What if we had a vaccine against fragility?
We’ve never had as many technologies as we have today to help us predict what will happen in the world. And yet we have the inescapable feeling that this knowledge continues to evade us, to slip between our fingers.
Our history is built on paradigm-changing industrial revolutions, from coal and electricity to nuclear power, computing and now digital, with the rise of artificial intelligence. We have lived through them, driven them forward and prospered, sometimes forgetting the emotional toll they took at the time. Reinventing the present and the future requires us to look at the world as a whole, overcoming our natural tendency to focus on ourselves and our immediate surroundings.
For businesses, the current challenge is to vaccinate their workers, and above all their leaders, against inertia, fatalism and – worst of all – feverish inaction in this period when “speed is the new currency of business”. The breeding grounds of the virus are well known, as are the emotional and affective disorders they create. They have the power to slow down or stop performance, since there is no thought without emotion, no planning without fear, and no change without a higher vision.
In our meetings with business leaders and their teams, particularly during the pandemic, it’s become essential to talk about strategy as well as positively using emotions. This is how Homo Erectus found the power to stand up and stand tall, despite the pressure of gravity and his fear of the unknown. In our new world, where impermanence and the cult of speed rule, three principles help to vaccinate the organisation against fragility and tackle each day with highly-developed emotional and organisation agility:
- Sharing one major collective vision that goes well beyond mere strategy
- Recognising and rewarding talents beyond job roles
- Putting in place agile interfaces stemming from the heart of the business
We’ve never had as many technologies as we have today to help us predict what will happen in the world. And yet the real levers of change are found not in technology, but in each of us.
Original article (in French) Agefi (19 April 2021): https://agefi.com/actualites/acteurs/et-si-le-vaccin-de-lanti-fragilite-etait-a-portee-de-main
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