Imagine for a moment, that you’re driving home from work in a heavy rain with limited visibility. You turn on the head lamp and speeds up the wiper, your vision improved and you get to see 15-feet further. You can sense tension easing up in you. Yet anxiety looms, as you’re ruminating if the route you’ve chosen will eventually lead to a standstill traffic due to road hazard. You finally turned on Waze, with its advanced technology, u get to see the route and it even recommends which route leads you home while avoiding unnecessary hazards. Even as you drive slowly, you still drive with higher sense of certainty, despite the rain creating uncertainty, you’re clearer on what you need to do to achieve your goal with higher sense of control.

While we may not have a direct equivalent of Waze to equip our Talents to perform at work, we can help them to upgrade the way they think and view, to get greater Clarity amidst higher complexity and confusion of the highly disruptive and uncertain world.

Source: Future of Jobs Report 2020, World Economic Forum

In October 2020, World Economic Forum released the Future Jobs Report, documenting the top 10 skills to equip our talent for 2025. Interestingly, 5 of the top 10 skills are skills connected to thinking. As an organization that specializes in thinking skills and innovation, we often receive queries, on what is the difference between the different thinking methods – to name a few; analytical thinking, critical thinking, strategic thinking, creative thinking, system thinking, design thinking etc. Essentially thinking is our mental process for us to get clarity on our options to reach our goals. If our leaders can facilitate the conversation around the complexities, uncertainty and pathfinding to opportunity, one can pivot the team through innovation and clear direction.

In 2020, the pandemic showed how important these skills are, as COVID sends countries into lockdown, technology changing the landscape of business, teams being forced to work remotely, smart organizations took advantage of this to turn these challenges into profitable opportunities – changing business process and growing new markets and ways to reach customers.

Whereas those who just joined the herd late, when the dust has settled, and opportunities are “clear and obvious” eventually discovered that they are late in the game and are caught unprepared, such as the latecomers to the glove industry in 2021, with rapidly declining demand, and high inventory with many new entrants, global average selling price (ASP) tumbled with high cost of raw material. A clear thinking would have eased the cloud of confusion and fluttering emotions.

Some of the skills that help Leaders to Lead from Clarity and Translating that for their team are:

• Ability to discern, and ask the right question

• Critically think and analyse complexity to break it into manageable parts

• Analyse the parts to come to key conclusions

• Strategic Awareness of emerging trends, opportunity, challenges and what’s feasible

• Creative thinking and use the right innovation process to arrive a solutions

• Decision making to evaluate considerations, requirement and conclusions, while being conscious of personal and organizational bias

• Ability to Facilitate these thinking process with their team

• Ability to communicate context, solution and decisions with clarity and influence

Leaders are not born, they are made. Each of the above is are skills, that can be developed.

If you’re keen to find our more, on how to develop your talents to be able to Lead from Certainty, feel free to write to us now to schedule a free consultation with our specialist.