Agile thinking in times of uncertainty

By Caryn Skinner, Co-Director of Sharpstone Skinner

“Several times lately, I have finished my work, closed the laptop and sat staring out of the window of my spare room office worrying that I don’t have the answers. That my team are looking to me for guidance about the future…and I simply don’t know.” Paul Jackson-Cole, Executive Director of Engagement, Parkinson’s UK

A genuine, honest reflection from an impressive and successful leader. He has gravitas, is trusted and a great coach to his senior reports. He is also highly intuitive, with an innate ability to be a pioneering visionary who can then work with others to ground that vision into reality. And yet, he is stuck. He still has his instincts, yet with the world, in flux, he is finding it hard to convince his team to go with him because they need more tangible evidence to ground his ideas.

Gut-feel judgement is part of agile thinking which is a crucial leadership skill. In the financial world you may have finely honed other types of thinking as you need to show evidence, use data and put forward your thoughts in a rational way.

Agile thinking has five main features:

Systems thinking – investigating an issue from a broad perspective to understand the interdependencies

Possibility thinking – to be open-minded and generate a wide range of possibilities, the classic brainstorm

Logical analysis – to reach valid conclusions using clear, rational logic

Evidence-based thinking – identify core issues by analysing evidence from relevant resources

The fifth one is gut-feel judgement – relying on your gut instincts to provide valuable input for decisions.

Richard Branson says, “I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics”, and he’s not done too badly.

Mr Branson may make you shudder though, as it is quite an extreme view. Most of us use all or a few of them combined. Yet in this world of unknowns, your instincts may need to be more finely tuned. It isn’t easy to find evidence and interdependencies if we have never been in this situation before. Rational logic needs something tangible to test it against, the world feels nebulous at the moment. Being open-minded looks like a good option yet can get stifled because the possibilities are almost endless.

Here are some ways to tap into and use your gut-feel judgement:

1. Know that your instincts are not woolly ideas but based on your years of experience. The thought has come from somewhere, an experience you have had, something you have read a conversation you had with a colleague.
2. Feed and grow your instincts. The more exposure you have to your market the harder your instincts will work. Keep getting out and about, visit your people, talk to them, learn from them about the front-line challenges and successes.
3. See your business through the eyes of your customer or client. Why do they like doing business with you, what would they like you to do better and does your business align with their needs.

Make your own observations about what’s next for your business rather than staring at spreadsheets of cold data. I heard about a trader who regularly walks the shops to see what’s selling and what isn’t, it informed her instinct about where the next investments might be.

4. Keep in touch with the world around you, tune into what’s coming over the horizon. A client of ours was in marketing for a bank, he regularly spoke to his teenage nieces and nephews about how they communicated, how many digital “languages” they spoke and which social platform they used for what. They were his future customers and the conversations fuelled his instincts in discussions with the senior team around the bank going online and changing the way they communicated with customers.
5. Trust your gut then test it against other types of thinking to ground it and help you sell it in. Others may not get your vision so painting the picture for them with more solid evidence will make your job easier.

It is an exciting area of leadership and one that, perhaps, has been overlooked in a world that can access evidence, stats and data at the swipe of a screen.

Next time you find yourself staring out of your home office window, let your thoughts wander, don’t evaluate them or crush any ideas that come to you, it might be that your gut is trying to tell you something.