A few days ago I wrote “Are you willing to accept lower profits to be anti-fragile?“, noting:
Resilience is to have minimal impact at times of “disorder”, whereas an anti-fragile organisation actively benefits from times of disorder….in order to be anti-fragile, one must first accept that this can eat into the idea of “profit maximisation” at a level beyond even being resilient, but perhaps it is time in our world of grey and black swans to look at optimising shareholder returns over the longer-term rather than maximising them over the short term?
I am putting this in the language of shareholder returns as this does remain the primary driver for business, albeit increasingly short term and short termist in nature by many key measures. By those measures, we often hear of how corporations are focussed more now on diversity, yet very often we also hear of it as a cost of “doing the right thing”, not as an investment.
This is also short termist and short-sighted, as rethinking your organisation as designed at all levels to embrace and encourage diversity is not a cost but an investment in your future, in building an anti-fragile business ready to actively benefit from times of disorder.
As I have spoken and written about for quite a number of years, we live in the fastest moving times we have ever lived in, yet the slowest we will ever live in. The old ways of leadership simply aren’t fit for purpose in our “VUCA” world, and increasingly we are recognising how VUCA our world is, ie Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous.
Truly embracing and being a diverse organisation at all levels of your business is an investment in being anti-fragile. A diverse organisation sees difference as an asset (yes, that shareholder language again), is curious, open, caring, listening. A diverse organisation will see every challenge and opportunity from multiple angles and share them openly and with full acceptance of the value of difference and differing thoughts, ideas, opinions, points and directions of view.
This is a much, much bigger challenge for almost all organisations than you might consider, as to design and operate a truly diverse organisation means fully embracing being curious, open, caring, listening and so much more. A few thoughts and ideas around this then:
- In our “importance-motivated” world of business, can you not just make room but actively seek to recruit and embrace in your ways of working ADHD people who care nothing for importance but care deeply about creative and focussed work that they care about, as they are “interest-motivated”. What would your business look like if you actively recruited ADHD people at entry level and developed them through to be your CEO? One thought is that an ADHD CEO would spend far more time focussed on the big questions your business faces than a neuro-typical one. For more on that read my post: “Time blindness and the power of presence“
- Everybody in your business who is outside your “norm” faces a cost to them on a daily basis at both cognitive and emotional levels from having to conform to your norms, including frequent “code-switching” from being who they naturally are in order to fit in. The more your business is genuinely a diverse one, the less this is the case, but be clear and honest with yourself that this cost exists and it takes a fundamental redesign of how business is done to get as close as we can to eliminating it. Oh, and please don’t ask those from various “outside your norms” groups about this after reading this blog or you’ll just be adding to the problem. Just to give one example though, flash back to summer 2020 and the height of BLM awareness. If you are a white person, did you ask black colleagues about their lived experience? Yes, that. I have countless black friends and family who told me how (insert expletive of choice) exhausting that period was.
So, to wrap up today’s thoughts, this post was inspired by a friend asking me what ideas I am most focussed on right now, and it is this, to help shift corporate leadership minds away from short term cost reduction and profit maximisation to investing in anti-fragility, including through investing in designing and building organisations that are diverse by design.