At the beginning of my career, as an apprentice to leadership, I learnt to select binoculars as the preferred tool for the archetypal leader who projects sight far and ahead. I now realize that a kaleidoscope is a more suitable tool for future apprentices dueling with complexity. In my current role as manager of a multinational overseeing more than forty countries, I am now revising everything I once knew.
After the World War II, the geopolitical order built a bi-polar world. The Western politics, economics and overall society somewhat stabilized on a linear development of future-looking, economic expansion and relative peace. I was born in a period we can call SPOD world – Stability, Predictability, Order and Determinism.
In the SPOD context, managers do not need to understand the system dynamics in which they are immersed. They simply need to understand the direction the system flows, as it’s most stable and unidirectional. I still remember my time as a young manager in meetings with senior executives, projecting investments, team expansions, portfolio diversification, and future earnings. Naively, predicting the future for us was a simple exercise of tracing a linear pattern forward. Budget projections in our graphs were a simple extension of upward-moving lines towards the future, with disregard for economic risks, competitive setbacks, or technological obsolescence.
From those executives, I learnt to use binoculars or a magnifier to better understand how society and businesses evolve or work.
Examples of binoculars included past statistical reviews, linear projections of the future based on current numbers, forecasting exercises based on expert opinions, demographic mapping, and monitoring of competitors’ asset investments. These binoculars did a fair job of extending our sight far and ahead into social behavior, economic patterns, and investments, for instance.
Magnifiers included breaking organizations into departments, multiplying policies and rules, and conducting technical experiments to isolate cause and effect. By breaking the system into identifiable units, we believed we could understand its functioning, predict and control its behavior.
As you experience, the world has changed. The dynamics we are now immersed in are complex for many reasons, but I will mention just two examples: climate change and technology obsolescence.
We live in multiple realities, next to the SPOD world. VUCA-world, marked by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, necessitates adaptive strategies focused on agility and rapid response. BANI-world, emphasizing Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, and Incomprehensible dynamics, calls for an approach rooted in flexibility and constant adaptation. RUPT-world, shaped by Rapid, Unpredictable, Paradoxical, and Turbulent changes, requires strategies to manage crises and foster resilience. TUNA-world, characterized by Transitory, Unstable, Novel, and Ambiguous factors, necessitates strategies that prioritize innovation and creative problem-solving.
A kaleidoscope is a tube containing mirrors and pieces of colored glass or paper, whose reflections produce changing patterns when the tube is rotated. Modern managers might better learn and use it to make sense of their reality. The kaleidoscope metaphor refers to a new set of tools leaders can use, alongside binoculars and magnifiers.
The digital industry has been prolific in new managerial tools, which we can call a kaleidoscope. Those tools are suitable for observing and influencing not only the elements in a system, but also their interactions and the drivers that animate them. Examples of such tools include the Agile Manifesto, sprint cycles, customer co-development, and flat, borderless organizations. In agile tech organizations, power is exercised bottom-up, where managers constantly experiment directly with their future consumers. These leaders can adopt and change not only the technical but also the social configuration of their organizations, adapting faster to the design most efficient for their success.
The kaleidoscope approach of the tech industry allows them to “see” the best configuration that fits the dynamics shaping their context. Malleable organization and mindset favor adaptation when the drivers in the system change direction. In this sense, these organizations don’t need to guess what’s coming, as they co-create the future, being exposed to the drivers that shape it.
The Unconscious Skill 