What We Can Learn from Wildfire Fighters About Leading Through Uncertainty
GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton
What does a lightning strike in a Spanish forest have to do with your next leadership meeting? More than you think.
On June 14, 2014, lightning struck a forest on Spain’s northeast coast, only 60 miles from Barcelona. Within hours, flames 16 to 33 feet high raced out of control toward populated areas, threatening 27,000 acres of forest, an area larger than the city of Boston.
Everything – data, instincts, decades of firefighting doctrine – prioritized saving the entire forest and protecting the coastal towns.
Instead, the fire commanders chose to deliberately let 2,057 acres, roughly the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, burn.
The result? They saved the other 25,000 acres (an area the size of San Francisco), protected the coastal communities, and created a natural firebreak that would protect the region for decades. By accepting some losses, they prevented catastrophic ones.
The Fear Trap That’s Strangling Your Business
The Tivissa fire’s triumph happened because firefighters found the courage to escape what researchers call the “fear trap” – the tendency to focus exclusively on defending against known, measurable risks.
Despite research proving that defending against predictable, measurable risks through defensive strategies consistently fails in uncertain and dynamic scenarios, firefighter “best practices” continue to advocate this approach.
Sound familiar? It should. Most executives today are trapped in exactly this pattern.
We’re in the fire right now. Financial markets are yo-yoing, AI threatens to disrupt everything, and consumer behaviors are shifting.
Most executives are falling into the Fear Trap by doubling down on protecting their existing business and pouring resources into defending against predictable risks. Yet the real threats, the ones you can’t measure or model, continue to pound the business.
While you’re protecting last quarter’s wins, tomorrow’s disruption is spreading unchecked.
Four Principles for Creative Decision-Making Under Fire
The decision to cede certain areas wasn’t hasty but based on four principles enabling leaders in any situation to successfully navigate uncertainty.
1. A Predictable Situation is a Safe Situation.
Stop trying to control the uncontrollable. Standard procedures work in predictable situations but fail in unprecedented challenges.
Put it in Practice: Instead of creating endless contingency plans, build flexibility and agility into operations and decision-making.
2. Build Credibility Through Realistic Expectations.
Reducing uncertainty requires realism about what can be achieved. Fire commanders mapped out precisely which areas around Tivissa would burn and which would be saved, then communicated these hard truths and the considered trade-offs to officials and communities before implementing their strategy, building trust and preventing panic as the selected areas burned.
Put it in practice: Stop promising to protect everything and set realistic expectations about what you can control. Then communicate priorities, expectations, and trade-offs frequently, transparently, and clearly with all key stakeholders.
3. Include the future in your definition of success
Traditional firefighting protects immediate assets at risk. The Tivissa firefighters expanded this to include future resilience, recognizing that saving everything today could jeopardize the region tomorrow.
Put it in practice: Be transparent about how you define the Common Good in your organization, then reinforce it by making hard choices about where to compete and where to retreat. The goal isn’t to avoid all losses – it’s to maximize overall organizational health.
4. Use uncertainty to build for tomorrow.
Firefighters didn’t just accept that 2,057 acres would burn – they strategically chose which acres to let burn to create maximum future advantage, protecting the region for generations.
Put it in practice: Evaluate every response to uncertainty on whether it better positions you for future challenges. Leverage the disruption to build capabilities, market positions, and organizational structures that strengthen you for future uncertainty.
Your Next Move
When the wind shifted and the fire exploded, firefighters had to choose between defending everything (and likely losing it all) or accepting strategic losses to ensure overall wins.
You’re facing the same choice right now.
Like the firefighters, your breakthrough might come not from fighting harder against uncertainty, but from learning to work with it strategically.
What are you willing to let burn to save what matters most?
Image credit: Pexels
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If you use your sane-and-rational lenses and the situation doesn’t make sense, that’s because the situation is not governed by sanity and rationality. Yet, even though there’s a mismatch between the system’s behavior and sane-and-rational, we still try to understand the system through the cloudy lenses of sanity and rationality.
Computer programs are sane and rational; Algorithms are sane and rational; Machines are sane and rational. Fixed inputs yield predicted outputs; If this, then that; Repeat the experiment and the results are repeated. In the cold domain of machines, computer programs and algorithms you may not like the output, but you’re not surprised by it.
But businesses are not run by computer programs, algorithms and machines. Businesses are run by people. And that’s why things aren’t always sane and rational in business.
Where computer programs blindly follow logic that’s coded into them, people follow their emotions. Where algorithms don’t decide what to do based on their emotional state, people do. And where machines aren’t afraid to try something new, people are.
When something doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because your assumptions about the underlying principles are wrong. If you see things that violate logic, it’s because logic isn’t the guiding principle. And if logic isn’t the guiding principle, the only other things that could be driving the irrationality are feelings and emotions. But if you think the solution is to make the irrational system behave rationally, be prepared to be perplexed and frustrated.
The underpinnings of management and leadership are thoughts, feelings and emotions. And, thoughts are governed by feelings and emotions. In that way, the currency of management and leadership is feelings and emotions.
If your first inclination is to figure out a situation using logic, don’t. Logic is for computers, and even that’s changing with deep learning. Business is about people. When in doubt, assess the feelings and emotions of the people involved. And once you understand their thoughts and feelings, you’ll know what to do.
Business isn’t about algorithms. Business is about people. And people respond based on their emotional state. If you want to be a good manager, focus on people’s feelings and emotions. And if you want to be a good leader, do the same.
Image credit: Pixabay
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The surprising power of reframing as an innovation tool
GUEST POST from John Bessant
Neuroplasticity. Not some weird creation of a mad 3D sculptor intent on creating a strange new species with which to threaten the world in another zombie apocalypse story but instead a wonderful feature of our brains. Research increasingly confirms our ability, in the face of unexpected shock or challenge, to rewire ourselves, make new neural connections. Defined as‘the ability of neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization’ it’s visible in the ways in which people can recover speech or movement after traumatic brain injury and it’s now understood to be critical in the process of early cognitive development in babies. It’s even offered as one explanation for the impossible and unpredictable lifestyls of teenagers; their penchant for lying in bed all day and mooching aorund may be down to their working hard at the synaptic level to reconstruct their brains!
It’s also a good description of a key capability which entrepreneurs have. Being able to reframe, seeing the world in a new way opens up significant new possibilities. Provided, of course, that you are then able to follow through, solving problems and enabling the new connections necessary to bring about that state.
Think about Malcolm Maclean, sitting on the dock of the bay one afternoon and imagining an alternative approach to shipping. Instead of the laborious loading and unloading with all its costs, its wasted time, the security challenges and so on – why not use containers? The vision involved a stretch of the imagination; the actual realisation of it considerably more but in the end you have a game changer. Reframing and then realising the possibilities.
It’s an old story; the challenge of transportation and logistics was one which engaged James Brindley 200 years earlier as the Industrial Revolution began to reshape the British economy and the landscape in which it took place. You can’t get a manufacturing-led transformation off the ground unless you can move tings around – raw materials in and finsihed products out of your factories. Which, given the worn-out and primitive state of many of the roads and tracks criss-crossing the country at the time was a big problem. Brindley was one of the pioneers of the idea of creating waterways – canals – as an alternative, providing fast and straight connections between factories, cities and ports.
Image: Watercolour of Barton aqueduct by G.F. Yates 1793, public domain
Just like Malcolm Maclean, this was an inspirational idea which required a deal of systems thinking. Not just one which could imagine an alternative world built on waterways but also one which would need a lot of practical problem solving to bring it into being. Dealing with multiple questions around how to enable the different elements of the system to come together and deliver ‘emergent properties’ where the whole has an impact much greater than the sum of its parts.
His efforts extended well beyond the map making and route planning through to the detailed construction, involving tunnels, cuttings and viaducts. He also had to think through the big challenge of hydraulics, how to fill the canals with water and keep them full – which meant, amongst other things, solving the problem of lining the canal with a water- saving clay. He also reduced the water demand by cutting narrower canals and then designing narrow-boats to navigate them. And since the country is not level means that in places vessels using the canal have to climb up or down slopes which necessitated development of intricately engineered locks and sluices.
Brindley’s work on connecting up the dots of his system into something which changed the transportation world of its time even extended to thinking in the same direction as Malcolm Mclean came to do much later. Faced with the problem of loading and unloading coal as a key bulk item Brindley devised a system involving specially built wooden containers which could be prefilled and transhipped quickly from specially-designed boats!
Above all Brindley was a systems thinker, seeing connections and working on how to best join up the dots to deliver major change. Which his legacy over 350 miles of canals criss-crossing the country and powering the Industrial Revolution seems to have done.
There’s still plenty of scope for such system rethinking today – giving opportunities even in the face of crisis. Take the example of Gridless, founded in 2022 and already a successful and growing business in the energy sector of Africa.
First the vision. Africa is the coming continent, with a huge population of around a billion largely young people and rapidly accelerating development. This creates an engine for growth through both domestic demand and – with sufficient investment – the possibility of increasing exports, not just of raw materials but of finished goods and services.
It has enormous potential – and it has a track record as a place where radical innovations can emerge and scale. Take the example of M-PESA. Where the idea of mobile money still seems fresh and exciting for citizens of the industrialised world learning to use cashless payments by phone it’s actually rather old hat to many people in East Africa. M-PESA (the word means mobile money in Swahili) is coming up towards celebrating its 20th birthday and has moved a long way from being an experiment to try and improve access to basic financial services for the largely unbanked population of Kenya. Now the M-PESA network carries 60% of GDP and delivers a growing range of services across the economy.
But Africa is also unevenly developed; not least in the case of energy. Whilst much of the population is now connected this is not the case everywhere. Over two thirds of the population – 600 million people – have no access to electricity. Mini-grids (relatively small local power stations and networks) can help solve this energy access problem, not least by tapping into the huge potential which renewable energy – solar, wind, hydro and biomass – has for the region.
There’s no shortage of technology to help construct mini and even micro-grids, and there are plenty of power sources which could potentially be tapped. The problem is economic; in order to finance the construction of such a micro-grid a lot of capital is needed up front. That needs a reasonable return to cover operating costs and recoup the investment costs – but in the short term the market to pay for this isn’t there.
When the power starts to flow there is relatively little demand to hook it up to; people who’ve survived without electricity don’t suddenly become active consumers. As Eric Hersman, one of the founders of Gridless points out, ‘ … if you’re a smallholder farmer in a rural village in Africa you’ll likely buy an LED light bulb and charge your phone at first. These don’t draw a lot of electricity, but they do change your life considerably. It might be a few years before you invest in that refrigerator, TV, irrigation pump, or electric oven’.
The consequence of this slow demand growth is that the provider ends up throwing away 80% of its energy and having to charge too high a price for the rest. What could be an important way of helping local communities develop runs aground because that high price effectively throttles the emerging demand at birth. Catch-22.
Gridless represents an entrepreneurial way of reframing this problem. Given such a stalemate their business model asks a simple question. What if there were a consumer who would guarantee to buy electricity at the necessary market rate to support the project and then gradually retreat as the prices fell and the connections rose? A stepping stone approach, essentially a temporary scaffolding to enable an infrastructure to emerge and grow. Using a horticultural metaphor it’s like putting in place a trellis to support an early sapling until the plant is able to survive and thrive on its own.
That’s the vision part of the Gridless approach – to help Africa with micro-grid development. Their website describes it simply: ‘By combining small-scale bitcoin data centres and renewables-based mini-grids they aim to develop the foundation of a new model to expand profitable electrification to communities in emerging markets without the need for charity, aid, gifts, or government subsidy…’
Bitcoin mining – the energy intensive operation of multiple computers beavering away at solving complex mathematical puzzles to earn rewards in the form of bitcoins – does not have the best of reputations in terms of sustainability. By its nature it involves consuming huge amounts of energy whose generation often contributes to pollution and global warming. But Gridless have reworked the story so that it makes a positive contribution to both sustainability of operations and community development.
It does so in a simple a practical way. It hooks up a bitcoin mine with a source of sustainable energy provided by local renewables like hydro or solar. And it deals with the ‘stranded energy’ problem by joining in the system as a ‘buyer of last resort’. Their bitcoin mining operations provide plenty of demand for energy and those operations are profitable enough to buy it at prices which are too high for local communities to pay in the short term. But as the market develops so the local demand increases – and this means the provider can reduce prices, recouping their costs over a larger market. They can also invest to extend the grid and bring yet more demand into the system.
Eventually things reach a point where there isn’t enough power left for the bitcoin mining, so Gridless pack up their operations, move on to another site where there is ‘stranded energy;’ and start the whole cycle once again. It’s a business model for development with some important social values underpinning it. The main purpose is to help connect people through micro-grids and to gradually exit as the role of the buyer of first resort becomes unnecessary. It’s a business fuelled by bitcoin profits but these are effectively being reinvested in social development – a powerful alternative vision. By providing a consistent and reliable demand for electricity, Bitcoin mining helps to utilize excess renewable energy that might otherwise go to waste, thereby unlocking the potential of stranded renewable energy projects and contributing to a more sustainable energy future.
An impressive vision – but as Messrs Maclean and Brindley will tell you, the challenge is not in creating the vision, it’s in realising it. Visions like these need a lot of different dots to be joined up, a lot of problem solving to make it all work. The Gridless solution starts with the idea of being ‘geographically agnostic’ – meaning it is mobile and can be moved anywhere, finding and helping develop micro-grids wherever there is ‘stranded energy’ opportunity.
They do this by putting the bitcoin mine in a box – literally, using a shipping container in a way which would make Malcolm Maclean proud. They move it close to sources of renewable power – like a micro-hydro system in Zambia, harvesting the abundant energy from the fast flowing Zambesi river.
They’ve worked hard on adapting their technology – computers, power supplies, software – to operate in what can still be challenging conditions. Rural Africa is a long way from the clinical clean environments of Silicon Valley and they’ve had to learn to deal with the suite of problems this throws up in order to make their system reliable. For example air quality- the dust which the wind blows up as it sweeps across the wide plains means you have to be very careful to fit suitable filters to avoid all the expensive electronics grinding to a halt. Ditto the heat; average temperatures in Kenya hover around 30 degrees Celsius so there’s a big problem in keeping things cool. And then there are the bugs.
In 2022 when they set up their first facility the lights attracted plenty of curious insects and, especially in the rainy season, they flew towards them en masse, only to crash into the ventilation fans and eventually jam them!
Problems weren’t just physical; the economics of buying containers ready made from China or the USA to use as mobile bitcoin mines posed a big challenge. Quite apart from the logistics and transportation costs of getting them to Africa there were bureaucratic costs involved in getting the various permissions needed to import such equipment. And then there were the capital costs – at over $100,000 per container it was too expensive. So the team went back to the drawing board and designed their own container which cost 75% less. It’s also had the side benefit of bypassing many of the import regulations (since it is now a domestically manufactured product)
Their problem-solving also extends to another big issue with their business model – that of micro-grid management. How to balance supply and demand and make sure that the needs of the community are served first? Gridless wanted to make sure that they weren’t using electricity which somebody else needed. They did this by writing their own software – Gridless OS – which allows for real-time response to demand, making sure people get what they need when they need it whilst also stabilising the grid.
After three years of such problem-solving the team have a robust model which they have demonstrated can work in a variety of contexts, using whatever renewable power supply is available – solar, hydro or biomass. Theirs is primarily a social mission and so they’ve codified their experience and can offer a blueprint for the same kind of model to be used by others to help African development.
And it works. Not only by connecting people to electric power but by extending the range of possibilities which that then opens up. Once you have power you can have light – which offers more than just illumination, it allows children to study at night and boosts education. Local services become possible because power enables small-scale facilities to operate and deliver healthcare. Business can connect better to markets and small-scale farms and factories can improve their operations and profitability, generating employment.
In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine one of the Gridless founders, Janet Maingi, elaborated on this novel approach which now operates in several countries including Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, ‘…for example, there’s a tea factory in Muranga, Kenya, which is in the highlands. We partnered with the energy generator in the area and they were able to give the factory power. Now, their facilities are able to support the tea factory, which has two benefits: tea farmers can bring their tea to the factory, which means it doesn’t spoil on the farms because they can’t get it to point B in time and more employment has also been created just by that tea factory becoming an electrified space….’
The potential is huge. As Eric Hersman, points out‘….just 10% – 40GW of the 400GW of hydroelectric energy in Africa – has been developed (and that’s just hydro!). There is a near unlimited supply of energy to be developed in the one place on earth that needs it most… Africa. But how to get the plants built? Despite being home to 17% of the world’s population, Africa currently accounts for just 4% of global power supply investment’.
As he points out mini-grid business models have traditionally focused on having an ‘anchor client’, a single large electricity consumer such as a telecom tower, which consumes the majority of electricity supplied by the mini-grid. The anchor client is the first step in what’s called an ABC strategy (Anchor—Business—Consumers) for mini-grid financial sustainability. The model builds on finding an anchor client with a predictable load profile and then helping develop around that a group of local businesses that can provide stable demand and promote economic growth in the communities. The last step is residential customers, bringing them in gradually by improving access and generating income from them.
Over the last 3 years Gridless has shown that mini-grids can be made profitable using their model of becoming a ‘geographically agnostic anchor tenant’. They’ve done this on 6 sites in 3 African countries, using the stranded (wasted) energy from hydro, biomass, geothermal, some of that augmented by solar. Their numbers prove that it can be done; they are confident that a 5-7 year return on investment is possible on almost any hydro mini grid.
There’s a lot to be done – figures from the World Bank estimate that Africa needs 140,000 mini-grids to help electrify the continent. But as of 2025 only 5000 have been built – around 5% of what’s required. Which opens up a huge opportunity – if we can reframe the problem.
The key thing about neuroplasticity is that it isn’t an instant process of constructing new neural pathways. Instead the connections have to be made and reinforced; only gradually does the new network become fully operational. Patients who manage to recover movement or speech after a catastrophic neural event like a stroke do so by a mixture of hard work and determination. Gradually creating those new pathways.
Fixing problems like Africa’s energy challenge won’t happen overnight. It’s not going to be simple, and it will need a lot of system-level problem-solving, joining the dots. But just like James Brindley imagining a network of canals or Malcolm Maclean picturing container routes spanning the world, it starts with an entrepreneurial vision.
If you want things to change, you have two options. You can incentivize change or you can move things out of the way that block change. The first way doesn’t work and the second one does. For more details, click this link at it will take you to a post that describes the late Danny Kahneman’s thoughts on the subject.
And, also from Kahneman, to move things out of the way and unblock change, change the environment.
Change Blocker 1 – Metrics
When you measure someone on efficiency, you get efficiency. And if people think a potential change could reduce efficiency, that change is blocked. And the same goes for all metrics associated with cost, quality and speed. When a change threatens the metric, the change will be blocked. To change the environment to eliminate the blocking, help people understand who the change will actually IMPROVE the metric. Do the analysis and educate those who would be negatively impacted if the change reduced the metric. Change their environment to one that believes the change will improve the metric.
Change Blocker 2 – Incentives
When someone’s bonus could be negatively impacted by a potential change, that change will be blocked. Figure out whose incentive compensation are jeopardized by the potential change and help them understand how the potential change will actually increase their incentives. You may have to explain that their incentives will increase in the long term, but that’s an argument that holds water. Until they believe their incentives will not suffer, they’ll block the change.
Change Blocker 3 – Fear
This is the big one – fear of negative consequences. Here’s a short list: fear of being judged, fear of being blamed, fear of losing status, fear of losing control, fear of losing a job, fear of losing a promotion, fear of looking stupid and fear of failing. One of the best ways to help people get over their fear is to run a small experiment that demonstrates that they have nothing to fear. Show them that the change will actually work. Show them how they’ll benefit.
Eliminating the things that block change is fundamentally different than pushing people in the direction of change. It’s different in effectiveness and approach. Start with the questions: “What’s in the way of change?” or “Who is in the way of change?” and then “Why are they in the way of change?” From there, you’ll have an idea what must be moved out of the way. And then ask: “How can their environment be changed so the change-blocker can be moved out of the way?”
What’s in the way of giving it a try?
Image credit: Pixabay
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When my husband and I became accredited as foster parents for children in need, I thought my skills as a trainer and facilitator would help me navigate the challenges we faced. I quickly discovered that when children arrived at our home late at night, often physically injured and emotionally distraught due to a tragic accident or being separated from their families, their primary need was for emotional safety. This began my long and enlightening quest into what it truly means for someone to develop both emotional and psychological safety. To discover and explore why both emotional and psychological safety are crucial for people to survive, innovate and thrive in the post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.
The whole issue of “safety” is a crucial one. Causing many people, especially those in the change, learning and coaching space, to stop, pause, retreat, and reflect upon how to personalize and contextualize it for ourselves and others we care about and interact with. Yet so few people understand the importance of creating safe environments, especially today when there is so much hatred and violence happening on many of our streets.
We all deserve to, and are entitled to, feel emotionally safe and secure in all aspects of our lives.
What does it mean to be safe?
Because safety: the condition of being protected from or unlikely to cause danger, risk, or injury, impacts everyone and everything in our entire world system. It is an essential element required for our survival, growth, and ability to navigate and innovate in the post-pandemic era. Safety is critical in enhancing people’s capacity to connect, belong, and engage in purposeful relationships, build happy families and secure communities, as well as produce creative, inventive, and innovative work that helps make the world a better place.
What is emotional safety?
Emotional safety exists in an environment where individuals feel valued, respected, and heard, regardless of their values, beliefs, or religious or cultural origins. It involves allowing people to feel safe and secure, nurturing vulnerability, and sharing personal thoughts and feelings without fear of having their words judged as “bad” or “wrong.” Without facing punishment, discrimination, persecution, diminishment, blame, shame, hatred, or violence by others.
It’s a space where it’s safe to say “I don’t know” or “I made a mistake” without being labelled as incompetent or “lacking” in some vital way.
Improving well-being, engagement and productivity
Emotional safety is a vital element of an emotionally and mentally healthy environment that fosters well-being, boosts engagement, and enhances productivity. In such an environment, individuals feel secure enough to express, explore, and share their thoughts and feelings about themselves, their colleagues, managers, leaders, and even their organization as a whole. People feel respected and trusted to share ideas, establish boundaries, and be accepted for who they are, what they believe in, flaws and all.
“The tendency of relationship partners to think of themselves as members of a dyadic relationship rather than as distinct individuals. As close relationships, particularly romantic ones, develop over time, partners display increasing levels of mutuality, which may influence their affect, cognition, and behavior. In interdependence theory, the tendency of partners to depend equally on each other’s behavior for the attainment of desirable outcomes”.
We live in an interdependent, globalized world where developing emotionally safe, positive, and interactive mutual relationships across geographies, technologies, demographics, and functions is more important than ever. Mutuality lays the groundwork for creating a shared understanding that fosters a safe and open space for learning and effective interactions, based on cooperative, co-petitive, and collaborative relationships in the workplace.
Becoming attuned
Emotional intelligence, empathy, trust, and effective communication are vital for fostering emotional safety and form the basis for developing effective emotional regulation and management strategies. This enables us to attune to and connect with others with whom we wish to build relationships.
“When we attune with others, we allow our internal state to shift, to come to resonate with the inner world of another. This resonance is at the heart of the important sense of “feeling felt” that emerges in close relationships. Children need attunement to feel secure and to develop well, and throughout our lives we need attunement to feel close and connected.”
As a foster carer, my ability and willingness to attune with them represented the most important gift I could offer the children. It allowed them to feel close and connected to someone who genuinely cared for them by simply providing the most basic essentials. With no judgement or strings attached, and with both detachment and empathy, it also provided them with crucial evidence that this could indeed continue to be possible for them in their future lives.
As a trainer, facilitator, and coach, these are the key ingredients for establishing an emotionally safe and effective learning intervention, particularly about the people side of innovation and in building an organization that fosters a culture of failure.
Developing a psychologically safe culture
Emotional safety is closely linked to psychological safety, which is the belief that individuals can be themselves at work and share their opinions and ideas without fear of negative repercussions. According to Dr Timothy Clarke at the Leaderfactor, psychological safety empowers individuals and teams to reach new levels of creativity, collaboration, and innovation by nurturing a culture of inclusion and vulnerability. It is a social condition where people feel accepted and secure enough to learn, contribute, and question the status quo, free from fear of embarrassment, marginalization, or punishment, by creating an environment founded on permission, safety, and trust.
Embodying a way of being
Creating this emotional state or culture is much harder than most people think. Most organizations believe it’s something they must achieve through process and system changes, rather than by embodying it as a way of being a manager, leader, trainer, or coach who creates:
Sanctuaries of inclusion—a space where individuals feel safe and are encouraged to express their feelings, thoughts, opinions, and ideas, fostering a profound sense of inclusion, connection, and belonging.
Safe containers – a space where individuals confidently disrupt conventional or habitual ways of doing things, step outside their comfort zones, and challenge the status quo, allowing dissonance, contradiction, paradox, and conflict as sources of creative tension to disrupt, differ, and deviate from the norm.
Collective holding spaces—where individuals accept responsibility, take ownership, and are trusted to contribute to the entire system. By fostering co-creative, interdependent relationships both internally and externally, we work towards achieving the team’s and organization’s vision, mission, purpose, and collective goals.
Incubators and accelerators of innovation—where team members are free to emerge, diverge, and converge possibilities. They are empowered, enabled, and equipped to transform these into creative ideas and opportunities. Individuals and teams feel safe in unlearning, learning, and relearning new ways of being, thinking, and acting. This environment challenges the status quo by encouraging disruptive questions, taking calculated risks, and experimenting with new ideas within an authentic, fail-fast culture that promotes quick learning.
Benefits of emotional and psychological safety
Enhances individual, team, and collective engagement, connection, and belonging. It establishes a foundation for harnessing and mobilizing people’s collective intelligence in line with the organization’s vision, mission, and purpose.
Promotes effective team collaboration, where individuals feel at ease sharing their ideas, opinions, and concerns. It cultivates an environment where diverse perspectives can be openly discussed alongside differing views:
Inspires people to be emotionally energetic, agile, and adaptable in the face of uncertainty and chaos, as well as in a rapidly changing business landscape.
AI will continue to disrupt job stability and security.
Developing emotional and psychological safety is a key success factor that underpins a culture of innovation, as it creates the essential space for individuals to think and act differently. This is achieved through experimentation, learning from failures, and exploring new methods that lead to breakthrough ideas and innovative solutions, enabling individuals to survive and thrive in the age of AI.
Both job losses and opportunities
Fast Company shares that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has a stark warning for the developed world about job losses resulting from AI. The CEO told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. This could result in a 10% to 20% rise in the unemployment rate over the next one to five years, Amodei says. The losses could come from tech, finance, law, consulting, and other white-collar professions, with entry-level jobs being hit the hardest.
Just as the children we fostered needed emotional safety, we all require emotional safety when walking our city streets. Similarly, while at work, we all need a psychologically safe working environment rooted in mutuality and trust. This is what allows individuals to attune to each other, feel secure, bonded, and connected, fostering a sense of belonging and unity. This requires investing in the co-creation of emotionally and psychologically safe spaces that attract and retain top talent, enabling individuals to feel valued, as they truly matter, and helping them adapt, innovate, grow, perform and thrive in a post-pandemic, unstable, and uncertain world.
This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.
Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.
It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.
Image Credit: Pixabay
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When Lou Gerstner was chosen to lead IBM in 1993, he was an unlikely revolutionary. A McKinsey consultant and then the successful CEO of RJR Nabisco, he was considered to be a pillar of the establishment. He would, however, turn out to be as subversive as any activist, transforming the company and saving it from near-death.
Yet there was more to what he achieved than simply turning red ink to black. “The Gerstner revolution wasn’t about technology or strategy, it was about transforming our values and our culture to be in greater harmony with the market,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, one of his chief lieutenants, told me.
Values are essential to how an enterprise honors its mission. They represent choices of what an organization will and will not do, what it rewards and what it punishes and how it defines success and failure. Perhaps most importantly, values will determine an enterprise’s relationships with other stakeholders, how it collaborates and what it can achieve.
Values Incur Costs And Constraints
At his very first press conference, Gerstner famously declared: “the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” It was an odd, even shocking statement for a new CEO charged with turning around a historic company. But what he understood, and few others did, was that unless he changed the culture to honor the values its success was built on, no strategy could succeed.
“At IBM we had lost sight of our values,” Wladawsky-Berger would later tell me. “For example, there was a long tradition of IBM executives dressing formally in a suit and tie. Yet that wasn’t a value, it was an early manifestation of a value. In the early days, many of IBM’s customers were banks, so IBM’s salespeople dressed to reflect their customers. So the value was to be close to customers.”
Gerstner had been a customer and knew that IBM did not always treat him well. At one point the company threatened to pull service from an entire data center because a single piece of competitive equipment was installed. So as CEO, he vowed to shift the focus from IBM’s “own “proprietary stack of technologies” to its customers’ “stack of business processes.”
Yet he did something else as well. He made it clear that he was willing to forego revenue on every sale to do what was right for the customer and he showed that he meant it. Over the years I’ve spoken to dozens of IBM executives from that period and virtually all of them have pointed this out. Not one seems to think IBM would still be in business today without it.
The truth is that if you’re not willing to incur costs and constraints, it’s not a value. It’s a platitude. “Lou refocused us all on customers and listening to what they wanted and he did it by example,” Wladawsky-Berger, remembers. “We started listening to customers more because he listened to customers.
Values Signal Trust And Credibility
In South Africa, the Congress of The People was held in June, 1955. The gathering, which included blacks, mixed race, Indians and liberal whites, convened to draft and adopt the Freedom Charter, much like the Continental Congress gathered to produce the Declaration of Independence in America. The idea was to come up with a common and inclusive vision.
However, the Freedom Charter was anything but moderate. It was a “revolutionary document precisely because the changes it envisioned could not be achieved without radically altering the economic and political structure of South Africa… In South Africa, to merely achieve fairness, one had to destroy apartheid itself, for it was the very embodiment of injustice,” Nelson Mandela would later write.
Yet despite its seemingly radical aims, the Freedom Charter spoke to common values, such as equal rights and equal protection under the law—not just among the signatories, but for anyone living in a free society. It was powerful because of how it signaled to outside stakeholders, such as international institutions, governments and corporations that they shared more with the anti-apartheid movement than they did with the regime.
It was because of those values that activists were able to successfully boycott firms, such as Barclays Bank and Shell Oil, that did business in South Africa. When those companies pulled their investments out, the dominoes began to fall. International sanctions and political pressure increased markedly and Apartheid became politically untenable.
Here again, values would play a crucial role. Much like Gerstner’s willingness to lose revenue on every sale to keep his commitment to IBM customers, Mandela’s commitment to the Freedom Charter, even during 27 years in prison, signaled to stakeholders—inside and outside of South Africa—that supporting his cause was the right thing to do.
Shared Values Drive Collaboration
In the 1960s and 70s, Route 128 outside of Boston was the center of technology, but by the 1990s Silicon Valley had taken over and never looked back. As AnnaLee Saxenian explained in her classic, Regional Advantage, the key difference had less to do with strategy, technology and tactics than it did with values and how the firms saw themselves.
Dominant Boston firms such as DEC, Data General and Wang Laboratories saw themselves as warring fiefdoms. The west coast startups, however, saw themselves as part of the same ecosystem and tended to band together and socialize. “Everybody worked for the same company — Silicon Valley,” Saxenian would later tell me.
This difference in values translated directly into differences in operational practice. For example, in Silicon Valley if you left your employer to start a company of your own, you were still considered part of the family. Many new entrepreneurs became suppliers or customers to their former employers and still socialized actively with their former colleagues. In Boston, if you left your firm you were treated as a pariah and an outcast.
When technology began to shift in the 80s and 90s, the Boston firms had little, if any, connection to the new ecosystems that were evolving. In Silicon Valley, however, connections to former employees acted as an antenna network, providing early market intelligence that helped those companies adapt.
When you value competition above all else, everyone is a potential enemy. However, when you are willing to forsake absolute fealty in the service of collaboration, you can leverage the assets of an entire ecosystem. Those may not show up on a strategic plan or a balance sheet, but they are just as important as any other asset.
Moving From Hierarchies to Networks
The truth is that IBM was not devoid of values when Gerstner arrived. It’s just that they’d gone awry. “IBM had always valued competitiveness, but we had started to compete with each other internally rather than working together to beat the competition,” Wladawsky-Berger remembers. Certainly it valued technology and profits, just not customers.
What Gerstner did was, as noted above, bring the company’s culture and values back into “harmony with the market.” The company no longer wielded monopoly-like power. It had to collaborate with a wide array of stakeholders. It was this realization that led it to become the first major technology company to embrace open source software and support Linux.
Traditionally we’ve seen the world as driven by hierarchies. Kings and queens ruled the world through aristocracies that carried out their orders. Corporate CEO’s outlined strategies that underlings would have to execute. Discipline was enforced through a system of punishments and rewards. Power was valued above all else.
Yet as Moisés Naím pointed out in The End of Power, “Power is easier to get, but harder to use or keep.” Therefore, the ability to attract has become more important than the power to compel or coerce. That’s why today, strategy has less to do with increasing efficiencies and acquiring resources and more to do with widening and deepening networks of connections.
Power no longer lies at the top of hierarchies, but emanates from the center of networks. What determines whether we will get there or not is our values.
One-on-one meetings with employees are a crucial aspect of effective leadership. Organizations spent countless hours, money, and other resources trying to find the most qualified talent on board, and then spent more money to keep that talent motivated and engaged. And yet, the single most time time-efficient and effective way to invest in the growth and development of employees is a simple feedback session with their direct supervisor.
In this article, we will delve into the three main sections that make up a successful one-on-one meeting: expectations, feedback, and growth and development. By following this structure, you can ensure that your meetings are productive and meaningful, leading to improved performance and employee satisfaction.
Expectations
The first part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should focus on expectations. Setting clear objectives and expectations is the foundation of any successful working relationship. During one-on-one meetings, it is essential to discuss and align on these expectations to ensure that everyone is on the same page. By doing so, you can monitor progress, celebrate achievements, and identify any factors that may be affecting performance.
By setting clear objectives and roles, you provide your employees with a sense of direction and purpose. This clarity allows them to focus their efforts on the most important tasks and prioritize their work effectively. Monitoring progress and celebrating achievements not only boosts morale but also provides an opportunity to recognize and reward outstanding performance. Additionally, by identifying factors that may be affecting performance, you can work together to find solutions and remove any obstacles that may hinder progress.
Feedback
The second part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should focus on feedback. Feedback is a powerful tool for growth and improvement. During one-on-one meetings, it is crucial to provide fair feedback that highlights both areas of high performance and areas for improvement. By acknowledging and appreciating the employee’s strengths, you motivate them to continue excelling in those areas. Simultaneously, by providing constructive feedback, you help them identify areas where they can grow and develop.
This section is also meant to be a two-way conversation. This is a time for employees to give you feedback as well. How are you doing as their manager? What resources do they need that you can provide? Encourage your employees to share their thoughts and ideas, and actively listen to their feedback. By fostering a safe and supportive environment, you can build trust and strengthen the relationship with your team members.
Growth and Development
The final part of your one-on-one meetings with employees should discuss the employees’ growth and development. Take the time to discuss their long-term career goals, the skills they want to develop, and potential future roles they aspire to. Understanding your employees’ career aspirations allows you to tailor their development plans and provide them with the necessary resources and opportunities to achieve their goals. By identifying the skills and knowledge they need to grow, you can offer targeted training and development programs. Additionally, supporting employees in their current roles by assigning challenging projects or providing mentorship opportunities can facilitate their growth and prepare them for future roles within the organization.
This section should focus on the real and accurate career objectives of employees. Unfortunately, too often employees who lack trust in their boss or the company invent false ambitions (“I want to be a manager” or “I’m here for the long-term.”) It’s okay if some employees decide their long-term goals will take them away from the organization. Leaders can still invest in their growth, and they can still be high performers in the meantime.
One-on-one meetings with employees are a valuable investment of time and effort. By following the threefold structure of expectations, feedback, and growth and development, you can create a supportive and engaging work environment. Candid and honest conversations in these meetings can lead to faster growth and better results than formal annual reviews or performance improvement plans.
Remember, the order of the three sections is important, as ending on growth and development helps make the conversation forward-looking and motivating. By setting clear expectations, providing constructive feedback, and supporting your employees’ growth, you can foster a culture of continuous improvement and help everyone on your team do their best work ever.
Let’s explore one of the biggest barriers to innovation – fear of failure – and share actionable steps to help your organization overcome it. Your perspectives, ideas, and feedback are much appreciated.
What is the Challenge?
One of the biggest barriers to innovation is the fear of failure. Many organizations, especially large corporations, develop cultures where taking risks is discouraged because failure is often met with negative consequences. This results in stagnation, as employees and leaders shy away from innovative ideas that carry potential risk.
Why Does This Matter?
Without risk, there is no innovation. Companies that focus too much on avoiding failure end up missing opportunities for growth and transformation. Fear of failure leads to risk-averse behavior, stifling creativity and preventing teams from experimenting with new ideas.
How to Overcome It
The key enabler to overcoming the fear of failure is psychological safety—when team members feel safe to express ideas, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of being judged or penalized, they are more likely to experiment.
Here are some steps to foster psychological safety and address the fear of failure:
Model Vulnerability: Leaders should share their own past failures and the lessons learned, showing that failure is a stepping stone to success.
Encourage Small Experiments: Allow teams to run small, low-stakes experiments where failure carries minimal risk. This builds a culture of learning and exploration.
Celebrate Learnings, Not Just Successes: When a project doesn’t achieve the desired outcome, recognize and celebrate the learning gained rather than focusing on the failure itself.
Establish a Feedback Culture: Implement regular feedback loops where employees can openly discuss what went wrong, why it happened, and how to improve without fear of blame.
Create Safety Nets: Ensure that failure doesn’t have punitive consequences by offering support and framing failures as essential learning experiences for future innovation.
What This Means for Your Teams / Organization
By reducing the stigma around failure, you empower your teams to think more creatively and push boundaries. This mindset shift can lead to more breakthrough innovations and a more dynamic, agile organization.
More Inspiration – Thought Leaders, Case-Study
Thought Leader: Tom Kelley of IDEO on Creative Confidence
Case Study: How Google’s “Moonshot Factory” (X) embraces failure as part of its process to develop groundbreaking technologies and new ways of doing things.
This post is part of my Corporate Innovation Explained series. You can also follow my Leadership Growth Explained and Team Dynamics Explained series if you like this kind of inspiration.
Image Credit: Pixabay
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People matter more than ever as we witness one of the most significant technological advancements reshaping humanity. Regardless of size, every industry and organization can adopt AI to enhance operations, innovate, stay competitive, and grow by partnering AI with people. Our research highlights three workplace trends and four global, strategic, and systemic human crises that affect the successful execution of all organizational transformation initiatives, posing potential barriers to implementing AI strategies. This makes the importance of people mattering in the age of AI greater than ever.
Understand how to navigate the skills landscape and why it is essential to assess, identify, develop, and validate the skills their teams possess, lack, and require to remain innovative and competitive.
Adapt to the rise of AI, focusing on how generative AI and automation disrupt our work processes and their role in supporting a shift to a skills-based approach.
Develop strong leaders who can guide their teams through change and foster resilience within them.
Five Key Global Crises
1. Organizational engagement is in crisis.
Recently, Gallup reported that Global employee engagement fell by two percentage points in 2024, only the second time it has fallen in the past 12 years. Managers (particularly young managers and female managers) experienced the sharpest decline. Employee engagement significantly influences economic output; Gallup estimates that a two-point drop in engagement costs the world $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024.
2. People are burning out, causing a crisis in well-being.
In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Three dimensions characterize it:
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
Reduced professional efficacy.
Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”
They estimate that globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety, costing US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity.
Burnout is more than just an employee problem; it’s an organizational issue that requires a comprehensive solution. People’s mental and emotional health and well-being are still not prioritized or managed effectively. Well-being in the workplace is a complex systemic issue that must be addressed. Making people matter in the age of AI involves empowering, enabling, and equipping them to focus on developing their self-regulation and self-management skills, shifting them from languishing in a constant state of emotional overwhelm and cognitive overload that leads to burnout.
3. The attention economy is putting people into crisis.
According to Johann Hari, in his best-selling book, “Stolen Focus,” people’s focus and attention have been stolen; our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and we must intentionally reclaim it. His book describes the wide range of consequences that losing focus and attention has on our lives. These issues are further impacted by the pervasive and addictive technology we are compelled to use in our virtual world, exacerbated by the legacy of the global pandemic and the ongoing necessity for many people to work virtually from home. He reveals how our dwindling attention spans predate the internet and how its decline is accelerating at an alarming rate. He suggests that to regain your ability to focus, you should stop multitasking and practice paying attention. Yet, in the Thesaurus, there are 286 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to paying attention, such as listen and give heed.
4. Organizational performance is in crisis.
Research at BetterUp Labs analyzed behavioral data from 410,000 employees (2019-2025), linking real-world performance with organizational outcomes and psychological drivers. It reveals that performance isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about shifting fluidity between three performance modes – basic: the legacy from the industrial age, collaborative: the imperative of knowledge work, and adaptive: the core requirement to perform effectively in the face of technological disruption, by being agile, creative, and connected. The right human fuel powers these: motivation, optimism and agency, which our research has found to be in short supply and BetterUp states is running dry.
Data scientists at BetterUp uncovered that performance has declined by 2-6% across industries since 2019. In business terms, half of today’s workforce would land in a lower performance tier, across all three modes, by 2019 standards.
GenAI relies on activating all three performance gears, and the rise of AI-powered agents is reshaping the way teams work together. Research reveals that companies that invest in adaptive performance see up to 37% higher innovation.
“Companies have never placed a higher priority on innovation—yet they have never been as unready to deliver on their innovation aspirations”
Their annual survey of global innovators finds that the pandemic, a shifting macroeconomic climate, and rising geopolitical tensions have all taken a toll on the innovation discipline. With high uncertainty, leaders shifted from medium-term advantage and value creation to short-term agility. In that environment, the systems guiding innovation activities and channeling innovation investments suffered, leaving organizations less equipped for the race to come. In particular, as measured by BCG’s proprietary innovation maturity score, innovation readiness is down across the elements of the innovation system that align with the corporate value creation agenda.
You can overcome these crises by transforming them into opportunities through a continuous learning platform that empowers, enables, and equips people to innovate today, making people matter in the age of AI. This will help develop new ways of shaping tomorrow while serving natural, social, and human capital, as well as humanity.
Current constraints of AI mean developing crucial human skills
While AI can perform many tasks, it cannot yet understand and respond to human emotions, build meaningful relationships, exhibit curiosity, or solve problems creatively.
This is why making people matter in the age of AI is crucial, as their human skills are essential.
Some of the most critical human skills are illustrated below.
These essential human skills are challenging to learn and require time, repetition, and practice to develop; however, they are fundamental for creating practical solutions to address the three trends and four crises mentioned above.
Making people matter in the age of AI involves:
Providing individuals with the ‘chance to’ self-regulate their reactive responses by fostering self and systemic awareness and agility to flow with change and disruption in an increasingly uncertain, volatile, ambiguous, and complex world.
Inspiring and motivating people to ‘want to’ self-manage and develop their authentic presence and learning processes to be visionary and purposeful in adapting, innovating, and growing through disruption.
Teaching people ‘how to’ develop the states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills that foster discomfort resilience, adaptive and creative thinking, problem-solving, purpose and vision, conflict negotiation, and innovation.
Human Skills Matter More Than Ever
The human element is critical to shaping the future of work, collaboration, and growth. The most effective AI outcomes will likely come from human-AI partnership, not from automation alone. Making people matter in the age of AI is crucial as part of the adoption journey, and partnering them with AI can turn their fears into curiosity, re-engage them purposefully and meaningfully, and enable them to contribute more to a team or organization. This, in turn, allows them to improve their well-being, maintain attention, innovate, and enhance their performance. Still, it cannot do this for them.
Making people matter in the age of AI by investing in continuous learning tools that develop their human skills will empower them to adapt, learn, grow, and take initiative. External support from a coach or mentor can enhance support, alleviate stress, boost performance, and improve work-life balance and satisfaction.
Human problems require human solutions.
Our human skills are irreplaceable in making real-world decisions and solving complex problems. AI cannot align fragmented and dysfunctional teams, repair broken processes, or address outdated governance. These are human problems requiring human solutions. That’s where human curiosity and inspiration define what AI can never achieve. It is not yet possible to connect people, through AI, to what wants to emerge in the future.
Making people matter in the age of AI can ignite our human inspiration, empowering, engaging, and enabling individuals to unleash their potential at the intersection of human possibility and technological innovation. We can then harness people’s collective intelligence and technological expertise to create, adapt, grow, and innovate in ways that enhance people’s lives, which are deeply appreciated and cherished.
This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.
Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.
Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.
It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.
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We live in an automated age. From the news we read and the items we shop for, to who we date and what companies we choose to work for, algorithms help drive every facet of modern life. Such rapid technological advancement has led some to predict that we’re headed for a jobless future, where there is no more need for humans.
Yet in their recent book Radically Human, Accenture’s Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson argue exactly the opposite. In their work guiding technology strategy for many of the world’s top corporations, they have found that, in many cases, the robots need us more than we need them. Automation is no panacea.
For over a century, pundits have been trying to apply an engineering mindset to human affairs with the hope of taking a more “scientific approach.” So far, those efforts have failed. In reality, these ideas have less to do with science than denying the value of human agency and limiting the impact of human judgment. We need to stop making the same mistake.
The Myth Of Shareholder Value
In 1970, the economist Milton Friedman proposed a radical idea. He argued that corporate CEOs should not take into account the interests of the communities they serve, but that their only social responsibility was to increase shareholder value. While ridiculed by many at the time, by the 1980s Friedman’s idea became accepted doctrine.
In particular, what irked Friedman was that managers would exercise judgment with respect to the objectives of the organization. “the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation … and his primary responsibility is to them,” he wrote.
The problem is that boiling down the success of an enterprise to the single variable of shareholder value avoids important questions. What do we mean by “value?” Is short term value more important than long-term value? Do owners value only share price or do they also value other things, like technological progress and a healthy environment?
Avoiding tough questions leaves significant problems unsolved, which may be one reason that, since Friedman’s essay, our well-being has declined significantly. Our economy has become markedly less productive, less competitive and less dynamic. Purchasing power for most people has stagnated. By just about every metric, we’re worse off.
How The Consumer Welfare Standard Undermines Consumer Welfare
In 1978, the legal scholar Robert Bork published the Antitrust Paradox in which he argued against the rule of reason standard for antitrust cases that required judges to use their discretion when deciding what constitutes a practice that “unreasonably” restricts trade. In its place, he suggested a consumer welfare standard, which would only take into account whether the consumer was harmed by higher prices.
Much like Friedman, Bork didn’t like the idea of depending on subjective human judgment. How could we trust judges to decide what is “reasonable” without a clear and objective standard? If the government is going to block business activity, he argued, it should have to prove, through stringent economic analysis, that harm is being done.
Yet as Lina Kahn pointed out in a now-famous paper titled Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, consumers can be harmed even as prices are lowered. If Amazon is allowed to control the online retail infrastructure, including logistics, hosting, marketing, etc., then trade is restricted, free markets are undermined and the consumer will be harmed.
To understand why, you only need to look at the recent baby formula shortage, in which only three firms dominate the market and, the leader, Abbott, is the exclusive supplier in many markets. Not only is it highly likely that the lack of competition contributed to lax quality standards at Abbott’s plant in Sturgis, Michigan, but once it went offline because of contamination, there weren’t enough suppliers to fill the gap.
These aren’t isolated examples, but indicative of a much larger and growing crisis. An article in Harvard Business Review details how the vast majority of industries are concentrated in just a few dominant players. A more extensive analysis by the Federal Reserve bank shows how the lack of competition leads to lower business dynamism and less productivity.
“Great Power” Politics
In early March, the prominent political scientist John Mearsheimer gave an interview to The New Yorker in which he argued that the United States had erred greatly in its support of Ukraine. According to his theory, we should recognize Russia’s role as a great power and its right to dictate certain things to its smaller and weaker neighbor.
Today, the idea that America should have left Ukraine at the mercy of Russia seems not only morally questionable, but patently absurd. Not only has the brutality of the Russian forces horrified the world, their incompetence has laid bare the fecklessness of the the Putin regime. How could such a respected expert of foreign affairs get things so wrong?
Once again, the failure to recognize human agency is a key culprit. In Mearsheimer’s view, which he calls, “realism,” only “great powers” have a say in world affairs and they will work to further their interests. He believes that by not recognizing Russia’s desire to subjugate other nations in its orbit, America and its allies are being silly and impractical.
Hopefully, we can learn some lessons from the war in Ukraine. Strategy is not a game of chess, in which we move inert pieces around a board. People have the power to make choices. Ukraine chose to undertake tough reforms and arm itself. Russia chose an autocracy which rewarded loyalty over competence. That, more than anything else, has driven events.
The Real World Isn’t An Algorithm
A joke began circulating in the late 1970s, often attributed to management consultant Warren Bennis, that the factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. Today, even with offshoring, about 10% of Americans work in factories.
When you scratch below the surface, the joke has less to do with technological advancement than it does with derision and control. Bennis wasn’t just any business consultant, but a renowned expert on leadership, who wrote books, published articles in top journals and even advised presidents. That he would promote the view, even as a joke, that leaders should deny agency to employees is as troubling as it is telling.
If you believe that human judgment is a liability rather than an asset, you manage accordingly. You treat employees as cogs in a machine rather than partners in a shared enterprise. You invest in offshoring rather than up-skilling, schedule shifts without regard to people’s lives, deny benefits such as parental leave. We’ve seen where that’s gotten us—lower productivity, worsening mental health and a society that is more unequal and less just.
We need to get back to the business of being human. Our economy should serve our people, not the other way around. The success of a society needs to be measured by the well-being of those who live in it. If we increase GDP, but our air and water are more polluted, our children less educated, we live unhappy lives and die deaths of despair, what have we really gained?
— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pixabay
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