Abdullah Verachia’s Disruption Amplified

This week, I wanted to introduce you to Nigerian artist Ndidi Emefiele I loved her piece, Here as in Heaven which is currently showing in London’s Gallery Rosenfeld.

Then, Sepanta Bagherpour, Nando’s CMO for North America, dropped me a note telling me about their undemocratic meal campaign which they had run in the lead-up to the US election, encouraging people to vote.

What a quandary!

What to do?

I didn’t know which to share and so, in typical Taurean fashion, I have resolved it by giving you both.

Kudos to Nando’s who said, “At Nando’s, we care deeply about voting because we originated in South Africa. We were there in 1994 when millions of South Africans had their voices heard for the first time. Voting is a right and should never be taken for granted.”

It is thrilling to see how they have translated their irreverent humour and commitment to social justice into a North American context. That is strategy and soul in action!

Last week’s mail reflected on how we use language. Today’s looks at time.

I have dipped into both for in a world of turmoil these are variables that we can influence and in doing so reclaim a sense of agency.

/ STRATEGY

Last month, Abdullah Verachia released his book Disruption Amplified.

Verachia is the Programme Director for the Harvard Business School and GIBS Senior Executive Program for Africa, where he teaches strategy and innovation.

The book itself is a testament to the use of time.

While the rest of us were grappling with banana bread, Verachia sat down to start processing what COVID-19 might mean for organisations and those who lead them. The result is his book.

It’s amazing what one can achieve with discipline and focus.

Of course, Verachia both consults and reads widely and this is reflected in the book where he weaves together a wide array of sources to present a picture of the different possibilities that confront leaders in this moment.

In the spirit of Oliver Sacks (see below) the book is a product both of intention in the moment and of decades worth of focused application.

Woven throughout his book is a question about how we want to lead and the world we want to create.

He says, “The question we need to be asking ourselves is not if we can return to ‘normal’ but whether we should.”

He consistently points us to how our system of operating had deleterious effects on everything from global inequality to our lived sense of peace and connection.

Verachia shares an anecdote where a client suggested moving an event to January 2021.

His question, “Why then?” Their response, “It’s a new year.”

He reflects that it is unlikely that the virus that has disrupted our world has a calendar that it is responding to and yet we try to impose our own sense of order. In so doing, often disastrously missing what needs to be done.

It is a powerful cautionary tale.

Pause and think about what concepts you’re using to make sense of the world. Are they still relevant?

Verachia draws our attention to the turbulent world that millennials have faced since entering the labour market.

This is critical for understanding organizational leadership and strategy into the future. The macro context inevitably influences leadership tactics.

This is heightened in a South African context where millennials also carried their parents’ hopes for what a democratic South Africa would mean.

Whether you work with millennials or are one, pausing to think about what these events mean for your leadership style is critical.

A theme throughout Disruption Amplified is of complexity, the need to adapt, to be creative, to be patient in the face of ambiguity and initiate small, considered actions to test the environment. This requires considerable resilience and self-awareness from all of us who lead.

Verachia quotes a GIBS colleague, Dr Manoj Chiba, pointing to four useful questions to hold as one navigates the complexity:

• What has changed? (Be honest and detailed)
• How have you changed? (This is both a global and a personal moment)
• What are your needs? (Your organisations, your people’s and your own)
• What new or current capacities of yours do your customers need?

/ SELF

I love science fiction stories as a way of challenging myself to think differently.

I think of them as secular parables enabling me to see the world with a fresh perspective.

Chen Quifan’s short story, The Fish of Liajing introduced me to ‘time sense compressors’.

The story’s protagonist is sent for mandatory rehabilitation after being diagnosed with Psychogenic Neural-Functional Disorder II (PNFD). We’d call it burnout.

Whilst in rehab, he discovers that the alarm clock on his work desk is a time sense compressor. It speeds up his subjective sense of time, leading him to work long hours and suffer insomnia as he chases to catch up.

It makes him incredibly productive. The downside is he burns out. No worries though, the labour laws have been changed to ensure that he gets mandatory care when the PNFD inevitably hits.

Work. Crash. Rehabilitate. Work. Crash. Rehabilitate.

Sound familiar?

It got me wondering how many times we install our own time sense compressors, forcing our world to speed by, keeping ourselves awake at night with the anxiety that we may not catch up.

Slow it all down. It’s a complex world.

You might just discover – as Lars Kenseth puts in this wry cartoon for Wired – “that the thing you’ve been chasing your whole life…has been part of you all along.”

(The Fish of Liajing is in Invisible Planets edited by Ken Liu)

/ SOUL

In a beautiful essay entitled Humphrey Davy: Poet of Chemistry, the late Oliver Sacks argues that in connecting with those who have gone before us, we can deepen what we bring to the world today.

He recounts that when he was writing his first book, Migraine he read Edward Liveing’s Megrim, which was published 100 years earlier.

He says, “I reread it many times for six months, and I got to know Liveing extremely well. His presence and his way of thinking were continually with me. My prolonged exposure with Liveing was crucial for the generation of my own thoughts.”

Who in your business, in your sphere of operation went before you?

What are you missing out by not connecting with their knowledge?

He reflects that “science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.”

This a powerful reminder for this moment. It grows from our past.

We need to hold knowledge of history if we are going to shape our future.

In any moment we are history, we are here, and we are our future.

Use your time wisely this week.

Karl

PS: If you enjoyed this mail please share it.

If it was shared with you, you can subscribe here and learn more about me on LinkedIn.

(This letter was first published on 8 November 2020)