There is chaos we deal with as individuals, teams, and organizations; chaos that presents itself at the most inopportune times, and requires you to zig when you’d rather zag. No matter where you are, chaos finds you, and if you don’t know how to deal with change as an individual or as an organization, then you get eaten, swallowed whole, and left for dead.
The alternative, of course, is to never leave the womb. Or, once you do, to revert back to your safety net immediately after you realize that the waters you’re in are too cold and won’t suffice.
Anybody can perform a task that he or she already knows and understands. It’s when obscurity, doubt, and stress are interjected into the equation against the backdrop of survival that the creature of the unknown exposes us for who we are, not just what we know how to do.
Of course, not all chaos is bad. Nobody learns from personal successes as they do from personal failures, from what he or she should have done or said (or not). Just as uncertainty and change spur fear and trepidation, tackling the unknown makes you better because it forces you to call upon judgment and insight that you can use to make better decisions and navigate change next time. Let me illustrate this through the following example…
The Strategy of Movement
Consider this hypothetical situation:
You and your team of twelve are in a hellacious gunfight. Bullets are ricocheting off the rocks of the mountain slope you’re on and hitting all around you. You’re wondering to yourself not if but when that next enemy bullet is going to skip off a rock and lodge into your gut. Meanwhile, the guy next to you—your shooting buddy—is cracking jokes from behind cover, “Whooooh hoooo! Just like fuckin’ Vietnam!” despite the fact that he’s under the age of thirty.
Meanwhile, the enemy has identified your position and bullets are flying at you that elicit two responses from you, the fearless team leader. The typical first response is, “Fuck! We need to get the hell outta of here!” But it’s the second response that’s the real moneymaker: “Where can we go?” In other words, you begin to assess the terrain for a better position. You first begin to scan the surrounding area for alternative sources of cover because you’re not going to go running into a hail of bullets without first identifying the next safe position to move to. You want to make sure that another—better—vantage point does, in fact, exist before you order the team to move.
Once you decide upon the next best place to run for protection, you determine if the cover itself is viable for its intended purpose, which is complete tactical superiority over the enemy. Will that tree serve the purpose that I need of stopping bullets? I haven’t exercised lately, so maybe I should find a tree with a wider base. If the area in question will not do what you want it to, then you need to keep looking.
But, if it is worthy of protecting your now puckered-up backside, then you need to pinpoint the right time to move, to change. When the opportunity presents itself, you make a deliberate decision to get up with your team, shoot back at the enemy while screaming a loud, Rambo-like “AAAAAHHHHHHH!” and then run like hell toward your newfound sanctuary. Once there, you discover that this new piece of cover really only offers a fresh perspective in one of four ways:
1 It provides both cover and a fresh angle of attack on your enemy that will enable you to protect yourself, gain perspective, and win the fight.
2 It offers mediocre protection and partial exposure (at this point, you’re just prolonging the nightmare).
3 It serves as a great defense but obstructs all lanes of visibility, therefore hindering your situational awareness and ability to respond.
4 It is actually a bush and bushes do not stop bullets. It fails miserably and you die.
The Lesson
The bottom line is, if you have to move in a firefight, the marketplace, or a job role, you do so for one main reason: to strategically improve the position of your team or organization. Any discomfort, whether it be physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual, is secondary. If you aren’t experiencing discomfort, trepidation, or failure, then you’re doing something that will bring about far graver consequences: you’re trying to avoid it altogether.
In the hypothetical gunfight scenario, change only occurs when its significance has garnered the shared attention of everyone involved. You don’t just move because the leader told you to. You change position because there is meaning and purpose associated with the behavior to move.
Failure can’t be out-thought, out-strategized or out-worked. It’s an element of uncertainty that appears unexpectedly and challenges you to reveal the real you through new circumstance.
To bounce back from failure and change for the better requires effort, courage, and the tenacity to see things through—all performance-based criteria that will be covered in upcoming chapters—but the risk of not changing far outweighs the temporary discomfort of the change itself.
The purpose of moving is to gain the high ground; to adapt amidst a changing threat toward a new situation based upon a new stimulus and thus create new meaning. However, your ability to move—to create value—depends on the people with whom you work, their individual and team-based competencies, their internal drivers for excellence, and their support network. This is where performance and leadership come into play.
Continuing with the above hypothetical situation, the first goal of the leader is to make sure that everybody is shooting in the right direction, and toward the same end-state such that everybody’s efforts align toward the same purpose. There are a few assumptions made in this statement of “everybody is shooting in the right direction” that are important to highlight here. When people, teams, or companies share the same purpose it is presumed that:
1 Communication is clear. There is no ambiguity as to whom the enemy or competitor is, their position, and what resources they are employing against you. Every employee must be able to identify the battle because if you know your enemy, then you know how to defeat him. It’s when you don’t necessarily know your enemy intimately enough that the unforeseen arises and takes a bite out of your ass.
2 The team is working in alignment. The muzzle of each team member’s rifle must be pointed in the same direction to maximize potential, reduce wasted efforts, and share the same purpose. Whether you are in a gunfight, a pricing war, or a product battle, every second you lose is three more seconds you now need to advance—one second to collect yourself, one second to catch up, and another to get ahead.
3 “Winning” has been defined. There is no confusion about what success looks like, and everybody is on the same page to get there.
4 Operating environment is understood before moving. At some point, one side will have to turn the page and gain higher ground, conduct a flanking maneuver, or create some sort of change in an effort to tip the scale in their favor. A systemic understanding of the competitive landscape allows you to beat the enemy to the metaphorical high ground.
5 Skill and performance standards exist. Of course, if you want your top sniper to take the shot or your number one negotiator to land your next deal, it is expected that he or she will do so. It’s an ungrateful responsibility, but one for which physical, mental, and emotional performance demands require a standard of excellence.
Once the team is aligned and shooting in the right direction, you will need to relocate and create a new formation since the enemy already knows your current position. So, what do you do? You change. You adapt and repurpose the team in such a way that the right people fall into the right places and you have the right fit. This also entails removing the wrong people (although not in the middle of a firefight), which only comes after you identify the performance-based skills (i.e. behaviors) that each member brings to the table and how they help or hinder your team’s objectives.
Meanwhile, back in the gunfight, your team’s effectiveness is decreasing by the second, so you want to keep a heavy volley of fire on the enemy to keep him suppressed. In other words, you don’t want any lulls in the exchange of fire. To do this, the heavy weapons guys (.60 gunners) need to “sing” with each other at a rhythmic pace