Resilience in Leadership – From ‘how’ to ‘why’ and back to ‘how’

Leadership behaviors result from a leadership mindset. Mindset includes how someone feels, their attitudes and beliefs and their thinking style. You obviously need a special mindset to endeavour the huge strategic changes - and take the financial, social and emotional risks - involved in resilience. What does this mindset look like in terms of meta programs?

Change!
The most obvious meta program involved in resilience, is ‘change’ thinking (from the trio 'maintenance' versus 'development' versus 'change'). Or could it be development? Development is doing the same thing, but doing it differently: faster, more intensely, better, et cetera. Change is doing it completely differently. Development is evolution, change is revolution, a ‘turnaround’. In business, as in most areas in life, there is always an element of development in change. When reforming Danish Oil and Natural Gas, Poulsen stayed with energy. In that sense he started a development. He didn’t say: let’s forget about energy. Let’s focus on yoga training. He developed new ways to generate energy. So at a general level it was development: keep generating energy, but in a different way. But certainly on an operational level it was change: forget about gas, let's go for wind.

From mismatching to matching
Organisations take radical turns when circumstances force them. Like the price of your main product dropping by 90%, or China producing household appliances with an acceptable quality for a quarter of your cost, or your main market suddenly slamming high taxes on your product.

Seeing a positive future in a crisis
Resilient leaders do two main things in a crisis. First of all, they see the crisis as an opportunity for fundamental change. In a crisis other stakeholders are more open to new directions. It is obvious that something needs to change. Maintaining the old strategy will eventually lead to bankruptcy. Hence the opportunity for radical changes that probably hadn’t been acceptable without that crisis. Dominic Cummings, the (in)famous British political strategist has said: “Things are possible, and they are especially possible when there is a crisis.”

Seeing the opportunities in a crisis is an expression of the meta program ’matching’. Focussing on what is good, right or correct. What is special about this matching, is that it is done in a context where most people are mismatching (focussing on what’s bad or wrong). People tend to focus on the negative when there is a major threat. The human brain has a tendency to give more weight to negative experiences than positive ones. “Our brains are wired to scout for the bad stuff and fixate on the threat” (Rick Hanson). The resilient leader manages somehow to keep this negative focus in check and focus on possibilities.

Focus on options. From ‘away from’ to ‘towards’
The second thing a resilient leader does in a crisis, is focus on options. They see a future that not many people see. Under Poulsen, f.i., Ørsted embarked on what many experts thought of as an impossible mission. The company invested in offshore wind power, but it was too expensive, the energy produced was more than double the price of energy generated by onshore wind. So the next strategic goal was to make offshore wind energy cheaper. 

In this second aspect of resilience, we see an interplay of five different meta programs:

1. Towards (goals you want achieve rather than disasters you want to avoid or escape from)
2. Options (Focus on possibilities)
3. Future (Seeing those possibilities in the future)
4.  Internal reference (Believing in your vision of change, even when others don’t - and even though they have a point).
5. Internal locus of control (Believing that the new goals can be achieved).

From the 'how' to the 'why' and from there down to a new 'how'
Leaders that have led great strategic changes emphasise that they derived their new direction from a bigger picture. They moved from: ‘What do we need?’ to ‘What does society need, or even what does the planet need?’ And what can we contribute to that? Philips for instance, understood that with an ageing population, they could contribute more by producing high quality medical equipment than by producing ever cheaper consumer goods in competition with low wage countries. In terms of meta programs this is ‘general’ thinking: having a helicopter view. In terms of abstraction they first moved up and then down again. From the 'how' to the 'why' and from there down to a new 'how'. From the present strategy to a higher level: what are the higher goals we strive for? And from there, down again to a new strategy.

The relationship between vision and resilience
Resilience is a special case of envisioning. Or rather: resilience is envisioning in a special context. We looked at vision in general terms before (article number one of this series). Having a vision is having an image of an ideal world, related to a mission: how our organisation can bring that ideal world closer. So in our definition of vision, we incorporated the big picture.

In our envisioning benchmark we were looking for:

1. Future thinking
2. Towards thinking
3. Matching thinking
4. A lot of visual thinking
5. Some kinesthetic thinking
6. Internally referenced thinking
7. Internal locus of control thinking
   

All these meta programs are the same for resilience. When Poulsen shifted Danish Oil and Natural Gas from fossil fuel to wind energy f.i., he was showing all these meta programs:

1. Future thinking: What do we want Danish Oil to be in the future?
2. Towards thinking: We are in trouble now, but where do we want to go?
3. Matching thinking: Wat is good about our present situation? How is this an opportunity for Danish Oil?
4. A lot of visual thinking: What would it look like when Danish Oil would be wind energy oriented? (Here we see why he had to change the name of the company too).
5. Some kinesthetic thinking: Inspiration has a strong kinesthetic, physical element.
6. Internally referenced thinking: I know this is the right strategy, no matter what the experts say.
7. Internal locus of control thinking: If we want to achieve this, we can. Even when others are sure it’s impossible

Adversity
Resilience is all the meta programs mentioned above, but in a context of adversity (danger, crisis, threat, uncertainty). It is not just ‘towards’ thinking and ‘matching’ thinking. It is  towards and matching thinking in a context where most people are thinking in terms of ‘mismatching’ and ‘away from’. If you simply do your usual envisioning in a crisis, rather than panicking or going passive, you’re already taking good steps towards resilience.

Creativity
Resilience needs creativity (more intensive ‘options’ thinking). In a crisis this is unusual. Scientists who studied over 9,000 daily diary entries from people working on creative tasks, found that time pressure led to less creative results. “When creativity is under the gun,” they wrote, “it usually ends up getting killed.” (Harvard Business Review). Researchers also found that chronically stressed rats fall back to familiar routines instead of using their normal curious learning behaviour (Dias-Ferreira, et al). So the resilient leader knows how to stay relatively relaxed in the face of crisis. Which enables them to stay creative. Take a step back, relax and look at all the possibilities.

Faith
Resilience needs more faith (a greater extent of both ‘internal reference’ and ‘internal locus of control’ thinking) than just envisioning. This is essential in a context where people, many of them experts, do not believe that this is the road to take. Barack Obama expressed this kind of thinking concisely in his slogan “Yes we can!”

Resilience Benchmark
So when we want to measure resilience with MindSonar, first of all we are looking for the same benchmark we formulated for vision:

1. Future thinking > 7 - 9 points
2. Towards thinking > 7 - 9 points
3. Matching thinking > 7 -9 points
4. Visual thinking > At least 5 points
5. Some kinesthetic thinking > At least 2 points
6. Internally referenced thinking > 7 -9 points
7. Internal locus of control thinking > 7 - 9 points

For resilience I will add to that:

1. Change thinking
2. Options thinking
3. General thinking

Plus, we will set the desired scores for ‘internally referenced thinking’ and ‘internal locus of control’ thinking higher for resilience than for envisioning.

Plus we will up the score for kinesthetic thinking. Looking at the examples described above, emotional commitment to the new strategy seems very important. Here too, we have limited room to move, because we need to maintain a high visual score for the vision.

So the benchmark for resilience would be:

1. Future thinking > 7 - 9 points
2. Towards thinking > 7 - 9 points
3. Matching thinking > 7 - 9 points
4. Visual thinking > At least 5 points
5. Some kinesthetic thinking > At least 3 points
6. Internally referenced thinking > 8 -9 points
7. Internal locus of control thinking > 8 - 9 points
8. Options thinking > 6 - 8 points
9. General thinking > 6 - 8 points
10. Change thinking > 5 points, with Maintenance thinking <2