We know that in a time of change there are no intrinsic opportunities or threats — there is only what happens and how we choose to respond.
We’ve also seen how this means that the key attitude that defines leadership in a time of change is the ability to see problems as opportunities. 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 into the multi-billion dollar opportunity that is Uber, and all its imitators.
And, like anything else, this attitude is a skill that can be learned.
How?
We will never know exactly what happened in these three situations 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 past, wearing ripped trousers. Travis Kalanick might have given up all hope of ever finding a cab when he noticed his friend using his smartphone to buy something online.
This attitude that enables us to spot the opportunities around us is called serendipity. And we can increase it in ourselves 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 spot the 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.
. - Deliberately Treating the Problem as if it was an Opportunity
Finally, we can change the way we respond to a situation if we explicitly look for the opportunities it contains.
Alexander Fleming might initially have thought, “Oh no! Disaster! My experiment has failed!” But by changing his emotional response to, “That’s interesting… Something has prevented the bacteria from growing…” he then enabled himself to ask the question, “Who would find it useful to have ‘Something that prevents bacteria from growing’?”
And Travis Kalanick might have asked himself, “I wonder how many other people are struggling to find a taxi right now? What would it take to use our phones to order one, like ordering a book?”
When we shift our emotional response to a situation we open up new possibilities for the practical responses we can make.
When engineers building a railway tunnel through a mountain in Japan found large amounts of water leaking into the 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 gave themselves the opportunity to create a multi-million dollar mineral water business.
Practicing these three skills does not automatically guarantee that you will find a world-changing solution to every ‘problem’ you face. But the more you develop these skills, the more likely you are to find new options for moving forward, and the more likely it is that among these options you will find a transformative response.
Practicing these skills will develop the key attitude that defines leadership. And it will take you another step forward towards becoming antifragile in a time of change.
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 solutions? Are you facing a ‘problem’ that someone else would find useful or that someone else would like to have solved? A year from today, do you expect it will become more useful or less useful to have these abilities? What are you doing to address that?
Adapted from Inner Leadership: a framework and tools for building inspiration in times of change.
You can sign up to daily posts here.
You can also buy the book here and the workbook here.
(And remember: you can’t learn to swim just by reading about swimming, you also have to do the practice.)
Photo By Nicole Castanheira via StockPholio.net