A 2020 vision: the year of acuity?

In 1982 when the British film-maker Ridley Scott created his masterpiece Blade Runner, he set his dystopian vision of the future in the year 2019.  The film is set in a technologically super-advanced but climate-change decimated Los Angeles.  It opens with an extreme close-up of an eye, examined by the titular Blade Runner, Rick Deckard, whose job is to track down a fugitive group of synthetic humans. He is unaware that he is similarly bio-engineered by the same ‘maker’. 

The film explores powerful themes of personal identity, mortality and the dangers of Big Tech.  It explores a world teetering on the edge of some dreadful oblivion, a society wrought with discord and uncertainty about what is true and what is genuine; what is fake and what is real. 

A vision of 2019 we might find uncomfortably familiar? 

 

A dystopian's delight or the best year in human history?

While the lens of social media is less of an accurate truth tool than Deckard’s rudimentary eye-exam, any time online over the past few years has been a dystopian’s delight.  But are things really so bad? 

Not according to the national newspaper columnist Matt Ridley. Writing in The Spectator before Christmas, he enthusiastically trumpeted that we are “living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history”.

He wrote: “Extreme poverty has fallen below 10% of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60% when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.” 

But the more common mode of news and political commentary in 2019 was of a society that makes Deckard’s world seem noble and full of conviction.

We woke most days to political aggro, global warming, Extinction Rebellion, hypersonic missiles, rogue bosses, big-tech truth manipulation and global tax avoidance.  If nothing else, the teenage years of this century have felt exhausting, emotional and marked by much slamming of doors.

What then for 2020?  What will the New Year and the start of a new decade bring, particularly for the business leader, charged with energising and engaging their team? We already have great expectations from our business leaders and increasingly require more. Not merely management competence, but a raft of leadership characteristics.

A colleague recently shared with me an article about the qualities required for good leadership: a detailed matrix of some 31 essential qualities.  Another shared a coherent argument for a ’mere’ 24 levels of leadership. 

Even the edited highlights can seem overwhelming.  We want our leaders to be honest and fair, as well as tech-savvy and purposeful, but also to be rigorous decision-makers, who demonstrate agility, humility and authenticity, while exercising their curiosity in wrestling with the demands of a VUCA world.

Despite an already onerous leadership development in-tray, in 2020, I am proposing adding another essential quality to the list. Given the evidence of the past decade, great leaders in the 2020s will be those who can demonstrate acuity. 

 

What does acuity mean for leaders?

Acuity is, in itself, a lovely word.  Seldom used, it’s short, easily misspelled and packed full of richness and meaning.  The OED defines it as “a sharpness, or keenness of thought, vision, or hearing”.

But the applications of the word are much broader, suggesting acuteness of perception, increased sensitivity or sharpness, an exactitude and fine discernment of receptivity both in vision and aurally. 

The concept is not meant to lead to managers forming a queue outside their local opticians (though I have very personal reasons for knowing the value of a regular sight check) but a broader call for greater attentiveness in how leaders perceive, interpret and describe the world to others.  Notice that unlike many leadership qualities it works in both ‘broadcast’ and ‘receipt’ mode?  Leaders need to hear with acuity, as well as being able to share clearly their thoughts and vision with others. 

Developing leadership acuity makes much sense in a world investing in big data, artificial intelligence and contending with 24-hour news feeds, customer feedback and analytics overload.  But discernment of what is valuable and what is just more noise represents an extraordinary challenge for all of us – not just the modern leader. 

Others have already spotted the implications ahead of me. In a world where big data nudges behaviour, fake news is endemic and belief in ‘expert authority’ is at an historic low, at the heart of the issue is a matter of trust.

 

Acuity and the trust conundrum

How do you establish, build and re-engender trust in teams and organisations?  It is a particular challenge for internal HR and Communications functions, who have in recent years adopted a more ‘strategic role’, resulting in a move to corporate speak, jargon and sloganeering, at the expense of facilitating honest, open, two-way conversations between employers and employees.

If you can't trust those in charge, who can you trust?  From government to business, banks to the BBC, trust in institutions and their leaders seems to be at an all-time low.  But there is hope, in discerning the signs and signals differently and leaders need to understand these. 

Rachel Botsman’s terrific book Who Can You Trust? reveals that a new world order is emerging where, while we may have lost faith in institutions and leaders, we have moved to an age of ‘distributed trust’ where millions of us rent out our homes to total strangers, exchange digital currencies online, or find ourselves following an engaging bot.  We might not trust the media platform, but do we do trust voices and recommendations on that platform.  Navigating this trust conundrum requires a heightened sense of acuity.

For leaders trying to take organisations through rapid change, being perceived as someone of careful discernment can be hugely powerful. Decisions on future strategy, on marketing choices, or a new company purpose need such careful consideration, but also need to be led with verisimilitude and communicated with conviction.

There are ways leaders can role-model such attentiveness and their acuity can be made more obvious for others. For example, those who seem to see the world with greatest clarity appear to invest much time in exploring it through the eyes and ears of others.

 

Reading and reflecting

Books are exemplars themselves of heightened acuity; an author’s carefully crafted, edited and proofed perception, reflection and report on the world they see and feel and share. Former US President Barack Obama continues to share his reading list each year.

“While each of us has plenty that keeps us busy, outlets like literature and art can enhance our lives. They’re the fabric that helps make up a life”, he said. His 2019 list of 19 books is predictable in some ways, but it’s also much more eclectic, challenging, varied and longer than mine.

Various surveys in the US and the UK have shown that while physical book sales rose and fell and rose again in the past decade, our likelihood of actually reading them fell as well. In another dystopian future posed in 1984, George Orwell wrote that “The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

On our learning programmes at London Business School, we aim to make the required reading the very opposite of this. On some programmes, we encourage our executive participants to share examples of their own personal reading or viewing; sharing what inspired them, changed their view of the world, or illuminated a pivotal moment in their lives.

On our Senior Executive Programme (SEP), we explore ideas related to developing greater acuity in a number of different ways. More through serendipity than by deliberate design, we have adopted a kind of Confucian approach. “By three methods we may learn such wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”

So, we encourage real thoughtful reflection; taking leaders back to the beginning of their own leadership journey and exploring where that might still lead. We bring in CEOs we see as role models and unconventional contributors to challenge perspectives and surface the cognitive and international diversity of outlook among our participants.

Finally, we stay closely in touch with our cohorts; building on their learning through their powerfully shared experience with classmates, who often become lifelong friends.

 

Leaders who lead us through the fog

As we enter the next iteration of the roaring 20s, we must prepare for thick fog, heavy mist and smoke to navigate. Amid much noise, discord and a deepening political debate on trust, the acuity leader is most likely to be regarded as a trusted truth-teller through the ways they are seen to visibly behave.

The acuity leader will be seen as accessible and actively engaged in different internal and external forums, well read and connected and comfortable with diversity and dissension. They will leave time to explore ambiguity, but, after some reflection, will communicate a clear, compelling, unambiguous sense of the right ways to navigate the challenges of the future.

It is a very high bar for the already exhausted leader to aspire to. But the reward will be worth the effort.

Happy New Year.

John Dore is the Programme Director for London Business School’s flagship executive general management programme, the Senior Executive Programme (SEP). The SEP celebrates its 100^th edition in 2020.