Becoming A Vigilant Leader

Successfully Navigating Digital Turbulence

The convergence of digital technologies is contributing to more instability and greater uncertainty in every organization. Vigilant organizations create more customer and shareholder value than competitors because they pursue a higher number of viable responses to digital turbulence. See Sooner – Act Faster gives leaders a powerful toolkit to improve corporate foresight, develop future-oriented scenarios and make better investments in strategic options.

A key principle for responding to digital turbulence means increasing the organization’s readiness to take action when the timing is right. Through this Sprint, leaders will learn how to implement a system of vigilance, and master new approaches for sensing, probing and interpreting weak signals in the external environment.

Readiness also requires new attitudes. Leaders must determine to shift their attention to outside-in perspectives in order to overcome tunnel vision, shortsightedness, and willful blindness. They’ll discover how to develop diverse perspectives by seeing the organization through the eyes of customers, competitors and other external stakeholders. They’ll interrogate current practices, use bold questions
to challenge the status quo, and investigate anomalies falling outside the organization’s normal operating patterns. From those insights, they’ll develop hypotheses to drive experimentation and learning, and define possible future scenarios.

As leaders amplify weak signals, seek diverse perspectives, facilitate information sharing, and develop stories about possible futures, they create new strategic options and put the organization in a much stronger position to take timely action.