Managing chaos to generate success

Managing chaos to generate success: power of using generation flux approach to embrace chaos and successfully lead.

Extract from Fast Company – Robert Safian:

Generation Flux is a term I coined several months ago, in a Fast Company cover story that explained how the dizzying velocity of change in our economy has made chaos the defining feature of modern business. New companies–even industries–rise and fall faster than ever: Witness Apple, Facebook, and Amazon; witness Research in Motion, Blockbuster, and MySpace; witness the iPad and, yes, cloud computing. Accepted models for success are proving vulnerable, and pressure is building on giants like GE and Nokia, as their historic advantages of scale and efficiency run up against the benefits of agility and quick course corrections. Meanwhile, the bonds between employer and employee, and between brands and their customers, are more tenuous than ever.

Generation Flux describes the people who will thrive best in this environment. It is a psychographic, not a demographic–you can be any age and be GenFlux. Their characteristics are clear: an embrace of adaptability and flexibility; an openness to learning from anywhere; decisiveness tempered by the knowledge that business life today can shift radically every three months or so, as Levie says.

That first article was primarily a career guide, a handbook for navigating work in an era that refuses to settle into a status quo. Yet after the article was published, I got many emails from CEOs and other business leaders who find themselves struggling–some quietly, some candidly–with how to run their organizations amid such tumult. “There’s so much chaos all around,” one wrote. “You can’t prevent the chaos, only respond to it… quickly.” Their overriding concern is simple: Traditional organizational structures no longer seem sufficient.

This is the great challenge of 21st-century leadership. We have grown up with certain assumptions about what works in an enterprise, what the metrics for success are, how we organize and deploy resources. The bulk of those assumptions are wrong now. The world in which we were raised and trained no longer exists. The clarity of words we use to discuss business, standbys like marketplace and competitive advantage, are being redefined and rendered almost meaningless.

In this environment, the examples of companies we once turned to as models for success–Apple, Coca-Cola, Walmart–are less useful. Size and brand awareness no longer provide a competitive moat. “The advantages of long-standing brands, of distribution, of reach–these don’t offer the same leverage,” observes Levie, who has himself exploited this reality in constructing his business. “Thanks to technology, the newcomer may be as well or even better equipped.” In this world of constant change, following a single system or model is foolhardy–the companies that succeed will be nimble and ever-changing.

Twenty years ago, a management professor by the name of Margaret Wheatley published a book called Leadership and the New Science. It was prescient then; it is even more eye-opening now. Her premise: Organizations and society have been structured to match our understanding of the natural world, which goes back to the 17th-century ideas of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton famously posited theories of cause and effect, and referred to our world as a machine–a closed system (set in place by the Great Watchmaker). In Newtonian physics, there is no greater goal than stability. That scientific conclusion helped us to embrace hierarchy and one-size-fits-all models. And our businesses have indeed been constructed for efficiency. Following the example of Henry Ford, we have extended our manufacturing prowess into shipping and logistics. We have used technology to enhance effectiveness, to track data and mine it for new refinements.

Now, however, these traditional business priorities are under strain in profound ways. Wheatley again points to science as a model: to the post-Newtonian study of quantum mechanics and subatomic particles. We now know that cause and effect is not a given in the natural world. Creation comes not from stasis but from unpredictable movement. Chaos is everywhere. One of the more mind-bending paradoxes of quantum physics that Wheatley highlights is the fact that subatomic matter has two forms of being. In something called a double-slit experiment, an electron behaves like a wave when it is observed in one way and like a particle when it is observed another way. Both views are true.

Business today is nothing if not as paradoxical. We require efficiency and openness, thrift and mind-blowing ambition, nimbleness and a workplace that fosters creativity. Organizational systems based on the Newtonian model are not equipped for these dualities.

Generation Flux leaders are the ones who will steer their companies, and modern business, toward more sophisticated models. In today’s chaos, leadership is more critical than ever–but a different kind of leadership. There is no single model of what it will take to succeed now. But drawing on examples from many different kinds of organizations–including the U.S. Army, Foursquare, Nike, Intuit, and a 105-year-old not-for-profit in Texas–we can begin to define the qualities of successful GenFlux leaders. And we can even see the power that comes from a full, open embrace of the challenge. “Companies and people tend to look at chaos as an obstacle, a hurdle,” says Nike CEO Mark Parker. “We look at it as an opportunity: Get on the offense.”

More … http://www.fastcompany.com/3001734/secrets-generation-flux