It’s readily accepted that the pace of evolution is so fast today that the majority of college students are preparing for jobs that haven’t been invented yet. The often overlooked corollary is that what’s true for students is also true for leaders: leadership is being reinvented to succeed in the new normal world.
New-normal leaders are on a different course. They’re developing appreciation for, and practices that honor, an age-old truth: the future always favors foresight.
Whether they’re teaching an elephant to dance, or starting the next unicorn, new-normal leaders are evolving the way they, their peers and their organizations think and work. They’re recognizing the limitations of last century’s best practices. And creating adaptive organizations capable of constant transformation, not just eking out incremental growth.
Aligned foresight is the discipline of looking up and out, comparing perspective, and then developing shared perspective. Jeff Bezos, a master at aligned foresight, says it’s as much about what’s unchanging as what is changing. It’s about having deep, shared points of view about how a company can accelerate its evolution, raise its relevance, and move at or above the pace of change in the world.
Moving faster without aligned foresight makes an organization shaky and hard to steer. And it takes its toll on everyone.
• Perspective is used to develop aligned foresight, which unlocks an organization’s ability to see its most important possibilities.
• Framing the most important possibilities for an organization creates authentic engagement. Authentic engagement unlocks an organization’s purpose and energy to perform in new ways and at higher levels.
• Performing in new and more relevant ways makes an organization perspective-seeking, which is the key to being sustainably adaptive.
Our aim at RADAR is to help leaders develop the new-normal skills they’ll need to see and shape the future of their organizations. The stories we'll tell will play a big role in that. Join us in evolving at or above the pace of change in the world.