You can either submit to the turbulence caused by complex and fast pace business environment and get lost OR position yourself ahead of the trends. What does it take to become a visionary leader and help your organization navigate through sea of change and land on the green pastures of opportunity and growth?

Contributor

• • Rob-Jan de Jong, “Anticipate – the Art of Leading by Looking Ahead”, Founder of Vongolo Consulting and Author

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Trancript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:56]:

Hello, and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com, and as always, we invite you to join the discussion on Twitter, hashtag CTR live, and look for this show Leadership Matters. Today’s topic is Becoming A Visionary Leader, and our guest for today’s show is Rob-Jan De Jong, who is the author of a very well-known published book, Anticipate, the Art of Leading by Looking Ahead. Hi, Rob-Jan. How are you? Hi, Rob. That’s what I’ll call you, Rob.

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:01:31]:

Yes. That’s fine. I’m very well, thank you.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:34]:

Great. Great. Great to have you. Now the reason we wanted to talk about this subject is because, of course, it’s interesting that you’ve literally written the book on exactly the same subject and we wanted to cover it. It’s because while we see leaders who have been out there and they somehow have created success and they have had people following, but we, at the same time, don’t see them creating great visions, and without the great vision, it could almost mean that, you got lucky, but you don’t want a leader at the top who’s just becoming lucky versus having the skills and the competencies to be able to continue to vision create a vision, refine it, and navigate through the sea of change and eventually get people to that, those green pastures versus always being in turbulence. So that said, one of the things which we always wanted to understand is where is this issue of vision being so critical to leadership? So what is the value that we should be placing as leaders on having a vision?

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:02:36]:

Well, that’s a great question, and my personal belief is it’s actually one of the key leadership qualities, having a vision, but I use vision in a rich context. What I mean is when I talk about vision, vision is not purely an idea about the future, which obviously is an important ingredient of a vision, but it’s also a tool to inspire people, to get people, to bring people along, to lead people into change. As we all know, change is usually not everybody appreciates change, so it requires a leader to cast the path forward and to pull people along, and in that journey of exciting people, igniting people, your vision, the story that you have, the idea that you bring forward, is one of the key elements of getting people to follow you. So I think it’s actually one of the key qualities in your leadership backpack. Transformational leadership, which is the kind of leadership that’s researched mostly nowadays, really puts a vision at the core of the qualities that are required for modern-day leaders, especially, I guess, because we’re living in a time of such rapid change, and change requires, we appreciate leaders that have the ability to look ahead, to look forward, and to make sense of that pretty daunting sometimes, but also exciting picture of tomorrow where change is coming at us at a rapid speed.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:18]:

See, on one hand, you mentioned and I’ll just take a contrarian view here. On one hand you say that a vision is required, and whenever you create a vision, at least you feel that there is gonna be some longevity to it. At the same time, when you see there is turbulence, there is a short term, of course, not short term changes that are we are asking for, but the way things are fundamentally getting disrupted, your vision could itself be rendered irrelevant. So should we keep talking about vision and having those grand visions? Or now we have to also come up with a term called short-term vision?

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:04:53]:

Good point. Well, you know, I think, interestingly, in the work I do, I am less interested in the end product being the vision. I’m more interested in your ability to develop your visionary side. Because that’s like a big unknown on how do you actually develop that visionary side of yours, and when you have a well-developed visionary side, the vision is the product that you arrive at that’s the end result of that, and I agree with you. The future doesn’t stand still. So I don’t believe in, as you say, the grand visions. They’re very often nice to talk about in retrospect, and it turns out, when your vision turned out to be true, you can write a book about yourself, about how fantastically you could predict the future, but for most of us, that doesn’t work. You’ll have to have the agility to change course, which also means you have to have the flexibility of mindset and you need to have the open-mindedness to change directions. So the story itself, the vision, the idea that you have we can say more about it, what it requires, and there are certain fundamentals that need to be in place, but above all, it becomes scary when people become dogmatic about their vision. In fact, dogmatic visions are the perfect recipe for tunnel visions. So there is definitely an open-mindedness and an agility required in order to do the vision thing, right.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:32]:

So with what you mentioned, you, of course, state the importance of having a vision, and then if people are working towards it, they should be really trying to develop that capability. Interestingly, there are quite a few people at least that’s been seen that while they are in leadership positions, and to some, they seem like having the right leadership trait, but then they have not actually shown that visionary capability. So is this something which is almost, it looks like to some people it is an important thing, for others it’s not, and if it is an important thing, then why are those pieces missing and you’re still able to carry out what you’re supposed to do?

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:07:23]:

Well, this is a difficult subject. I’m inclined to believe that an important reason for that is that the leaders that we have nowadays are the product of an era of market focus and quarterly results, and a lot of short-termism has been infused into the leadership game. Quite different, by the way, in family businesses where very often you see family businesses which have been around for several generations, where the current generation really takes a leadership stance in which they believe their role is that they leave the company behind better for the next generation. That is a very different mindset than many of the leaders that we see nowadays, particularly in stock-listed companies, whose focus has been for so long on making the next quarter, and I’m not saying that they are bad people. I don’t mean it that way, but if you’ve grown up in that culture, if you’ve grown up in a culture where the short term matters most, because that’s how you get incentivized and what have you, then naturally a vision sometimes is mocked; they say it’s something for idealists or dreamers and they are more like the hard-nosed business realists who make the numbers, and I think that’s one of the struggles that we have is that on the one hand it’s really important that we develop the ideas of where we’re heading, and it doesn’t actually need an argument. I think everybody sees that. At the same time, a lot of people operate in a reality where that’s less valued and where the next quarterly results are more valued than where the company will be in the next 3 to 5 years, and I think many people feel that tension. They feel that dilemma. A lot of people struggle with that because a lot of people from their leadership stands, they do drive home every now and then and wonder how we are going to make sure that we’re going to also pay attention to the next 3 to 5 years. So I think this is largely the culture that has grown in many organizations.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:53]:

So interestingly, you say that there are some leadership qualities which actually in absence of those, the individual in that position may get all worked up because of the short-term challenges or the pressure that they may be, and they may not even consider utilizing the vision even though they may have had the skills, but in many cases, even if a person had the resilience who wants to use that capability of being able to create and deploy the vision across the organization, they are not able to do that. So would you point out any specific areas of weaknesses or shortcomings overall in such people who are not even able to create a vision or develop a vision in the first place?

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:10:36]:

Well, the development of a vision is one of the things that has really intrigued me. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book: how can you develop this side? If all of us, and I’m talking about I also operate in the world of academe, I’m associated with Wharton, so we do a lot of research in the world of leadership, and in that world, it’s a no-brainer that vision is a really important leadership quality, and I became intrigued in this subject because I said, well, if that’s the case, why is there so little guidance on how you actually go about developing your vision, your visionary side? What are the qualities that you need to develop, and how do you actually develop them in order to raise it? And there is remarkably little guidance in that area. In the absence of that, we start living the idea that you either have it or you don’t. You’re either born a visionary or not. I don’t like that idea. I think it’s something you can develop. Just like playing tennis, anybody can learn how to play tennis. Now obviously, some of us are better at it than others, but there is nature and nurture, but everybody can become a better tennis player with the right practices. So I started to look into the subject and I started to wonder what are those key qualities to develop, and it turned out, in my research I boiled it down essentially to two main abilities that you must develop. First is your ability to see things early. So your ability to early on identify the impact of a potential game changer, and the second ability is your ability to connect the dots, to put that together into this famous big picture, to create the coherence in your story, so you get the larger frame, and both those dimensions are required. It’s not just one or the other. I think both of them are required. So you gotta be able to understand when an early warning signal presents itself and what the impact of that might be on your industry, particularly in the world of technology where there are lots of changes and which of those are the early warning signals and which of them are the noise. So it’s really about distinguishing the signal from the noise on the one end, and on the other end, you gotta put it into a bigger, wider, coherent perspective, and these 2 abilities, in my idea, are the most fundamental abilities to develop your visionary side, and both those abilities I’ve looked at and I’ve provided techniques to actually grow these parts of your leadership.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:28]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back, and let’s talk about how an organization, which is, of course, hoping for it to have the leader really take the charge and lead us to the green pastures, help maneuver through all the turbulence, etcetera, but if this person himself or herself has not been up to speed on how to develop vision, you really don’t want an apprentice leader to be taking charge. So how do we first diagnose if this is what’s happening, and how do we provide the support? What kind of personal organizational limitations an individual may face, which would prevent a person to develop that vision, or what kind of support they can get from the organization so that while they are developing that capability, the organization doesn’t suffer because of this apprentice status of a leader. Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:14:41]:

When it comes to business, you’ll find the experts here. Voice America Business Network. HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impactful business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner. When it comes to business, you’ll find the experts here. Voice America Business Network. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:16:01]:

Welcome back. So let’s start with the first question that I’d like to put there is what are the personal and organizational limitations that you think may be undermining a leader’s ability to develop a vision?

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:16:14]:

Well, if you allow me to, I’m actually gonna reverse a little bit, and then we can see where those boundaries are because I think we can also look at the other way. What are the things that you must develop in terms of developing that right mindset? And there really are three things that you want to develop, and then sometimes organizations might not allow you to do that. If I look at it from a personal leadership perspective, the individual, three things stand out. First of all, it’s curiosity. It’s a sort of existential interest in what could be different. So curiosity is a key trait of a visionary leader. The second one is the openness to new information. Being truly open minded when new information arrives. Not assuming that you already know it or that it’s already part of your thinking. So being truly open minded, being willing to change your mind when some information presents itself. We’re really talking about psychology here, so I’ll go a little deeper as we progress, but to give you the overview, and the third one I already said is being non-dogmatic, being willing to challenge the conventions and to be willing to challenge your own assumptions. So if these are the ones that we know are important to develop if you want to develop your visionary side, then organizations must allow people to go that route, which really means that an organization should support the individual leader in that learning journey. This is about your forgiveness to make mistakes, working with multiple scenarios, not committing necessarily immediately to big bets. This sort of speaks of organizational cultures that stand for experimentation, that stand for trying things new, not staying within the same patterns. So organization limitations very often go along those lines. They don’t allow their people to fail or they might say they do, but they’ve developed a leadership culture where people are being punished when things don’t work out well. I worked with a leader who said when something hasn’t worked out the way we expected it, and it might have cost us a lot of money, I ask the person who was responsible one question. The one question I ask is what have you learned from this? I don’t get upset that we lose all that money, but I do get upset if they don’t have a good answer to the question what they have learned. Because we want people to be entrepreneurial. We want people to try. We want people to be out there to give it their best. We know they can fail, but what we can’t accept is that they don’t learn from their mistakes, and I think that speaks of a leader who understands the importance of engaging with the future. Nobody has a crystal ball. Nobody knows exactly how things are gonna play out. We’re talking about CIOs. There is lots of change. We’re talking about the Internet of Things. All these things are gonna change the world that we live in, but exactly how it’s gonna play out, we don’t really know. So the only right way of developing that foresight is to allow people to engage with that and to allow them to make mistakes and learn. So I guess these are some things that come to mind.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:08]:

Sure. No. This is a great answer that you offered here. Now the next thing is to say, okay. One is to support, but what are the personal shortcomings which prevent them from being able to develop a vision?

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:20:36]:

You mean as an organization or as a person?

Sanjog Aul [00:20:37]:

As a person. As a person. So you may be saying that you could be your worst enemy because you could keep saying, okay, the rest of the world doesn’t want me to, but you may be handicapped because of your own short-term approach to how you’re leading anything. Or even if you want to develop yourself, you may not be seeing the complete picture which would allow you the necessary room to grow.

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:21:01]:

Sure. In terms of developing that side, part of that is mindset, and mindset really has to do with curiosity, being open minded, being non-dogmatic, and these are things you can reflect on. These are things you can work on if you deem this important for your leadership. There are ways of creating that feedback loop in an organization that could be peer coaching, there are various tools and techniques out there to allow you to reflect on your behavior. If you make these important behaviors, people can help you and coach you. In addition to that, there are a series of practices. I’ve listed 25 individual practices that you can incorporate into your day-to-day leadership game and start experimenting with those. Generally, I don’t suggest people try all 25 at once. I usually say take 1 or 2 and in the next 2 or 3 weeks try to experiment with those practices. Sometimes there can be somewhat bigger things, but there are also small things. A very popular little practice that works wonders is to start catching yourself when you say yes, but. You know, we very often have this yes, but conversation. Somebody comes to you with an interesting idea, and very often our mind is thinking how can I prove them wrong? And we’re gonna do yes, but and then we’re actually killing an interesting train of thought. I assume I make these mistakes myself as well, but I said to myself a while ago, if I catch myself saying yes, but, I will immediately reformulate that into a yes, and. The moment you start saying yes, and, you’re not killing a train of thought, you’re actually building on somebody else’s idea, and that’s how you in your behavior start growing and expanding your horizon and start bonding with people and other effects. So there are things you can do yourself. Like I said, practices, there are behavioral aspects to this, and all this is not rocket science. This is within reach for everybody, and then, like I said earlier, there is nature and there is nurture. For some of us, these things come easier than others. Igniting your imagination, for instance, is an important part: being able to challenge your conventions. Some of us find it easier to be imaginative than others. So again, there are practices and tools you can do, but nonetheless, for some people, this still goes easier than others, but that’s just like playing tennis. Some of us put that serve in much easier than others simply because nature also plays along.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:03]:

So we spoke about the way we could create a vision, but what are our benchmarks to say okay, this person is capable of vision development versus others. Is there to our listeners, if anyone who’s listening to this talk starts thinking okay, what are my checklist to see where do I stand with respect to how good of a visionary leader I am? What would you say to that?

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:24:32]:

Well, I kind of when I check for a vision I’m interested in what I call powerful visions. It’s not just merely a perspective on tomorrow. My checklist I use is threefold. Interestingly, this idea was developed 2,500 years ago by one of the ancient Greeks, Aristotle, who discovered what it requires to get people to follow you, to persuade people to follow you. He boiled it down to three angles: logos, ethos, and pathos. Logos refers to the intellectual component. When you’re expressing your vision, people are looking does it make sense? Does it correlate with what I’m seeing? If it’s completely nonsense, people will not follow you. So there is part of that which is content related. That’s the part we usually do quite well. Educated people read the newspapers, get their content in order, and eventually come to a logically consistent story, but where it becomes more challenging is that you also need to add pathos and ethos to this. Pathos means it needs to also emotionally do something with people. Your audience, typically your team members or the organization, they need to actually feel something. They need to be inspired, enthusiastic, motivated. People need to actually experience some feelings with what you’re saying. There are two ways of achieving emotional engagement. First is unconventionality. If your story is what everybody else is saying, it doesn’t do much. There is something about the unconventional part of your vision which intrigues people. This is the card Apple always played. Steve Jobs didn’t let an opportunity go by without saying that at Apple we are revolutionizing the world. He was always playing the unconventional card. The second part of creating emotional engagement is your connection to some sort of noble cause. I don’t mean a noble cause like Miss World would say peace on earth, but something that’s more enduring than just hitting the quarterly results. A lot of people get emotionally engaged because they realize they’re working for an organization that has a deeper purpose. So that’s pathos, and then ethos is the third critical pillar that sits underneath your vision. Ethos has to do with the credibility of the speaker. You can have logos and an interesting story and emotion, but if it’s not credible coming from you, it’ll still fall flat. Nobody gets excited about a vision that comes from a leader who doesn’t live up to his own words. So authenticity and understanding how you’re being perceived, and connecting your story to who you are as a leader, is critically important for making your vision powerful. So the checklist is logos: does my story make intellectual sense? Pathos: does it emotionally do something? Ethos: is it credible coming from you? That last question is quite confronting. I often ask executives, why would anybody want to be led by you? People find that a very difficult question to answer. They don’t often have clarity on what exactly they stand for as a leader, but the moment you do, the moment you have more clarity on what you stand for and you can infuse those values into your vision, your vision gains tremendous power because people can associate your words with your actions. These are the three critical things in building a powerful vision.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:41]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back, and while we spoke about how to paint a vision which could be powerful, the way a leader may gain credibility is after it has been painted to be able to convert it into reality, navigate through the sea of changes, innovation, change management. So a leader may not be seen as a powerful leader with vision if they just do wordsmithing. They have to show something in concrete terms, something that gets manifested in the real world, and then they create the next one, then that makes it even better. So they have to be like a serial entrepreneur or a serial set of visions that they have to create and then execute on them and show the result is what is going to create the credibility, but is that where people fail? So they are like a one-time champion of creating a great vision and thereafter they don’t do it? Is that where they fall or are they consistently poor? Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back and explore.

Speaker 0 [00:30:56]:

From the boardroom to you, Voice America Business Network. HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impactful business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner. Voice America Business Network, the bottom line in business. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:32:16]:

Welcome back. So, Rob, if Steve Jobs just had said, oh, I’m gonna revolutionize the world and had not done what he did, that would all be seen as empty talk.

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:32:25]:

Absolutely.

Sanjog Aul [00:32:27]:

So as a leader, a person who is supposed to be visionary has to go beyond wordsmithing and without just being an emotionally charged talking head. The person has to really deliver. What do you think that has to do with an overall credibility creation and even self-improvement cycle that they will enjoy in order to become visionary? Because then they learn the lessons firsthand that whatever I envisioned, this is what it really meant when I try to execute it and what can I do next time? So that actually starts improving them as leaders, as visionary leaders.

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:33:07]:

So you’re talking about the feedback loop that you want to have. You’re referring to Steve Jobs, who is a favorite topic because he made a big impression in turning the company around with his vision. At the same time, Steve Jobs is a complex example because he didn’t always demonstrate the behaviors we’d like to attribute to visionary leaders. Steve Jobs is a very complex example, but typically what you’re referring to is how you combine those two roles in your leadership position, which is the leader and the manager. There is always a big debate about the difference between a leader and a manager, and then we get these lists: managers plan and organize and control activities and solve problems, and leaders are more about direction setting and motivating and inspiring. The reality for most people is you are both, and that is what makes it very difficult to play that role. It’s very difficult. Sometimes even on an hourly basis you might be sitting in a meeting from 9 to 10 in the morning and you have to put your team straight because they missed their deadlines, and an hour later you need to step into a conversation about changes at the horizon of your industry and what your thoughts are. So you are always playing that double role as a manager and a leader. I agree that a visionary who only wordsmiths and only talks but doesn’t get to execution quickly loses credibility. We don’t really hook up with people who merely envision. We also want execution. So having both sides developed is important. The manager usually wins when pressed for time because the manager deals with the immediate, the urgent, the problems that need to be solved. The leadership role, the vision thing, can always be postponed until tomorrow. So what tends to happen is you develop that managerial side because that comes to the forefront as you deal with day-to-day challenges. The leadership part very often is put on a back burner, which eventually leads to people seeing you as a great manager but not as a source of inspiration. I personally think it is critical for anybody who wants to be a leader to understand that you are a source of inspiration to others. People look up to their leaders and they’d like to get inspiration from them. That’s the leadership role you also play.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:16]:

So basically, a sprinter versus a marathon runner. If you’re talking short term, you will sprint to it, but a true leader who will get the credibility and will be able to go in a certain direction even though the person would be running for many hours, that would only happen if they had a purpose, something meaningful, a vision, and that’s the only way the rest of the world will follow them. The goal here is to get over the short-term humps but also not lose sight of the long term.

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:37:56]:

Absolutely.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:57]:

So if you had to do something like that, what would you say would be the key characteristics that a leader could create or should showcase or should work on so that when they are called visionary leaders, that’s only gonna happen when they deliver something. That delivery doesn’t necessarily have to demote it to manager, but to be able to stick to the vision. So you want to be persistent. Once you’ve created a vision, yes, you may tweak it a little bit, but don’t let go of that and don’t jump into the minutia of day-to-day grind.

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:38:36]:

Yes. You used the word purpose. It has a lot to do with that. Your leadership game tremendously improves if you every so often reflect on your leadership role. One routine I help leaders develop is the art of reflection. The art of reflection is to take, at the end of the day, a couple of minutes for yourself and ask some reflective questions. This routine helps people over time, not after one day, but when you get into the spirit of reflecting on your behavior and what you believe in and what you stand for, you start getting more clarity on the purpose, the thing you believe in, the dream that you have, or the kind of leader you’d like to become or look up to, and you start reflecting on how you put it into practice and how you could improve going forward. So having clarity on your purpose and what you stand for makes it much easier to navigate short-term challenges. There will be short-term challenges; that’s the world we live in. Dealing with short-term challenges without any perspective on where you’re heading in the long run is not leadership. It’s unmotivating and people around you will not get inspiration. Dealing with short-term challenges in the presence of an understanding of your long-term direction helps people understand why you need to deviate from the path for a short period, as long as they know after a while you’ll get back onto the main road again. So a lot of it has to do with reflecting and getting clarity for yourself on what you truly stand for.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:14]:

Interestingly, the organization is looking up to the leader and the leader is gonna look up to their own internal compass to move ahead. How much of that alignment is plain luck that where organization wants to go aligns well with the leader’s compass? Because if it’s not the case, then a leader may be driven by a vision or purpose that may be their own, but the organization may not truly benefit from it to the degree that it should.

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:41:47]:

That happens sometimes. Sometimes as you get into this reflective mode you might arrive at a perspective that doesn’t fit with the organization you’re working for. That could happen. I don’t see it happen very often, and I think a lot of people, even within your purpose, there are boundaries just like there are legal boundaries and other boundaries you have to operate in. One boundary very often is the path that the organization is on. If you’re not leading the organization itself but are slightly lower down the ranks, it doesn’t mean you can’t define your purpose, but you probably have to define it within the boundaries of where the organization is heading. It also means that one challenge I often notice is people look up the chain at their bosses. In my work I often get people who say this is great, my boss should be in your session. I say it might be that your boss needs this work, but you are equally a leader. The people working for you look at you for leadership, so it equally matters that you develop this stuff. There are some boundaries. If they really bite, people change course; they find the organization doesn’t give them what they’re looking for and they go somewhere else, but typically, within the boundaries of an organization, there’s a lot you can find as long as you practice thinking about what you really stand for.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:41]:

Let’s take a quick break, listeners. We’ll be right back, and let’s talk about the two things that typically help develop a vision. One has been stated as the ability to see things early, and the second is to connect the dots. So, of course, we spoke about how to develop the ability to see things early, but then talking about connecting the dots, is that more analytics that we are referring to or a way for us to look through the fuzziness of what’s happening today versus what’s gonna happen tomorrow and somehow be able to get that crystal ball? What is connecting the dots? What is that missing piece which may be key to developing a vision and becoming a visionary leader? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:44:39]:

The business community’s first choice in Internet talk radio, Voice America Business Network. HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impactful business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner. When it comes to business, you’ll find the experts here. Voice America Business Network. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul. Welcome back.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:01]:

So, we spoke about the ability for someone to connect the dots as part of one of the elements on how to develop a good vision. Now when we say connecting the dots, of course, there are a lot of things changing, and you have to find trends and figure out where this is all going. Do you think a leader should just bank on their own ability and develop that versus taking that as a way to develop the capabilities of a team because analytics or finding where the trends are is not necessarily a 1 person’s job given that so many different pieces may be involved?

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:46:40]:

Yes. For sure. When I talk about connecting the dots, I’m not so much talking about analytics yet, but you’re right. We talked about the behavioral part of being a successful visionary leader. One is open-mindedness, and open-mindedness means listening to others, bringing in the knowledge and expertise that others can provide you. None of us has all the answers. So indeed it’s much more of a team effort than an individual effort. In fact, it’s quite risky if it remains an individual effort. If we look at big failures, tunnel visions are usually an overly dogmatic, often narcissistic leader who does not leave space for alternative interpretations. We want to do this vision thing responsibly. Doing it responsibly means you need to be open-minded and engage with others who might have different perspectives. The collective is always better than the singular version.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:49]:

So if you are looking at someone working with the team, then their ability to become a visionary leader also boils down to what type of team they inherit or develop. So it again becomes a component of how you manage versus how you lead.

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:48:10]:

That’s right. Diversity of perspectives. When I talk about diversity I don’t necessarily mean gender diversity, but diversity of perspectives. The better leaders are the ones that have the willingness to be open-minded, non-dogmatic, and allowing these different perspectives to flourish, particularly when facing uncertainty and radical change. Being in tune with different perspectives is important to pick up on early warning signals. Young team members signal different changes than people who have been in the job for 10, 15, or 20 years. Very often important insights come from the people you work with closest. Having a diverse group with diverse interests will help you come to a coherent perspective.

Sanjog Aul [00:49:19]:

We talk about the last-mile challenge in analytics, which is a more technology term, but if you look at the way you will get different perspectives from different age groups or levels of experience or tenure and their knowledge about the business, all of that being put into one part, and the leader is supposed to eventually make a decision based on which direction they’re gonna go. What competency are they using there?

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:49:47]:

One technique we talk about in this space on how to connect the dots is scenario planning. Scenario planning is a deliberate attempt to create multiple perspectives. Given uncertainty where nobody knows exactly how it’s gonna go, it’s risky to place all your bets on one horse only to find out you placed it on the wrong one. A better way is to envision multiple future scenarios. There is a technique called scenario planning. It’s a stepwise approach that gives you typically three or four equally plausible but fundamentally different future perspectives. Once you go through that process and work that way, it enriches the picture you have of tomorrow. It allows you to integrate different ideas and provides a richer picture. It also allows you to develop a radar screen of milestones and early warning signals to pay attention to, to understand where the future is headed and where you should place your bets. If you’re dealing with fundamental changes, we typically say placing big bets is a risky strategy. We dial back to experimenting, trying out things, failing quick, failing fast. That’s a much better culture to develop as a leader than having a dogmatic tunnel vision. The sad thing is that usually the leaders we applaud are the ones with big grand visions, and with hindsight we celebrate the insight they had, and how fascinating it was that they came with that vision, but we forget many others had different visions and were wrong. So connecting the dots is not so much about analyzing and getting to one version. It’s much more about being imaginative, open-minded, and anticipating multiple futures to develop the agility to change course.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:24]:

One last question for you. There are certain things you could do as a checklist: do this, this, this, and you are good. Another is to go through the fuzziness of scenarios, develop your analytical skills, your creativity, and many other competencies. So what type of support is available to leaders who are aspiring or current leaders who feel they may have issues with how they create or develop vision or want to improve upon it?

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:52:58]:

Like I said earlier, I was struck by the fact that there is so little guidance in this field. One reason I wrote my book was to fill that gap. There aren’t many comprehensive developmental frameworks. I’ve done the research and nobody actually provided a developmental framework on the things you must do to develop your visionary side. My developmental framework in the book Anticipate, plus numerous practices you can do to develop these skills, is quite new. Many thought leaders state the importance of vision and stop there. I wanted to take it one step further and look at how you can actually develop that side. That’s what Anticipate is about.

Sanjog Aul [00:54:16]:

If you had the ideal world where leaders had an academy or set of support groups or other avenues, what would those be? Just very quickly.

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:54:34]:

I think, like we talked about before, develop a diverse team. Above all, try it. Don’t get stuck in the idea that vision is something for larger-than-life figures like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Everybody can develop their visionary capacity. There is support out there. There are things you can do, and I would encourage people to do it because it really is a critical part of your leadership persona.

Sanjog Aul [00:55:04]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, really thank you so much, Rob, for taking the time to share with us the thoughts on how to become a visionary leader, what are the checklists, what can people do themselves on a regular basis to develop and hone that vision. Thank you so much again.

Rob-Jan De Jong [00:55:20]:

Thank you very much for having me.

Sanjog Aul [00:55:22]:

Listeners, enjoyed. Hopefully you enjoyed this discussion; I personally did. Please like us on Facebook, search for CIO Talk Radio, and be sure to follow us on Twitter. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week, take care and God bless.