Future Shaper

How Leaders Can Take Charge in an Uncertain World

Niamh O'Keeffe

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789662184, 9781789662207
• eBook ISBN: 9781789662191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

We live in a world of continuous uncertainty and on the brink of a massive digital and AI-powered shift. What should leaders do? The answer is not to shy away from inevitable changes and more uncertainty, but to have the courage to face it. Leaders need to take charge by embracing new technologies and ideas and converting these into opportunities for leadership innovation. The best ways for leaders to predict the future is to help create the future. Future Shaper is about giving back a sense of control. It's about empowering leaders to take charge and shape the future. Niamh O'Keeffe asks leaders to re-calibrate their leadership skills to include imagination and courage, to embrace innovation and drive growth and create a better future. Future Shaper helps readers to:
· Embrace new digital technologies, understand AI and equip themselves for those not-yet-invented challenges
· Gain insights from today's successful leaders
· Make an impact and feel more in control using an easy-to-understand leadership framework

Part One

Leadership overwhelm

CHAPTER ONE

The exhilaration and exhaustion of being a leader today

To put it simply, leadership has become more complicated

As a leader, you have to navigate a way forward in the face of an exciting technology and AI revolution, and against a backdrop of geopolitical turmoil and societal change. New challenges and new possibilities emerge every day. The opportunities seem so limitless – if only we had the time to think about them! The relentless pace of change keeps us stimulated, and also ensures we can never stay complacent – not at the weekend, not at quarter end, not at year end and maybe never again.

This is an unsettling and unstable time for the world economically, politically and socially. Let’s name-check all the complex macro forces at play as a backdrop to business leadership today: global economy, climate change, corruption, terrorism, mass migration, populism. At times, it can be overwhelming listening to the morning news and your day has only just begun. It sometimes feels as if the world is spinning out of control and this inevitably impacts our role as business leaders. Current watchwords in business today are ‘uncertainty’ and ‘disruption’. Business media and industry commentators are trying to look around corners and producing ever more anxiety-inducing reports like ‘how to manage the trust deficit’ and ‘how to lead in the age of artificial intelligence’.

No one wants to admit it, but leaders at the top are frightened – there are fewer knowns and the pace of change ushered in by the Fourth Industrial Revolution is so fast-moving that it is hard to keep up. Leaders realize their businesses are facing potential sudden collapse because of inadequate speed of response to digital and AI threats and opportunities, resulting in our current innovative disruption environment. Worse than sudden collapse are the more common occurrences we all witness, such as relentless undermining and eroding of profit year on year, when the tide turns in an industry and players stuck in traditional business models just cannot seem to respond, for example our high-street shops in the face of consumers’ switch to online shopping.

Leaders today have so much to deal with. Even if you love your leadership role, a sense of leadership vertigo may creep in from time to time, when the stakes get higher and the pressure mounts up. Perhaps the word ‘overwhelmed’ sums up how you are feeling some or most of the time?

You will have your own experience and perspective on the unique pressures in your role. Here is a top ten list of what I have noticed, in terms of the complex challenges that constantly permeate the leadership time and efforts of business leaders today:

• Navigating through global uncertainty and unpredictability, and not knowing what macro or micro shocks and disruptions are around the next corner.
• Anticipating the opportunity and impact of artificial intelligence on how to go to market, and how to lead people and teams.
• Managing the complexity of an ever-expanding, shifting ecosystem of partners, suppliers and customers in our increasingly interconnected world.
• Dealing with an increased speed and volume of data, information and communication, and how to filter through it to focus on the key relevant facts.
• Having to be in touch all the time, whether that’s via social media or across different time zones, and being expected to respond and make leadership decisions immediately.
• Figuring out how to create a more inclusive environment in order to benefit from a range of more diverse experiences and fresh points of view.
• Satisfying the expectations of the millennial workforce at a time when employee expectations have become ever more demanding. The younger generation are asserting their desire for more meaningful work and want to feel simultaneously fulfilled, stimulated and stretched as well as enjoying an appropriate work–life balance.
• When budgets are restricted, the effort of being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, while still motivating and inspiring a workforce to deliver to deadlines and not burn out along the way.
• Addressing customer and societal demands that business becomes more transparent and becomes a greater force for good.
• The challenge of setting priorities in face of such relentless change.

To put it simply, leadership has become increasingly complicated. Let’s examine some of the broader themes in more detail.

An unpredictable future amplified by the Fourth Industrial Revolution

If there is a pattern, it seems to be that unpredictability is the new predictability. We start off expecting one outcome, and we inevitably get another – whether that is the collapse of institutions too big to fail or the unexpected outcomes of political elections. How can leaders be expected to plan for their businesses knowing to expect a series of unpredictable international and domestic economic unknowns? When I first started out on my career, the world of work seemed to be a more stable place and certainly strategic work plans were more linear. We set out a ten-year plan; we broke it into timeline goals across horizons of what needed to be achieved within five years, within three years, within one year. That doesn’t seem like a realistic way to plan any more. Now it is fair to say we have shifted from linear to a more organic and opportunistic spaghetti-shaped planning landscape!

There are still attempts to imagine what the world will look like in the future. From a possible extinction event, or apocalyptic visions of a doomed future and nuclear wars, food and water shortages, and widespread social discontent, to the utopian vision of leisure and abundance for all on Earth and on Mars with humans coexisting collaboratively with their benign robot counterparts… and all things in between. But, of course, we just don’t know. And because we don’t know what the future will bring, we seem to struggle to confidently set out any stakes in the ground.

What we do know is that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is under way. The First Industrial Revolution introduced the use of steam power to mechanize production. The Second Industrial Revolution saw a number of ground-breaking inventions in transport, telecommunications and manufacturing, including the use of electric power to generate mass production. The Third Industrial Revolution brought the internet and other technological innovations, which have ushered humanity into the digital era. Today, society is undergoing a Fourth Industrial Revolution, an age in which scientific and technological breakthroughs are disrupting industries, blurring geographical boundaries, challenging existing regulatory frameworks, and even redefining what it means to be human. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, drones and precision medicine are swiftly changing lives and transforming businesses and societies, inevitably posing new risks and raising ethical concerns. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, says Klaus Schwab, in his book of the same name (Schwab, 2016), will impact all disciplines, economies and industries at an unprecedented rate and is characterized by new technologies fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds. The Fourth Industrial Revolution brings tremendous opportunities. However, it also raises the question of who will succeed and who will fail in the 2020s and the decades ahead. Only the fittest organizations and most adaptable leaders will survive.

Leaders under constant threat alert: ‘disrupt or be disrupted’

You are under constant pressure because your business model is under constant pressure. On the one hand, the advances in technology and the AI revolution are making our lives easier. On the other hand, limitless consumer and business possibilities open up and there is so much more pressure to compete at an organizational level. ‘Disrupt or be disrupted’ is a clanging chime of hope and doom ringing in our ears, which means that leaders are under constant threat alert and constant pressure to think ahead, to look around corners, to be creative, to innovate and to make changes. For example, the new digital payment systems threaten traditional banking. It is interesting to note that a robust global company like Diageo has a strategy of investing in entrepreneurial disruptors, within their own industry, so they can stay close to the entrepreneurial frontier and stay ahead of what might be coming around the corner at them.

The message on disruption and innovation is loud and clear. Leaders are now hyper-aware of the threat potential and the need to convert any crisis into new opportunities, fast. Apart from being hyper-aware, hyper-alert to the point of paranoia, what else should we do to take charge and act? While we rush around on adrenalin, are we missing the bigger picture and neglecting to pay attention to cultivating the appropriate leadership skills needed for this kind of relentless dynamic business environment?

Even if your company is the disruptor, you can’t be complacent. We see the tech companies under more scrutiny than ever before. They are having to grow up in front of our eyes and navigate issues like maintaining users’ trust. If you belong to a more traditional company, a key leadership challenge is how to rethink, reimagine and reinvent your business model, harness big data and new technologies, and make a wise pivot towards the new and the future. Just inserting or layering on artificial intelligence to existing processes and systems won’t cut it – or, at a minimum is a lost opportunity for the full potential of what could be achieved. Of course, it’s still all about the customer, and it always will be. But the competition to reach that customer and fulfil their needs will be played out with new gusto in terms of how fast you can harness new technologies to identify and serve customer needs, integrate learning loops into processes and act on insights in real time. There are new enablers in town, and more coming. This is so exciting! But also so many ‘what ifs’ and inherent threats if we don’t master this, or are not the first off the blocks, or fail to step up as leaders to take advantage of the new possibilities.

Seismic shifts such as anticipating how to lead in the age of artificial intelligence

Many top executives have started to feel a bit adrift in today’s climate of disruption and new digital and AI revolution. Many are already struggling to lead through disruption and – next – fast coming down the track is the question of how to anticipate the threats and opportunities that AI is bringing. Leading through disruption is being quickly superseded by fresh challenges on how to lead in the age of artificial intelligence.

Should you be worried about the impact artificial intelligence will have on how you go to market in the future and how you organize and lead your workforce? Of course! But how can you plan for something you don’t yet understand? Even the renowned theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, said that AI could be either the best or worst invention humanity has ever made. Hawking said developments in AI have been so great that the machines will one day be more dominant than human beings. So, plenty of room for ongoing future uncertainty there!

Every era of technological change has been met with resistance, but ultimately it has also brought about a huge amount of progress and freedom for workforces and employers. Leaders will have to rise above any fear and resistance to search for the opportunities brought by AI. Successful leadership will involve educating the workforce about how automation and overhauling the existing operational model can result in more enjoyable, strategic and creative job roles, and how people and machines working together will bring more productivity and increased revenues. Leaders will have to figure out how AI becomes a competitive advantage. They will have to find ways to soothe fears from workers about inevitable job losses – and reskill people for the new types of roles that will emerge, such as augmented reality architect, avatar relationship manager, digital identity planner, 3D organ designer and many more. Leaders will need the self-confidence to step into the unknown and make decisions with next to no certainty. It will be a curious set-up when we get to the point of having to learn how to manage and lead robots, as well as managing and leading people. We will need to get used to having new types of colleagues who aren’t human, and also learn how to get the best out of them.

With all this in mind, it is understandable that leaders are unnerved and finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the challenges of leading in today’s complicated fast-moving environment.

Emergence of ecosystems that require a new type of borderless leadership

Leadership has become more borderless. Previously we were just concerned with our team, our operating unit, our organization and our market. We enjoyed a fairly narrow and bounded definition of what we had to take care of. That too has changed, and we are now transcending traditional borders as we witness the emergence of powerful ecosystems – clusters of companies that form new collaborative relationships, who choose to build on synergies and mutual wins rather than the traditional ‘I win, you lose’ style of competing. Intersections where we can all win are now much more in vogue – but how to establish these ecosystems, how to be a leader within one, how to co-evolve, how to manage the dynamics and the uncontrollables within these new arrangements require an evolved s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Titlepage
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Why you should read this book
• PART ONE Leadership overwhelm
• 1 The exhilaration and exhaustion of being a leader today
• PART TWO Empower yourself
• 2 Future shaper leadership intelligence playbook
• PART THREE Five key fundamentals of future shaping leadership intelligence
• 3 Preferable: establish your preferred future outcome
• 4 Persuade: convince people to follow you
• 5 Persist: be resilient and stay the course
• 6 Prove: nurture successful teams and deliver the right results
• 7 Platform: power up your network and multiply your impact
• PART FOUR Future shaper leadership intelligence traits
• 8 F.U.T.U.R.E. shaper leadership traits
• 9 Future S.H.A.P.E.R. leadership traits
• PART FIVE Shape a better future for everyone
• 10 Create a positive ripple effect on the world around you
• References
• Index
• Copright