Today’s leaders face complex and interconnected challenges at a speed faster and more furious than ever before. These challenges are impossible to solve with siloed thinking—they require problem-solving and innovation through the lens of multiple domains. Nexus leaders, who can function across domains, serve as connectors and build teams with diverse skill sets.
What are the must-have abilities that provide steady and clear thinking to thrive in today’s dizzyingly chaotic world?
Here are the top five lessons from The Nexus to guide your thinking about leadership for innovation:
1. Develop Maps, but Use the Compass as Your Guide
Crises may alter maps, but they do not disrupt a compass. Traditional leaders are map-driven, hierarchical, analytical, methodical, and evolutionary. New leaders are compass-driven, collaborative Nexus thinkers, who create conditions for constant reinvention. The ability to instill the sense of a compass in a complex organization may, in fact, be the essence of leadership.
Navigating complexity is like the difference between being a tourist and an explorer. As a leader, you need the capacity to explore uncharted territory, not just the landscape you already know. That is why the compass is critical.
2. Constantly Evaluate the Balance Between Core and Periphery
Visualizing an organization in terms of map-compass and core-periphery balances can help navigate chaotic environments amidst conflicting forces and provide leaders with a sense of direction. The core areas of today must be balanced with investments in peripheral areas that represent the future. If all we have is the periphery, we lose the center. On the flip side, having all center and no periphery is a sure sign of fragility and problems lurking down the road.
The periphery has a thickness—a zone where the wild unknown gets transformed into the useful core by true innovators. Knowing how to navigate this edge is critical to future leadership.
3. To Understand the World, Learn the Basics of Complexity
Complex systems-based thinking is becoming essential to operate in today’s world. Thriving under complexity requires us to internalize lessons that will prepare us to deal with the highly connected systems that make up the world around us. Studying complex systems can reveal new insights and provide useful tools, but the main value is in shaping our thinking—being able to seamlessly view and reconcile what may appear as diametrically different perceptions of realities. The lesson of learning to see simplicity in complexity, and complexity in simplicity, contains the kernel of complementarity, the ability to synthesize opposing viewpoints. Chaos and order are not opposites; they coexist within complexity.
The Nexus is a good place to begin. In Chapter 6, we outline the foundational ideas and highlight the difference between complicated (old school) and complexity (the future).
4. Master the Ability to Synthesize Opposing Viewpoints
The ability to reconcile opposing viewpoints is an essential skill for a leader in dealing with the future. More than ever, we will be required to balance opposites. Having opposites can be a plus. Opposites can coexist within a larger whole, reinforce each other, and produce something unexpectedly bigger.
Wave and particle, making up light in quantum mechanics, is a classic example. So are cold engineering coexisting with raw emotion in Ferrari, complex technology subsumed by simplicity in the designs of Apple, I.M. Pei’s gleaming courtyard pyramid balancing the Renaissance architecture of Le Louvre, and cutting-edge technology and reverence for tradition perfectly balancing each other in Japanese society.
The synthesis and resolution of opposites may be the central issue for leaders in the twenty-first century.
5. Learn Emergence
Respect and prepare for emergence, but more than that, engineer emergence. Emergence occurs when elements—“agents” in the terminology of complex systems theory—interact with each other to produce outcomes that could not have been predicted by examining the agents in isolation. Studying one termite does not give us a clue as to how they form mounds, and no amount of knowledge about a neuron can explain consciousness. Something seemingly magical happens when many elements interact together. Make emergence a priority for yourself, your team, and others. A successful organization will create the right conditions for emergence.
This runs profoundly at odds with contemporary command and control leadership in business. We need to design the liberty (including the liberty of failure) to provide a fertile condition for emergence to flourish. Negotiating the balance between freedom and control may be the most daunting challenge of future leadership.
