Leadership Requires Imagination

Does that mean it has to change?

All the CEOs and senior executives I know feel that the mood in which they work has done has changed—one compared it to ‘being in an asteroid shower’—but few can agree whether the demands of leadership are now fundamentally different. Trust. Good communication. The capacity to motivate an aligned team. Integrity. Delegating and convening open debate. These, they maintain, are the fundamental pillars of leadership and will never alter.

I’m not so sure. One argument in favour of the need to upgrade leadership is that the context in which leadership is practiced has become so much so uncertain. Yet, this remains a notorious area of confusion. After all, one defining aspect of uncertainty is that it is ambiguous and fearsomely difficult to measure. While the IMF’s World Uncertainty Index affirms our sense of fragility, it may be accused of exaggeration if assessed purely from the analysis of media text, where drama will always be at a premium.

Depending on market analysis yields a calmer assessment—but that may be because markets are too anxious and tentative to do much. It might also be that so-called leaders are just sticking to what they know: cutting costs and headcount. This is reassuring for managers, of course, but potentially dangerous in reducing the intellectual capital required for resilience. Cleaving to the status quo, while reassuring, can be a trap. One in which we aren’t calm but becalmed.

A third measure of uncertainty is based on sales forecasts from 1,000 businesses. To my mind, it looks alarmingly complacent and makes me wonder if this is another form of wilful blindness: a mistake I call Russell’s Chicken’s Error, based on Bertrand Russell’s parable of the chicken who behaves the same way every day until the morning that the farmer wrings its neck. If markets, like chickens, assume that history repeats itself, that one good day is predictive of the next, that would speak to an absence of leadership and foresight. And markets, of course, are not the economy and they are not the world.

I’m not persuaded that any of these models is robust, not least because our capacity for accurate forecasting has been shrinking, and because (as even the best and most insightful forecasters know) the completely unexpected can never be ruled out. Data is always about the past and models are selective. They have to leave out large amounts of information—otherwise they’d be as big as the world, and no help at all.

I’m frequently asked, with an air of urgency, whether today’s uncertainty is greater than ever. I am skeptical but also blasé: even if it were, what difference would that make, beyond justifying a lot of self-pity? Uncertainty is endemic to life. It is only the siren sounds of propagandists, techno-prophets and shills that tries to persuade us otherwise. We’d do better to accept the reality of not knowing.

But that makes the qualities demanded of leaders strikingly different from the traditional, recognized competencies. Once we accept that we do not know what the future holds, then the strategic minds addressing must use imagination. This is why the World Economic Forum’s Jobs Reports keep arguing about the essential need for critical and creative thinking. Strategy is intrinsically a creative activity; it requires being able to conceive of a world we don’t inhabit yet and designing multiple ways to create it. What uncertainty demands (however it is measured) are plenty of options—and the creativity to keep generating them.

Which leaves the question: do most leaders lack creativity, or have they just lost it along the way? At a recent discussion of this topic, most CEOs could remember moments at work when they had been curious enough to think beyond their peers, brave enough to propose an experiment or a novel approach, eager to seize the initiative and resilient when it didn’t always turn out as anticipated. All spoke with a degree of nostalgia about this highlight in their careers and many later reflected that this was the moment that had designated them as leaders. Was it too late to revive the creativity they once had had? They all left determined to try.

Another group got stuck in analyzing the causes of our crises, keener to identify causes and definitions than to propose creative responses to them. They were taken aback when I suggested that they seemed to pour more energy into alibi-seeking than problem-solving. But to their credit, they embraced my challenge; it will be interesting to see if their reawakened sense of agency lasts.

We are mired in multiple crises—political, climate, inequality, volatility, AI and democracy. But our biggest is a crisis of imagination. I’m not sure that today’s CEOs can see this, in themselves or others, or that they were brought up to cherish, identify or to develop genuinely creative thinking. But imagination is now a critical component of any organization attempting to navigate uncertainty. Whether that uncertainty is increasing, decreasing or deceiving us, leaders must have the capacity to imagine a world that is different, better—and possible. Otherwise, who will stay the journey?