A fundamental challenge for leaders today is to reset and refocus their organizations to move with hope and confidence into an uncertain future. Elegance is a framework that facilitates that journey.  With elegance, one can embrace beauty and fluidity while eschewing waste and complication. As you examine assumptions and surface innovative alternatives, ask yourself, “Is this the most elegant option?” Go in search of elegance and you may just find an age-old goal: excellence.

Dr. Marcus has been a frequent commentator in the media on these issues, including in this piece for USA Today and this one for the Washington Post.

Listen to the full program here.

The authors at Harvard Law School
Rose Lincoln Photo

You’re It: Crisis, Change, and How to Lead When it Matters Most is the latest book from CML principals Leonard Marcus, Eric McNulty, Joseph Henderson, and Barry Dorn. To be published by PublicAffairs Books, You’re It distills more fifteen years of field research and teaching into a highly readable, highly practical guide to leading effectively in high-stress, high-pressure situations as well as in more routine environments. The book features stories from the Boston Marathon bombing response, Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and H1N1 pandemic as well as lessons from corporate start-ups and turnarounds. It is full of pragmatic tools and proven techniques derived from observing leaders at their best (and worst). Pre-ordering is now available.

Read the full article at the Journal of Leadership Studies.

From becoming locked in a narrow view to failure at self-care, there are numerous potential traps for those trying to lead through a “You’re It” moment. With the right mindset and tools, those snares can be turned into opportunities to excel.

Read the full article at Domestic Preparedness Journal.

The meta-leadership concept continues to evolve. The team learns both from research with leaders in the field as they prepare for and respond to crises as well as from participants in classes, workshops, and seminars. Fresh insights have been gathered by observing and interviewing leaders during and immediately after incidents, including: responses to the H1N1, Ebola, and Zika outbreaks; the Deepwater Horizon oil spill; the Hurricane Sandy landfall; and the Boston Marathon bombings. Many of these response leaders have completed meta-leadership training, providing opportunities to field test ideas and practices. Likewise, the research team has expanded, now including Eric McNulty, Richard Serino, and other researchers and faculty. With all that, the team has undertaken a “reboot” of the original concepts and their applications. Welcome to Meta-Leadership 2.0.

Meta-leadership was conceived as a conceptual framework and practice method particularly applicable to leaders expected to influence a wide range of stakeholders, including those over whom they have no direct authority. For example, during a large complex disaster, subject matter experts must persuade political officials and executives, the general public, as well as leaders of other organizations to achieve effective coordination and collaboration. The necessary connectivity of effort includes agencies across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Since 2006, the degree of difficulty in accomplishing these linkages has increased; the threat environment has grown more complex; and the expectations of the public to ensure their safety and security has intensified. Leadership practices can explain many of the differences between response successes and disappointments.

Read the full article at Domestic Preparedness Journal.

Becoming too entrenched in your own position can lead to blind spots resulting from cognitive biases and positional prejudice — the same situation can look quite different when viewed through the lens of finance versus that of legal or marketing. The actual conditions are likely more nuanced and complex than can be seen from any one position alone. If your goal truly is the best outcome for your organization, your associates, your customers, and your investors, it pays to learn how to argue and critique properly and productively.

The Walk in the Woods, a methodology originally developed by Cambridge Meta-Leadership principals for conflict resolution, is equally useful for encouraging healthy debate and productive collaboration. Discipline around the process helps teams elicit numerous ideas, critique them constructively, and find common ground around the most promising. The process helps focus on which is the best idea rather than whose idea is best — the first step to a better outcome.

Read the full post.

Swarm Intelligence in nature can help inform leader behaviors

This post by Dr. Lenny Marcus originally appeared at NatGeo.com.

In the course of our research on leaders of the Boston Marathon Bombings Response, we discovered an extraordinary phenomenon. Though many people took charge of aspects of the response, no one official was in command of it all, including the range of law enforcement, medical and recovery activities.  Boston’s leaders set a tone of remarkable collaboration and inter-agency leveraging amongst one another. Competitiveness, ego driven behavior, and flamboyant credit taking – often present in large crises involving many jurisdictions and agencies – were not significant factors.

We discovered in this research a phenomenon akin to “Swarm Intelligence,” a term coined to explain natural phenomena – such as birds flying and fish schooling – that allow for remarkable achievements when no one is in charge or directing overall activity.  It requires all to follow the same rules and principles, though they may not be explicit.  In Boston, Swarm Intelligence shaped order without control.

Five leadership principles and rules emerged during the Boston Marathon Bombings Response. While these principles may appear logical and self-evident, adherence is remarkably difficult during a high stakes crisis with its penetrating emotions and uncertainties.

In brief, the five principles are:

1. Unity of Mission
2. Staying in One’s Lane
3. No Ego, No Blame
4. Generosity of Spirit and Action
5. A Foundation of Trust-based Relationships

They are explored in greater detail in the full post. Cambridge Meta-Leadership principals are engaged in on-going research to deepen their understanding of how the scholarly work on Collectivistic Leadership can be linked to the insights derived from swarm intelligence to help leaders achieve more robust and resilient connectivity that improves outcomes.

A public memorial after the Boston bombings

I spent several hours watching the first House hearing on the Boston bombings last week. Witnesses included retired Senator Joe Lieberman, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, MA Undersecretary for Homeland Security Kurt Schwartz, and USC professor Erroll Southers. Watch and make your own judgements about this specific hearing. What is important for meta-leaders is to understand the three phases of crisis narrative:

The anticipatory narrative comes before the incident. It is largely shaped by the professional preparedness and response community and captures what they think will happen and how they plan to respond should the worst occur. It is largely invisible to the public. This scenario planning is used to allocate and justify resources as well as to shape both strategic and tactical plans.  In Boston, special events have long been used as opportunities to exercise crisis plans. Richard Serino, former head of Boston EMS and now deputy administrator of FEMA, was a vocal advocate for such planning and much of the success of the Boston response can be tied back to a decade of interagency training and exercises based on such scenarios.

The reactive narrative unfolds during the incident. It is composed on the information flowing in real time, parts of which will amplified by the media. It can include fact as well as speculation. The reactive narrative is shaped by statements by officials, witness accounts, pundit commentary, social media chatter, and more. There may be many versions until there is enough confirmed information to constitute a generally accepted account.

The legacy narrative is the story of how the event will be remembered and judged. Congressional hearings are an important part of the legacy narrative: sometimes they capture important, revealing testimony; at other times they showcase cheap political potshots. In either case, they are a foundational element of the historical record along with books and long-form journalism pieces that are written after the event. The legacy narrative will be mined for academic inquiry as well as political advantage for years and, in some cases, decades.

In this hearing, Lieberman led off the testimony and lost no time in labeling the Boston bombings a failure of the intelligence agencies. He believed that it could, and should, have been prevented. As a longtime Beltway insider, Lieberman was clearly intentional in influencing the legacy narrative. He said that his standard was no successful terrorist incidents ever again on U.S. soil. Anything short of that is unacceptable to him and, he implied, should be for the American public as well. Lieberman no longer seeks public office so it may be safe for him to hold others to a standard of perfection. His goal may have been to catalyze increased vigilance or to tarnish the Obama administration. I will let others judge his motives.

Leaders still active in their careers should be wary of the temptation to offer a perfect future as salve to a wounded public or anxious press corps. As colleague Juliette Kayyem of the Harvard’s Kennedy School counsels, “never say never again” because that is a standard outside of a leader’s control. Leaders should also be aware that the legacy narrative can take on a life of its own and may or may not remain tethered to one’s own anticipatory or reactive narratives. Lieberman’s testimony gathered the greatest attention in press coverage of the hearing and will likely echo for some time to come.

Davis and Schwartz were much more positive in their testimony. They saw the response to the event as a success. Most judge it to have been remarkable: survivors were dispersed effectively to area hospitals.  No one who was taken to a hospital died. Law enforcement agencies collaborated effectively and with minimal acrimony. Their legacy narrative is tied tightly to the anticipatory narrative that they knew well: yes, the event was horrific but professional responders and the public acted heroically and competently. Lives were saved. The response went as planned.

Failure or success? It depends upon your perspective, your concerns, and your reference points. The lesson is for leaders, particularly those operating in or near a political environment, to acknowledge and attend to all three phases of the narrative of crisis. Tell your story or someone else will tell it for you.