The demands on leadership in our era of unprecedented change are profoundly different than in previous times — it is the difference between relying on a map or a compass to find your way. In a stable landscape, a map will do. But if that landscape is on fire, everything you know about it is in a state of flux and you need a compass to advance.
THE NEXUS, my book with Bruce Mau, offers a framework which we present below. Nexus Leadership helps you navigate complexities, balance competing forces, leverage diverse strengths, and set a successful, sustainable course forward in our rapidly changing world.
Let’s use the opportunity of presenting The Nexus Leadership concept, to brings some lessons in creativity as well.
The first lesson is that crafting lists sharpen our thinking and force convergence. Once a decision has been made about crafting a list – in this case foundational Elements and Key Competencies, the what-should-go-into-the-list becomes the biggest job, and this forces our thinking with issues of balance, aesthetics, and more. A second lesson is that lists facilitate getting feedback. In this case, people may become aware of skills they already had and did not know they had; lists also stimulate thoughts as to what things may be missing, and this helps in refining the ideas. For example, the ability to make decisions with conflicting information is not explicitly named, but elements that contribute to it appear in several of the competencies.
After the ten lessons were identified a question appears: Should the lessons be named or just described? Or both?
FOUNDATIONS FOR NEXUS LEADERSHIP Here we present two different distillations from a long sequence of iterations. One has titles which do not verbs and 2-3 lines of descriptions; the other, descriptions with two action verbs, presented in the context of a leadership course. Important to explore extremes when going through ideas.
The final lesson: Any idea worth presenting should go through multiple iterations. The important lesson here is to look at all of them from a distance. When looked in this way, the best idea is rarely the last. Overshooting is good. Becoming enamored of the last version is not. This is crucially important when ideas are produced by big teams.
Reactions, of course, welcome.
