Integer Leadership Consulting

The artcile begins with the byline…“Despite Warnings, Officials Say There Wasn’t Clear Plan For a New Orleans Disaster. Bush: Recovery To ‘Take Years’

“Nearly three days after Hurricane Katrina blasted past New Orleans, federal officials announced a broad mobilization of government aid to assist nearly four million people in devestated areas of Louisiana and Mississippi. But the storm is exposing serious failures by government leaders and crises planners before Katrina’s arrival and flawed execution by relief agencies as the disaster unfolded. Despite decades of repeated warnings about a breach of levees or failure of drainage systems…..local and federal officials now concede there weren’t sufficient preparations for dealing with a catastrophe of this scale. “

The expression “the storm is exposing serious failures…” caught my eye. Leaders area asked to be intuitive thinkers. They are asked to be, according to Robert Greenleaf, people who possess foresight. This means that effective leaders are thinking continually about different alternatives, possible scenarios, variable outcomes BEFORE they actually take place. They are seldom, if ever, unprepared for crises because they have already considered the possibility of an emerging crises and thought through how they would lead if that crises were to unfold. Compare this to leaders who fail to exercise foresight. They refuse to think through unpleasent scenarios believing that the likelihood of such a scenario actually taking place is exceedingly rare.

Those federal officials in charge of disaster relieaf, those charged with crises contingency planning “apparently” failed to exercise enough forsight to keep New Orleans from deteriorating into a malstrom of anger and anarchy in the wake of Katrina.

Lessons for leadership are very clear. First, discipline yourself to necessarily factor in the most unpleasent of scenarios and their resultants. If a leader is aware of what is possible, a leader will be preapred for (as opposed to being surprised by) the most inhospitable of outcomes. Second, because of number one above, leaders are therefore aware of available resources and prepared to bring those critical resources to the most urgent of situations. Third, leaders prepare their teams for these contingincies. They share their knowledge with those who are in positions of influence and leadeship. Fourth, leaders and teams understand the risk associated with failing to apply the appropriate resources in a reasonsable time frame. Fifth, leaders cause significant systemic damage throughout the organization by their failure to exercise foresight. Not thinking with foresight is not only about what a leader fails to do, it is ultimately about the damage done to both people and organizations. There are always personal and professional “Katrinas” looming just beyond the horizon. It is a fact of leadership and of life. Leaders…be ready and prepared.

Finally, another “window” into the matter of leadership foresight comes from the word, Prescience, which means to know beforehand…to anticipate the course of events before they actually happen. Prescience is not predicting but rather thinking enough about possible future outcomes that one is reasonably confident that most possibilities have been examined and considered. Effective leaders are those who exercise Prescience.

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