Listen to this man

Bit of a grand title I know...

I was lucky enough to hear Professor Ed Hess talk at an LEF (Leading Edge Forum) event a couple of years ago.  He talked about lots of things I've never really thought hard about, but immediately made perfect sense to me.

At the time he had just published his book called Learn or Die, which is well worth a read.  It talks about developing a learning mindset, and about being much more open to other peoples ideas, concepts such as 'I am not my ideas', 'my mental models are not reality' (aka I know I have biases).  He also talked a lot about make up of team, and how much diversity of thought positively impacts a team's performance.

I still follow the LEF guys ( twitter feed ) and also Ed Hess (Twitter Feed) and saw that Prof. Hess was speaking at the LEF study tour.

There's an LEF article (Link) called 'Rethinking Human Excellence with Ed Hess' which is worth a read, but if you've got 10 minutes watch the video below

He talks about how the operational models we developed in the industrial revolution (operational excellence, low failure rates, efficiency, command and control etc.) are not suitable for the smart machine age of software running everything/AI/ML.  He believes that :

Operational excellence will be taken over by technology and will become table stakes

his view is that we will need to change our approach and focus on what humans does better than machines.

You cannot command and control human beings to be innovative

You cannot command and control human being to be emotionally intelligent

I think he talks a lot of sense about how we need to change as leaders, being better versions of ourselves, continually learning, hiring for mindset and behaviours and this will be absolutely crucial in the years to come.

Some of this thinking is very similar to some of the thinking another I read a while ago  General Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams, which also proposes changing the structure of organisation away from command and control to teams of teams - I wrote a bit about this here