INTRODUCTION

Twisting Toward Distributed Everything

THE SHIFT FROM CENTRALIZED TO DISTRIBUTED ORGAnizations has already begun, but the current leadership literacy—inherited from large centralized organizations—isn’t ready for a future when anything that can be distributed will be distributed.

Centralized and decentralized organizations will give way to truly distributed organizations that have no center, grow from the edges, and cannot be controlled. Hierarchies will come and go in shape-shifting forms resembling a swirl. Rock-star leaders will be rare; networked leadership with strength and humility will work best. As centralized organizations become increasingly distributed, expect a cloudburst of disruption. In this future, leaders will see things they have never seen before.

My hope is that readers will allow themselves to be provoked by this book. It doesn’t really matter if you agree with my forecasts or not; it matters only if they provoke you in useful ways. In fact, some of the best forecasts are those you don’t like—forecasts that cause you to think and do things you would not have done otherwise.

This book will suggest a process for developing your own future leadership literacies, a process that will cycle from foresight to insight to action—in a continuous and bidirectional flow (see Figure 1).

FIGURE 1 In the future, leaders will have to practice foresight, insight, and action.

In simpler times, perhaps being action oriented was enough to make a great leader. Perhaps the future was clearer back then, the insights more obvious. In the past, consultants and business books preached action as the defining characteristic of great leaders. But even thousands of hours of action experience won’t be enough for this future. Leaders will need to develop new literacies in new ways for new futures. Action will not be enough to win in the kind of future that is emerging. Action without foresight and insight will be dumb, dangerous, or both. Leaders will need to combine the practices of foresight, insight, and action in an ongoing cycle of learning.

The next decade will be extremely complex, messy, and threatening. Future leaders will be facing a VUCA world: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. I learned this term at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I have done immersion experiences, workshops, and talks since 9/11. This book is about what’s next in what I believe will be an increasingly VUCA world, a pothole-filled path winding toward—but never quite reaching—a future when everything is distributed.

The word that best characterizes the near future is scramble: lots of things that have been stuck will get unstuck. In the ensuing scramble, many creative things will happen—including shifts that are very different from what the scramblers intended. Those who are good at unsticking—the scramblers—are not likely to be very good at putting things back together again in new ways. This is a future that will be full of innovation that can be put to all kinds of uses—for good and for evil.

I’ll be using the Foresight-Insight-Action Cycle to summarize how leaders can develop their own personal process of leading in the midst of the scramble.