While we’re still on the topic of leadership: I think it’s very important for leaders to have vision:
- Foresight (looking to the future):
- Being absolutely clear about where organisations/departments are at present, both in terms of their achievements and their uselessness, especially when pitted against other organisations or departments (i.e. Insightful Foresight).
- Being perceptive with regard to where their organisation or department needs to go to be less useless and more successful.
- Insight (looking at the present):
- Being nimble enough to:
- Realise that everything has the potential to go wrong and potentially blow up in one’s face, and
- Make changes on the fly, even if it means retracting a prior decision that has proven to be useless and putting something meaningful in its place, at the risk of meeting with resistance from others (i.e. Insightful Hindsight).
- Hindsight (looking at the past):
- Being reflective enough to consider whether anything is going wrong, and
- If something has gone wrong, being humble enough to admit this and then working on fixing the problem so that it doesn’t happen again (i.e. Reflective Foresight).
Of course, all smart-alecky material is nothing without a smart-alecky diagram to go along with it, so here you go:
