Connection, Leadership, and Growth
Balancing Authentic Connection with Effective Leadership in Growing Teams
As your business grows, do you sometimes feel further removed from the very things that defined your early success? The close relationships with your core team, the deep understanding of your customers - these connections that once fuelled your leadership now feel distant. Layers of managers, processes, and shifting priorities seem to separate you from your roots. How can you stay connected to what matters most while leading a rapidly expanding organization?
You're experiencing the leader's paradox.
The same growth that marks your success also pulls you away from the relationships and insights that helped you achieve it. But growth doesn’t have to come at the cost of connection. The most effective leaders find ways to bridge this gap, fostering authentic relationships while steering their teams toward new heights.
The Challenge of Scale
As your business grows, so do its complexities. Your team expands, hierarchies emerge, and you face competing demands—strategic oversight, operational execution, and people management.
“Succeeding in business is about making connections.” – Richard Branson
For founders and executives in tech businesses, this challenge is particularly acute. Hyper-growth brings communication gaps, cultural drift, and a sense of distance from both the customer base and the team. Yet, authentic connection is critical to thriving during growth.
Authentic relationships foster trust, alignment, and loyalty—all essential for sustained success. But to truly unlock the value of these relationships, it’s important to understand how connection operates as a key leadership asset.
Connection as Currency
In growing organizations, connection is a leader’s most valuable currency. It strengthens the bonds that drive collaboration, innovation, and retention. By maintaining authentic relationships, you can inspire your team and stay closely connected to your customers' needs, even as your business scales.
Metcalfe’s Law: V = n²
According to Metcalfe’s Law, the value of a network grows exponentially as more nodes are connected. In leadership, this means that each authentic relationship you cultivate doesn’t just add value—it amplifies the effectiveness of the entire team. Strong, intentional connections create resilience, adaptability, and opportunities for innovation that no single individual can achieve alone.
Without these connections, even the most robust structures become fragile. As a leader, you’re the central node in your organizational network, setting the tone for how these relationships are built and maintained. By fostering trust and alignment, you multiply the collective strength of your team, driving sustainable growth.
But how do you practically build and sustain these connections?
It begins with intentional strategies for leadership.
Strategies for Balancing Connection and Leadership
Maintaining authentic connection while effectively leading a growing business requires intentionality. Here are four strategies to help you achieve that balance:
1. Lead with Clarity
- The Challenge: As teams grow, vision can become diluted. This misalignment can lead to confusion, reduced engagement, and inefficiency.
- The Solution: Articulate and reinforce a compelling vision that aligns your team. As Simon Sinek emphasizes in Start with Why, people are inspired not by what you do but by why you do it. Share the "why" behind your actions to build purpose-driven alignment. Regularly revisit and communicate your company’s core values and mission during all-hands meetings or leadership updates.
- Example: Use storytelling to illustrate your vision, linking daily tasks to larger goals. For instance, highlight how a team's work contributes to solving a meaningful customer challenge or achieving a shared milestone.
Clear communication about vision creates alignment, but effective delegation ensures your team is empowered to act with purpose.
2. Delegate with Trust
- The Challenge: You may feel the need to stay involved in every decision to maintain control. This not only overwhelms you but can also stifle team autonomy and growth.
- The Solution: Empower your team by delegating effectively and trusting them to deliver. Elon Musk emphasizes the importance of fostering a culture where team members take ownership of their tasks. This sense of responsibility builds trust and accountability, enabling your team to perform at its best. By delegating effectively, you'll free yourself to focus on higher-level connections—your customers, investors, partners, and key team members.
- Tip: Establish frameworks for decision-making so your team has clarity without micromanagement. Help team members understand not just what needs to be done but why it matters, aligning their efforts with the broader mission.
With trust in place, maintaining regular touchpoints helps sustain the connection needed for team cohesion.
3. Adopt Strategies for Connection
- The Challenge: Time for personal connections often shrinks as responsibilities grow. This can erode trust, misalign teams, and weaken leadership influence. Innovation suffers when staff disengage and collaboration declines. Maintaining these connections is critical for fostering trust, cohesion, and motivation.
- The Solution: Establish consistent strategies to stay connected with your team. Weekly 1:1s, monthly town halls, or informal team lunches can serve as valuable touchpoints for meaningful interaction. However, ensure these meetings are purposeful and respect everyone’s time—only invite those whose presence is essential, and have a clear agenda to keep things productive.
- Example: Consider hosting “Ask Me Anything” sessions where teams can connect directly with you and voice their thoughts, and review recurring meetings to ensure their continued value.
To scale these efforts effectively, thoughtful use of technology can be a powerful enabler.
4. Leverage Technology Thoughtfully
- The Challenge: Scaling communication can feel impersonal.
- The Solution: Use technology to enhance—not replace—authentic communication. Messaging and collaboration platforms can facilitate real-time discussions and organize topic-specific conversations. Video tools enable you to record and share personalized messages, updates, or instructions, maintaining a personal touch even across distributed teams.
- Example: Record short video updates to celebrate team successes or highlight key milestones, making your communication more engaging and relatable.
When paired with authenticity, these strategies can transform the way you lead through growth.
The Role of Authenticity in Leadership
Leadership isn’t about perfection—it’s about progress. One of the most powerful ways to maintain connection as a leader is through authenticity. Being genuine builds trust, and trust deepens relationships.
“Being unafraid of making mistakes makes everything easy... you win or learn from your loss—which means you win either way.” – Gary Vaynerchuk
By being open about your challenges, seeking input, and admitting mistakes, you show your team that leadership is rooted in honesty and growth. When you lead authentically, you create an environment where your team feels safe to innovate, take risks, and take ownership.
This fosters collaboration and strengthens the connections that drive your organization forward.
Growth doesn’t have to mean losing connection. By leading with authenticity, trusting your team, and staying intentional about your relationships, you can navigate the complexities of scale without losing sight of what matters most.
Ask yourself:
- What’s one action you can take this week to build trust and empower your team?
- How can you reinforce the connections that strengthen your leadership?
Growth may pull you in new directions, but authenticity and trust can keep you grounded.
As your business scales, so can the depth of your leadership.
Collaboration is Key
There are some things that we are naturally good at, and others that we were clearly never meant to master. Give me numbers, processes, systems, and theories and I am in my element. But give me a hammer or a saw, and I’ll probably injure myself while breaking something expensive.
This became evident when I was in metalwork class at school. I remember the hot, noisy room full of tools and safety goggles. We had been given our mission; to make a nail puller, apparently a pretty simple task.
We were about 14 years old at the time, and desperately competitive. Most of my classmates couldn’t wait to get in there and were bragging about how theirs would be the best. My ambition was merely to leave with all my fingers intact!
Step one was design; this was fine, as I could draw, measure, and calculate. My friend however was struggling, so I stepped in and helped him out. It soon came time for him to return the favour, as when it came to physically making the item, I was out of my element. Thankfully he was there for me, and between us we succeeded in completing the class and making our first metal tools.
It’s easy to see why collaborating with friends, family, neighbours, and society in general is a good idea. However, what about in the world of commerce, economics, and business? Isn’t it competition that is generally seen as a healthy objective?
Myths of Economic Competition
In economics, competition refers to the process by which various sellers each try to offer better products, lower prices, and other advantages to choosing their wares over a rival’s. Economic competition allows the so-called “invisible hand” of the market to reward the most effective seller, rather than relying on a central committee or monopoly to plan the economy.
In reality, we don’t have the conditions that allow for truly competitive markets. Too often, one company or group of people have advantage over others – either they know more, have “people on the inside” that can influence policy and markets, or they have enough power to simply buy and consume their competitors. There are also many layers of government regulations that can paradoxically hurt competition by creating barriers to entry for small players.
But even if we did have perfect competitive markets, what would the outcome be? As you can see from above, perfect competition drives prices down to the smallest margin that doesn’t squeeze a business to death. Does that sound appealing?
We can’t dispense with the idea of competition, as we are undoubtedly better off with many suppliers rather than just one option. Competition can also be a positive force that drives innovation.
However, competition can also be a trap, as we can become focused on competing and lose sight of what makes us truly unique. Our creativity is inappropriately assigned to the task of winning a battle with competitors, instead of adding maximum unique value to the market. In doing so we fail to improve upon what we do and meet the customer’s needs in a more fulfilling way.
“All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.” Peter Thiel - Zero to One
What About Collaboration?
We can all understand cooperation and collaboration within a business. But how about collaboration between companies that are technically competing? What would motivate such behaviour, and how can it lead to beneficial economic outcomes?
In Rod Axelrod’s seminal work on game theory, “The Evolution of Cooperation”, he demonstrates not only that cooperation emerges naturally between players in competitive systems, but that it leads to better outcomes for all.
“What makes it possible for cooperation to emerge is the fact that the players might meet again” Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition
In short, we are better off helping each other solve each other’s problems, so that we all get ahead faster. This will likely continue as long as we keep bumping into each other, creating virtuous cycles of collaborative competition.
One example of how this works is with competitive hobbies like Magic: The Gathering, where players are both competing with each other to win tournaments while sharing new ideas for card deck configurations online. This community of practice is one of the reasons that Magic has become one of the most popular and profitable hobby brands of the modern era.
In an economic sense, we are now dependent on each other more than ever before. I can’t personally build shelter, make clothing, hunt, or grow food. I can’t even start a fire without tools made by someone else. Many people today are the same way.
Many of our technologies come from and facilitate distributed cognition (DCog). DCog is the social organisation of, and evolution of, information processing. The insight behind DCog is that we don’t even acquire or apply knowledge alone. It’s a collective effort all the way down.
The digital age allows for massive specialisation leading to networks of small, versatile, adaptive companies collaborating and competing together. Customers increasingly want personalised products and services, and with modern supply chains as the glue holding everything together, it is possible for companies to meet this demand.
Throughout our history, humans have worked together to overcome complex problems, particularly hostile environments and scarce resources. We solved together, and thrived together.
But that doesn’t mean you should blindly collaborate with anyone.
Choosing Economic Collaborators
“In this world of relentless chaos, I rely on a small group of “anchors” to keep me and THG steady.” - Matthew Moulding Founder & CEO at THG
As you might expect, it’s not always the best idea to reveal your challenges or your plans to your competitors. There are others that you may not be able to work with due to conflicts of interest. Certain suppliers, clients, and previous colleagues may not be good collaborative partners.
The real power of collaboration doesn’t come from working with people that have the same perspectives, skills, experiences, and background as you either. When a group of people think in similar ways, they tend to arrive at similar conclusions.
Indeed, the real power of collaboration comes from working with people that have different ways of looking at things than you. Bringing different experiences, perspectives, skills, and thinking to a problem generates a far greater number of insights. Potential solutions that you never would have considered become accessible.
When searching for people to collaborate with, you should also look for people that are open to learning and don’t think they have all the answers. It’s vital that they can give and receive feedback and are willing to ask questions, offer opinions, and remain open to listen.
Ultimately, the trusting and cooperative connections we form with other stakeholders in “competitive” economies lead to resilience, adaptability, growth, and innovation. The longer you work together, the greater the value that you can generate as a group.
Respia: A Start-up Story
From lockdown to launch: How an idea became a mission
On Monday 23 March 2020, the UK government announced the first national lockdown measures in response to the COVID pandemic. At the time, I was working in a busy office in London Bridge, but by the end of that week I was told that I would be working from home indefinitely.
I have never been back.
My situation is not unique – our society has experienced profound changes ever since the pandemic hit. Social life seemed to move online, remote working became commonplace, and “zoom” became a verb with new meaning.
I’m sure you remember those first months well – although we might have been expecting Star Trek, it was more like Comedy Central. Cats jumping on desks in the middle of meetings, people turning up in dressing gowns, or forgetting to mute themselves as they blurted out what was really on their mind. In short, entirely new ways for professionals to embarrass themselves.
But, it soon became clear that lockdowns meant more than occasional Zoom mishaps. Many people began experiencing isolation, anxiety, and frustration, which has spilled over into politics, corporate governance, and pop culture in the years since COVID.
Christian and I first met in a Telegram Group for people wanting to understand the impact of these issues and what could be done to support those affected. Christian was led to the group by his interest in executive coaching. For me, it was my interest in finding solutions to complex problems. As we collaborated, we discovered a mutual interest in growth, entrepreneurship, and the emerging digital economy.
We began to look at the impacts of the lockdowns from new perspectives. With an eye on the future, we realised that along with the challenges there were also many opportunities. Opportunities that, if embraced by professionals today, could help them successfully transition into the emerging digital economy over the next few decades.
It was also clear that many of the challenges people were facing, including isolation, increased responsibility, and a need to be more autonomous are intrinsic to being an entrepreneur, founder, or leader. Being at the helm of a new venture or shouldering the responsibility of leadership can be a lonely and daunting journey full of uncertainty.
Christian and I both understood that as we exit the industrial age and enter the digital era, the rate of change will keep accelerating. New technologies, new consumer demands, new expectations, new markets, new political landscapes, even new forms of money. We saw that learning how to navigate the seas of change is critical for anyone that wants to survive, and that learning to embrace new ways of doing business is necessary for those that want to thrive.
Turning Uncertainty Into Opportunity
It wasn’t long before we had a mission, we wanted to help people filter the signal from the noise, discover exciting new opportunities, and thrive in today’s turbulent business world. We knew we needed to tap into multiple disciplines to innovate and create a flexible process that would support professionals as they grow into these challenges.
We started by exploring our own experiences and interests.
Influences
I’ve always been a big picture person, fascinated by both the past and the future. In particular, from an early age I was drawn to history, trying to make sense of how the past influences the present. Why do people think they way they do? What are the great stories that inform us, and what wisdom is hidden within them?
Around 4 years ago I stumbled across Rebel Wisdom a media platform founded by BBC & Channel 4 filmmaker David Fuller, and Alexander Beiner, a writer, podcaster and event organiser. Rebel Wisdom was centered on the conviction that we are seeing a crisis of ideas as the old operating system breaks down and that the most transformative ideas always show up first as rebellious.
Amongst the many amazing people showcased on Rebel Wisdom I found John Vervaeke, Ph.D. He is an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. John’s epic video series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” has been a huge influence, in it he unravels the mystery of how we think and generate knowledge and wisdom. His work is also influential in the pathways taken to develop AI modelled on human cognitive processes.
From John I learned about distributed cognition and how the story of human development is also the story of working together. Distributed cognition describes how information processing, learning and problem solving happens collectively. Yes, we do figure things out for ourselves as individuals, but the heavy lifting is a collaborative effort that we naturally participate in.
Research now shows that our memory, decision making, reasoning, and learning are all distributed activities that include people, technology, social organizations and workplaces. Furthermore, these processes evolve over time. The advantages of this way of working have become a key influence in how we work at Respia, as our flagship programs all involve group problem-solving processes.
Futurism & Business
For me, William Gibson is one of the most visionary and original authors alive, and probably the best science fiction / futurist author of all time. In 1984 he wrote Neuromancer in which he coined the term “cyberspace” and emerged as a leading exponent of the cyberpunk movement. His writing continues to enrich my imagination and vision, opening up numerous avenues of possibility.
This futurist perspective is the foundation of my optimism for what Respia and our clients can achieve together. The opening up of possibility, the development of forward momentum, and the leaning into adaptive experimentation keeps us flexible, responsive, and seeking to be at least one step ahead.
Continuum
A narrative of history and future is most useful when it forms a continuum, an unfinished story that follows the forces, drives, and trends of the past into the present and extends into the future.
This is of great importance as we enter a transitionary period from industrial to informational, from analogue to digital, and from centralised to decentralised. There has never been a time in history when so much is changing – and changing with such velocity.
What we produce and how we produce it, how we organise ourselves, how we spend our time, who we connect with and how we connect with them, even how we pay for things are all changing at the same time. There are many coherent theories that encompass past and present, but few have so accurately predicted the near future as The Sovereign Individual. It is this key text that really drove home the inevitable explosion in entrepreneurial growth as a consequence of, and response to, the changes that are underway.
In fact, prior to pandemic lockdowns, self-employment in the UK had been steadily increasing, peaking at 5.0 million in December 2019, approximately 15% of total employment. Since then, the numbers have fallen considerably, down to around 4.2 million in Feb 2024, just under 13% of total employment.
However, the trend is rising again, and entrepreneurship is the obvious response to complex and widespread transformation caused by converging social and technological trends. We need people who see, and seize, opportunities. People that create, organise and operate new forms of business, often by taking great risks in exchange for great rewards.
Partnership With Christian
Meeting Christian was the pivotal moment in the creation of Respia. My focus on macro trends gave us a context, but Christian’s expertise in organisational and leadership issues, and his experience in managing networks, gave us the working model we needed to develop a service offering.
Christian’s first career was in the legal profession. He graduated in business and finance law specialising in commercial and tax law. During his time in law, he tuned into the fundamental importance of personal psychology as a factor of success.
A few years later Christian qualified as a psychotherapist and has been running a private practice in south London focusing on organisational issues and executive coaching. In that capacity, he has worked with founders and managers in the tech and B2B services sector.
Christian has also managed a national network providing support to employees on workplace and personal issues, as well as chairing the Ethics Committee of a psychotherapy training institute. His deep understanding of workplace dynamics and group analysis is a key influence in the design of Respia’s services.
His skills, experience, and perspective helped us move from the standard goal orientated model to an innovative process orientated methodology. With this approach, we were seeking to go beyond the traditional consulting world and future-proof ourselves in the digital age.
Collaboration as a Service (CaaS)
The result of our work is Collaboration-as-a-Service, or CaaS. This is a share, learn, grow methodology rooted in relational intelligence, designed for modern professionals meeting the challenges of rapidly changing complex environments. We designed CaaS for anyone, like us, who is seeking growth beyond traditional networking, consulting, and coaching.
By bringing together like-minded professionals to discuss common problems within a structured framework, we allow participants to discover untapped potential in their own work, refine their perspectives through open dialogue with peers, and brainstorm new ideas within a supportive and diverse group.
Ultimately, we created Respia to support the next generation of business leaders as they leverage the wisdom of their peers, and the advantages of our CaaS process, to turn their challenges into their greatest opportunities and sources of development.
The Digital Disruptor
The Digital Disruptor - Innovation, Minimalism, and Embracing Imperfection.
As I stepped off the plane at Beijing Capital International Airport the freezing air gripped my bones. It was January 2003 and Northern China can be brutally cold, only 7 hours earlier I had been soaking up the heat in Kuala Lumpur. I exited the airport in search of a taxi and was instantly mobbed by men, cigarettes seemingly glued to their lips, as they shouted in Mandarin and tried to drag me into their taxis.
I quickly put my 10 weeks of Mandarin lessons to the test but no one seemed to understand me. It was an intense moment; I was in uncharted waters and could feel panic washing over me. I wanted to get back on the plane and return to KL. I stopped, pulled my arm free from the guy currently dragging me towards a car and thanked him in my awful Mandarin. Closing my eyes I counted to 10 and slowed my breathing, “what was I doing here?”, ah yes, the address in my pocket.
I found the piece of paper with my friend’s Beijing address and instructions on where to find the official taxi rank. “Don’t exit the airport, turn left before the doors and follow the signs for tourist information.” I rapidly about-faced and re-entered the airport, found the official taxi rank and joined an orderly queue. The relief of the familiar!
A month later I was still in Beijing, I quit an amazing career in London with JP Morgan Chase & Co to take the biggest risk of my life. At that time China was entering the market in full force, the entrepreneurial energy was amazing, and despite the initial shock I quickly adapted.
There were opportunities everywhere once you allowed yourself to see them. Sure, it was unfamiliar, even uncomfortable at times, I frequently felt lost and confused and had to think on my feet, ask for help, and embrace the vulnerability. However, necessity is the mother of more than invention, it is also a great motivator. I learned the language quickly, made friends, found my way around, and embraced the accelerating momentum of change. Within a year Beijing had changed before my very eyes, and it wasn’t long before the rest of the world was trying to catch up.
Relentless evolution
Today’s businesses find themselves in a perpetual race against time. The digital era is one of relentless evolution, and it’s not just technology that is changing at an unprecedented pace. Our financial systems, political perspectives, environmental conditions, and social structures are also undergoing rapid transformation. At the intersection of these developmental pathways emerges new consumer demands and expectations.
”And it is why digital transformation can be so frightening: Companies must shift their focus from what they know works and invest instead in alternatives they view as risky and unproven. Many companies simply refuse to believe they are facing a life-or-death situation. This is Clayton Christensen’s aptly named “Innovator’s Dilemma”: Companies fail to innovate, because it means changing the focus from what’s working to something unproven and risky.” - Thomas M. Siebel
For many businesses, they face pressure to innovate rapidly or crumble! Abandon what works and pursue what might fail. All of this in an environment of rapid change. Yet, we haven’t even begun to feel the true impact of elastic cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things (IoT). How do we navigate these unchartered waters?
It is clear innovation must become part of the DNA of any business that is serious about having a future. Innovative must embrace learning at its core, and learning always involves failure, especially in unmapped territories. So, what strategies can lead to success whilst embracing failure?
Well one counterintuitive strategy stands out. You may know it as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Rik Vera wrote a beautiful article about MVP where he refers to Antoni Gaudí's approach to building the Sagrada Família, a cathedral in Barcelona.
“Gaudí's genius lies in seeing the cathedral not as a finished product but as an evolving masterpiece.” - Rik Vera
As Vera explains, Gaudí created a visionary prototype. Instead of attempting to design a masterpiece before construction began, he took an novel approach to the design-build cycle. Gaudí built iterative refinement and allowance of imperfection into the design-build process itself. In other words, he made it possible to learn from failure without undermining the chances of eventual success.
In the digital age, businesses wrestle with what can appear to be overwhelming challenges. Where crafting a perfect blueprint or product is impractical in a frenetically changing world. The artistry of Gaudí’s approach afforded agility, resilience, ongoing innovative, and spontaneous learning in response to new challenges and changing demands. The result is spectacular!
Let that sink in, new challenges and changing demands have to be met by learning and innovation. Eric Ries author of The Lean Startup puts it wonderfully,
“…let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.” - Eric Ries, The Lean Startup.
So what can we learn from the brilliance of Gaudí, the insight of Siebel, and the experience of Ries?
MVPs and Iteration: The MVP approach emphasizes beginning with a viable foundation and iterating for refinement. Businesses must recognize their initial models as imperfect but essential launchpads for continuous improvement.
The Tao of MVP: Innovative companies find ways to leverage external dynamics rather than resist them, turning challenges into advantages. Attempting to resist market forces during times of sweeping change is like trying to withstand a tsunami. Your best bet is to get in front of it and ride the wave. Businesses need to become responsive to trends by listening to customers and tracking user behaviour such as click-through-rates, repeat purchases, social shares, and reviews.
Validated Learning and Expansion: Scaling a business, product, or service in an evolving market means ensuring that iterative refinement is responsive to changing market forces. This requires what Eric Ries calls ‘validated learning’. In other words, businesses need the right measurements to demonstrate that they have discovered valuable truths about current and future business prospects.
“The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.” – Eric Ries, The Lean Startup.
MVPs should not be restricted to one off models for launching new services. In fact, maintaining a version of key products and services for the purpose of learning, responding to market forces, and maintaining relevance to the needs of customers is an excellent strategy in the digital age.
What else can we do?
Siebel explores various technological solutions that can help organizations navigate digital transformation successfully. This includes leveraging emerging technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and blockchain to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and drive growth.
All of these technologies enhance the usefulness of data to track trends, gain insights, and generate measurements that demonstrate valuable truths have been discovered. When harnessed properly they can feed the iterative validated learning and market responsive of businesses.
When the game is new the playing ground is somewhat levelled, there are no seasoned experts in the digital age. This presents a fabulous opportunity to create, play, test, and learn. Let’s think about this for a moment. Multiple changes in multiple domains, no real experts, and lots of uncertainty.
How has humanity taken advantage of novel opportunities and overcome new obstacles since the dawn of time? By working together. The saying “collaboration drives innovation” has never been more appropriate than now. When you bring together diverse perspectives, minds, experiences, and fields of expertise you maximise the potential for insight and innovation. With a structured approach you don’t need experts, you just need to be looking at the opportunity or challenge from as many different angles as possible.
Combine collaboration with enhanced data capabilities and you have the agility, resilience, and spontaneous learning to stay ahead of the curve.
Sources and resources:
The Future of Business
Futurology - Marty McFly, Megatrends, and the V.U.C.A world.
I was 11 years old, and it was a Saturday afternoon, I was so excited that I could barely sit still as my dad drove us into town. We were going to the cinema to see the original release of Back to The Future!
It was a big deal back then, waiting for a movie to come to video could take years, if you wanted to see the latest film you had to go to the cinema. If you were lucky, you might also get ice-cream and popcorn, the suspense made the experience so much better.
For context, back in the 80’s Blockbuster Video had 1 store in Dallas, Texas and I lived in a small town in Hertfordshire, England. We used to rent VHS video cassettes from a guy with a van that drove around residential streets like he was selling ice-cream. There were no local rental shops, DVDs wouldn’t be invented for another 10 years, and the concept of streaming services didn’t even exist.
By the end of that Saturday afternoon, I was hooked on the idea of time travel, and I fell in love with Sci-Fi, watching and reading everything I could. When Back to the Future 2 was released 4 years later I queued up for an hour to see it on the first day.
Why am I telling you this? Well, there is a key part to the plot of Back to the Future 2 where Marty McFly, the protagonist, buys a sports almanac with all the sports outcomes from 1950 to 2000. His plan, to go back to 1985 and use the results to make a fortune betting on known results.
As a 15-year-old boy I thought this was genius, the smartest thing I had ever heard of. Imagine being able to predict the future of sports, stocks, the lottery numbers! As I got older, I gave up on my time travelling dreams of getting rich quick, but I didn’t lose my fascination with trying to understand the future.
Back to the present
Imagine being able to predict the future of business. What decisions would you make now? How would you change the way you work to secure your place in the years to come?
The future has always been unknown to some degree, and people have always searched for answers and ways to settle their anxieties. The value we place on insight into the future is very high, and there are entire careers built around guessing at the future.
For example, what would you trade for next year’s sports results, stock prices, or winning lottery numbers? What about the next trend in fashion, or the genre that desperately needs a certain novel?
Of course, these types of precise outcomes have never been predictable, and beware anyone that makes such claims with certainty. That said, there are forces, drivers, and trends whose impacts are more predictable. Let’s take a look at some of these in a minute.
In the past we may have turned to the Oracle at Delphi, the I Ching, or Nostradamus. Today, big data and technology have become the new oracles. Predictive data sets, internet memes, and AI have replaced mystics and divination. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are viewed as modern-day prophets for profit.
Modern day futurists go beyond attempting to foresee change by trying to exert control over the future. Through their actions and narratives, they seek to nudge events one way or another, often through insightful interventions. From driverless cars to metaverse economies, entrepreneurs, influencers, and thought leaders influence our perception of what is to come. In doing so they act as essential navigators for founders and businesses facing global uncertainty and complexity.
Forces, drivers, and trends
Let’s take a quick dive into different causes of change and how these might improve our ability to predict the future.
Forces are things that operate over very long timescales; think evolution, means of production, socio-political systems, global population growth, advances in technology.
Hunting and gathering was the main means of production for more than 300,000 years, then agriculture for at least 10,000 more. Several centuries ago, it became industry and now we are moving into an era of digital productivity. These forces are stable, and therefore predictable. This means they can easily be built into our strategic processes – and often are.
Drivers are the next “layer” of forces. They operate over decades; not only are they shorter lived, but different drivers may ‘compete’ with each other in terms of their impact. Drivers might include, rapid urbanisation, the explosion of information communication technology, globalisation, advances in healthcare, and environmental awareness. Movements in international trade or the rise of a nation’s manufacturing sector may also count as drivers.
These drivers are usually more salient due to their contemporary nature. We can see the changes they bring during our lifetimes and tend to focus on them. However, it is important to recognise they are emergent properties of underlying forces. The very fact that ICT has largely ‘arrived’ as a driver of change in the last few decades tells us that it may well be replaced by something else in the years to come, perhaps by AI for example.
Lastly, we have trends. These tend to happen over much shorter periods; we see this in fashion, diet, music, art, and exercise. They are often impulses emanating from hype, novelty, or celebrity influence. Although these offer great opportunities to capitalise on in the short-term, they rarely play important roles in futurology unless they are part of the larger puzzle.
What can we learn from today’s futurists?
Today’s futurists are concerned with drivers that emerge from the deeper historical forces of change. It is these irresistible forces and drivers which shape the landscape of the future. They need to be understood and adapted to, as resisting larger societal or economic forces is a fast path to irrelevancy.
“Resilience, agility, and creativity will replace efficiency as the key objective” - Gerd Leonard
Leonard, a German futurist, emphasizes the shift from "business as usual" to a new era marked by permanent VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity).
In response to this he sees a growing need for resilience, agility, and creativity along with a change in how we measure success. Gerd believes a transition from traditional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Key Human Indicators (KHIs) will help shift capitalism into a healthier model. A new quadruple bottom-line: People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity.
"General-purpose technologies shape societies in tremendous ways... as they intersect, they create many, many new opportunities." - Azeem Azhar
Azeem Azhar, an influential entrepreneur and creator of Exponential View underscores the profound impact of general-purpose technologies on society.
Our own society is built on technologies like electricity and the car, which lead to factories, 9 - 5 jobs, town planning for vehicles, and even further down the path social welfare, agribusiness, and processed foods.
Now we have the internet, mobile communications, cloud computing, AI, and blockchain. Understanding the long-term impacts of these technologies will allow us to better plan for and respond to the inevitable changes that will occur.
Demographic futurist Bradley Schurman highlights the global shift towards an aging population, predicting its profound impact on social, economic, and business norms. His focus is the intersection of megatrends, or drivers, like increased longevity and decreasing birth rates.
In less than a decade, at least 35 countries will have more than one out of five people over the age of 65 – a first in the history of the world.
He emphasizes the urgency for organizations to adapt to this change, as it alters the way business is conducted and affects the bottom line.
They provide scenarios for evolving customer and industry landscapes, emphasizing the need for resilience, innovation, and adaptability.
How can you put these insights into action?
It’s easy to make plans that never leave your desk. It’s much harder to be decisive and act, even under the pressure of challenges. Strategic foresight or ‘futures thinking’ is a collaborative and iterative process. It’s about shared, participatory decision making and planning, bringing together insights and perspectives like those from Leonard, Azhar, and Schurman. Megatrends and VUCA environments are not to be navigated alone.
Working with others may feel risky, but ultimately, as a leader you need to leverage the creativity, and diversity of perspective of those around you. If you are to be successful in the face of the complex challenges ahead you need to be able to identify the forces, drivers, and trends that are relevant and then collaborate with others to plot potential pathways forward.
Sources and resources:
https://zebrainsights.com/futurists-what-can-they-bring-to-your-business-and-organization
https://futuristgerd.com/
https://www.exponentialview.co/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradleyschurman/