We know that in a time of change there are no opportunities or threats: there is only what happens and how we choose to respond.
This means that the key attitude that defines ‘leadership’ in a time of change is to look for the opportunities that lie behind the apparent ‘problems’ we face. This is the attitude that enabled Alexander Fleming to turn a ‘failed’ lab experiment into life-saving penicillin. This is the attitude that enabled Levi Strauss to turn a stack of ‘unsellable’ tents into the world’s first blue jeans. And this is the attitude that enabled Travis Kalanick to turn the apparent ‘problem’ of not being able to find a taxi in Paris one day into the multi-billion dollar opportunity that is Uber and all its imitators.
And like anything else, this attitude can be learned.
How?
We will never know for sure what happened in the three situations I outlined but it must surely have been one of three things:
- Chance, Synchronicity, or Serendipity
Levi Strauss might have been crying over his unsellable tents when a Californian miner walked by, wearing ripped trousers. Travis Kalanick might have given up all hope of ever finding a cab when he noticed his friend using a smartphone to buy something online.
This attitude that enables us to spot the opportunities around us is called serendipity. And we can increase our serendipity if we take five minutes at the end of each day to remember what has gone well that day. This gets us into the habit of noticing what is going well. And that makes us more likely to the spot new opportunities when they arise.
. - Intuition
James Cameron had the ideas for Terminator and Avatar in dreams. The inventor of the sewing machine solved the problem of how to make the needle work in the same way.
And although we can’t control what we dream, we can increase our ability to call on our intuition by using a tool called Morning Pages. Morning Pages are a way to draw out the insights of our unconscious mind. And the more we practice doing this, the easier it becomes.
. - Deliberately Treating the Problem as if it was an Opportunity
Finally, we can change the way we respond to situations by explicitly looking for the opportunities they might contain.
Alexander Fleming could initially have thought, “Oh no! What a disaster! My experiment has failed!” But by changing his emotional response to, “That’s interesting… Something has prevented the bacteria from growing…” he enabled himself to then ask the question, “Who would find it useful to have ‘Something that prevents bacteria from growing’?”
Travis Kalanick might have noticed other people also getting frustrated at not being able to find a taxi. And rather than grumbling, “I hate this city! It’s impossible to get a cab!” he instead asked himself, “I wonder how many people there must be trying to get a cab right now. What if we could solve that problem for them?”
When we shift our emotional response to our situation we open up new possibilities for the practical responses we can then make.
When engineers building a railway through a mountain in Japan found huge amounts of water leaking into their tunnel it seemed like a massive problem. But when they asked themselves, “Who would find it useful to have ‘water that has leaked through a mountain’?” they created the opportunity to create a multi-million dollar mineral water business.
Practicing these three skills cannot guarantee that you will find a world-changing solution to every new ‘problem’ you face. But the more you develop these skills, the more you will be able to find new options to move forward, and the more likely it becomes that you will find a transformative response.
Practicing these skills will develop the key attitude that defines leadership in you. And that will bring you another step closer to being antifragile.
How often do you take the time to notice what is going well for you? How easily do you call on your intuition to find a solution? Are you facing a ‘problem’ that someone else would find useful or that someone else would also like to solve? A year from now, will it be more useful or less useful to have these three skills? What are you doing to build them?
Adapted from The Churning, Inner Leadership: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.
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Photo By Nicole Castanheira via StockPholio.net