Jacqueline is the founder and Managing Director of Waldencroft – a specialist consulting practice working with CEOs and their executive teams. Central to this is facilitating executive teams in strategic foresight and grappling with complexity.
She holds a PhD in Relational Leadership and Top Team Group Process from the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. Jacqueline writes and speaks regularly on the ways of thinking, acting and being that are required for executives to lead well in a disrupted world. And she has published a major research study conducted with CEOs called Advanced Executive Fluency: Responding to new leadership challenges in a complex world.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
More about Jacqueline
2004. Kees Van Der Heijden. Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversations.
2011. Colin Eden & Fran Ackerman. Making Strategy: Mapping Out Strategic Success.
2013. Robert MacIntosh, et all. Complexity & Organization. Readings and Conversations.
2007. Dave Snowden & Mary Boon. A Leaders Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review.
2011. Manfred Kets de Vries. The Hedgehog Effect.
Sign up for the research Advanced Executive Fluency. https://waldencroft.com/sign-up-to-receive-our-ceo-report/
Transcript
Peter Hayward
Hello and welcome to Futurepod I'm Peter Hayward. Futurepod gathers voices from the international field of futures and foresight. Through a series of interviews the founders of the field in the emerging leaders share their stories, tools and experiences, please visit Futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series. Today, our guest is Dr. Jacqueline Conway. Jacqueline is the founder and managing director of Waldencroft, a specialist consulting practice working with CEOs and their executive teams. Central to this is facilitating executive teams in strategic foresight, and grappling with complexity. She holds a PhD in Relational Leadership and Top Team group process from the Adam Smith Business school at the University of Glasgow. Jacqueline writes and speaks regularly on the ways of thinking acting and being that are required for executives to lead well in a disrupted world. And she has recently published a major research study conducted with CEOs called Advanced Executive Fluency, responding to the new leadership challenges in a complex world. Welcome to Futurepod. Jacqueline,
Jacqueline Conway
Thank you for having me, Peter. It's great to be here.
Peter Hayward
So Jacqueline, question one. What is Jacqueline Conway's story? How did you become a member of the futures and foresight community?
Jacqueline Conway
Well, like many of people who come onto your podcast, I have found myself here through a fairly circuitous route. And also, in a way it found me as much as I found it. I started my career in Motorola in HR and moved quite quickly into a change role, the people side of change, and organization development and became fascinated with the way that organizations and people change. And I moved from there into roles both in-house and in consultancy in London, and had the opportunity to work with major global companies that were undergoing change; everything from M&A's, to new strategy launches and transformation initiatives. And already at that point, in my, my kind of professional journey, there was something that wasn't quite sitting right with me around how organizations were trying to change. So, you know, I was experiencing really well intentioned people doing good strategy work. But when it came to sort of implement it, or it came to try and embed this in the organization, something was going wrong. And so I'll come back to that, because that sort of idea of change not working really has been the sort of golden thread that has run through my entire career. So I had my daughter when we were in London and we returned to Scotland, I had my son and the point at which I was ready to step back full time into the kind of professional world (I hadn't ever fully stepped off) but in order to really kind of punctuate that bit of my life, the point where the children were off, going off to school and nursery. I decided to go and do the MBA at Strathclyde which is in Glasgow and the University, unbeknownst to me, was home to the 'Center for scenario planning and future studies' and actually had a very good international reputation. He's Vanderheiden had been the director lead until just before I sort of got the I got there in 2006. And it was the year during that MBA that I was introduced to scenarios and opened up for me the world of possibilities. I mean, I was just completely blown away by this amazing way of thinking about the world. And I really loved the way that the whole scenario methodology can help you really quickly come to understand a topic that you previously had no knowledge of so as an approach to knowledge creation, I was immediately hooked. And I had the good fortune to be in a business transformation organization development role at the time in an organization who were really happy to let me try things out and so I was immediately able to experiment with this. Both the futures work and the scenario work that I had been taught at Strathclyde and also the front end of strategy making. So I did a lot of work also from some of the professors called an Eaton and Fran Ackerman at Strathclyde on the kind of participatory strategy making work at the front end, and so I did a lot of that work. And then when I moved back into consultancy, I decided I was going to kind of carry that work on. And I really liked how this was a participatory process, you know, engaging executives in their collective leadership, considering the future really in a non deterministic way. You know, there was something about it that I just found really enlivening. At the end of my MBA, I was introduced to Professor Robert McIntosh, who was actually on loan from Glasgow University and was teaching the change elective and Robert agreed to be my dissertation supervisor. And after that, MBA, I then asked Robert to be my PhD supervisor and moved to the University of Glasgow. And Robert was Chair in strategic management, but actually had a keen interest in complexity, and had done some of the early work alongside others such as Ralph Stacy. So Robert was was introducing these things to me. And so probably a few months into my PhD, Robert sat me down and said, Okay, Jacqueline, you've probably heard this peter many times, but you know, it's time for the it's time for the ologies, where you know
ontology, epistemology and methodology now, by this time, I had an undergraduate honors degree, a master's degree and an MBA and I'd heard... But yeah, I knew about methodology but it was my first introduction to ontology and epistemology. Well, that took me down a three year philosophical rabbit hole, which Robert eventually had to sort of pull me back out of and say, 'right, you've read enough for three PhDs, it's time to start applying it'. And the reason I was so completely fascinated with this was because in the work that I had been doing with senior leaders and change, and this idea of this problematizing of it that I had experienced earlier in my career... the minute I started thinking about these from an ontological position, you know, taking a philosophical stance, it became immediately clear that we were considering organizations from a kind of objectivist ontology, we were thinking about them wrong. The very existence of what an organization is this idea that is a is a real soul thing. And we were therefore applying kind of rational, reductive, deterministic ideas, to how organizations operate based on these objectivist assumptions. So this was like, just, you know, the veil is lifted. And I suddenly think this is the problem, this has been the problem. That's what's been missing. Indeed, and by extension, that was also happening in the leadership literature. So the idea that leaders were defined by a set of traits or characteristics that were kind of woven into their personality, and you either had it or you didn't seemed to me did not reflect what I was experiencing with leaders. And so my, my PhD then became about top teams, it became about relational leadership and taking a relational ontology and looking at how we lead organizations from that sort of perspective. And so there was a huge pivot in my life intellectually, and in my work, and post PhD, that's where I then set up Waldencroft. So I set up Waldencroft in 2016, we work exclusively with CEOs and executive teams. And really, I don't say this to them, because, you know you can tell with the micro expressions on their face that you've lost them, if you start talking to them about ontology, but a lot of the work really is about helping them understand different ways of thinking about organizations. And really, the work in Waldencroft is essentially about helping executive leaders who have been promoted on the basis of their functional excellence on their own or excellence in dealing with the here and now, in the in and down in the day to day and then the functional, and then they become executive leaders. And they continue to do that, but just from a more senior position. And in Waldencroft, we're not asking them to give that over we are, we are asking them to have a more purposeful relationship with that component of their leadership. And what we would call the up and out, the there and then and the adaptation side of it. So it's, it's balancing the in and down, the here and now with the up and out, there and then and as they make that transition, then to what we call enterprise leadership, then you say well, what is it that we need to consider at the enterprise level and that's where Strategic Foresight and scenarios comes back in because we call it the enterprise five, which is that there are really five things that leaders need to be grappling with when they're at this organizational peak. And the first of them is around strategic foresight as developing the anticipatory capacity to think about what might impact this organization, and how do I help it be ready for those eventualities, the others just just for completeness, is around complexity, is around social responsibility with stakeholders is around ethical decision making an organizational culture. So they're what we call the enterprise five. And so that's how I do the Strategic Foresight work that I do now is with executive teams, as we try and encourage them to fully occupy their enterprise leadership
Peter Hayward
With your journey, what you said you found when you found the ologies, when ultimately you found the notion of reality and morality. Was that something that you think had been always operating at a kind of unconscious level in you? Or were you like a lot of your leaders, merely a person who has been trying to be effective through technique and method?
Jacqueline Conway
That's such a good question. And I think I was at the effect of a dominant worldview, that until that conversation with Robert, where he introduced me to the idea of the ologies that were running me, I wasn't running them. And so yes, I was looking for methods that was helpful and had utility in a particular situation. And I was coming up against the inadequacies of them, because in effect, effectively what was happening was, and I see this with organizations that I work with now, it was the case for me too. So I have been there is that we were applying a category area, a category area of applying a logic or a methodology that applies to one sort of thing that doesn't apply to others. So if we take, for example, complexity, you know complex problems are structured in a radically different way than the sorts of problems that exist in the physical and natural sciences. And so the idea of a kind of rational, deductive, deterministic approach that we might take for an engineering type of problem, and it works beautifully in those scenarios. Because we are working, there's a consistency of, of the within the category, we are applying the right logic and the right methodology to that problem. But with complex problems with adaptive challenges, we're trying to apply those same methodologies. And that's where we come unstuck. And I was very much at the effect of that, for that early part of my career until I really started to consider this on the basis of what's the kind of philosophical position I'm taking here.
Peter Hayward
The other thing too, which I'm going to push you on, just because I think you can handle it, is the notion, you talk about the technical operative, who moves into leadership roles and tries to still maintain their technical expertise. And the thing that gets tied up in your competence is your sense of who you are. Yes. And to some extent, you talk about moving leaders to a more constructivist participatory style that also requires them to change who they think they are, and what makes them effective.
Jacqueline Conway
That is absolutely the challenge. And I mean, we don't say that going in, because, who would say that. And so yes, at the most basic level, it's about changing what you spend your time doing. But as you say, underpinning that is actually that they need to become different in the world, that they need to evolve themselves and adapt themselves to move into a space, which paradoxically, the more senior they become, the more participatory they have to get, the more they have to. One of the things we say in Waldencroft is that you know that this peak, that leaders that this organizational peak, we call it the perilous peak, because organizations are failing faster than they ever have before. CEO tenure is less than it has been forever. I mean, it's it's five years as the global average in the UK doesn't even get there. It's something like 4.8 in the UK. And there's been some really robust research done on executive leadership and the failure of executive leadership or those who sort of quietly struggle. So there's something going on at this perilous peak, and we believe that part of it is this failure of executive teams to fully step into this enterprise leadership. And part of the reason that that is so challenging is that they have to let go of so many things. One of the things they have to let go of is the old ideas of the heroic individual who can get there by their sheer willpower, or force of personality, or by their brain power, or by their energy. So a lot of the things that did them well, in the other parts of their careers, I mean, in some ways, I now have a great deal of empathy for these leaders, because we haven't prepared them well. For these positions, all of the training, we have given them up until that point, almost becomes the thing that gets in the way of them leading really well going forward. And so we're asking them to engage properly, with collective leadership with relational leadership, rather than individually leadership, we're asking them to work productively with the unknown, rather than the things that they can solve on a kind of day to day basis. And we're asking them to move away from execution, or at least balance execution with adaptation. And as you say, this represents a huge developmental leap for these leaders, individually. And collectively. And we are different from a lot of people who do enterprise leadership, we think the reason a lot of it fails is that they try and do it individually with leaders, whereas we work with the executive team as a collective unit of performance, you know, that they do it together. And so the, loneliness and the struggle, and the all of the kind of existential angst that might come up as they make this leap is ameliorated in some way in that they are going through it together. And the positive outcome that can come from that is that if they do make this the step into enterprise leadership, then the results can be fantastic, both for them individually, and for the leadership team that they become part of. But also they create because they've moved up, they've created a gap in the organization where others can also move up. And so we can see that the paradoxical idea that by improving the most senior leadership, actually, you democratize leadership across the organization.
Peter Hayward
Nice. Good. Thanks, Jacqueline.
So second question, we can go a bit deeper into this, this is the question where I ask the guest to explain in more depth, a framework and ology if you want, that is central to who they are and what they do. So what do you want to go into deeper with the listeners?
Jacqueline Conway
Yeah, there's a number of things that really inform the work that I do in strategic foresight. One is going back to tools, I was sort of brought up on the scenario method. But I later actually did the Houston foresight certificate, and actually really love that methodology of taking you from the kind of the inward change in what's coming into us from outside. And then how do we, how do we work with that to then affect change outside, so the entire methodology was helpful for me, but the future cone, I think one of the things that I find really helpful about that working with senior teams, when we take them through the Strategic Foresight approach, and of course, we don't do it for them, and then present the results, the whole, the whole purpose of it is that the knowledge is created by them for them. And in so doing, when we get to the point where we're looking at the baseline, the executive teams that I work with, typically, at that point, realize that the baseline is as much a work of fiction as anything, as any other, no matter how ridiculous, a kind of future scenario you may have painted. But the baseline itself is as much a work of fiction, this idea that, you know, these executive teams have been able to work very well with concepts of continuity concepts of you know, let's continue to forecast on the basis of where we've come from, and extrapolate that into the future in an incremental way, but not so good at looking at what are the discontinuities that are coming, and how does change actually happen in the outside world and how does it impact us and so, a lot of the work that we do is we also help them look at the organizational history, and how it can came about through these discontinuities rather than through some sort of linear progression. The idea that the baseline is a work of fiction is is often a revelatory thing for senior leaders to experience
Peter Hayward
and danger of the status quo is, in fact, in some ways, the most dangerous thing you can believe in.
Jacqueline Conway
Yes. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And yet, it's, it's a strange sort of Kaiser SUSE? You know, the greatest trick they managed to pull off is that the, the forecast will come true, you know, I've always found it really curious that, you know, there can be these forecasts, and because it comes from the finance people, or whoever thay say this is what's going to happen next year, Jacqueline, I've even found myself thinking, Alright, okay, so that's what's going to happen until I check myself and see, that's not necessarily what is going to happen. And, of course, I mean, if we're going to talk about this continuity, you know, I remember working with some senior teams, one in particular, in December 2019. And the growth trajectory for 2020 was a couple of percentage points less than it had been for the previous five years for the whirlwind sort of fairly exponential growth. And this was, this was a worry. And then lo and behold, you know, by March, you know, the world had just turned on its axis. And, that particular organization was one in which was profoundly impacted by lockdown they went down .5%, of what they were doing turnover wise, the previous year. So this organization was all but obliterated by the discontinuity. And yet, even still, some within that organization and within the wider parent organization, I remembered in march them saying that, yeah, we've modeled this, and we think we're going to be out of this by June. And this, this was June 2020, they were talking about, and I remember thinking to myself, I'm not a very good futurist, because I can't possibly see how that can be the case. And as it turned out, you know, they were completely wrong. Another thing that is really helpful for me, is the complexity sciences. And the idea that when we are grappling with complex problems, that they are structured differently from kind of technical challenges from the kinds of problems that we just see that we see in the physical and natural sciences, and therefore, that we need to, we need to apply a different methodology, and that we need to think about them differently. And also that the kind of leadership we therefore display has to be different. So if we go back to that idea of executive leaders moving elegantly between, I mean, if you imagine it in the kind of infinity loop of moving between the execution and the adaptation focus, so the execution being the kind of technical leadership, the day to day, and the adaptation, the moving up to enterprise leadership, the things in the execution have typically been much more in to use the Cynefin framework, you know, the in the complicated domain, but the adaptive challenges that they are then confronted with as executive leaders, oftentimes sit with uncertainly, the whole of the enterprise five, are really about complexity. And helping leaders see the way that these problems are structured very differently, and therefore the way that you have to solve them differently. And not just by applying a different methodology, sometimes you can do that. But it's also that it requires a different presence in your leadership, a different way to sink into what it is to be a leader. And that's what we mean when we talk about in the research that we've just completed. The advanced executive fluency research, where we talk about these fluencies of being different ways of thinking, acting and being because it requires different ways of thinking, acting and being to solve these different sorts of problems.
Peter Hayward
One of the things I'd like you to go a bit deeper into is this notion of participation and executive groups having potentially more fluency then individuals can ever have. But one of the challenges, you talked about the loneliness, of being the solo leader, but working in teams, brings its own sets of stresses in terms of working with people you may not agree with, and working with people who see the world differently to you so how does the real hard work of working together help develop some of these capacities?
Jacqueline Conway
Yeah, that's a great question. So I mean, I do believe in the group as a whole dynamic. I do think that when you put the entire group together that has a life that is separate from the individual characteristics of the people in the room, and it creates something different. And so when we work on that particular group as a whole dynamic, then we're starting to get somewhere. But of course, you work on that dynamic by bringing people together, who have different ideas of what it is to be close, or to be far away from other people. So I think it was Schopenhauer who said, you know, that we get to close, that the prickles of the hedgehogs, you know, prick each other, and actually, so getting too close is deeply uncomfortable. But in a winter environment, you know, if they move too far away from each other, they get too cold. And that puts them under a great deal of danger. So how do you get sufficiently closef but not so close, that you have the benefit of being together without, without the kind of negative impacts of the prickliness that can come from that? Now, I see part of my role is to act as a container for those organizations for those teams to to start testing the water. And of course, in some teams, it's a relatively easy ask, there's are some things going on in the dynamics where the people are able to move closer together, and do the work relatively easy. Sometimes we're invited in to do work with executive teams, actually, because of what's perceived as interpersonal difficulties with the team itself. Now, when that happens, in actual fact, we don't work. I mean, there's a great thing in complexity, you never, you never tackle a complex problem directly. And so we tend to find that interpersonal difficulties within a senior team are very often the result of other things that are not in place that needs to be in place. And so and one of the things that I did through my PhD research was developed what's called the integrative framework of team effectiveness that looks at the conditions for high performance in executive teams. And it sits within three domains. There's a structural domain, a relational domain, and a practical domain. And when we work with senior teams, we start we don't start with the relational, ironically, we start with a structural and within the structural domain there are four parts; there's purpose, task, composition and structure. And so we always start with purpose, we say that structure follows purpose, composition follows purpose, task follows purpose. So the first thing we do with teams is actually have them articulate. Why do you as an executive team exist? What is it that you, and only you as a team can do for and in this organization, that if you stopped doing it, or if you don't do it, no other team is going to pick it up. And that's really the enterprise leadership that we've talked about. Invariably, there are other people who can pick up the functional things, their heads of service, that the CFO might have a really strong financial controller, who can pick a lot of these things up, you know, the technical side is, in effect dealt with elsewhere. And we have the executive team articulate their purpose. And from that, we then say, okay, if that is the reason that you exist as an executive team, so there's a team purpose, not an organizational purpose, if that's the purpose of you existing as an executive team, what are the tasks that you have to do in order to advance that purpose? What is the composition of this team in order to achieve that purpose? And what's the structure of it? So how does this team relate to other teams? What teams feed into the executive team? And where does the work of the executive team feed out to that's the structural bit. And so we work with those things. First and foremost, how does it relate to the board? How does it relate to the first tier leaders? And from there, we then look at the relational domain. And within the relational domain, we're looking at, what are the norms within this group? And what are the most effective norms in order for this group to work? Well, what are the values? What's the levels of trust? Because of course, we know that psychological safety and trust is absolutely paramount in teams. And what's the levels of affiliation and affiliation actually, Peter, to your question around how do they both become kind of individual leaders, but also part of this team affiliation? That their sense of do I want to be in this team? Am I proud to be in this team is actually a hugely important part of that, and we work with them on that too. And then third, the practical domain as well, what are the results you're trying to achieve? What's the performance of this team? And how do you challenge each other and hold each other to accountable and actually do your work, how do you do strategic foresight? How do you grapple with complexity? How do you make ethical decisions, for example? So that's where that's where we tackle the work. So we have a holistic way of, of going about that within the senior team.
Peter Hayward
Thanks, Jacqueline.
Third question, where I talked to Jacqueline Conway, mother, citizen, friend, neighbor, about the futures that you're sensing for you, around you, possibly in Scotland, whatever, what are the things that you're seeing emerge? To get you excited that get your attention that get you thinking? And what are the other things that are emerging and making you think and wonder and possibly even worry about some of the futures that we might be seeing?
Jacqueline Conway
Your question is so timely, because of course, I am sitting here in Scotland, and along the road about 35 miles away at COP 26 is happening as we speak. Barack Obama is here in Scotland, perfect timing. Yes. And we are having conversations that are potentially the most profound conversations about the future that we could possibly be having. And contrast that just here on Saturday, Scotland saw its biggest ever demonstration, where people took to the streets to activists to say "you people inside COP are not doing it fast enough, you are not paying enough attention". And so, you know, I as a concerned citizen. And as you say, as a mother, I'm watching on the news around the kind of technical bits of the detail, you know, the bits, the words that are in brackets that are up for grabs. So, you know, the difference between will and may in a legal document is massive, you know, and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these things still to be ironed out. And you know, so you contrast, you know, the sort of pedantic, albeit necessary, legal wranglings, around words that's going on inside the COP26 village, with people out in the street in the cold and the rain demanding change. And I can't help but feel that the bridge between both of those things is still very, very great. And it does make me feel pessimistic in some ways, that that we are going to have the wherewithal to do what we need to do fast enough. And I worry that one of the things that happens in terms of change happening is that it is only when we are met with a crisis, it's only when the pain of not doing something is or the pain of doing something is greater than the pain of not doing it, that that we move into action and so I do fear for that. An inner world. And I guess that is one of the reasons why I also work with executive leaders, is because I do see part of their roles stepping up into this enterprise leadership is taking responsibility for more than just profit, you know, this idea of you know, are you going to be a good ancestor? How long is the legacy and moving away from the tyranny of short termism that we see in organizations, particularly those that are doing quarterly reporting. You know, they're publicly owned, and they're doing quarterly reporting? I think that that is depressing in some ways. And yet, I do see the possibility within the teams that I'm working with that they are now not just talking about growth for growth's sake, and they're not just talking about profit for profit's sake and that the ideas of sustainability, I've always been slightly uncomfortable with sustainability and prefer the idea of regeneration. Exactly It has a really kind of static quality and I prefer the idea of how do we regenerate our organizations to adapt and evolve to the circumstances that we find ourselves in now? So I feel that within the climate, and I feel within organizations that there is also a move to radically rethink leadership and radically rethink work and that's already going on. I mean, I think COVID and lockdowns accelerated that conversation but that is certainly what my work is all about.
Peter Hayward
Your work working in a place working with organizations and their executive teams and you're working there because you believe that you can support enterprise leadership in those domains? Of course, the people that are in COP, as you say, the people that are inside are not from those domains, they're from political domains. Do you believe that enterprise leadership can be cultivated in political domains?
Jacqueline Conway
That's a really good question. And I'm not sure that I know the answer, because I don't work in the political domain. But I would question whether or not executive leaders inside organizations have got a role to play because I do see that politicians only have quite a small role to play. And I do see corporate leaders and other leaders at COP who are making the shift, and who are doing what is necessary and and in some ways those people are, are doing it faster. And they're doing it with boldness, and with courage more than the political leaders that I see. So I guess I, I have a really fundamental belief that, that the business environment has got a massive role to play, and that leaders therefore need to fully take up their role in seeing their responsibility and their business's responsibility. And not just I mean, I am fortunate enough to work with some executive teams in the renewable sector. But a lot of my work also happens with executive teams who are in industries that are being rapidly disrupted in this new world. And that causes them a great deal of consternation, but also provides for them an opportunity to adapt and evolve in a way that if things were just going along in the status quo, and they were, you know, they were posting quite good results on a quarterly and annual basis, that there wouldn't be an incentive to change; there now is an incentive to change. And I see those older industries also really making significant shifts in the world. And it gives me a great deal of pleasure to get alongside them and help them take old industrialized models and bring them into the 21st century for a world that we need them to be going forward.
Peter Hayward
Thanks, Jacqueline.
Fourth question the communication question. So how does Jacqueline explain to people what she does, when people don't necessarily understand what it is Jacqueline does?
Jacqueline Conway
I guess I don't call myself a futurist. And I locate the work that I do around strategic foresight within the work that I do with top teams. So rather than saying 'Oh I do Strategic Foresight work', I talk about the fact that I help executive leaders fully step into their enterprise wide responsibilities. And those responsibilities include strategic foresight, and what do I mean by that? Well, that's really about looking to the trends and disruptors that are coming, that may have an impact on their business is about looking at nonlinear risk, and the impact that might have on their business, and looking at things like emergence for what things potentially can coalesce, to create a situation that could have events or issues that could have a massive impact on the organization. So I come at it more from the work that I'm trying to do to elevate executive leadership. And I use the work that I do in Strategic Foresight as one of the drivers of that.
Peter Hayward
If you want to encourage someone to move towards this, who might be reluctant or hesitant. How do you sort of if I use the word 'entice' or attract a person to move towards this way of operating?
Jacqueline Conway
I guess, one of the things I have learned over time, when you do a PhD and you immerse yourself in that sort of literature, it's very easy to find yourself talking in terms that don't translate very well when you start to talk with real life leaders. And so, one of the things I am increasingly trying to force myself to do is to speak about my work in a way that is very pragmatic. And so, I am inviting leaders to think about the nature of the environment that they are working in now. The fact that the context has changed, that disruption and turbulence and complexity and uncertainty are a normal and natural part of quota is to operate at the peak at this perilous peak and that in order to do it well, then they need to fully embrace that not run away from it. And in fully embracing it they have to then deploy a different kind of leadership; a kind of leadership that doesn't just work with, let's try and make things certain, you know, with kind of standard financial forecasts. But let's also work with the unknown, and work with these things productively in a way that has been harder for them, potentially to do in their lower stages of the organization. But once they reach this peak, is really the kind of bread and butter of what it requires. And the paradoxical idea that by leaning into all of the things that make the perilous peak, perilous. The fact that it's uncertain, the fact that there's disruption, the fact that discontinuity can have a massive impact on the business, that we can't necessarily know these things. But we can prepare for eventualities, that that's the sort of thing that I think executive leaders need to be working on. And in working on them they actually make the perilous peak less perilous, because they have, in a way, ameliorated themselves from a lot of the blind spots that typically happen at that level.
Peter Hayward
Lovely, thanks.
The last question, do you we've talked a little bit about the research, but I'd like to hear a bit more about it. So advanced executive fluency. What do you want to tell the listeners about it and how can if people are interested in the research, you might want to talk about how people might get their hands on it?
Jacqueline Conway
I began this research about a year ago. And it stemmed from what I was observing in executive leaders needing to adopt new ways of thinking, acting and being if they were to be really effective as enterprise leaders. And I had an idea of that the fact that they didn't just need to grapple with some of these new ways of thinking, acting and being but they needed to become fluent in them in the way that they would potentially be fluent in, you know, reading a balance sheet or, you know, a profit and loss, you know, that once they get to that level, there should be an expectation of fluency in certain areas. And so I went out to 17, chief executives, some of whom I knew, some of whom I didn't know. And we worked together on what are those areas of fluency. And we came up with four, we originally had five and that didn't quite make the cut, I might say a word or two about that. But there was there was, there are four fluencies. And those fluencies are: cognitive fluency, futures fluency, ethical fluency, and emotional fluency. Now, cognitive fluency is the ability that we've already talked about to be able to understand what is the structure and nature of the problem that I am trying to solve here, and being fluent enough with applying a different mindset, a different approach to different sorts of problems? And so the way that we may solve the problem of a technical engineering type of problem around how do we build this bridge? Or how do we build this road? Or, or how do we put this wind farm up is different from, you know, how do we work with organizational culture? Or how do we grapple with different stakeholder demands? So cognitive fluency is the ability to both recognize different problem types, and then to be able to deploy different mindsets and tool sets in order to solve them. And then there's futures fluency, futures fluency is really the ability to be able to anticipate what might be coming in the future; to think about the trends and disruptors to think about how things that perhaps live far in space and time can come together to create events that could have a huge impact for the organization. And the fact that leaders at the perilous peak really ought to be looking out, up and out to the long term as part of their day job. And really the sort of villain of that futures fluency is effectively the tyranny of short termism that I've already spoken about that the executive leaders are very often having to report on a quarterly basis. us. And so we naturally lead on that basis. And the other is the comfort of certainty. And so inviting executive leaders to, to step away from this kind of tyranny of short termism and comfort of certainty and lean into the unknown in order to really help the organization anticipate what might be coming. And then there's ethical fluency. And this fluency comes from the fact that I believe that executive leaders are making ethical decisions, they are grappling with ethical conundrums on a day to day basis. One of the things I do in my work as I observe executive teams as they are having their conversations, and very often they're having ethical conversations, but they're not they're not labeling it as such. And when we talked to CEOs around, what would ethical fluency be, it's a step away from the idea of the fairly straightforward black and white, right and wrong. And when you get when you're operating at that level, you're really grappling with situations where there isn't one right answer anymore. So a good example of that is that a number of the clients I was working with had implemented a policy of doing away with zero hours contracts, which had been prevalent in the UK. And, you know, they had done that against the backdrop of being profitable of, of doing, you're doing well as a business, and then making the decision that they were going to do away with it. And so that wasn't an ethical conundrum, because you know, zero hours contracts are inherently not ethical. The challenge came when they were on their third round of redundancies, post COVID lockdown. And the ethical conundrum is do we let more people go? Or do we reintroduce zero hours contracts? Now, there you are in the grey area. And this ethical fluency is really about what ethical framework are you going to bring to your leadership? And how are you going to become able to have those kinds of conversations and bring to the surface the values and assumptions that underpin the decisions that you make? So that's the ethical, and the emotional fluency is really around. So often, executive leadership is about being able to hold yourself steady your own emotional process steady. So another thing I see in executive teams is a difficult situation arises, we might see in a piece of Strategic Foresight work, we might see in some other kinds of conundrum that they are grappling with. And it raises anxiety, that's deeply anxiety provoking for them. And what what they do is the very often go straight to let's make a decision, any decision. And the decision making is as much about dissipating their own anxiety, as it is about actually solving the real problem. And so emotional fluency is helping executive leaders to understand their own emotional process, and to be able to sit longer with their own discomfort and not knowing that they can then make the right decision rather than the quick decision. So that's the four that's the four fluencies. And we think that this has some utility for working with senior teams. And so the report is almost published and people can sign up for it at the Waldencroft website, and it will arrive in their inbox this side of Christmas.
Peter Hayward
Jacqueline it's been an absolute blast, I've had a ball as you can gather. So thanks very much for taking some time out to talk to the Futurepod community and congratulations on the research and I look forward to getting a copy in my Christmas stocking.
Jacqueline Conway
Thank you very much, Peter. It has been my absolute pleasure really appreciate it.
Peter Hayward
This has been another production from Futurepod. Futurepod is a not for profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support Futurepod, go to the Patreon link on our website. Thank you for listening. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. This is Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.