Several years ago I knew a CEO who was fond of networking with others in similar positions. Initially this seemed to be a good thing, as it meant that he was exposed to a lot of new ideas. But over time things changed.
His team began to dread his return from one of his network meetings. They knew that the great new idea they had started to implement last month was about to be replaced by something “even better”. There was no continuity as they lurched from one initiative to the next. Many commented that working for this CEO began to feel like living with a fad dieter.
Consultant and author Eileen Shapiro coined a term for this phenomenon: “fad surfing in the boardroom”. Her book of that name must have been published around the time that I moved into the consulting world myself.
A great benefit of consulting is the opportunity to get to know, and therefore be able to compare, a wide range of organisations. As I did this in my first few years as a consultant I saw plenty of ‘fad surfing’ taking place, and my uncomfortable feelings about it started to gel.
I’d always felt, deep down, that constantly ‘reinventing the wheel’ was counterproductive. Now I started to understand why.
What became clearer and clearer to me was that the success of leaders, and through them their organisations, was not a product of the way they went about doing things. Success was a matter of the way leaders went about thinking.
More specifically, I learned that successful leaders think ‘big picture’. They think ‘systemically’, as part of the system rather than as an outsider trying control it. They think with their whole bodies, to use the language of two recent blog posts (here and here).
In doing so, these leaders create organisations around themselves that start to think, as a coherent whole, in the same way. Such organisations no longer see just achieving the budget as their ultimate goal. They develop an organisational consciousness which in turn promotes a more integrated approach to business and sustained success over time.
Ultimately it was our increased awareness of all this that inspired Malcolm and I as we established Global Leadership Foundation back in 2003.
In fact our organisation was a direct product of this focus and of ‘quantum thinking’ (which I’ll explain in a future post). We set our intent for what we saw was possible and within 24 hours we had begun – without the standard business plan and reams of accompanying paper.
Since then, we have proved to ourselves time and time again that it is fully integrated thinking, not fad surfing, that leads to sustainable success. Along the way, we’ve helped many leaders get their businesses off the cycle of fad ‘diets’ and onto a much more healthier approach to ‘life’.
I have observed the same. Equally, I have seen it in some leaders who have had a great deal of success. It somethimes seems that intuitive leaders sometime look for ways of describing or codifying what they do or how they think because they don’t have the ‘sophisticated’ set of words to articulate their style. We know that, as organisations grow, having a sound managemnt strategy and getting as many members to understand and use it is important. When faced with ‘fad dieters’ I find it useful to analyse thier motives and help them understand and articlate thier management strategy, or lack of it.
for those of us who work in social policy contexts, the tendency to jump from one framework or ‘fad’ to another, is tempting but unhelpful. The temptation is to deny the complexity – to simplify the issue in order to come to a speedy solution and a nice new ‘fad’ often gives us the means and excuse to do so. In going down this path, however, we risk one dimensional responses to issues that require a more considered, whole of system response.