‘Courage: The Heart of Leadership’

We are undoubtedly living in a time of great transition and radical uncertainty, where the old normal has gone and the new normal has not yet emerged.

Annabel Beerel

Leaders must be committed to wrestling with the forces of change in the context of complex systems. They need to be aware that signals always exist alluding to the imminent arrival of a new reality even though these signals may be difficult to detect.

Many companies and their leadership teams are poor at reading the environment systemically. They might identify a few blatant new trends in their industries, but the more subtle tidal movements across the globe and the reconfiguration of industries along with rapid innovation and intense competition from unexpected quarters invariably catches them unawares.

While I put much of this down to hubris and complacency, lack of courage plays a huge role; courage to think out of the box, to ask the scary “what if” questions and to make decisions that may include taking new and different risks. Leaders also need the courage to admit that they do not have all the answers and that they need to invite others’ ideas and opinions.

Regrettably, in so many instances, once an organization feels it is losing its image as a fast-growth, highly profitable company, the ethical shenanigans begin. Earning restatements, capitalization of expenses, payments in advance treated as current revenue, and all other kinds of accounting tricks are put into practice.

When difficulties arise because new realities have been ignored and things are not going well, employees are typically told “to figure it out.” Since in many cases their jobs depend on it, figure it out they do, and the slippery slope either begins or gathers momentum — note Enron, Tyco, Bed Bath & Beyond and so on.

Most employees keep their mouths shut and comply. Pacts of silence and acts of collusion are all hidden as best as possible so that jobs can be kept, salaries earned, promotions attained and bonuses banked — anything rather than being laid off or facing the abuse that often goes with whistle blowing.

And yet, if employees could understand that if a dozen of them marched into the CEO’s office or the board room and protested false claims, poor quality (Boeing!!!), fake accounting and so on, they would have enough clout to make a difference.

In “Courage: The Heart of Leadership,” I discuss Margaret Heffernan’s insightful 2020 book, “Unchartered: How to Navigate the Future,” which discusses our fascination and addiction with data as the way out of dealing with uncertainty. She points out that, since the beginning of time, there has been a fortune to be made in prophesy and that now we have swapped the fortune teller’s globe for data analytics and technological solutions.

We tell ourselves that data can give us assurance, forgetting that history is a poor forecaster. New problems need new solutions for which there may be no data, no predictive correlation and no known and tested algorithm.

I describe our tendency to keep trying to simplify complex problems, forgetting that life is complex, nonlinear and fluid, but we persist in looking for cause and effect, and in seeking out patterns of similarities rather than differences. We happily accrue mountains of data that in many cases are irrelevant.

In our rapidly changing world, patterns are changing. New problems are arising based on complex interconnections and subjective issues that cannot be mapped or tracked by data. To lead effectively now requires curiosity, imagination and courage.

Cathy O’Neil, a former Wall Street mathematician who became involved in auditing a variety of AI systems, wrote a powerful book, “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy” (2017). Based on her extensive experience, she defines the AI modelers as computer and math nerds infatuated by equations without any sensitivity or understanding of human feelings. She points out that Big Data is powered by mathematical algorithms designed by fallible human beings and should be used with great caution.

Leaders should not be hastily, and often indiscriminately, relying on data or technological solutions to drive their decision-making.

They are relying on what O’Neil describes as models based on sloppy statistics, inappropriate data sets and biased assumptions and lousy inferences. In my nine years of developing AI systems, I saw plenty of those, too.

We need leaders who use their critical thinking skills, intuition and wisdom, rather than relying on data or technological solutions to drive their decision-making. We need leaders who have the courage to explore the new instead of getting caught up in technological fads such as AI. And we need leaders who have the courage to think outside the box, to ask the scary “what if” questions and to make certain radical decisions that may include taking new and different risks.

Annabel Beerel, an experienced executive and leadership coach, has worked with international corporations and educational and nonprofit companies. She has written 12 books, including her most recent, “Courage: The Heart of Leadership.”