The Gift of Insufficiency

How Leaders Can Turn What They Don’t Know into Advantage in a Digital World

Last year I posted a brief article about the afternoon I spent with Clay Christensen, and a couple of other great thinkers, discussing change, transformation, culture, and leadership. I relayed something that we discussed that has gone on to become a meaningful part of nearly every keynote, presentation, or discussion I have recently had with executive leaders. At one point in the conversation, Clay paused us and said, “I’m having a bit of an epiphany here. It used to be that we had to develop the skills to get the job. Now we have the job and need to develop the skills!” 

Clay was referring to the fact that the problems we are addressing in a digital world are changing so quickly that leaders often find themselves in a place where the capabilities and experiences that got them where they are now have become insufficient for where they must take their organizations next. As I have shared this insight with leaders around the globe, something has emerged. That something is that this one realization causes people to react and move in one of two very distinctly different ways. And the direction they go in depends entirely on whether they embrace this dawning awareness with fear or joy. Let me explain.

First, and sadly most often, people tend to react in a more fearful manner to realizing they no longer have all the knowledge and skills they need. We are so used to the idea that you earn your position by what you know and have done, that finding ourselves no longer fully qualified to do something we have worked exceedingly hard to achieve, is a nasty shock. That is because we extrapolate the paradigm of “earning the role” to a conclusion that if we no longer have the needed skills then we should no longer be in the job we have!  And that hurts. In fact, it hurts so much that want to not believe it is true. When we do that we will tend to fight the fact that things are changing and will resist where the world is taking our organizations. I believe that a great deal of the resistance to digital transformation or culture change by leaders, is driven by the subconscious desire to avoid this fear of insufficiency which, in their subconscious mind, now equals irrelevancy. However, I also think that this choice, made in a way we are not cognizant of, is a false one.

There is clearly another way to look at being in the job and no longer having the all the skills we need. That is to realize that we are the right person in the role and this is a fantastic opportunity to grow and, moreover, serve as a role model for growing and changing. I think the right way to look at it is that we are in these roles for a reason. We understand many things; our customers, our markets, our organization’s history and culture, etc. And what we do know give us a solid foundation to build upon and recognize what we don’t know. We are not irrelevant and simply bringing in someone else with those “digital” skills or ways of working, to do our jobs, means that our companies lose the legacy knowledge we possess.  After all, who better to take the company forward than those who have brought it successfully to where it is? 

But this requires that we embrace our newfound ignorance and put our efforts into learning, growing, and changing as individual leaders. To do that we must be willing to acknowledge that we no longer know it all and we must have a plan and strategy (and help) to build new skills and knowledge. In fact, I would argue that we need to make our skills at learning, and not just knowing, the most important thing we bring to the table. Finally, we need to do this in a very public way if we are to be a role model for those who work with, and for us, so we illuminate a path do the same. Making not knowing an advantage, not a doom.

Finding ourselves in the place of no longer having all the skills is an exciting opportunity to help our organizations become learning, change ready, and even transformational organizations. If we let fear keep us from accepting that the world has changed around us, then we actually become the thing we fear—insufficient, and maybe even irrelevant—in the world we now live and work in.