[scenarios] Leadership future trends and scenarios

Around the turn of every year, we tend to look ahead at the future trends. In this post, I'll share what I found and think about the direction leadership and leadership development is headed. By definition, the future has a fair degree of uncertainty associated with it, but we do see it coming. First, let's look at some trends for the short term, and then go for long term scenarios.

1- Short term: 4 trends in leadership development

These trends come from an excellent whitepaper "Future Trends in Leadership Development" written by Nick Petrie after interviewing many experts in the field from different organisations. You can download it for free from the CCL website. I made a mindmap of the paper and included it here below.




Basically, the paper states that due to the changed environment business and leadership operates in (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous), we no longer face a leadership challenge, but also a leadership development challenge. The environment has changed, the skills needed for leadership have changed accordingly (systemic thinking, creativity, comfort with agility, etc), but the leadership development methods not so much. The latter are no longer developing fast enough or in the right ways. So some experimentation is ahead of us to figure out the way ahead...

Four trends emerge:

• Vertical development : the horizontal development of skills and competencies as the sole focus of development will get complemented with more focus on the development stages (vertical).
• Individuals in the driving seat : this is a trend that not only plays for leadership, but as I argued before for all kinds of knowledge work. (Refer to my book Homo Competens - Let's talk about competent people in the network age.) Like it or not, we have become the prime owner of our development. By the way, it doesn't mean individualistic (anyone said social?), it means driven by individuals rather than training departments.
• Collective rather than individual leader and networks of leadership : we mark the decline of the heroic leader in favour of the collective leadership. Adaptive challenges call for collaboration and engagement rather than command and control.
• Innovation in leadership development : as the current ways won't cut it, expect to see new development methods. As the author concludes: "The answers will not be found in a report (even a good one) but discovered along the way on the messy path of innovation."

Some selected quotes will give you the gist of the message:

Managers have become experts on the 'what' of leadership, but novices in the 'how' of their own development.

Some people want to put Christ back into Christmas. I want to put development back into leadership development. (Robert Kegan - Harvard)

Q: what do you think needs to be stopped from the way leadership development is currently done? A: Competencies : they become either overwhelming in a number or incredibly generic. ... It is only one aspect and their application has been done to death.

Q: What should be stopped or phased out in leadership development? A: Stop sending people to courses they don't want to go to.

The industry needs to ask itself how leadership development became so elitist. The world's challenges are big enough now that we need to think about how we can democratize leadership development, take it back to the masses - to the base and middle of the socioeconomic pyramid, not only the peak. (David Altman, Center for Creative Leadership)

If leadership is seen as a social process that engages everyone in a community, then it makes less sense to invest exclusively in the skills of individual leaders. (Grady McGonagill, Tina Doerffer)

... the coming generations will see leadership's residing within networks as a natural phenomenon.

... these (leadership development) innovators will need to be prepared to experiment and fail in order to gain more feedback from which to build their next iterations.

"In ice hockey they teach you to skate not where the puck is, but to where it is going next." (A. Nanda, Harvard) 

2- Going for LeaderSHIP

Let me elaborate on the third trend: from heroic leaders to collective leadership. For the past decades, we looked for big leaders, what their traits were, what competencies and situations they needed to thrive, etc. Below I re-included my overly simplistic overview of leadership theories. Have a look at the last slide: is there is CEO fish?

Overly simplistic overview of leadership schools of thought

View more presentations from Bert De Coutere

As we move our focus to the collective, we need to shift our mindset from leaders (it is a role) to leadership (it is a process).

Leadership is a social, collective process with defined outcomes. Those outcomes are Direction, Alignment and Commitment. (DAC) (Source: CCL)

You can read the general principles of DAC in this Forbes article 'Three ways to make leadership happen', and get a bit more concrete indicators in the follow up article 'What leadership looks like'.


3- Long term: 4 future learning scenarios

When we move to a timespan of 20 years or more, trends becomes a less accurate method for viewing and preparing for the future. So to take a longer term perspective, we use scenario planning. Actually, I'm going to take the same scenarios that were developed at the Online Educa 2012 conference. Hans and Willem did a great job leveraging their experience with scenario development at Shell. The 4 future possible worlds defined are not just a valid way to think and make long term decisions for learning, but for leadership and leadership development as well. I created some fake future newspaper articles on learning in the worlds of big data, quantified self, incrowd and old boys network before.

So how will the social and collaborative process that is leadership look like in any of these 4 potential future worlds? I've only started to get my head around those, and you are welcome to join the exercise. As an appetizer, here is a (hopefully funny) cartoon animation I made with GoAnimate to illustrate the world of 'Big Data'.

Big Leader is Watching You : In the Big Data future world, work gets done based on data rather than relationships, and is tightly managed rather than enabled.

(more to come)


4- What's your 2 cents?

So, what is your view on the evoluation of leadership and leadership development? More and more people are taking a critical look at what it will take for leadership to happen effectively in the network age, and how we'll get there. One example is the recent Stoos gathering.

But what about your ideas? Let's try out a new techy tool I stumbled upon, called Urtak, to find out.

The Future of Leadership