Leadership development for agile leaders
Mary Jo Asmus defines an agile leader this way in her post “Agile leadership: what it is and how to get it.”
“Leaders who are agile learners are quick thinking, decisive, curious, intuitive and take (what others might call) risks. Agile leaders are exactly what we need in our organizations that are getting bigger, flatter, and more complex. They adapt moment by moment, are creative, proactive, able to learn on the fly, and comfortable with complexity.”
The Great Planning Fallacy
When I was coming up, pretty much everyone believed that you could plan the error out of things if you were smart and conscientious. The books and the classes and the mythology told us that if we planned things right, implementation would be flawless. The only problem was that never worked.
Reality and the competition had a way of surprising us. Human limitations and biases limited us. We plowed ahead anyway. We even applied that thinking to our development.
I remember sitting in class, sometime around 1970, as we planned our careers. The objective was an unbroken chain of success and upward movement. Oh how wrong we were!
Leadership development and reality
It never worked the way we thought it would. It couldn’t. Instead life was an organic development process. We reacted to new challenges, learned new things, seized some opportunities and passed on others, and had a mixture of good and bad luck. Mary Jo describes her own journey this way:
“I loved learning new things, and my curiosity led me into some unusual jobs; I learned what I needed to, completed what I started, and moved on.”
The difference between agile leaders and other leaders is that agile leaders embrace the chaos. They learn that their development is not likely to be the result of flawless planning and more likely to be the result of an endless cycle of unpredictable development.
