Leadership in a Post-Covid World: Where Learning Beats Knowingby Bill Fischer

After a hundred years, we are once again fighting a world viral conflict that is seemingly everywhere and ever devouring. As with the Spanish Flu pandemic, once again we’ve been found wanting in our response, and inadequate in our leadership. What’s worked, social distancing and hand-washing, were relatively simple techniques born decades ago. Where we have disappointed has been in simple leadership sciences such as inspiration, vision, interest, inclusiveness and curiosity. In the worst situations, formal managers have proved unaware, failed to listen to advice, needed confidence and decisiveness, and all too often abdicated their leadership roles. This was not leadership at its finest, and “were having” paid a ponderous rate in excessive lives lost and impact on all “peoples lives”. What is even more alarming is that covid-1 9 is not likely to be the last of the potentially catastrophic challenges that we will face over the coming few decades. It is clearly a wake-up call to reassess leadership from top to bottom.

Drucker Forum 2020

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” taking place on October 29& 30, 2020 in Vienna, Austria .# Druckerforum

Interrelated themes

Two key interrelated themes run through the current Covid-1 9 crisis that must be addressed if leadership is to have credibility in the future. The first is recognizing that learning is more important than knowing. The basin of insight, so often taken for granted, is actually contextually-dependent, and perishable in crisis situations. The second topic is that innovation, change in general, is a seriously social phenomenon. Technologies be insufficient. It is people who need to be inspired be involved in the often bothersome struggle against cataclysmic environmental challenges.

Learning , not knowing

In a crisis, learning becomes more important than knowing, particularly because what we know may have lost its relevance as a result of the crisis.

Openness, an awareness of new ideas, and a willingness to quickly experiment with them, is something that Peter Drucker recognized in his work on The Effective Executive, when he reminded us that we are all “knowledge workers” and are expected to replenish the working knowledge capital of our organizations as effectively as we managed traditional working capital. Scalable learning is to crises as scalable efficiencies were to profit-harvesting in grow, slow-moving industries. Merely scalable memorize is much faster in cadence and does not have the potential benefits of an established learning infrastructure as is in most massive, complex organizations.

Learning is social

Making all of this work remains an intensely social phenomenon. Small, autonomous, fast-moving crews, close to the action appears to be the organizational form most appropriate for the improvised alternatives that are so often necessary. But this only occupations if lead characters are shared from the top. Emergence will replace directedness in shaping the organizational structure, and Strategy will fade in usefulnes. Both will defer to tricks which are faster moving and more experimental. We also envision organizational bounds blurring and ecosystems prospering in the pursuit of collaborative learning. All of these things are vital to effective responses in the unknown, but all of these require a rethinking of conventional leader practices.

About the Author: Bill Fischer is Professor of Innovation Management, at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland.

This article is one in the Drucker Forum “shape the debate” series relating to the 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” taking place on October 29& 30, 2020 in Vienna, Austria .# Druckerforum

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