The Leader’s Framework for Decision Making by David J. Snowden and Mary E. Boone
Harvard Business Review November 2007
This article provides a really nice connection between complexity theory and leadership, suggesting that different styles of leadership are needed for varying contexts:
- Simple contexts (Domain of Best Practices) – the realm of the “known knowns” – calls for leaders to sense, categorize and respond. Established answers exist and just need to be accessed. A command and control style works best. (There are very few simple contexts within current business environments).
- Complicated contexts (Domain of Experts) – the realm of the “known unknowns” – calls for leaders to sense, analyze and respond. Like the simple context, things are ordered and there is a direct connection between causes and effects. A leadership style of listening to experts and encouraging dissenting perspectives works best.
- Complex contexts ( Domain of Emergence) – the realm of the “unknown unknowns” – calls for leaders to probe first, then sense and respond. This is the realm in which answers are emergent and the whole is more than the sum of the parts. A leadership style of experimentation, patience and openness to emergent answers works best. This is the most common context in the contemporary environment.
- Chaotic contexts (Domain of Rapid Response) – realm of the “unknowables” – calls for leaders to act first to establish order, then to sense and respond. Chaotic environments are also the source of innovation if attention can be focused both on crisis management and creativity.
“Truly adaptive leaders know not only how to identify the context they’re working in but also how to change their behavior to match.”
“In the complex environment of the current business world, leaders often will be called upon to act against their instincts. They will need to know when to share power and when to look to the wisdom of the group and when to take their own counsel. A deep understanding of context, the ability to embrace complexity and paradox, and a willingness to flexibly change leadership style will be required for leaders who want to make things happen in a time of increasing uncertainty.”
These two quotes cause me to reflect upon our experiences at CHD. We had a number of crises over the years, from staff unrest and public relations challenges to serious budget cuts. At those times, we instinctively recognized the need to change our leadership style and to impose much more direction and “top-down” decision making than was our norm. We also considered those times of crisis to be opportunities for change and we accomplished some amazing changes in quickly during these times of chaos. Some of the operating principles during these critical times were:
- Clarity of decision making. Crises called for crisis management and in those times we declared that our normal decision parameters were being suspended or modified. Key decisions were centralized with the CEO and later with the Admin Council.
- Transparency and open communications. We made an effort to share as much information as possible and to be clear when it was necessary to temporarily withhold information. We had frequent meetings to share information and regularly shared written updates and background documents.
- Request involvement. We solicited ideas and asked for work groups to take on research and analysis tasks and to make recommendations to the decision makers.
- Declare the end of a crisis. Since our decision making processes changed and power became more centralized during crises, it was always important to remind everyone (leaders included) that this was a temporary situation and to explicitly declare the crisis over as soon as possible to return to more normal processes.
- Acknowledge the situation. Don’t minimize or avoid the pain and the challenges. As much as possible, externalize the source of the problem and ask for patience, trust and understanding as we dealt with it. This was important to minimize the internal finger pointing and defensiveness. And it was always an test of how much trust and open communication we had developed.
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