The Leadership Revolution

Traditionally, leaders were evaluated for their ability to establish objectives, develop plans, allocate resources, organize people, supervise execution, and deliver results.

Those responsibilities are no longer sufficient to explain what effective leadership requires.

During the Sixth Great Transition, leaders increasingly govern systems that can observe, analyze, recommend, decide, communicate, and act with reduced direct human involvement. These capabilities operate at different velocities, extend across organizational boundaries, and generate consequences that may outrun traditional oversight.

A leader cannot personally supervise every consequential action. Nor can leadership depend upon the assumption that somewhere in the process a knowledgeable person will notice what is going wrong and intervene in time.

Instead, leaders must design the conditions under which intelligence can contribute responsibly, decisions can remain legitimate, errors can be corrected, people can adapt, and the organization can continue learning.

This changes the focus of leadership from the individual leader’s ability to maintain control toward the organization’s ability to remain governable.

It changes the value of human judgment from being present at every decision to establishing where judgment must remain meaningful.

It changes the objective of speed from moving faster to moving at rates the whole system can responsibly sustain.

And it changes the meaning of performance from delivering results today to delivering results without destroying the capabilities required for tomorrow.

My latest book on this topic is available here.