The future is coming.
Intelligent foresight has enabled leaders to conduct meaningful scenario-planning exercises. But, to paraphrase a military saying, no plan survives contact with future reality. In a predictably unpredictable world, leaders can expect to be surprised. This is one of the big themes emerging from Gagen MacDonald’s latest white paper, Five Priorities in 2025 for Human-Centric Leaders.
How do you, as a leader, seize momentum and adapt to navigate what is in front of you?
You start by accepting that the future is going to stretch and disrupt the structure of your organization. Most CEOs and Heads of Strategy, after all, believe that markets are changing more rapidly than their business models. Whatever your strategy, clinging to what once was is not an option.
As markets change and technologies advance, people will need to work together in different ways and configurations. As my colleague Becky Jimenez, a senior director at Gagen, says in the paper regarding today’s universal challenge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption: “You’re only as mature with AI as your people are, and it’s just as important ... to be investing in them as it is to be investing in new tools.”
While you can never know exactly what is coming as a leader, you can still help your people get ready to adapt. For an organization, this preparation should involve more and more cross-functional collaboration, tackling organizational challenges on shorter timelines than you’re used to and building the practice of course-correcting as you go.
However, over all this activity, a dark shadow looms.
How do you prepare your organisation for its nth restructure in the last 2-3 years while also keeping the wheels on your business in the present?
“Give people more KPIs” would be the traditionalist answer. New Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)—new goals—are indeed the solution that the majority of companies in the Middle East turn to today.
In MENA, KPIs tend to be very top-down. They come, in essence, from the top, and they send the implicit message that it is there—at the top—where the most important answers are found. But does the top really know the customer? Does the top know AI? Does the top really know what’s happening in day-to-day marketplace interactions with customers?
Can the top generate excitement around the uncertainty and opportunity of future transitions and what it means about how things are going to change?
In my experience, the answer is no—leaders at the top cannot figure all this out alone. They need to understand not only the business mechanics but also the human dynamics. This means investing time to hold dialogue with employees, aligning the organization’s agenda with what those in the middle and at the edge of the organisation believe to be most important.
Organisations that provide smart answers by enabling people to ask smart questions—and which create a cultural climate with a degree of psychological safety—will be the agile ones able to succeed in a future that promises to be very messy indeed.
8%
of 68 companies surveyed enable employees to skip levels and talk directly to leaders.
Here in MENA, companies that really listen gain a huge competitive edge. Last year, APCO partnered with the GCC Board Development Institute (GCC BDI) and Nasdaq Governance Solutions to conduct a survey of 58 companies. We found that only 8 percent of them—five companies total—enabled employees to skip levels and talk directly to leaders.
That means a lot of companies are going to have trouble finding the solutions to complex challenges. In the same report, a mere 9 percent of respondents believed that their companies had transformational leaders.
Companies across the world, and certainly in the Middle East, have their work cut out for them. But as the paper reminds us, intelligent answers are out there—especially for the companies that are bold enough to listen for them.
