So I was doing some analysis on patterns in my gigwork, and realized I'm usually selling an alt to default-mode leadership, whatever that is (it changes every few years). Applying lens to 2022 led to interesting conclusion that current default-mode leadership is "doomsday mode"
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This is interesting, because it is a dark version of one of my infrequent leadership posts from recent years, [Good] CEOs don't steer. Except when you're headed for a cliff, not steering becomes doomsday mode.
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I don't have a conclusion yet to this train of thought. There isn't actually a good alt to doomsday leadership, since high momentum + no steering is such a low-energy, easy equilibrium, it's really hard to disrupt or take over.
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by doomsday mode, I don't mean they're planning and leading around a specific doomsday vision or outcome. It just means they've abandoned all attempts or pretense at foresight and navigating in a sort of dead-reckoning way, extrapolating from momentum vectors of business
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ie, if you sell products A and B, growing/declining QoQ at say +5% and -5% respectively, and you do all your management based on that and supply chain without reference to your market environment or where it's going, you're in doomsday mode inertial navigation
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It's not that you fear zombies or asteroids. It's that sensemaking the environment directly has become too hard, so you use inertial demand signals as a proxy for environmental intelligence, which means a zombie behavior cascade
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For eg. say you sell kitchen appliances and the market is shifting due to people moving out of cities and into suburbs or something. That trend will show up in your demand data, but is going to be hard to interpret unless you gather supporting signals to interpret what's going on
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So to the extent A. G. Lafley "leader's job is to interpret external reality for the org" is still correct, you're instead *projecting* internal realities onto the environment, probably with an obsolete mental model
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This leads on to the further thought that it's the weak signals around the main signals that drive environmental intelligence and measure something *other* than sheer momentum
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seinfeld voice: is this anything?
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