3 Reasons Leadership Teams Fail to Drive Progress Amidst Complexity
Once you understand them, they’re easy for leadership teams to fix.
The most significant challenges leadership teams face today are complex. They’re issues like doubling revenue growth, creating competitive advantage, removing inefficiency, transforming customer satisfaction, and improving the employee experience.
Complexity exists when work crosses traditional team boundaries, spanning departments, disciplines, locations, hierarchies, organizations, industries, or areas of expertise. It exists when there are a multitude of decision makers tackling adjacent issues simultaneously at multiple levels of an organization over an extended period of time.
In complexity, loosely connected people step up at unpredictable moments and take unpredictable actions. The people involved are not held accountable by any one person; key stakeholders don’t work in any single system; and resources are not controlled by any single hierarchy.
Progress is not linear in complex environments. Progress is decentralized and fluid, and the landscape constantly changes. The complexity often makes progress feel harder and slower than it needs to be.
Why? There are three reasons. Once you understand them, they’re quite easy to fix.
Traditional systems, silos, and project management strategies do not work well to drive progress amidst complexity.
They leave leaders and all the people involved in an initiative lacking real-time data, visibility, and direction, reducing progress to a crawl.
Reason 1: Lack of real-time data from people.
Organizations are operating in dynamic, unpredictable, and even volatile markets. But understanding precisely what is occurring across an initiative, organization, or problem is a slow and highly manual process. The information leaders need is often not readily available, so leaders gather it using a variety of methods.
Systems of record, like CRMs, capture discipline-specific data consistently over a long period of time but are typically not flexible or fast enough to gather data leaders need in-the-moment. They are also not inclusive enough or used widely enough to provide real-time data from all disciplines and key stakeholders.
Surveys and pulsing mechanisms collect information retroactively, causing people to recollect what happened after the fact. In many instances they cause people to recollect multiple events after the fact, synthesize the events, come to their own conclusions, and share their conclusions retroactively. In both cases, surveys and pulsing yield latent, less accurate data than the real-time data required for complex problem-solving.
Shared spreadsheets are used to capture data on demand, but they are largely neglected, unsecured, and cumbersome.
Email, text, conversations, meetings, channels, and discussion boards yield inconsistent information that takes time to aggregate and derive actual data that can be acted upon.
Leaders are forced to get the information using multiple methods simultaneously. Data is everywhere, nowhere, and it’s ad-hoc data chaos. By the time data is gathered and analyzed, the situation and nuances have changed. Accurately identifying and diagnosing problems is a struggle and solving them with speed and agility is nearly impossible without real-time data.
When leaders lack real-time data from people, problem-solving breaks down.
Reason 2: Lack of real-time visibility.
Solving complex problems involves a multitude of decision-makers, working at every altitude in an organization, across disciplines, locations, industries, and areas of expertise. There’s an intricate web of decision-makers. Every person works from their respective roles and informs their own decisions with the data available to them. Problem-solving breaks down when key stakeholders are operating with an incomplete or siloed picture; it’s operating in the dark. This lack of real-time visibility is the second area complex problem-solving breaks down.
Traditional problem-solving keeps key stakeholders in the dark until the end. As information is gathered, a small group of people—sometimes even a single individual—consumes the data. They collect input, aggregate, analyze it, and draw conclusions. At key points, decisions are made and communicated to key stakeholders. Instead of real-time visibility where alignment is developed, key stakeholders have conclusion visibility where alignment is expected.
When key stakeholders lack real-time visibility, they lose the opportunity to learn along the way, and take informed, constructive action in their own areas of expertise. Key stakeholders miss chances to discover a specific issue, invent a new process, create a new strategy, evolve their understanding, or revisit a decision.
When employees lack real-time visibility, they feel as if their input is going nowhere and little changes, undermining engagement.
To solve complex problems, everyone involved must have real-time visibility so that their engagement and actions are informed. Without real-time visibility, progress grinds to a halt.
Reason 3: Lack of real-time direction.
Problem-solving is not an event, it’s a process. The engagement leaders need from key stakeholders will change over time and it will change suddenly, and everyone must adjust accordingly. When leaders do not have a mechanism for directing and redirecting people in real time, problem-solving breaks down.
In traditional organizations, direction is announced at a meeting, sent through email, posted to a channel. Direction is provided, then it changes, and it’s difficult for key stakeholders to know what is important right now.
Leaders often lack the systems to provide ongoing direction at scale and redirect people instantly, so progress breaks down. Traditional tools and methods leave a gap that make it difficult for leaders to lead at scale.
How to fix it
We’re all leading in dynamic, unpredictable, and even volatile environments. Real-time data gives us the capacity to understand, real-time visibility gives us the capacity to act, and real-time direction is what will give us the capacity to adapt with total agility. New technology solutions are needed to make it possible.
Fortunately, that new technology is here today. It’s a completely new category of software called crowdsolving.
Download this white paper for a shareable copy of the Three Reasons to discuss with your team, to learn more about crowdsolving, and view 6 real-world use cases in Sales, Customer Satisfaction, Competitive Intelligence, Employee Engagement, Store Operations and Executive Leadership. It’s a must read for every leadership team.
