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Agility and flexibility are critical skills for CEOs when Black Swan events transpire

Jon Foster-Pedley
By Jon Foster-Pedley
27 Sep 2024
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Modern CEOs must have incredibly well-developed situational awareness; the capacity to take the lead and the ability to sit back and let someone else take the lead when the time is right.

One of the greatest conundrums in management training is the issue of agility — and how to develop it. We all know that it’s necessary, but somehow, it doesn’t come naturally to businesses — or individuals.

A Boeing 747 isn’t made for being thrown about the sky. It’s built for stability. At the same time, F35 fighter jets may be responsive and acrobatic, but they are impossible to control without sophisticated computers.

You need two different kinds of skills to fly them. Very few 747 pilots can put a fighter aircraft through its paces, and not all fighter pilots have the temperament to fly 500 people from one side of the world to the other on time and without them spilling their coffee.

As captains of industry, our mandate is to keep the business in a steady state, but sometimes we have to throw it around a bit and disrupt it, particularly when the options are change or death. It’s a terrifying thought, especially when you don’t have a playbook for it.

Covid-19 is a perfect case in point; nothing in living memory could have prepared us for what we went through. Many people couldn’t get to work and, if they did, whatever they made couldn’t get to market; and, if it did, no one could get to it to buy it.

What can often happen in Black Swan events like that is that people become overwhelmed by the enormity of the crisis and play it safe. In this way, they asphyxiate what’s left of the business through analysis paralysis. What is needed at these times is to be brave enough to do what might seem counterintuitive.

Randomised strategy


When the hunting areas in the vast frozen lands of the Northern Hemisphere start running empty, the Inuit turn to their spiritual leaders. The shamans roast a caribou shoulder bone over a fire and read the cracks in it to predict where the caribou will be heading and send the hunters in that direction.

It’s a randomised strategy, which both disrupts habit and goes against the grain of traditional strategy, which is about thinking something through and coming up with not just the destination, but also a way of getting there.

This can be uncomfortable, even exhausting, but it might make the difference between life and death. Organisations similarly need to manage the tensions between the predictable and stable and the adaptable. This may seem a contradiction in terms, but organisations can prepare themselves to be opportunistic by planning for opportunities.

They can do this by becoming brilliant at seeing — seeing what is there, not what we are used to seeing or what we’d like to see — making reality our friend.

In this way, the opportunities become clear to us — and the threats to our business too. This means opening ourselves up to hearing unpleasant truths and even encouraging internal contestation in the companies we run to provoke these truths to show themselves.

Years ago, when I was teaching in Cape Town, we surveyed South Africa’s richest and most successful entrepreneurs to try to establish if there was something common to all of them that would explain their success. Turns out there was a commonality: each one had people who would tell them the truth, whether they liked it or not.

Being disrupted in their own space forced these business leaders to be adaptable, it inspired creativity and innovation, because they were made aware that in some instances they could not continue doing as they had always done. They were not interested in being cosseted in their mahogany row offices, insulated by their privilege and bluffed by their courtiers.

The process of disruption, someone once told me, is like the British game of conkers where you try to smash another person’s horse chestnut on a string with your own. The faster you spin it, the greater the force that your conker or horse chestnut has and the greater its chance of breaking the opponent’s. The paradox is that the faster you go, the tighter you must hold it.

Creative energy is a lot like that. My complexity theory mentor, Ralph Stacey, said the difference between top-down management, self-management and self-organised management was the difference between autocratic control, delegated control and insurrection, because people are starting to self-organise and manage.

The difficulty is that most innovation takes place in the self-organising sector. But this area has the highest potential for disaster if that creativity is not properly channelled — just like the fast-spinning conker.

We build institutions that are incredibly immutable because we have skewed our risk:reward ratio, where reward is seen in stability and change is risk. Success lies in managing the dynamic tension between contentment and complacency, walking the tightrope between stability and innovation.

Modern CEOs must have extremely well-developed situational awareness; the capacity to take the lead and the ability to sit back and let someone else take the lead when the time is right.

As unpleasant and as uncomfortable as it often is, we must sow the seeds for self-organisation, institutionalising pushback among colleagues so that our prejudices and institutional biases are challenged, but at the same time, business leaders dare not abrogate their responsibilities or abdicate their authority, for therein lies anarchy.

As we straddle these two conflicting worlds, we return once more to the First People of the ice.

The caribou shoulder blade that shatters in the coals randomises the strategy, forcing the hunters to go into areas where common sense dictates they shouldn’t — or areas that they had never considered before, but that give them a better chance of success because the animals themselves, the prey, have changed their behavioural patterns and have moved elsewhere, which is why the Inuits’ old strategy is no longer yielding results.

It’s a process that is very uncomfortable because there is so much at stake — in this case, the starvation of the entire tribe. But no one remembers the hard times when the strategy works and their bellies are full.

That’s as true today as it was in ancient times. We must lean into the discomfort, not away from it, if we are to survive and thrive. DM

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