Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.
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Thought of the Week
“The problem you’re solving isn’t ‘change’.
The problem is generating in others the courage required to enter uncertainty, and the effort and energy required to stay there until we all reach the other side.
It’s a leadership problem”
Jim Lawless
This week I was invited by my friends at PepTalk to deliver a webinar:
Strategy Into Action — Leading Through Uncertainty.
I’ve spent over 20 years helping leaders and organisations deliver ambitious, high-stakes goals and navigate the uncertainty, disruption, and change that come with them.
In the webinar, I took the audience behind the scenes of that work and placed two of the practical frameworks I use with leadership teams, the Second Strategy and the DARE Loop, into their wider context as tools of strategic execution at scale.
We ran out of time before I could get to all the questions. So, this week, I’m turning the newsletter over to the ones that didn’t get answered. I hope they’re useful for you.
Theo — If you had to achieve a big goal in one year’s time, what would you do in the first two weeks?
I would spend the first two weeks using the DARE Loop, understanding the Actions required to deliver the Result in one year. Almost immediately, I would discover that I don’t know all of them — and that I need help. So, inevitably, I would also be building some sort of team or network. AI would certainly be in that network.
Having sought advice on what those actions are, and what new habits need to enter my schedule to deliver the goal, I would then do the thing most people avoid: I would change my calendar. This makes everybody’s Tiger roar because we like to please people and avoid conflict. So it is unpopular. Meaning the Actions cannot be done and the goal fails.
Change happens across four dimensions — mindset, skillset, relationships, and calendar.
There will almost certainly be elements across all four that need to shift for me before the goal becomes a genuine possibility. I need to identify the work on all four elements.
Change happens in your calendar. These two weeks are the time to design the future: through action in your calendar.
What are my most effective actions? Can I do these things excellently within my current workload? What will block me from success if I don’t deal with it now?
Alexander — Many leaders are facing constant uncertainty around AI, geopolitics, and economic conditions. How does the DARE Loop apply when the future is genuinely unclear?
The DARE Loop is designed specifically for environmental volatility and uncertainty – and also to demonstrate to us when we need to enter uncertainty voluntarily.
So whether you need to change course because the Strait of Hormuz just closed or you need to personally commit to the uncertainty of trying to bring in a different kind of client you’ve not attracted before to double your salary: you can use the DARE Loop
Uncertainty means there is no right answer. So you can either take a best guess and go hard – or act as a rabbit in the headlights and hope.
The DARE Loop demands that you identify your Result – so you cannot be a rabbit. You identify the Result you want to achieve. (That may be research for greater certainty – it may be a clear commercial outcome).
To achieve a Result you need to consider the potential Actions that may get you there – or consciously not Act (wait for events to unfold). So now you need to gather evidence and take a Decision.
As there is no right answer, you are testing your thinking, you must not relax and settle upon the course you adopted. It may well be catastrophic. So you seek data, continue scanning the horizon, and iterate fast – you Evaluate and Loop as fast as data (greater certainty) becomes available.
BUT, for this you need a culture where you can say out loud that there is no correct answer. We spend thousands on ‘uncertainty’ speakers to tell us that geopolitics is a a volatile set of unknown unknowns. And then we still punish people internally for saying there is not ‘correct’ course of action.
And a culture where you can spot a catastrophic decision and change course whilst ALSO congratulating the decision maker for taking calculated decisions and actions in uncertainty – instead of congratulating the rabbit in the headlights. Now we are moving into the Second Strategy.
Martin — What is the one team challenge you see come up over and over again?
Critical parent and compliant (in the room), or rebellious (outside the room), child.
When a team leader retains control, requires decisions to be taken by them, and in doing so trains the team that they are not to be trusted and should not use their brains to work, but to predict how to please the boss.
Change happens at the speed of trust. In this scenario, it needs to be built from the ground up before we can perform.
The initial cost is speed. The second cost is performance. The third cost is intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is central to the knowledge economy. You cannot carrot and stick somebody to think harder.
Intrinsic motivation dies when autonomy is killed off. Now you enter an extrinsic motivation, carrot-and-stick situation. Now the boss complains of overwhelm of course, because they are taking every decision and are, by their own design, overwhelmed.
James — How should leaders respond when they’re being asked to lead change they don’t yet fully believe in?
With positive intent, courageous challenge and intelligent questions.
The word “cascade” needs to be removed from our change vocabulary (other than for processes). If a leader has change cascaded upon them and must cascade it in turn, we have already failed.
Each leader needs to understand, and desire, the change deeply enough to define it for their area — to own it and lead it with their team, rather than ‘cascading the deck’.
If a leader doesn’t believe in the change, they have a responsibility to go find out what it is all about. They are being paid to lead, after all.
If that is genuinely too high risk for the leader, we may have a much bigger problem to address than the change plan.
David — What is the main takeaway from your first marathon?
That everybody who tells you “if you can run a half, you can run a full” is telling fibs!
I could run a half — and did so reasonably well. It turned out that running a full requires considerably more training.
My other takeaways were that the London crowds are extraordinary and that the amount raised for good causes by the people running that race is astronomical.
Supporting Together for Short Lives was a tremendous honour, and we raised a lot of money together.
Jill — If I want to step outside my comfort zone, what would you recommend as the first step?
Know why. What’s in it for you? Not in a mercenary sense, but in the deepest sense. What does crossing that line mean to you?
Then find either a good friend or a professional in the field, if you need tuition, to stand alongside you: give you confidence when you feel wobbly; hold you to account when your unwillingness to say ‘no’ to your old comfort zone calendar commitments means you are becoming flakey.
Take baby steps. You do not have to terrify yourself on day one. By the time I was diving to 100 metres, it was no further outside of my comfort zone than my first dive to five metres had been. The increments are what make the extraordinary feel, eventually, manageable and possible.
And remember: discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It is often a sign that something important is happening.
We are conditioned to believe that a good life is one in which we avoid fear, uncertainty and awkwardness. Yet almost everything worthwhile sits on the other side of those feelings. The goal is not to eliminate discomfort; it is to become willing to move forward despite it.
That’s all for this week. It’s quite long enough without hearing about my fortnight or book recommendation. But to those who drop me a lovely line about what is going on: some fabulous half term family fun was had along with some stimulating work adventures with highly fascinating people delivering complex projects.
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions — and to PepTalk for the invitation to deliver the session.
If any of this has landed and you’d like to explore what it might mean for your team or organisation, you know where to find me!
Write your story 🖋️
Jim
