Oh and thank you, dear reader, for being the type of person curious enough to read these acknowledgements. I love people like you. People like you are the best.
Introduction
Almost every leadership, strategy and motivation book on the planet advocates the importance of having a crystal-clear goal or vision for the future.
But, intuitively, we know this is an incredibly flawed position to take.
Sure, this outlook may serve in the short term. And, of course, an enterprise needs goals. If you want to galvanise a group of people towards achieving a particular outcome, a clear goal or vision is essential. People like goals – they remove the angst of uncertainty, and give us something to focus our efforts towards. Clear goals can also be reverse-engineered and broken down to create a roadmap, with clear milestones and executable steps. Past experience can be leveraged to improve performance, and systems can be optimised to improve efficiencies. Goals are easy to implement and incentivise, and a raft of precedents prove their efficacy.
But what happens if you don't know what the future has in store for your enterprise? What if you don't have a clear goal? What if you only have a vague hunch, or a fuzzy sense that something needs to change? What then? Do you simply wait for clarity? Or do you manufacture a goal and a forced sense of certainty?
Or worse: What happens if you wake up after a long ‘winning streak' only to discover that your enterprise is no longer relevant?
This is the major challenge many enterprise leaders face, and the fundamental flaw with leadership focused on clear goals and operational wins.
Naturally, this is quite a predicament. We cannot afford to simply wait for clarity. But at the same time, we cannot set forth a single, clear vision for the future while knowing that the future is infinitely complex and uncertain. What to do?
LEAD A QUEST
This book presents a different approach to enterprise strategy and leadership. I wouldn't go as far as to say it is an ‘alternative' approach; rather, it is something much more complementary: pioneering leadership.
Rather than simply work within existing parameters of operational excellence (incrementally optimising your business model to meet customer needs), pioneering leadership sees you embarking upon quests. Such quests allow us to systematically explore complex and uncertain futures. We don't set goals in the hopes that a particular future will manifest – rather, we explore multiple possible futures, and prepare proactive stratagems to capitalise on each.
The result of this continuous and dynamic approach is that enterprise strategy and leadership is enriched with viable, alternative options to pursue. Such options allow enterprise leaders to mitigate risk, obtain strategic advantage and ensure meaningful progress as the world changes.
If this sounds too good to be true, don't worry – it quickly won't.
Pioneering leadership is challenging to initiate and maintain – especially when compared to the established approach that favours fast results with a bias toward prudence and predictability. But! If we can crack through our default thinking, pioneering leadership offers enterprise leaders the chance to obtain the most important thing of all – enduring relevance.
USING THIS BOOK
The biggest paradox about writing a somewhat practical book about the dynamic and non-linear nature of leading a quest is that a book is static and linear. Because we don't have the benefit of exploring this concept together over a dynamic conversation with coffee and expansive gesticulation (at least, not right now), the inescapably static and linear nature of a book requires that I arrange relevant concepts into a seemingly logical sequence.
And so, I have attempted to do this. The result is okay – but it's not perfect. In fact, you may find yourself jumping back and forth between chapters.1 To assist you with this dance, here's a nifty overview of the parts that make up this book:
Part I: Default Thinking and the Kraken of Doom frames the why behind this book. Yes, I used that classic approach of framing the problem and context first. Call it constructive discontent. In part I, we explore default thinking, the Curse of Efficiency and the Delusion of Progress. We also review the default growth arc of an enterprise, and discover how great businesses can one day wake up to discover they are no longer relevant.
If you want to get into the meat of the book, you could skip part I – but I don't advise it. You see, I have this terrible tendency to weave metaphors through my stories (rather than use bland corporate speak). A key metaphor in this story – the Inevitable Kraken of Doom – is introduced in part I, and you don't want to miss this beast.
Part II: A Quest Beckons unpacks the what – Quest-Augmented Strategy. This is a framework for meaningful progress and enduring relevance, and is the main proposition of this book: providing a means to augment enterprise strategy with pioneering leadership. The model presented in chapter 5 summarises this framework, so, hot tip: if you find yourself getting lost, return to chapter 5.
Part III: Cultivating Options includes the first of our more focused how chapters. This may be the most challenging and paradoxical part of the book. Here, we explore infinitely complex and uncertain future contexts. Your existing business rationale is then contrasted against these possible futures, to identify any incoherencies.2 Such incoherencies may harbour alternative options – new pathways that may be of strategic merit to your enterprise. We harvest these.
Part IV: Crafting Experiments then switches our focus from pioneering thinking to pioneering doing. Here we explore how you can support experiments that enhance learning and yield strategic insight. It's through this focus that our alternative strategic options are validated.
Part V: Augmenting Strategy sees us switch back into more familiar operational territory. Here, we focus on how you can augment existing enterprise strategy with the viable alternative options generated through pioneering work. This is how we secure enduring relevance.
Part VI: Making Progress is what happens when we don't succumb to The Delusion of Progress – that is, our tendency to get caught up in the busy work. This section offers some practical insight for enterprise leaders looking to make meaningful progress ‘the new normal'.
Part VII: Pioneering Culture is a whole heap of fun. Having progressed through each quadrant of Quest-Augmented Strategy, we then cast our focus on new rituals you can integrate – personally and with your team – to lead meaningful progress. Through this, you begin to integrate pioneering leadership into workplace culture.
And then it all wraps up with a short conclusion. You may find that you are left with more questions than answers. If so, marvellous. This is my gift to you.
Righto, shall we? Let's get into it.
Part I
Default Thinking and the Kraken of Doom
Ahoy the default! It's always there, and it's such a time-saver. So handy. Thanks to the default, we get stuff done and we make things happen.
But sometimes – because it's always there – we stop seeing the default. We stop questioning the very thing that influences every decision we make. And, thus, we assume our assumptions are valid, sound, correct and appropriate for the current and emerging context we operate in.
Our default thinking (and the biases it harbours) becomes like air to a bird, or water to a fish. We are so unceasingly