A leader's role in change

- So as we step into a world where teams are doing more experimenting on their own, they're learning new ways of working and trying things at the edge, the question that leaders often ask me is well then what's my role, right, 'cause in the past my role was ensure perfect execution, ensure that everything goes according to plan, right, we're going to make this thing predictable and we're going to deliver that result that we want but in a world where there's complexity in the organization and in the marketplace, that's no longer possible, right? We can't be sure what's going to work. We can't be sure that the thing that worked in the previous part of our career is the right approach now and so we have to actually be open to teams figuring this stuff out for themselves, right? We actually don't want perfect execution. What we want is continually growing capability within the teams and the way we get that is by bringing two ideas to life. One is creating space. So creating space is basically holding the space for the vision, for the purpose saying this is what we're here to do, there's an opportunity in the market, there's a way we can serve the world, our customers, our internal customers that we've identified and here it is, this is the dance floor, right, this is where we're going to do our great work. That's creating space then holding space is saying, all right, within that sphere, within that space, I'm going to make sure that it's safe for us to learn by doing, to test and learn, to try, to fail, to find out what happens when, to ask these tough questions and kind of be in it together, be thrashing and figuring things out together without always worrying about what's my next role and what does this mean for my career and what is everybody going to think and all these other things that are more common in a traditional environment. Holding space is basically saying yeah, we're not going to let the trappings of bureaucracy creep in here, we're going to make this the best learning ecology on the planet against that purpose and as a result we're going to figure out things that no one else can figure out and that's really the key to the new leadership. It's I don't want perfect execution. Doesn't even exist anyway. I want to have an environment where people are learning faster and better and more deeply than anywhere else.