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Reflections – Five leadership lessons to transform 2025

7 Jan 2025

Face a little discomfort and see the new directions beyond what you fear – your mind is set up to deal with complexity even if you think you aren’t. We have the time right now as a new year begins to lean into the process.

1. Escape the bias trap: why reflection matters now more than ever

Reflection has become a bit of a buzzword in recent years, but unlike other fads the art of reflection is probably one of the most important skills to master. It has very quickly become a key component of leadership training and not without reason.

Our minds, whether we like it or not, are as much governed by our own algorithms as the bots are for our social media interactions. It’s an unpleasant truth that is surpassed only by the greater discomfort you feel when you do reflect on actions you’ve taken – and discover how a pre-existing bias led to the decision being the totally wrong one to take under the circumstances.

Update your maps: when familiar paths no longer serve us

And that’s precisely why we should take time out to reflect. US organisational theorist Karl Weick speaks of us mentally mapping the territory we work in. The more we do something the better the map becomes, the more instinctive our decision-making becomes because we base our decision-making on previous decisions that led to a positive outcome.

The problem arises when the map becomes outdated, like when we get promoted and our terms of reference change. The map no longer fits the new, expanded landscape exactly and starts to become a liability rather than an asset. Those of us who can remember life before GPS on our cellphones will remember this literally happening with the old city map books when suburbs started being cordoned off by residents or developers built brand new developments in what had been open country. You couldn’t travel on auto pilot anymore because the roads might dead-end or not exist anymore at all.

The higher up you are promoted, the worse it gets because the complexity of your terrain increases in scope and scale. Sadly, there are very few CEOs who openly lean into this phenomenon and tell their subordinates that they are taking time to learn the new lay of the land before making decisions. Instead, they commission canny consultants as proxy bearers of knowledge – though not always wisdom – as new CEOs try to buy time to map and work with the complexity.

Embrace the messy middle: learning through trial and error

Consultants have brilliant methodologies to identify problems, and from their global networks they’ve got case studies to draw on to suggest solutions, but they are still famous for giving an answer and leaving the implementation up to the people who paid them to help them in the first place. The rub is that the implementation is where the rubber hits the road; if you’re studying how a bird flies it doesn’t make sense to watch it on the ground or perched on a branch, it needs to be in the air.

Management is the same. It’s messy, you’ve got to grapple in the mud, but that’s where the learning takes place, through experimentation and implementation. We can’t expect perfection either – if we do, we are setting ourselves up for failure. instead, we’ve got to dispassionately observe our own trial and error, gathering data.

Getting the information together is the “what?” part of the process, the reflection is the “so what?” part. The answers you get lead to the plan, which is the “now what?” part. It’s a dynamic process because maybe what you thought was the problem wasn’t the problem at all, maybe the questions you asked gave you answers you didn’t expect and so the circle continues, because each time you apply a new plan, you observe and suffer the consequences – or enjoy the benefits – of it and adapt accordingly.

It’s literally how we evolve as humans and as businesses. In the process, we recalibrate those internal algorithms which are based on our experiences and update the mental maps of the terrain we must traverse.

Free your tortoise mind: epiphanies through slow, contemplative thinking

Active, conscious target-driven and analytical reflection is something that happens almost every day, whether we are aware of it or not, but there’s another kind that is just as important. It is a more contemplative form of reflection that is probably closer to the meditative reflection of monks, quietening the hare brain – that classic problem-solving way of thinking – to allow the tortoise mind to connect dots, see patterns and bring forth epiphanies, as described by British psychologist Guy Claxton.

It is a vital injunction to let the problem marinade in our brains, to let new understanding come to us, rather than trying to aggressively hot-house a solution. Too many of us don’t like doing this because we fear what will emerge, which is perfectly understandable. We need to test our assumptions – which are our cherished babies – whether they are the ones that informed our short-term decisions this year or the ones that underly our long-term strategies. The maps of our terrains are shifting all the time, we must continually recalibrate them to ensure that they are accurate.

Breaking free: confronting assumptions to unlock your growth

The biggest test of all is to free ourselves of assumptions that might be imprisoning us, and we can’t even see them because we have done everything in our power this year – and probably years before – to keep the tortoise mind tucked into its shell and locked away in a cupboard.

This isn’t an easy process – none of it is, because some of our decisions will have had profound consequences and altering them now might unlock another Pandora’s Box of consequences, but that is why we reflect and continue to reflect as new data enters the equation. It seems sometimes we fear growth and success more than stagnation and irrelevance.

Ultimately, the choice comes down to whether you can afford to go on as you are or decide to change course now. Face a little discomfort and see the new directions beyond what you fear – trust the process; trust yourself. Your mind is set up to deal with complexity even if you think you aren’t. We have the time right now as one year draws to a close and another begins to do exactly that and lean into the process.

If you’ve never done it before, it might be the best gift you have ever given yourself to think a little deeper about your business, the society you live in, the life you live, and yourself and how they all fit together or find out why they don’t. DM

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Opinionistas

1. Escape the bias trap: why reflection matters now more than ever