Business based books are often no more than the personal calling card of their author and often frame a philosophy that is rarely useful outside of the that persons particular set of circumstances.
Rob-Jan De Jong seems to have successfully moved away from this formula to deliver a book with incredibly useful content and a set of ideas that can help everyone understand The Art of Leading By Looking Ahead.
In his writing debut book Anticipate, De Jong starts by stating what seems to be obvious, in that leadership is about vision. Very few people however are successfully able to define what vision actually is and what it takes to build, construct and create a vision of the future that can truly help you navigate either your own career or your corporation's future to a fruitful outcome. De Jong creates a logical framework that allows a vision to be constructed and challenges anticipated. The books content is based on De Jong's corporate coaching lectures on leadership and encompasses many interesting anecdotes but most importantly some real life practical lessons that not only apply to the ambitious white collar corporate community but also everyday small business owners looking to refocus on their long term business direction.
We had the opportunity to catch up with Rob-Jan De Jong and discuss his views on vision, leadership and more.
IBR: When polling the qualities of a leader, vision arises as one of the most important traits however very little is understood about exactly what that means, why do you think its been considered a soft skill for so long?
Rob-Jan De Jong: This is a question that has puzzled me for a long time indeed. Why is it that on the one hand everybody agrees that ‘vision’ is such a vital leadership component, but on the other hand we see so many leaders lacking it, or struggling with it. I’m not sure if it has been a soft skill, I think the issue might have been that we did not consider it a skill in itself. We often refer to the larger-than-life characters such as JFK, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos when we talk of vision, which by definition makes the concept iconic and implicitly generates a sense that it is out of reach for us mortal souls. We are then inclined to believe that you either have it or you don’t.
I’ve challenged that notion. I see it as a developmental concept. But just like you should not expect to become the next Roger Federer when you develop your game of tennis and start working on your tennis skills, neither should you expect to become the next Steve Jobs when you start to develop your visionary skills. But the fact that you might not be the next larger-than-life visionary doesn’t mean that the concept is AFCnot relevant for you and your leadership. Those, to whom you are the leader, whether that’s 5 or 50,000 people, equally look at you for guidance and direction that energizes them and that is credible and authentic. They equally like to be inspired with a story that helps them orient themselves toward a compelling future. What I have done is simply demystify what the development dimensions of your visionary capacity are.
IBR: How does personal 'Vision' and professional 'Vision' relate?
Rob-Jan De Jong: I’m interested in people’s personal leadership, so therefore in their personal visionary capacity, albeit mostly in a professional context. But once we say ‘professional’, we’re inclined to make it purely cognitive and rational. A powerful vision rests on three pillars. First, it needs to set direction, and there are a few conditions for success that go along with that. But this is the part we are commonly well equipped for, it appeals to the brainy part of the vision, the strategic part if you will.
The second pillar is that it needs to emotionally engage. People need to feel something, whether that is excitement, belonging, warmth or any other energizing emotion. This does not happen on paper or through powerpoint slides, this is what you the leader bring about if you do a good job in communicating your vision. And thirdly your vision needs to be credible. If your ‘followers’ cannot associate your words with your personal actions and behaviors, your vision will just be considered hollow phrases. That implies that you need to make it authentic, and that in turn implies that you need to make yourself, your values, your lessons of life, your anecdotes, your beliefs part of your vision. So, although we focus on your vision in a professional context, the dimension of you yourself, your personal authentic side, cannot be separated from that effort.
IBR: History is full of as many people who got their Vision wrong as opposed to those who got it right, how much of it is down to sheer luck?
Rob-Jan De Jong: Some older research seems to indicate that about 50% of a company’s profits can be attributed to factors outside their control. These are factors that would luckily work in your favor, or unluckily work against you. In some industry, such as the oil industry, it is typically significantly higher than 50%. The oil price, which is outside the control of any oil company, has a significant impact on an oil company’s P&L. Interestingly, when the oil price goes up, and they make huge profits, you are likely to find in their annual report that this is “due to the successful business development program” and “thanks to the continued dedication of our staff”. When the oil price goes down, they are suddenly attributing their losses to these uncontrollable external factors such as the oil price. So, yes, factors outside your control – call them good or bad luck factors – play a role in successes and failures. Now the question is, does that imply that building a vision is a futile exercise? I don't think so. I typically steer clear from overusing examples where it turns out with the benefit of hindsight that the vision was a success. When building your vision, one of the two key skills to apply is your ability to connect the dots. This refers to building the bigger picture story, a coherent perspective on what lies ahead. But in the process of arriving at your Big Picture, I advocate using multiple future techniques such as scenario planning, for two reasons.
First, although you must arrive at one Big Picture story, you must go through the mental exercise of also imagining alternative outcomes if only to not get psychologically bogged down into the one story you hope for. And second, while you are building your strategy on the Big Picture you foresee, you must acknowledge the assumptions you are working under. Equally, it is wise to envision exit moments and exit strategies once these assumptions appear to be non-valid as the future unfolds.
Following the route of multiple futures is therefore responsible visionary leadership, which I’d like to separate from lucky visionary leadership.
IBR: Is Vision for everyone, can everyone develop a vision; it’s a question that encompasses the bigger question of should everyone be a leader?
Rob-Jan De Jong: I do think that most of us can grow our visionary side, and what I offer is a developmental model that consists of two skill dimensions, your ability to see things early and your ability to connect the dots. For both I provide practices that very effectively help you develop those skills.
But in all honesty, my book Anticipate has been described as an energetic, hype-free business guide – and I value the hype-free connotation in particular. In reality, when working on your visionary capacity, you are surely facing a number of barriers. And some will take those easier than others.
Without discouraging anyone, we must acknowledge that most leaders have evolved today in environments driven by market mantras. Its quarterly results orientation has left its marks on how they have grown used – and are often incentivized - to put short-term over long-term interests. The value of a vision, which is mostly concerned with the long term, has therefore depreciated. Some even make a mockery out of it, considering it something for dreamers and idealists, not for hard-nosed, results-oriented realists as they are. So “vision” has developed an image problem over time and that’s a real shame.
Secondly, we must also admit that it is not easy. It’s not magic, but nor is it easy to do well. Even those who do consciously work on it, often arrive at results that are at best just “direction setting”. Tapping into your imagination to give your vision more energy is sometimes a barrier for people. Equally, having a good sense of self awareness, and understanding what you stand for as a leader – which connects to the vital element of authenticity in your vision – is equally not something everybody can or is willing to do in reality.
So yes, in principle everybody can grow their visionary side, but I’m not suggesting it is easy, nor that all will succeed.
IBR: I found the idea of conducting "Future Facts" sessions incredibly useful, not just in a professional capacity but also personally, where did this technique originate?
Rob-Jan De Jong: The FutureFacts are the result of the FuturePriming process I describe, which is based on the idea that we are better at noticing once we have primed our mind for it. This often happens unconsciously (e.g. when you notice all those cars on the road that are just like yours – simply because the possession of your own car has primed your mind - unconsciously in this case – to notice). But you can achieve the same effect by priming your mind to future developments.
The idea of FuturePriming actually originated at a moment when I was sitting at France’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and was browsing through an innovation book in which they described the process of MindPriming. In this process, you first look around where you are sitting or standing and try to notice everything you possibly can. After you have completed that first step, you pick one out of a number of colors and then you look around again, but now only focused on the objects that match your color. Suddenly, you see all kinds of things that never grabbed your attention at first, even though you were consciously trying to observe all you could.
When I read about MindPriming, I suddenly realized that that’s what the emerging tool I was developing, which I later called FuturePriming, was about. Priming is a term used in psychology to describe the mental process of prompting particular associations in the brain. A simple way to understand how this works is to think of home painters. Painters first prime a surface so that the paint will stick. This is very similar to FuturePriming.
The FuturePriming process involves a set of four straight-forward conditions to create imaginary events that sharpen your thinking about future change. Detecting the faint signals of change amid the daily onslaught of information that bombards us is not easy, but FuturePriming is designed to help you separate the signal from the noise. And by effectively priming your mind with specific ideas about changing realities, the peripheral signals of change that would otherwise have passed you by now have a mental place to stick to. Your ability to detect these signals early significantly boosts your visionary and strategic leadership skills in terms of your ability to see change early. This, as I have laid out in my book, is one of the two critical components of growing your visionary capacity as a leader.
IBR: Do you think its more difficult in an age of information overload to crystalize a Vision that will help you anticipate the future of your industry, does too much information sometimes work against you?
Rob-Jan De Jong: Too much of anything is rarely good, and the same goes for information I suppose. Many argue that in the past gathering information was a strategic skill, but nowadays filtering information has replaced that. So if anything, it has become more complex, and we are often dealing with unforeseeable parameters and ‘black swans’ that can upset everything we rationally expected to happen.
It’s exactly for that reason that I warn against tunnel vision. The best way to prevent yourself from falling victim to that is to anticipate multiple future as you go about developing your visionary capacity. Multiple future techniques such as scenario planning are very effective in avoiding that you follow the route of filtering only what is most favorable to you. In scenario planning, you deliberately envision several future states and story lines that might not be what you expect or hope for. But by taking this non-dogmatic approach, you are safe guarding yourself for the big risk of tunnel vision.
IBR: You talk a little about how the need to be consistent runs counter intuitive to anticipating change, how do you help people overcome their fear of inconsistency when its getting in the way of planning for the future?
Rob-Jan De Jong: A helpful way of looking at this might be to realize that most people take the role of manager as well as leader in leading their team, business unit or organization. John Kotter very helpfully defined the different roles of leaders and managers some 25 years ago in a classic Harvard Business Review article titles ‘What Leaders Really Do’. He proclaimed that the role of the manager is to create predictability, by managing plans and deadlines, solving problems and what have you. So a very important role, but essentially about ensuring that we don’t deviate too much from what we had in mind. The role of the leader however is around producing change. Getting people to see the changing realities of the future, transforming the organization and reorienting it to the needs of the future. A very different role in fact, one that is about getting us to deviate from what we planned.
I largely agree with his definition of the two roles, but where I disagree is that he treats them in his article as two different kind of people. And although that might sometimes be true, most of the time however both roles are embodied in one person. In an organizational context you might literally go from one meeting in which you have to be very strict and confronting with some team members since deadlines have not been met, to a next meeting 30 minutes later in which you are expected to brainstorm about the implications of a very new technology and tune in with the long view.
That dual role makes it very difficult for people. There are no easy answers as to how to deal with that tension, but what I do know is that if you don’t take time to develop your visionary, long-term perspective, and assume your leadership role, the immediate and short-term role will always win, which is typically your managerial responsibility.
What I have tried to do is to take some of the mystery away from the vision thing, and make it comprehensible and practical for anyone who assumes a leadership role. So that your privilege and responsibility as a leader to engage with the longer term can be acted upon. Again, whether that is in leading 5 people or leading 50,000 people.
IBR: How do we tell a visionary from a narcissist?
Rob-Jan De Jong: To answer that, we must briefly side step to what narcissism is about. We’ve seen many leaders in the past who were seemingly good at the vision thing, they communicated powerfully, they seemed decisive and radiated being in control, but eventually they blew up the company. Enron naturally comes to mind, but so does Lehman Brothers and Royal Bank of Scotland and I’m sure you have local examples you can relate to. So the question is, when is a vision so powerful that it induces positive, desirable change, and when is a vision so powerful that it puts those involved out of touch with reality?
The development framework I introduce in the book, and which I believe is a new step in our thinking about vision development, is helpful in clarifying. Just to repeat, it consists of two growth dimensions: your ability to see things early and your ability to connect the dots. In other words, your ability to recognize the early signals of change and your ability to put those insights into a coherent, bigger picture story.
That first axis is about challenging the status quo, since we aim to early reconsider what might be a new reality going forward. This is typically what visionaries and narcissist share. They love rocking the boat.
The second axis however is about connecting the dots, developing the bigger picture. And here we find a difference. To do that responsibly, as I propose, you must be willing to consider alternative scenarios before you commit to your big picture. You must also be open to accepting that you’re building your bigger picture story on several assumptions, and that it makes sense to validate whether these remain true as the future unfolds. And if not, you should think through exit strategies and change course if that’s what’s called for. All this implies behaviors such as listening, being willing to reconsider your assumptions, hence being vulnerable. This is what the true visionary is good at, but that does not fit within the personality structure of the narcissist. The narcissist is typically self-absorbed, unwilling to listen and rather dogmatic. Moreover, the problem increases when the narcissist has gotten it right a few times. His successes feed his sense of grandiosity, making him even more self absorbed and closing him off to criticism even more.
So by looking at the behaviors that fit with both dimensions of my development framework, we can differentiate the ones that are truly open minded from those that are essentially dogmatic, even if they had it right a few times. The former is what I call a ‘true visionary’, the latter is typically a narcissist.
IBR: Finally, you may or may not agree that the Federal Governments globally have moved the cost burden of education from the state to the student over the past decades, so as an educator I would like to ask you how would you anticipate the future state of education and what's one future fact that will inevitably emerge as a result of the current system?
Rob-Jan De Jong: Well, first, forgive me for being a purist, but an ‘inevitable futurefact’ is a contradiction in terms. To those who haven’t read the book yet this might be confusing, but I introduce the concept of a FutureFact in the book as an imagined unconventional event, that might or might not happen in the future, but that primes your mind to detect early warning signals. If it were inevitable, it is a certain prediction, and I reserve the term for uncertain, unconventional ideas.
But to the point of the future of education, if this development would indeed be taking place, perhaps gradually and under the surface, than the implication would be that education would become more elitarian. Those who cannot afford it, would need to significantly borrow or drop out. So an interesting statistic to apply in the form of a FutureFact would be the average loan that students build up during their education period. Mark up today’s average with –say- 30%, put it 5 years into the future, and make that the title of your FutureFact. You have now primed your mind to look for early warning signals that flag the arrival of a more elitarian system.
As for my perspective on the state of education going forward, I would factor another big change into the equation, namely technology. Interestingly, that might actually play in favor of democratizing the education system. How these seemingly opposing factors might play out in the next five years would be a great topic for a scenario planning exercise.
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