Each week, I’m featuring excerpts from a chapter of my leadership book When the Curveballs Keep Coming: A Leadership Playbook for an Uncertain World to provide insights that can help all leaders adjust to these times of unrelenting uncertainty.
Last week, we outlined your personal journey to readiness using our VUCA Ready™ model that helps you create an environment where the team searches for their own answers – to build capacity in themselves and achieve what is possible.
This week, we’ll introduce the first step in our VUCA Ready Leadership Model: how to properly Prepare. This is where we learn to develop the important capability of Strategic Awareness, and understand how that’s different from Situational Awareness, which many of you already practice fairly regularly.
In your everyday working environment, you likely use Situational Awareness when faced with an unexpected situation (e.g., a key client escalation, a change in course from your boss, or a team member resignation). In these cases, you might stop to think about the short-term and possibly longer-term implications for your team, consider actions you might take to ameliorate any impact, and install some corrective measures for similar future issues.
Strategic Awareness goes beyond the process outlined above to include personal awareness. It requires you to be more alert and attentive to what is happening in the world around you—and to develop the self-knowledge to know your biases and assumptions. In doing this, you are more prepared to gather and evaluate the information you are receiving. You are able to “live in the question” and see the possibilities beyond business as usual and turn those into reality.
Without this keen awareness and the discipline to apply it, leaders who are unaware are not able to generate new possibilities; as a result, they can be easily derailed and much less effective than their more perceptive and confident peers.
Your journey to developing the power of strategic awareness necessarily begins with examining those limiting belief systems and behaviors. To begin practicing Strategic Awareness, you need to let go of three key assumptions:
- That you/your team is lacking the necessary knowledge and skills to move forward through uncertainty
- That the starting point for determining your way forward must come from your past experience, what you have done in the past, or what worked before
- That you need to have a certain amount of definitive information that comes from detailed evaluation and risk analysis to make a decision
Moving through these limiting beliefs, understanding that risk-taking has changed, and recognizing that action is needed in a world where the pace of change is accelerating, are all critical shifts to developing Strategic Awareness.
You will see this in action in the “Curveball” at the end of Chapter Six, where Nadya Duke Boone, Chief Product Officer at DAT Solutions, relied on Strategic Awareness to set product strategy during a particularly challenging time.
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Hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek into Chapter 6 of my leadership book When the Curveballs Keep Coming: A Leadership Playbook for an Uncertain World. Next week we’ll move on the second step to becoming VUCA Ready.
What you see here is just a “bite-size” sample of the leadership lessons and practical tips that I outline in my book. Buy your copy now at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or go to bobbielaporte.com/curveballs for more information about corporate bulk discounts.
#readyforcurveballs