It’s not often you hear a CEO speak candidly about the well-known but often ignored pitfalls in management - the ones that leave leaders in unenviable positions.
Margaret Heffernan, CEO of business and technology companies, professor of Practice at Bath University and an author, questions why we ignore the obvious and suggests that to see the full picture, you need to have people around the board table who inhabit different kinds of mindsets. In an age of complexity the failure to take account of multiple perspectives is really dangerous.
We understand the complex systems are impossible to see in a kind of a single view. So we need those multiple views if we are going to understand the world we are living in.
The question is how can we put these multiple perspectives together?
Think airlines. Briefly, it doesn’t require organisational restructuring - it is about continuous feedback triggered by high-impact, often hidden, intertwined causes of loss-making operational events and their impact on passengers.
It’s a refreshing, regenerative process. And the time is right. Let continuous reality checks and opportunity scans point the way forward and overcome often wilfully ignored pitfalls in management.
