“Everything you can imagine is real.” – Pablo Picasso
Many hours have been spent over the years trying to define what characteristics and behaviors define great leaders. Some things show up over and over again – work ethic, intelligence, integrity, etc. Those kinds of things will always matter.
The world is always changing, though, and as it changes, other things come into focus. One of the characteristics of great 21st-century leaders has shown up a number of times here in the past several weeks. It’s the willingness to seriously explore new and creative ideas.
I’m not suggesting that the willingness to look at new ideas never mattered before, and that now it’s suddenly on the radar. I’m just suggesting that it’s never been more important for leaders and leadership groups to look at things they’ve never done before and honestly consider if those are things they need to do.
And it’s not even just new ideas. I’ve been in dozens of leadership team meetings where someone throws out an idea and the rest of the group immediately shoots it down and talks about how they looked into something similar in 2004 and it was the right thing so therefore it must not be right now either.
I’m not suggesting that every new idea is great, or that we should revisit every decision we’ve ever made, or that we should ignore lessons learned from the past. All I’m suggesting is that the world changes, facts and circumstances change, people change, everything changes, and we have to be willing to change with it.
Think about your organization. How do your leaders respond to new ideas? Do they look for reasons to make them work? Or do they look for reasons to say no?
Are there topics that are completely off limits because they were discussed previously and we don’t want to discuss them again? Are there opportunities that exist that we won’t talk about because they weren’t a fit twenty years ago?
Be honest with yourself and those around you. The world we are currently living in is not the same one we were living in five or ten or twenty years ago. We MUST consider new ideas and seriously explore them. We can’t and don’t have to do them all, but we can’t just dismiss them either. Open your mind and get real about your future.
