Each year, Irish C-suite executives gather at IMI's National Management Conference to hear insights from international thought leaders. For 2018's conference, which was held on Thursday, September 27th, Deborah Rowland, Terence Mauri and Nathan Furr gave keynote addresses to delegates on the subjects of leading change, a mindset for performance and innovation. We caught up with Deborah, Terence and Nathan in advance of their talks, to get some reading recommendations and see if they had any words of advice for businesses..
Deborah Rowland
Thinkers50 list 2018 and co-author of Sustaining Change: Leadership That Works, and Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change, Rowland will be speaking at NMC 2018 on the topic Is Change Changing?, exploring how you and your organisation can embrace the agile and experimental strategies needed to pursue true, sustained change.
Based on your current work, if you had only six words of advice to give a business, what would they be?
Raise your levels of consciousness.
What’s the big idea behind this?
In today’s dynamic and ever-changing world, the quality of the results produced in any system depends on the quality of awareness from which the people in the system operate. Too often we are operating on autopilot, unaware of our routines and more importantly the mindsets and assumptions that create them.
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If we don’t hold these inner mental maps up to inspection, then we will unconsciously repeat our past story, even when if we think we are ‘doing’ change. That’s dangerous and costly. Yet too often, organisations only embark on change if they can travel in ways that reinforce today’s routines.
What I have discovered is that unless leaders in a system can turn inward and look deeply into the source of their routines, becoming more conscious of how they currently produce their results, and why, then change will end up as a lot of ‘busy action’ rather than what I call ‘still movement’.
All true movement - genuinely arriving at a new place - starts in stillness. Slowing down the pace, getting in contact with what is truly present (both in you and in the wider system), hitting the pause button and consciously and intentionally choosing your response to experience.
Where should we look for further information?
My latest book, Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change (Wiley 2017).
Terence Mauri
Terence will explore how a leader can learn to unlock purpose-led leadership in their organisation to thrive in today's complex and disruptive world in his talk The Leader's Mindset: Leading with Purpose. Terence is author of The Leader's Mindset: How to Win in the Age of Disruption and recognised as an Inc. Magazine Top 100 leadership speaker.
Based on your current work, if you had only six words of advice to give a business, what would they be?
Fight complexity with simplicity.
What does this mean?
The paradox of our times is that growth creates complexity, but complexity kills growth. Today, business is inherently more complex than it has ever been. The moment we enter the office, we are suddenly exposed to a huge number of rules, procedures and protocols to follow.
According to a recent McKinsey study, organizational complexity (the number of procedures, structures, processes, systems, vertical layers and decision approvals) has increased by a factor of 35 in the last six years. Too much complexity is not only frustrating, it can also waste time, erode productivity and kill innovation.
As our bureaucratic mass index continues to rise, leaders need to build fearless organisations that fight complexity with simplicity.
Where should we look for further information?
My book, The Leader's Mindset: How to Win in the Age of Disruption.
Nathan Furr
An assistant professor of strategy at INSEAD, Nathan will use his NMC 2018 address, Innovative Leaders: Leading and Creating the Future, to explore not only how innovative leaders come up with ideas, but how they know what to do with them and win the resources and support to pursue their ideas.
Based on your current work, if you had only six words of advice to give a business, what would they be?
You can prosper from uncertainty.
What does this mean?
Although uncertainty feels terrifying for big companies, you can turn it to your advantage. Established companies can innovate, transform and win the support to do it. It’s a matter of having the right tools and processes.
Responding to disruptive innovation may be one of the greatest challenges managers in established firms face. On the one hand, they’ve been warned that disruption can sneak up and quickly destroy their business. On the other hand, experience tells them that disruptions can take years, sometimes decades, to play out. And sometimes those that threaten - flying cars and robot maids, for example - never occur at all.
Firms that try to learn about and embrace the future do better than those that try to preserve the old business model. They get the most strategic value from their efforts in the present and are well-positioned to transition successfully to the next generation.
Where should we look for further information?
By reading Leading Transformation, which describes how to see what other opportunities you have. The Innovator's Method describes the innovation processes to tackle those opportunities and Innovation Capital describes how to win the support to do it.