Stand Out as a New Leader by Managing Your Thinking

In a keynote address, a corporate executive urged a prestigious high school faculty to prepare their students for the uncertainty they will face in their future working lives:

“In business — and in industry, government, and institutions — in the world outside this campus, nobody defines your assignment. And you almost never get a grade. There are rewards for a job well done — raises, perks, eventual prestige and position; but those come with less frequency, perhaps, than they do in school. This can provoke frustration, particularly in younger people unfamiliar with the anxiety of navigating uncharted territory without specific and certain directions and in the face of continual, accelerating change. Please help your students learn how to find out what to do by themselves. Help them learn how to operate independently.”

In organizations, how do individuals distinguish themselves as new leaders? First, they search out problems that need solving and have been overlooked by everyone else. Second, they solve problems for which there are no set procedure: They’ve never seen such a problem before and may never see it again. 

In business, industry, and their personal lives, people encounter two very different kinds of problems and decisions. The first kind is more “programmed” with solutions based on rigorous training on the job or in school, experience, analytical skills, and knowledge of rules and procedures pre-designed to handle similar situations. In organizations like manufacturing, people are taught analytical tools which are focused on improving the cost, efficiency, and quality in existing operational processes and learned programs. The second kind are “non-programmed”  and require the use of imagination. They have never been encountered before and have no pre-set rules and procedures to guide their handling and are often caused by changing circumstances. Such problems are less structured, unpredictable, and ambiguous as to “what is wanted”. The main challenge is often to discover and define “what is wanted” because nobody really knows. Sensing, anticipating, and defining the problem is more difficult than solving it.

Skills in both of the above kinds of problems are vital for effective performance. Our traditional formal training and education addresses the more “programmed” kind of problems. We tend to learn formulas, problem “types”, rules, and procedures. But what about “non-programmed” problems, those that have never been encountered before and have no pre-set rules and procedures to guide their handling?