward momentum expires. Then what?
The plane is gliding, but at ever-higher speeds. But increasingly there is less control. Where or how will it land safely? Or will it crash after all control has been lost?
Experts and economists conceded they were no longer in control of narratives because there was no precedent for what was happening.
‘the gap between confidence and activity has rarely been as wide’.
The Managing Director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, reinforced the reasons to be fearful. Using unusually stark language–even for her–she painted a binary choice for leaders between utopia and dystopia. The acute pressures of growing global inequality and climate change are fast increasing the risks that our world will be ‘toasted, roasted and grilled’ and faces a ‘dark future’.
Soros has made enormous amounts of money from being right. At Davos 2018 he even went so far as to warn that ‘the survival of our entire civilisation is at stake’.
25: EAT AN ELEPHANT IN ONE MOUTHFUL – WITH HUMILITY
Since 2014, the debate about reforming attitudes in the British Army has been catapulted into the open. That is when General Sir Nick Carter took over as Chief of the General Staff (CGS).
risks he took to change the Army’s embedded mentality and attitudes to disruption are worth reporting.
Talent had to be maximised, not oppressed by conformity and tradition. ‘We were going to have to play catch up.
He discovered there were a total of 375 initiatives underway. Then he asked: ‘Well, how many of these are resourced?’ He discovered it was just 6%!
existing leadership model was not fit for purpose.
the urgency and imperative? ‘For nearly 15 years we were focused entirely on trying to win the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the world had changed around us.’
Rather than a culture of just obeying top down orders, Carter believed there had to be a new inclusivity.
argue and debate until the decision was made, and then obey orders.
New safe spaces were created for young officers to debate and brainstorm under
New ideas, however off the wall, could now mean important credits and recognition in a soldier’s personnel record.
‘You need innovators. You need people with imagination. You need people who are prepared to challenge received wisdom. And you need people who are prepared to take a risk with their careers in order to go outside, develop themselves, come back in and generally add to the dynamic of thought that you need to be able to do this. ... With experimentation comes the opportunity to move to another horizon.’
‘The most important characteristic of a strategic leader is humility.
‘Trying to implement change is like trying to move a cemetery: the people there are not much help,’
‘get the right talent and educate commanders’ including recruiting from outside the traditional pool.
‘commanders must allow those who work for them to fail’ because fear of failure suppresses the kind of ‘cunning, curious, clever’ risk taking and maverick thinking soldiers who are needed to think unthinkables.
Christopher Elliott, a retired major general and an ex-Whitehall insider, published what was described as a ‘Diplomatically couched bombshell.’
‘the system was allowed to run the individuals, rather than the other way round’.
So he’s trying to change their culture, ironically for the military to become less like the military.’
change needed to be led from the top and driven from the bottom
Reassuringly for an army, they identified combat ethos and fighting spirit, hard earned in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a fundamental first issue plus historic legacy (which he described as ‘sort of a half point, not as big as the [other] three’). But even more important for achieving reform were two other key issues. First was that the empowerment and decentralisation soldiers expect in conflict should also be embraced by the army culture in peace time. Second came the fast-growing issue which is dominating our Thinking the Unthinkable work: the imperative for a leadership culture based on values.
Core principles had emerged. By 2017 Carter was urging his generals to:
· take the initiative:
· don’t accept the status quo.
· shape events rather than being shaped by them.
· work tirelessly to know our soldiers.
· set a clear direction, and make sure it is clearly understood by those you lead.
· know, care for and motivate those you lead.
· have empathy and the humility to listen, as well as the humility to adjust a plan when it is going wrong.
· take time to lead, to train [with] less process.
· make sure those you lead are valued.
· set standards and have the moral courage to enforce them.
· promote the phrase ‘be exceptional every day’.
War has a catalysing effect to give place and position to mavericks.
application of the battlefield principles of mission command (devolving responsibility) to peace time work
they can understand the context in which they’re operating–the sense of purpose.’
army was bad at doing the basics of business, especially how it ran itself.
new encouragement to get far broader experience outside the army–say in business–was being actively shunned.
individuals were not coming forward as much as I would like. And the reason for that was: for them it was a career risk.
‘culture trumps strategy. And in the army the way we’ve built all that is about leadership.’
‘You’re almost better to have written the story before you write the strategy.’
26: ‘MONUMENTAL, COLLECTIVE, INTELLECTUAL ERRORS’
Hillary Clinton makes clear the cost to her US presidential election bid of not even being willing to believe that ‘democracy was under attack’, or that President Putin would carry out the unthinkable of electoral interference in the way the Russians did.
Using personal data harvested from up to 87 million Facebook users via a third-party app, CA was able to micro-target US voters in key states with false claims about Clinton.
Violation of norms had become normal. Geopolitical interference and subversion–by way of digital manipulations of the election process, or proxy armed action in places like eastern Ukraine–went unpunished.
cost of clinging to conformist thinking and those zombie orthodoxies.
2007/ 8, then took it to the brink of a disastrous meltdown. The unthinkables were piling up in full view. But at the time few believed a near-catastrophe would happen,
one of a number of people in finance ministries, central bank regulators in the UK and US who failed to see the crisis coming, who failed to spot the build-up of risk. This was a monumental, collective, intellectual error,’ he said. ‘The fact is, we didn’t spot it. We didn’t ask the right questions and that was a failure.’
Hillary Clinton was equally frank about what she got wrong in her 2016 campaign. She believes a large part of her defeat was because ‘I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans’ anger and resentment.
27: A ‘CATASTROPHIC SETBACK TO CIVILISATION’?
‘singularity’
Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University,
new tension between liberty, security and privacy’ created by AI and algorithms.
‘This huge technological revolution is in fact a political revolution.’
France and Europe could be left well behind in the race of the two AI superpowers, China and the USA. So he announced a $ 1.5 billion investment in AI. ‘If you want to manage your own choice of society, your choice of civilisation, you have to be able to be an acting part of this AI revolution. I want to frame the discussion at a global scale.’
The question is whether we have the political courage and conviction to share the wealth wisely.’
28: ‘YOU GUYS ARE IN THE STONE AGE’
No one would pay a price for proposing ideas that failed. Quite the opposite. A sense of premium was placed on innovation and the view that a good idea can come from anywhere.
reverse mentoring?
29: ‘YES, THE STAKES ARE HIGH’
the nervous system of the world has become deeply fragile.
‘The capitalistic model no longer works,’ was the remarkable alert from Mark Bertolini, CEO of the health insurance giant Aetna,
Capitalism has ‘lost its way’ and taken a number of ‘wrong turnings’.
compass is necessarily calibrated. The Milton Friedman principle that ‘there is only one social responsibility of business–to … increase its profits’ is increasingly considered to be not just well past its sell-by date but now down right counter-productive.
Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, have a social purpose.’
pioneering footsteps of Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, who had mounted almost a one-man global campaign to highlight the failings of leaderships and what they could do better.
How could she be the daughter of a father who heads up a huge, oil-producing energy company which Greenpeace thought was a bad organisation?
30: POLITICAL INSURGENTS ‘SHATTER THE MOULD’
Europe’s migration crisis in 2015 is a classic example of the stability of the system being rocked by apparent unthinkables.
slow-moving tsunami.
Remarkably, through spring and summer of 2015, European leaders had failed even to conceive of these unthinkables. They had not believed the forecasts. The evidence and warnings were there. But they were unpalatable.
‘We failed to see it because we were too politically correct,’
In the US Bernie Sanders and in the UK Jeremy Corbyn attracted huge numbers of the young who feel politicians are out of touch. They used social media more effectively.
‘He went into battle with a fan club instead of a party, armed with themes rather than policies. Initially he seemed a mere will-o’-the-wisp of the social media age.’ It had been unthinkable. ‘We never saw it coming,’ conceded one Paris-based ambassador. The dramatic change in public mood secured Macron the presidency, a huge majority in parliament and unprecedented public expectations.
Hillary Clinton summarised the reason why those of her leadership generation have become so disconnected from the new truths. ‘Our immune system has been slowly eroded over years,’ she wrote. The former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told this project: ‘There is not enough leadership. It is a blindness to what is inevitable. It is a matter of planning. Difficult! Planning for the worst. [But] that is never a great encouragement for leaders.’
31: ‘TOTTERING TOWARDS AN OUTSIZED, WORLD-SHAPED EARTH WRECK’?
Populists are becoming mainstream.
Hillary Clinton knows the political cost of not knowing or realising. ‘I had been unable to connect with the deep anger so many Americans felt, or shake the perception that I was the candidate of the status quo.’ She added: ‘When people are angry and looking for someone to blame, they don’t want to hear your ten-point plan to create jobs and raise wages. They want you to be angry too.’ Clinton did not get that. Trump did. That is the price for sticking to those ‘old patterns’ in a new world of ‘anti-system messages’.
Lord Chris Patten repeatedly emphasised the scale of that leadership deficit in his magisterial effort to ask What Next? Surviving the Twenty-first Century.
‘Does economic globalisation–and the social and environmental changes that accompany it–run too far ahead of the ability of politics to cope?’
World War One happened in large part because leaders were ‘smug’ or ‘complacent’.
33: ‘RIPPING APART OUR SOCIAL FABRIC’
Digital subversion and the destabilising of nations viewed as adversaries via the weaponising of information is considered a valid strategy.
‘we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works’.
Ethics should not get in the ways of compelling new tech developments. Unthinkables were rarely on radar screens.
social structure is being hacked, and also that individual consumers and citizens are being hacked.’
Techies and data engineers were employed to develop great new digital ideas, not to concern themselves with the eventual social implications or possible downsides.
34: ‘GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE’
Ahead lies the probability of an ‘even greater disjointed world … [where] the majority of society will be left behind’.
35: ‘WAITING FOR MIRACLES DOES NOT CONSTITUTE POLICY’
Cape Town, a city of four million with probably two million more unregistered people, had been forecast to be the first city in the world to run out of water.
But by their own admission, over 13 years, few leaders in power ever took seriously the unpalatable warnings of climatologists and hydrologists about the inevitability that Cape Town would be a waterless city. The same fate could face 11 other major world cities.
Was it unthinkable? Or was it just indifference to the unpalatable evidence that made very clear what the city faced?
36: THE BLOCKERS STOP LEADERS KNOWING WHAT THEY NEED TO KNOW
on Brexit the UK government had to be warned by a parliamentary committee of a ‘serious dereliction of duty’ if it fails to prepare for the unthinkable that their negotiations could fail.
political correctness and career conformity have shamefully narrowed the options ministers and corporate leaders are given to consider.
37: ANGRY CONSUMERS AND ANGRY CITIZENS: WHO TAKES NOTICE?
While the shock from unthinkables since 2014 has been seismic, it is nothing compared to those which imminently threaten the capacity of top leaders to handle them.
knock-ons from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the digital power of algorithms threaten to convulse all assumptions about what makes a balanced, stable, contented society.
have we reached a point of ‘peak everything’? Peak democracy, peak western influence, peak progress and peak jobs,
39: ‘I JUST DON’T THINK HUMANS ARE DESIGNED FOR THIS’
The problem with ‘unthinkable’ is that it’s things that happen beyond your reference frame.
And we’ve been guilty of the law of averages. On average, the world is better off. I think most economists would say they could prove it. Most people would say that more people are out of poverty than previously, all of that. But it’s created in a very short time-space massive inequality and massive disruption to people’s lives.
children and grandchildren that we’re careening, I think is the right American word, towards bad things,
way to manage unstructured data.
The time compression means that it can become existential much quicker.
One of the inventions that we’ve done … is we’ve just unveiled new values. It’s taken two years–18 months–of work. And the reason we did is that we didn’t have a single set of values.
40: THINK ‘MAVERICK AND WACKY’: HOW TO CHANGE CULTURE, BEHAVIOUR AND MINDSET
‘In the past whenever we have tried to have these cultural values, put up posters and what have you, I wasn’t able to recall what the heck they meant or what they were. They were all corporate speak. I think a lot of us love to talk about culture. But it has to take organic roots.’
There are two core takeaways. Each of them recognises that the external environment demands transformation not just of the organisation but above all the minds that run it. This can be achieved by reacting immediately as a crisis unfolds, as happened at Safaricom. Or it can be achieved by acting proactively to address longer-term existential threats, as is being done at OCP or by PepsiCo.
human challenge more than a systems challenge.
Engaging, motivating and energising staff in this transformation is critical.
Most important was not just that they were seen to listen. They took notes and, in many respects, took action.
incentives to take risks.
swapped his grey socks for coloured ones, his core team started doing the same.
need to have some passion and you need to have some, I would say, personal “skin” in the game, and you need to have stories.
41: USING ‘SMART COMMAND’ TO UNCONFORM CONFORMITY
conformity which gets leaders to the top disqualifies them from understanding and thriving in a world of Black Swans, Black Elephants and Black Jelly fish.
currently no solutions, just options to try out and experiment
‘Culture evolved when people were in small tribes. If you didn’t fit in with the tribe you didn’t live,’ John Childress told us.
‘That comes from questioning the objectives of your institution. It comes from being out of step with the social norms that exist inside institution. It comes from questioning superiors. And for CEOs it comes from questioning the objectives of public markets. You just can’t do it.’
they and their institution had been calibrated to only think of positives.
42: THE PUBLIC: ALWAYS QUESTIONING AND UNFORGIVING
Her 3am Group supports stressed senior executives who often struggle to handle the wicked problems that are the stuff of nightmares
‘Leadership is about listening, not just about speaking.
43: FIND THAT EMOTIONAL HOOK AND REWARD
The focus of many executives continues to be on the conformity of box-ticking rather than coldly assessing the nature and scale of major risks.
‘Why list a risk if you don’t see it or understand it?’
leaders to address their sense of bewilderment.
45: DO YOU HAVE ‘PURPOSE’? IF SO, CAN YOU DEFINE IT?
Purpose. It emerged as a key new finding in our 2018 data crunch of leaders’ anxieties and thoughts. They linked it closely to Inclusivity/ Diversity and Behaviour.
46: IT’S THE GEOPOLITICS, STUPID
final urging from Thinking the Unthinkable is to widen dramatically your perceptions.
‘The top of the company has to be constantly vigilant about this. You know, one of the problems is nobody ever gets praise for stopping something that didn’t happen. And so, your political risk people: . . . you feel like they are crying wolf. Listen to them. Get them into the board room. Get them into the C-suite. Be personally responsible as a CEO for understanding the risk environment. Because in this geopolitical environment, those risks are coming from multiple sources.’
redefine the horizons of geopolitics.
geopolitics and threats from elsewhere could very swiftly affect their lives and the lives of every citizen.
challenge is not about the system. It is about human capabilities to accept and adapt what one CEO described as the multiple disruptions that are ‘invading our existence’. This is why we remind you of the seven words we shared with you on page 20. They underpin the way forward for Thinking the Unthinkable. They are culture, mindset, behaviour plus a new purpose and values which can be achieved through greater courage and humility. Easy words. Much harder to achieve. But so vital.
47: TAKEAWAYS FOR THE TAKE OFF
‘Many seem to have lost the awareness of peace’s fragility.’
who imagined that Putin’s Russia would use a military nerve agent in a Western country, leading to further disturbance of an already increasingly strained geopolitical balance?