strong that we have a name for it: brothers in arms. You are brothers because you’ve both gone through boot camp, you both wear the same uniform, you both fight for the same country.
But what happens when there’s a simple change in a company’s organizational structure, or even a country’s? Rather than being selective—or having any barriers to entry at all—what happens when a community is open for anyone to join?
We’ll begin by looking at the forces knocking down organizational fences and checkpoints. We’ll explore how selectivity—border control, if you will—comes at an economic cost that may or may not make sense.
What are the costs of control? Clearly, there’s a measurable economic price to keeping a sentry at the gate. But in exerting control, we may be paying a more serious but harder-to-measure cost: the ability to accurately view reality.
Indeed, it has become a cliché to say that we live in a complex, unpredictable, and rapidly changing world—so cliché, in fact, that we fail to appreciate how profoundly people are affected by it.
In 1770 John Adams declared that “facts are stubborn things.” Today, we argue, facts are vulnerable. Emerging technology is making facts increasingly vulnerable, and all of us will soon have trouble discerning what is actually true. Simply put, we’re about to enter an age where facts will no longer be reliable. The information we think is 100 percent accurate may be flawed, and even our best attempt to find the truth may fall short.
In a 2004 book, Ralph Keyes used the term “post-truth” to describe an emerging period in our history where the “borders blur between truth and lies, honesty and dishonesty, fiction and nonfiction.”1
We build on that observation and explore what the world will look like when, to gain understanding of the reality around us, there is no longer a debate of facts but rather a competition of narratives. As competing narratives vie to present a picture of the world, we will have a harder time determining what’s real and accurate.
Welcome to the era of the digital echo, where information passes from individual to individual more quickly but in the process often becomes distorted.
We will explain the phenomenon of the digital echo in great detail, but it is important to note from the start that it is a neutral force. It can inform, misinform, educate, entertain, inspire the human spirit to great acts of compassion, or unleash mankind’s darkest instincts. It can inspire the generosity of the “ice bucket challenge” or the hatred of the ISIS terrorist ideology. It presents both a leadership challenge and a leadership opportunity.
One thing is clear about the digital echo: it creates the need for inclusion.
In this new world, we need to leverage inclusion to gain better information about the world around us and to effectively communicate our message.
In order to help you accomplish these two imperatives, we provide concrete leadership tools to create an environment of inclusion:
1. Belonging isn’t optional: give them memories. We will argue that the first step in building a team is developing in its members a sense of belonging. Consider the alternative: if leaders don’t make those who follow feel a sense of belonging, someone or something else will. And the ubiquitous presence of the digital echo makes this not only possible but likely.
2. Connect effort with meaning: make it matter. We will show that persuading members of the team that their contributions matter is crucial to team success. We all want to believe we make a difference. Leaders help their followers understand what that takes.
3. Think about what you’re not thinking about: learn to imagine. We will encourage leaders to develop mindfulness, awareness, and imagination through a lifelong commitment to learning. We believe and will convince all who aspire to lead that imagination is a learned attribute.
4. Prevent decision paralysis: develop a bias for action. We will demonstrate that, when presented with a problem, leaders must look for what they can do in the moment. They must avoid information paralysis. They must act to change the environment and to learn, and then act again, in a deliberate pattern of persistent learning and proactive leadership.
5. Collaborate at every level of the organization: co-create context. We will discuss how the most effective leaders harvest knowledge and empower the organization from bottom to top. We will show the benefits of concentrating the “what” while distributing the “how.”
6. Expand the circle: relinquish control to build and sustain power. We will assert in the strongest terms that finding optimal, enduring, affordable solutions to complex problems requires leaders to reconsider and rebalance their understanding of the relationship among leadership, power, and control.
The leadership instincts are listen, amplify, include.
Neither the principles nor the instincts are an à la carte menu. Effective leaders must understand and practice all of them.
We’ve titled our book Radical Inclusion because we believe that the traditional relationship among leadership, power, and control has changed. Solving our problems by leading with an emphasis on exclusion, jealously husbanding power, and aspiring to greater control is producing suboptimal, fragile, and costly outcomes.
The alternative is to rebalance the relationship among leadership, power, and control with an emphasis on inclusion, to selectively and purposefully relinquish control to enhance power, to define success less in terms of power and control and more in the ability to achieve optimal, enduring, and affordable outcomes.
Counterintuitive? Perhaps. But as the digital echo spreads, as complex issues multiply, as uncertainty increases, as technology exponentially changes, and as risk rises, it seems reasonable that we should seek to lead by sharing our challenges rather than owning them outright.
That said, this book’s proposition about leadership is not that we ought to surrender our hard-earned power because possessing it is becoming a liability. Rather, it is that we must develop an instinct for seeking opportunities to share control in order to preserve and even enhance the power we possess.
Ours is a pragmatic proposal. We advocate sharing control in problem solving not because we wish to become somehow more egalitarian but because we want to solve problems effectively and efficiently, and we want them to stay solved!
Finally, we chose the adjective “radical” to describe the kind of inclusion we advocate because it speaks to the extremes we encounter as leaders in the world today. It is our belief that concentrations of power and exclusivity will continue to form but cannot endure in a world that sees all, a world in which technology levels all, a numbingly fast-paced world of rising expectations, glaring disparities, and declining trust.
If we’re right about that, about the environment in which the affairs of business, industry, international relations, and national security must be managed, then only the leader who can harness the power inherent in inclusion will make lasting progress and achieve enduring success.
CHAPTER 1: THE DIGITAL ECHO
The Fog of War Descends on Berkeley
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