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 introduced the first step in our VUCA Ready™ Leadership Model: Prepare, which includes developing the important capability of strategic awareness. This week, we’ll outline the second step in becoming VUCA Ready: Practice. In this chapter, we discuss how letting go of three assumptions can help you develop a sharper sense of discernment—and shift to a possibilities mindset.
Our unconscious, habitual responses can keep us from seeing a broader portfolio of options. Over time, we learn that it is easier and less stressful to respond in an automatic way, which can lead to faulty decision-making. I see this in my client work every day, personally observing and experiencing this natural, human tendency to let autopilot take over so many of our responses. Most leaders lack the confidence to stop and think through their next steps. It’s very tempting to take the safe and easy option, to hang onto what they know and have done before.
Discernment is the ability to obtain sharp perceptions or to judge well. It involves going past the mere perception of something and making nuanced judgments about its properties or qualities. In our model, discernment takes on an even deeper, more expansive meaning.
Leaders who have a highly-developed sense of discernment possess a foundational framework to look at challenges and critical situations and mine what is there to value, to amplify, and to use toward their goals—what we call “stripping for parts.” This requires self-awareness and the vulnerability to put ego aside and ask the question, “What is the possibility here?”
In Chapter Seven, I cover three assumptions that leaders need to learn to let go of so that they can develop discernment and shift to this kind of possibilities mindset. You will see this practice in action in the “Curveball” at the end the chapter, where Greg Kiraly, former COO of Hydro One, shares how a finely developed sense of discernment helped him be a successful leader across diverse organizational settings and cultures.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek into Chapter 7 of my leadership book When the Curveballs Keep Coming: A Leadership Playbook for an Uncertain World. Next week we’ll move on to the final step in 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.
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