In a 2004 book, Ralph Keyes used the term “post-truth” to describe an emerging period in our history where the “borders blur between truth and lies, honesty and dishonesty, fiction and nonfiction.”1
We build on that observation and explore what the world will look like when, to gain understanding of the reality around us, there is no longer a debate of facts but rather a competition of narratives. As competing narratives vie to present a picture of the world, we will have a harder time determining what’s real and accurate.
Welcome to the era of the digital echo, where information passes from individual to individual more quickly but in the process often becomes distorted.
We will explain the phenomenon of the digital echo in great detail, but it is important to note from the start that it is a neutral force. It can inform, misinform, educate, entertain, inspire the human spirit to great acts of compassion, or unleash mankind’s darkest instincts. It can inspire the generosity of the “ice bucket challenge” or the hatred of the ISIS terrorist ideology. It presents both a leadership challenge and a leadership opportunity.
One thing is clear about the digital echo: it creates the need for inclusion.
In this new world, we need to leverage inclusion to gain better information about the world around us and to effectively communicate our message.
In order to help you accomplish these two imperatives, we provide concrete leadership tools to create an environment of inclusion:
1. Belonging isn’t optional: give them memories. We will argue that the first step in building a team is developing in its members a sense of belonging. Consider the alternative: if leaders don’t make those who follow feel a sense of belonging, someone or something else will. And the ubiquitous presence of the digital echo makes this not only possible but likely.
2. Connect effort with meaning: make it matter. We will show that persuading members of the team that their contributions matter is crucial to team success. We all want to believe we make a difference. Leaders help their followers understand what that takes.
3. Think about what you’re not thinking about: learn to imagine. We will encourage leaders to develop mindfulness, awareness, and imagination through a lifelong commitment to learning. We believe and will convince all who aspire to lead that imagination is a learned attribute.
4. Prevent decision paralysis: develop a bias for action. We will demonstrate that, when presented with a problem, leaders must look for what they can do in the moment. They must avoid information paralysis. They must act to change the environment and to learn, and then act again, in a deliberate pattern of persistent learning and proactive leadership.
5. Collaborate at every level of the organization: co-create context. We will discuss how the most effective leaders harvest knowledge and empower the organization from bottom to top. We will show the benefits of concentrating the “what” while distributing the “how.”
6. Expand the circle: relinquish control to build and sustain power. We will assert in the strongest terms that finding optimal, enduring, affordable solutions to complex problems requires leaders to reconsider and rebalance their understanding of the relationship among leadership, power, and control.
The leadership instincts are listen, amplify, include.
Neither the principles nor the instincts are an à la carte menu. Effective leaders must understand and practice all of them.
We’ve titled our book Radical Inclusion because we believe that the traditional relationship among leadership, power, and control has changed. Solving our problems by leading with an emphasis on exclusion, jealously husbanding power, and aspiring to greater control is producing suboptimal, fragile, and costly outcomes.
The alternative is to rebalance the relationship among leadership, power, and control with an emphasis on inclusion, to selectively and purposefully relinquish control to enhance power, to define success less in terms of power and control and more in the ability to achieve optimal, enduring, and affordable outcomes.
Counterintuitive? Perhaps. But as the digital echo spreads, as complex issues multiply, as uncertainty increases, as technology exponentially changes, and as risk rises, it seems reasonable that we should seek to lead by sharing our challenges rather than owning them outright.
That said, this book’s proposition about leadership is not that we ought to surrender our hard-earned power because possessing it is becoming a liability. Rather, it is that we must develop an instinct for seeking opportunities to share control in order to preserve and even enhance the power we possess.
Ours is a pragmatic proposal. We advocate sharing control in problem solving not because we wish to become somehow more egalitarian but because we want to solve problems effectively and efficiently, and we want them to stay solved!
Finally, we chose the adjective “radical” to describe the kind of inclusion we advocate because it speaks to the extremes we encounter as leaders in the world today. It is our belief that concentrations of power and exclusivity will continue to form but cannot endure in a world that sees all, a world in which technology levels all, a numbingly fast-paced world of rising expectations, glaring disparities, and declining trust.
If we’re right about that, about the environment in which the affairs of business, industry, international relations, and national security must be managed, then only the leader who can harness the power inherent in inclusion will make lasting progress and achieve enduring success.
CHAPTER 1: THE DIGITAL ECHO
The Fog of War Descends on Berkeley
Berkeley police sergeant Sabrina Reich wore a clear and focused expression when we talked to her in the basement of Sproul Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.
The sergeant’s voice nonetheless shifted as she told us, “In the entire history of the campus, what happened is unprecedented. We didn’t expect something like this.”
By “unprecedented” the sergeant meant Molotov cocktails, damaged property, and masked perpetrators who were either right-wing extremists, paid agitators, or anarchists out of control. In the blink of an eye Berkeley had turned into a war zone; dozens of civilians took to the streets and engaged in full-on armed conflict.
What was most alarming was that the violence seemed to emerge out of nowhere. The police were taken so completely by surprise that they simply stood by and watched. The shockwaves from the day’s events reached all the way to the White House, escalating tensions between the federal government and the State of California.
And no one saw it coming. Wednesday, February 1, 2017, started out as a glorious Bay Area day. Over the previous month, after years of severe drought, California had finally been getting the drenching it so desperately needed. This week offered a respite from the rain. As temperatures rose in the afternoon, UC Berkeley students basked in glimpses of sunshine as they lounged on the steps of Sproul Hall.
Unlike the manicured, palm-lined drives of Stanford, its archrival an hour to the south, Cal has a decidedly gritty feel to it. It’s an urban campus where you’re as likely to run across a drum circle as you are to be caught up in a political debate. The guy in front of you in line for coffee could be a hippie, or he could be a Nobel laureate (Cal has reserved parking spots for Nobel Prize recipients)—or he could be both.
While the tech start-ups and venture capitalists may get more attention, it’s impossible to understand Silicon Valley without understanding what’s happening at Berkeley.