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Leadership calls for adapability

Posted on by Teresa Mackin

By: Neal Rothermel, principal officer of VMS BioMarketing and executive in residence at the Indiana University Tobias Leadership Center.

This article was first published in the Northwest Indiana Times here.

Leaders face more intense pressure, complicated problems, and more global challenges than ever before. The amount of change will continue to compound and accelerate for the foreseeable future.

Neal Rothermel, Executive in Residence at the Indiana University Tobias Leadership Center

How are we, as individuals, going to process all of the changes, let alone spearhead our families, teams, and organizations through turbulent times?

It’s already hard enough to succeed in the marketplace. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of all small businesses go extinct in the first five years. And based on long-standing National Center for the Mid-Market statistics cited in Verne Harnish’s “Scaling Up,” only 4% of the 28 million firms in the U.S. grow to a critical mass of at least $1 million in revenue and 7 to 12 employees.
Perhaps being part of a large enterprise will protect us? We all know stories of small companies or novel breakthroughs disrupting entire industries, and there is no indication of that slowing down. In the next few years, billions of new people will be connected for the first time to the internet and each other at fifth-generation wireless speeds. Competition will be not only with established institutions, but also with newly united entrepreneurs around the world.
Even the most prescient experts don’t have a crystal ball. The technology-enabled future with autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, 3D printing, and radical healthcare breakthroughs is upon us. Forces like artificial intelligence, solar power, quantum computing, and blockchain will continue to unleash exponential change. Executive Founder of Singularity University, Dr. Peter Diamandis, examines in his book “The Future is Faster Than You Think” the revolutionary changes the convergence of these interrelated technologies will bring about — and the dramatic impact they’ll have on every industry and aspect of our lives. These powerful insights help us see profound transformations ahead, but the specifics of the future — especially individual winners and losers — remain impossible to predict.
We know everything is going to change, but no one knows exactly how and when. We face more varieties of competition and opportunity than ever. The lines between predators and partners are blurring. We can’t bank on projections, and there’s nowhere to hide. And we know even simple changes can be very difficult to accommodate. Should we all quit and wait for the robots to run the world?

Darwin’s theory of evolution tells us it’s not the strongest or the smartest of the species that survive, but those that are most receptive to change. He observed that creatures on small islands under harsh circumstances evolve faster than other species. With exponential innovations on a global scale, our planet is now a small island under extreme and unrelenting stress. We can’t rely on forecasts or the strength of institutions for our survival, but we do need to have the skills to ensure we can anticipate and adjust to the tsunami of changes transforming our environment.

Our natural response in the face of ambiguity is to hunker down and resist new ideas. In his book “Unlocking Creativity,” Michael Roberto cites the research of professor Jennifer Mueller, who showed that people value practicality over creativity when faced with uncertainty. Our tendency is to become more closed-minded and negative at precisely the time we should be more flexible and open to trying new experiments. Fear impedes creativity and our environment can influence our response.

These are not intuitive traits for most of us to promote, and we have to overcome significant barriers for these ways of thinking to develop and thrive. If we are aware of our biases, we can do something about it. We can surround ourselves with people who can help us break out of our linear thinking conventions. We can seek novel experiences that will expand our perspectives. We can build capabilities that make us better prepared for the future. And we can create the conditions for our organizations and the next generation of leaders to flourish.

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