As a nation, we are experiencing the most profound loss of certainty in the 21st century. The incredible loss of reliability and safety opens up an unprecedented moment to reconsider the role and effectiveness of business leadership. With the success of so many companies up in the air, organizations rely on tried-and-true tactics of the past to stay afloat. But resilience and survival depend on our leadership abilities to listen, learn, and act in profoundly new ways.

Leaders in our world are trained to articulate visions, set goals, and oversee implementation. Inquiry within themselves and their teams is not always a key pillar. But, during a time of crisis, the failure to be present with what’s going on in your team, company, or with your stakeholders can make or break a company. Such a radical change, of course, will require all hands and hearts on deck.
The times call for renewal in our commitment to develop skills to thrive within uncertainty, frameworks for collective well-being, and techniques to harness emergent solutions. But what will that take? How will the current leaders of today’s companies and organizations help steward their teams through troubled waters? 

Thankfully there are deep bodies of research and techniques to guide leaders into these liminal spaces of inquiry. While these guiding methodologies are immensely valuable, after building and advising hundreds of companies and organizations, we at JumpScale and LUMAN have relied on four key pillars: self-knowledge, self-regulation, purpose, and organizing. 

Take Time For Self Reflection

Self-awareness or self-knowledge is critical to understanding our motivations, mental states, drives, and impulses. Through introspection, transparency, and self-inquiry, we can tune in to our own core operating systems. To refine your inquiries in this domain, it is essential that you feel responsible and accountable for your success and failures, knowing that every action serves a bigger purpose and vision for oneself and the world. To do that:

• Where am I telling myself, “that’s just how it is,” “I have to do what is expected of me,” or “I wish things were different  but…” 
• Do I notice when you make excuses or blame others for your outcomes. 
• In what areas am I relying on others to take the lead in my life? 
• How am I maintaining the culture or priorities I wish to change?

Respond To Situations, Don’t React

In our age of uncertainty and change, one’s leadership capacity is in direct proportion to one’s capacity for presence. Self-regulation is practicing all of the skills required for presence, resilience, and connection to others regardless of what is happening. We identified a few core individual competencies that are key to becoming a self-regulating leader.

• Practice Self Care: Extreme performance requires extreme self-care, as any good athlete will tell you. Keeping your body healthy, flexible, and strong serves as a first step to creating emotional and mental adaptability. Adaptability is about keeping your system dynamic and fluid to weather any changes.   
• Embrace Empathy: Empathy is the capacity to connect to one’s own and other’s emotions and experiences. It is also the capacity to identify, stratify, and name emotions that supports the management of personal and interpersonal emotional states. 
• Be Accountable For Yourself and Others: Accountability is making agreements with integrity and being transparent in their fulfillment. In a VUCA (Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) world, all we have to stand on is our integrity around our commitments. We will need the capacity to make explicit requests and agreements and have tools for what we do when those agreements are broken.
• Plan For The Future: The ability to see tomorrow. Before building anything, we need the ability to visualize it, to anticipate dynamic changes, and to project into the future. Vision requires learning from the past, anchoring in the present, seeing similar patterns across domains — and feeling psychologically safe enough to imagine what could be.
• In each of these capacities, it’s essential to ask yourself several questions to know where you stand as a leader.
• Which of these areas is my weakest link?
• When do I get derailed and lose my capacity for presence? 
• How much do I feel part of a larger narrative about the future?

Determine Your Purpose

Everyone has a unique calling, life purpose, and skillset. Self-knowledge and regulation help us trust ourselves to stay focused on what’s most important in every moment. The more you align your contributions and service with your unique purpose and skills, the more satisfied you will be. The Japanese have a beautiful concept, Ikigai, meaning “A reason for Being.” Your Ikigai sits at the crossroads of your passion, purpose, skills, and what you can get paid to do. Purpose serves as a timeless anchor allowing for stability in an uncertain world. It serves as a decision-making tool for employees on all levels of the organization and creates a sense of urgency.

There are many inquiries and practices to validate our purpose. Ask yourself this:

• What is the unique contribution I am here to make?
• What keeps calling me?

Evaluate your beliefs about working within your purpose. Many of us harbor limiting beliefs that tell us our gifts are not valuable. Find those you admire, not to follow their path, but to fully understand the path that inspires you.

Examine The Organization Of Your Company

Clarity of self and purpose in an ever-changing world is a tall order. Building the skills for resilience and presence as we take on challenges larger than ourselves requires courage. But, the ability to create and validate an idea, mobilize people and resources for a project can bring joy and a sense of accomplishment, even while suffering and struggle. While traditional organizational models are still common, we are quickly moving toward models of shared leadership and self-optimizing systems. We are in a time of entirely new ways of organizing ourselves. As we evolve where and how we work, we will need to evolve how we organize and lead. What works best for your company? Ask yourself the following:

• How am I building a learning organization that is adaptable and resilient to the challenges ahead?
• What is my company’s Theory of Change, and does it align with your organizational model?
• How am I focusing on my people as part of what makes a successful organization and not an afterthought?
• How am I supporting my team to innovate continuously?

Call To Action

None of us have a crystal ball to predict with accuracy what the future might bring.

While these pillars are helpful starting points, each organization has its unique vision, mission, and values to reflect on and build from. For leaders to be of service to their organizations throughout these deep processes, their ability for self-inquiry, self-care, and resilience will be put to the test. They will be stretched. There are no honest short-cuts. Many teams will find creative ways to distribute responsibilities, act quickly to solve immediate problems, and keep leaks from sinking the ship. Yet anyone who steps into a leadership role will need to accept the importance of this ongoing inquiry process to help them stay present to changing circumstances.

Our invitation to you, do not use these times as a measure to judge your failings but as a calling to your greatness. Join our ongoing inquiry as we commit to strengthening our teams and striving toward a thrivable future – together.

Tirza Hollenhorst is an entrepreneur and a futurist. Trained as a biologist and engineer who previously built a technology company and facilitated international, cross-sector collaboration around corporate responsibility. Tirza is the founder and CEO of LUMAN where she brings her experience in business, science, and innovation together to transform organizations and prepare them for the future of work. 

Daniel Roth is an experienced social entrepreneur, movement strategist, and integrative healthcare professional focused on sustainable development, indigenous cultural revitalization, and healing arts. Over the last two decades, he has launched over a dozen non-profit organizations, campaigns, and coalitions. In 2018, Daniel founded JumpScale, a wellbeing-oriented investment advisory firm and innovation lab. Prior, he served as Director of the Cornell Campus Sustainability Office, started New York’s first car-share business, and served as a Board Member of the U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development. 

The proverbial wisdom says that “you can have all the riches and success in the world, but if you don’t have your health, you have nothing.” Right now, everything hinges on our health. Our work, our wealth, our future.

As the sickest nation in the world with COVID-19, the United States is heading towards having “nothing.” The U.S. is leading the world in deaths by the coronavirus, and people are left with “nothing” as they lose their jobs. It is heartbreaking and scary. Simultaneously, politically, the U.S. is actively separating from international collaboration efforts and further isolating itself, and, consequently, losing its status as the world’s leading democracy. Are isolationism and protectionism also going to cost the U.S. to lose its top-ranking ingenuity? 

The warning signs were already in the air when the latest Global Innovation Index 2019 (1). was published: “Waning public support for R&D in high-income economies is concerning given its central role in funding basic R&D and other blue-sky research, which are key to future innovations— including for health innovation.”

At its best, science shows its transformative power when novel ideas and practical solutions are achieved under pressure, constraints, and with minimal resources. The pressure to quickly find solutions to the deadly coronavirus pandemic has pushed scientists and engineers to rethink everything. Interesting “frugal innovations” have emerged as scientists reuse and repurpose resources and deploy prototypes rapidly (2). Think of a team in a global computing consortium (3). led by Amanda Randles, a biomedical engineer at Duke University, who developed airflow simulations for a new device to split a ventilator between two or more patients in record time. This created much-needed extra capacity during the COVID-19 surge. 

Scientists gather — now mostly online — to pool their collective intelligence, and engage AI to innovate how to tackle this nasty virus. For example, a team led by assistant professor of biomedical engineering Jessilyn Dunn and Ryan Shaw, an associate professor of nursing and director of the Health Innovation Lab at Duke University, designed an app called CovIdentify to explore how data collected by smartphones and smartwatches could help determine whether device users have COVID-19. The app is expected to help indicate early symptoms of COVID-19 by collecting biometric information, like sleep schedules, oxygen levels, activity levels, and heart rate.

Because of human ingenuity, we are surrounded by miraculous things that have elevated our living standards. We’ve come a long way from the caveman times. The human mind is a powerful organ – but it loses its expansive power to innovate in isolation. Innovation is not an individual endeavor; it is a result of dynamic collaboration. 

Three human characteristics drive the innovation activity even under the direst circumstances. 

1. Curiosity

Foundational to science and all human progress is curiosity. Without mind-opening questions like Why? Why not? What if? the human race would have gone extinct a long ago. (Thankfully, some of the adult population retains a three-year-old’s curiosity throughout their lives!) Curiosity is often thought of as an individual personality characteristic, but it can also be a marker of a team or an organizational or national culture. Embracing curiosity, leads to the pursuing of knowledge and valuing of science. 

2. Courage

To actualize innovation, however, curiosity is not enough. While curiosity opens the mind, the energy needed to act on the new knowledge requires courage. Think of how in The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins asks Gandalf something like: “You ask me to go on this enormously dangerous sounding journey, but can you promise me that I will return?” Gandalf admits that there are no guarantees for Bilbao’s safe return. Instead, he says, “But if you will come back, you will come back changed.” Creating is for the brave. 

3. Collaboration

While you can create alone, you cannot innovate alone. Innovation is always a result of Collaboration. The collective intelligence of humans is exponentially more powerful than the work of any one genius. While many organizations claim “collaboration” as a core value for them, it is rare to practice it effectively. It’s hard to stay collaborative in fiercely competitive environments. Collaboration fails when the pressures of scarcity rule. When we believe that there isn’t enough time or money to do things collaboratively – we shrink. A scarcity mindset only leads to short term strategies for the survival of the fittest rather than cooperation and sustainable solutions in the long term. If leaders were more skilled at collaboration, we’d see more resource sharing, innovation, better leadership, more inspiration, and the human capacity for innovation would expand, especially under adversity.

Only with curiosity, courage, and collaboration can we imagine new possibilities and create novel solutions. Collaboration creates Hope. Like the autonomous spacecraft mission led by a 33-year scientist Sarah Al-Amiri (4). called “Al-Amal” or “Hope” which was recently launched to Mars due to UAE and Japan’s collaborative effort. As we ramp up our collaboration for interplanetary research, let’s hope our leaders continue to focus on international cooperation here on Earth. Our health – and lives – depend on it. 

1. https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo_pub_gii_2019-intro3.pdf
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0889-1.pdf
3. COVID-19 High-Performance Computing (HPC) Consortium
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/science/mars-united-arab-emirates.html?smtyp=cur&smid=fb-nytimes&fbclid=IwAR0CKSYYld0KYdjNDQ5QoGSIUnCFf8g6lBqSbY5Rx63eLqudOGZpeDPqvpA

Leaders throughout history have inspired us to take action, to become our best selves, to create a better world, and to ensure a brighter future. Their legacies live on in the quotes they gave us to live by. Here are some insights from leaders across the ages whose words continue to inspire us today.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead

“I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness I can show, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.” — Stephen Grellet

“Sometimes you have to let go of the picture of what you thought life would be like and learn to find joy in the story you are actually living.” — Rachel Marie Martin

“It’s not the strongest of the species, nor the smartest of the species that survive, but the ones most adaptable to change.” 
— Charles Darwin

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” 
— Maya Angelou

“Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.” — John Wooden

“Say Yes, and you’ll figure it out afterwards” — Tina Fey

“Out beyond idea of wrongdoing and righting, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.” — Rumi

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it; Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” — Goethe

“In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take.” — Lewis Carroll

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.” — Abraham Lincoln

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” — Nelson Mandela

“There is nothing to fear but fear itself.” — FDR

“Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” — Shakespeare

“Never let a good crisis go to waste.” — Winston Churchill

“Strive to be an uncynical force, to be a steward of substance.” — Maria Popova

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” — Henry Ford

“Expect not and thou shall not be disappointed.” — Chariji

“In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or step back into safety.” — Abraham Maslow

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” — T.S. Eliot

“The World is full of difficulties, but its even more full of hope!” — Bob Goff

“It’s not what you get into, it’s how you get out of it.” — Miles Davis

“If one moves confidently in the directly of their dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” — Henry David Thoreau

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” — Howard Thurman

“It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.” — Aristotle

“Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.” — Hermann Hesse

“The problem with real jobs…was the lack of opportunity to dance.” — Puma Sneakers

“May you always be Courageous, stand upright and be strong. May you stay forever young.” — Bob Dylan

Giving direct, difficult feedback is one of the most important and anxiety-inducing leadership tasks. Yet, the leaders who master this skill find that clear, connected conversations about what’s working and what’s not reduce the emotional turbulence in an organization and give people the critical information they need to develop. 

Early in my career, as a first-time startup leader, I managed a woman (“Mary”) who was wonderfully talented in many ways, but who routinely underperformed in a few critical areas. Despite this consistent underperformance, I found myself unable to give her direct, useful feedback. It felt unkind to criticize her. I wanted to lead an egalitarian organization, and at the time, I felt like the “do better or else” message others were asking me to give her would fly in the face of that ideal. It didn’t occur to me; there might be another way to deliver the message. 

Eventually, the company entered a difficult period, and we decided to reduce our staff. As a result of her performance, Mary was included in the layoff. The decision didn’t sit well with me at the time and, over many years of reflection since, I see now that it wasn’t her underperformance that led to the loss of her job, but my own. 

Many of us find it difficult to give critical feedback. One study of over 7,500 leaders found that over a fifth of leaders don’t bother doing it at all. Is it just the interpersonal discomfort that naturally arises from making critical assessments of others? Maybe not. A 1996 review of the feedback literature found that over one-third of “feedback interventions” actually reduced performance! We’re not just avoiding our own discomfort, we’re avoiding sharing a message that could hurt performance. 

In the decade since that layoff, I’ve been working to discover the art of giving feedback, for my own sake and as a tool for the leaders I coach and advise, from first-time managers in the fast-moving startup world to the leaders of some of the largest and most important institutions. I’ve found that when we are anxious about giving feedback, it’s often because we’re trapped in a critical mindset. 

So, how can a critical message be transformed into an inspirational one? The key is not the message you deliver, but in how you orient yourself. 

 From a critical boss…

Often, we approach difficult conversations as if we are a boss delivering bad news. As a result, we over-focus on the message’s content and under-focus on the outcome we’re trying to create (better performance). We get stuck managing our own anxiety rather than designing the experience for the receiver. The subconscious mindset driving all of this is: “something is wrong with the person I’m giving feedback to.” 

To inspiring coach…

The shift that the best leaders make is from criticism to possibility. They hold the mindset: “this person has even more potential than what they have realized so far.” The fact that the feedback even occurs to them is a reflection of the potential they see in the other person. How would you communicate this potential, and what advice do you have to help the person achieve it?

Rather than speaking down to the person you are giving feedback to about your criticism, imagine standing behind the person and guiding them to achieve their goals more quickly and effectively. Instead of showing up as a critical boss, you become an inspiring coach. You recognize that while they are the ones in the ring, you face the same opponent and ultimate goal. Your job is to build them up, even when you are delivering corrective advice.

If I could go back and give feedback to Mary with this orientation, it would go something like this:

Mary, I appreciate how you connect with potential clients. You have an infectious enthusiasm for the business, and that’s perhaps the most powerful sales tool we have as a company. I think there is an opportunity to take that skill to an even higher level. I’m seeing a drop in enthusiasm in the handoff between your contact with clients and the rest of the team, which means their client experience goes downhill after their first encounter with you. I want to see us build on the momentum you create rather than waste it. To do that, I see a need to tighten up the reporting and handoff process between you and the other teams. Do you agree? What do you think we could do to make that happen? 

I do not doubt that it would have been a productive conversation that would have tapped both of our best thinking and de-escalated the issue to talk about it openly. Having this conversation would have served her much more than my silence did. 

When I imagine myself in the corner of the person I’m cheering on, I am excited by the potential: I can suddenly see what’s possible for them, how they might get there faster, and what I can do to help. With this orientation, my anxiety about what to say drops considerably, and I can connect more deeply and with more respect. Extraordinary leaders realize that when they have feedback to give, the burden of responsibility for the performance gap lies in them, not the person they provide feedback to. As a result, they master the skill of delivering corrective feedback in a way that affirms the potential of the receiver and inspires committed action. 

Do you feel safe? Will life ever get back to normal? What will that new normal look like? As we define a pandemic, nearly everyone is grappling with questions like these.

An expert on the history of spaceflight — and one of the few women in her field — Amy Shira Teitel, wants us to find a silver lining and take this moment to learn how to adapt like an astronaut. Her original inspirations are captured in her new book Fighting For Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight. Drawing on an extensive knowledge of NASA’s history and missions going back more than 60 years, Teitel shares six astronaut-tested tips below, to help us face the unknown. She suggests taking small steps that might lead to giant leaps in conquering quarantine, staying in the moment, learning how to focus, keeping a positive outlook and looking forward to the future.

1. Prepare Like an Astronaut. When the space age began in the late 1950s, NASA had to figure out what challenges and dangers astronauts would face—fast—with the understanding that they wouldn’t be able to control everything. No one knew if astronauts would be able to swallow food in space or if microgravity would make them go blind. Their survival ultimately came down to the best-educated guesses. Astronauts need to react quickly, without creature comforts and with limited social interactions and uncharted risks. Survival Takeaway: Expect challenges. Make peace with uncertainty. Stay informed. Be adaptable.

2. Stay Calm Like an Astronaut. For the nation’s first astronauts, mental fortitude was mission-critical. After all, no one knew how flying in space and seeing Earth from orbit would affect the human psyche. As such, candidates went through extensive psychological testing. If they couldn’t stay calm and measured in the face of sensory deprivation and boredom or, on the flip side, they weren’t considered astronaut material when faced with a slew of alarms. Survival Takeaway: Pay attention to your mental health. Take time for yourself, and even find a new practice to help cultivate a healthy headspace.

3. Sanitize Like an Astronaut. A simple head cold gets complicated since sinus cavities can’t drain without gravity. If you get a stomach bug, well, you can’t air out a spacecraft. Astronauts have limited medication and water on board, making recovering from an illness a lot harder than at home. To prevent astronauts from getting sick in space, NASA quarantines all crews, typically for two weeks, before a launch. What’s more, all robotic missions have to go through intense sanitation before a flight. We don’t want to land on Mars and find that some little Earth germ stuck around and will kill the life we’re hoping to find. Survival Takeaway: Practice sound hygiene. Wear a mask. Wash your hands. Take precautions to avoid spreading the virus.

4. Stay Connected Like an Astronaut. On Apollo missions, ground crews kept the astronauts connected to Earth by relaying messages from their families and reading up daily news headlines, with a particular emphasis on sports scores. Though they were in the Moon’s vicinity, they were able to maintain that connection to home. Survival Takeaway: Stay close with family and friends while social distancing. Take advantage of group chat tools like Zoom. Pick up the phone. Make time to talk and listen.

5. Stay in the Moment Like an Astronaut. For most of us, astronauts seem like the luckiest people on—or off—Earth. They get to see our planet from orbit, a stunning view most of us will only ever see in pictures. And the 24 men who traveled to the Moon got the even more incredible view of Earth from the lunar orbit and remain the only people to see the Moon’s far side with their own eyes. Though astronauts’ schedules are packed with experiments and planned events, they take the time to appreciate where they are in an extraordinary moment, even if those moments for reflection are rare. COVID Takeaway: Focus on the positive side of sheltering in place or working from home. Seize an unprecedented opportunity to enjoy your family. Cook meals together. Play games. Turn off the TV; put down your phone. Set aside time each day to be present. In retrospect, you might discover how truly fortunate you are! 

6. Look Toward the Future Like an Astronaut. Even though missions are planned down to the minute, things can always go wrong at any moment. Astronauts are trained to adapt to any situation, trust their training, crewmates and support teams, work any problem, and sometimes come up with life-saving solutions. Spaceflight is always dangerous, but no astronaut has ever assumed they weren’t coming home. COVID Takeaway: When the world seems bleak and your future feels uncertain, know that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Trust your instincts, lean on friends, and be excited for the day big group gatherings will be safe again.

Does a CEO’s gut instinct matter in a world that runs on digital data-crunching?

Over the last decade, big data analytics has risen to the forefront as a tool to facilitate smarter, faster, and more effective decision-making in business. Its meteoric ascension into corporate boardrooms and executive offices has displaced our conventional ideas about the value of an individual leader’s savvy. Today, a leader who so much as mentions intuition during a strategy meeting is likely to prompt a few skeptical looks and a polite variation of: “Okay, but what does the data say?”

Gut instinct is an outdated faux pas in modern business culture — an idea that might have backed CEO icons in the past, but hardly suits our understanding of leadership craft now.

As one writer for the Harvard Business School Online summarizes in an article, “The concept of intuition has become so romanticized in modern life that it’s now a part of how many people talk about and understand the “geniuses” of our generation. Though intuition can be a helpful tool, it would be a mistake to base all decisions around a mere gut feeling. While intuition can provide a hunch or spark that starts you down a particular path, it’s through data that you verify, understand, and quantify.”

And, in the writer’s defense, data is a crucial aspect of business strategy. With big data analytics, organizations can use the troves of information that they collect to identify new business opportunities, better understand their customers, improve marketing and sales, improve operational efficiency, and boost profits, among other gains.

According to a 2019 whitepaper published by New Vantage, a full 62 percent of surveyed businesses have already experienced measurable results from big data and AI investments. Analysts for the International Institute for Analytics take these findings a step further; they estimate that businesses using big data will see a collective $430 billion in productivity benefits over their non-data-reliant competitors by the close of 2020.

Given these findings, it’s no surprise that 88 percent of surveyed organizations feel an urgency to invest in big data and AI, nor that 92 percent of those who do are motivated by a desire for digital transformation, agility, and competitive advantage. According to New Vantage data, 55 percent of surveyed businesses spend over $50 million on big data and AI initiatives, and 21 percent are spending over half a billion on them. 

But is our appreciation of big data at the expense of intuition poisoning our decisions with blind faith?

As leaders, we need to ensure that we aren’t allowing ourselves to be steamrolled by raw data. The truth is, data applied blindly or without context is worse than useless — it can be outright misleading.

Consider the issue of cherry-picking data as an example. With large data sets, it is all too common to find links that appear to be legitimate conclusions but are, in fact, due to fake statistical relationships. As tech writer Nassim Taleb once concluded in an article for Wired, “in large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to variance (or noise) than to information (or signal).”

For a leader who is both untrained in statistics and overly confident in the power of data, a glance over gathered data could inadvertently lead to cherry-picking (i.e., selectively choosing) these apparent relationships to build faulty conclusions. The consequences of following this statistical misdirection can be, as you might imagine, disastrous. 

Then, we have the issue of bias in algorithms. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that, for all our insistence that data is “objective” and thus immune to faulty human opinions, algorithms can be just as biased — if not more so — than human analysts.

As Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee once explained in an article for the Brookings Institute, “In machine learning, algorithms rely on multiple data sets or training data, that specifies what the correct outputs are for some people or objects. From that training data, it then learns a model that can be applied to other people or objects and make predictions about what the correct outputs should be for them.”

The result, she writes, is that “some algorithms run the risk of replicating and even amplifying human biases, particularly those affecting protected groups.” For all that the business world puts data on a pedestal, these points make it abundantly clear that we cannot blindly rely on its findings to guide our decision-making. 

This isn’t to say that data-driven decision-making isn’t useful — it is. However, data analytics tools must be implemented within a context of training and thoughtful consideration. To borrow a quote from New York Times contributor Robert J. Moore, “Obsessing over tests and metrics can be counterproductive if it prevents you from thinking about aspects of your vision that can’t be quantified.”

We seem to have forgotten in the hype that data is meant to inform our human intuition, not overpower it. 

In recent years, many executives have realized that the most significant barrier they face in creating data-driven organizations isn’t the technology, but the people who should be using it. One recent study published in Sustainability found that nearly half (48.5 percent) of U.S. executives polled in 2018 cited “people challenges” as their foremost concern in creating a data culture.

The problem appears to be a lack of personnel training and support. 

“Managers need to wake up to the fact that their data investments are providing limited returns because their organization is underinvested in understanding the information,” business researchers Shvetank Shah, Andrew Horne, and Jaime Capellá wrote in an article for the Harvard Business Review. “Companies that want to make better use of the data they gather should focus on two things: training workers to increase their data literacy and more efficiently incorporate information into decision making, and giving those workers the right tools.”

As business decision-makers, we need to stop dismissing intuition as an outdated strategic compass and take a more informed approach to our data strategy. Leaders need to seek balance at work and remember that while data should guide their path, it should not quash their instincts.

Use the word “love” in the context of work relationships? We avoid that like the plague! Well, now it’s interesting that a couple of real plagues, COVID-19 and social injustice, may become the catalyst for introducing the idea that love has everything to do with leadership, healing the stress and divisiveness in our politics, our society, and yes, especially in our business cultures.

Before anyone assumes that I will advocate for a “kumbaya, let’s all hold hands and be vulnerable” approach to the profound lack of trust and the disengagement rampant in our institutions today, let me define what I mean by “love.” Especially because, “I don’t have to love the people I work with,” is a common sentiment. And if we’re honest, love feels like a huge stretch when we can’t even seem to like the people we work with on most days!

When we say “love,” our minds tend to go immediately to intimate, personal/familial, warmth-and-butterflies kinds of feelings. But the type of love I am referring to is much broader, less gushy, and more powerful. One label often given to it is agape love—the selfless, unconditional love commonly found in the Bible. This kind of love asks many us as human beings, especially when it’s hard to get through a day without getting sucked into difficult conversations about our ideological differences and judgments about our world.

But as I explore in my new book, Leadership through Trust and Collaboration, finding ways to practice love at work is not that hard, nor does it have to be uncomfortable for anyone. Here are four ways to get started:

1.  Remember, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care: In the book, Trillion Dollar Coach about Bill Campbell, an executive coach who worked with some of the most successful tech companies in the world, the authors reveal that Bill attributed his impact as a business coach to teaching five timeless things, including getting things right in how you interact with people, building trust, collaboration, and his personal favorite, showing both love and appreciation as a leader. Bill is credited by his clients for helping generate over a trillion dollars in revenue. As the saying goes, the soft stuff is the hard stuff—it takes courage.

Market knowledge and strategy matter, but they are overrated as the essential leadership capabilities to drive growth and high performance.

2.  Be responsible for the energy you bring into the “virtual” room: Another way to think about love is as the most productive energy on the planet. In her wildly popular TED Talk, “A Stroke of Insight,” Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist who suffered a stroke on the left side of her brain, makes a compelling case for consciously choosing to bring positive, caring energy into any room you enter. She said that during her recovery (a miracle by medical standards), she could feel if people’s energy was positive or negative when they entered her room. It directly impacted her ability to heal.

Next time you are in a meeting, take a minute to notice what happens to productivity when the energy feels good (love) and when it doesn’t (anger/frustration/fear). The fact that our meetings are now mostly virtual makes it that much more important to create an emotional connection with people that positively raises the energy.

3.  Time and attention are the most powerful ways to show love: We continuously talk about time management; time is one thing no one seems to have enough of, especially if you are a leader today facing the relentless barrage of unpredictable business challenges. We have convinced ourselves that having limited time is the problem when, in reality, limited time is simply a universal truth that affects us all. This “problem” should instead be considered an opportunity to choose how we spend our most precious resource. 

When we consider prioritization as the challenge, how we spend our hours must pay significant returns. People know that your time and attention are your most valuable resource, so when you take the time out of your busy schedule to reach out and check in with people, they NOTICE. That builds loyalty and commitment, and it says, “I care” more clearly than anything else you could do.

4.  Ask people how they’re feeling rather than how they are doing: This may sound like splitting hairs, but it’s not. When you ask people how they’re doing, they tend to say, “I’m fine, thanks” or even, “I’m so busy!” They report what they are up to, what they are doing. When you ask someone how they feel, it’s more personal and lets them know you care. You also tend to get more honest answers, not autopilot responses. In his book Back to Human, Dan Schawbel talks about connectivity at work and the alarming rise in loneliness as one of the most significant health risks facing our country. He cites Dr. Vivek Murthy, the former U.S. Surgeon General, stating that the impact of loneliness on health is equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Unfortunately, in our society, people feel ashamed or embarrassed to share that they are feeling unconnected. A wise leader assumes that people struggle in our current work environments, then takes the time to make it safe to say so. Start by asking.

Being an author and speaker, and holding seminars with her husband, Tony Robbins, is a large part of what keeps Sage Robbins motivated during tough times. With the external world reeling from the isolation of a global quarantine and everyone’s daily lives disrupted beyond recognition, what gives Robbins hope is knowing that life is always bigger than any problem we will ever face — whether personally, in our families, at work, or collectively. 

 “There are seasons and stages to life,” she says. “No matter what education level we have, where we are from, how we grew up, or the shade of our skin, we will all experience ups-and-downs and the growing pains of different seasons of our life cycle. There are certainly those of us who may prefer summer over winter, or fall to spring, but each season offers us the gift of growth, insight, life experience, and a broader perspective.” 

 If we are metaphorically in winter right now, then Robbins thinks this is a calling to come inside, to go within, to reflect, to slow down. “It’s a time to become more efficient, reconnect to a higher purpose, and prepare for the road ahead,” she explains. Many people innocently believe that if they yell loud and long enough, or perhaps destroy something or someone else, they’ll be seen and heard. In Robbins’ personal life, yelling can sometimes make the people she loves tune out or walk away, or even fight back. “There are parallels to the world stage in our inner world and with our families,” she says. “It’s all a part of the human condition.” 

 “As a business owner and leader, I feel there is power in recognizing our humanness. We are better off recognizing our strengths and also our blind spots.” Robbins points to the strange reality of social media and news platforms that attempt to tear us down for being precisely what we are — human. “There is an unrealistic expectation for people in leadership roles to be ‘perfect’ and not make mistakes, or without errors in the past,” explains Robbins. “In my experience, goodness does not equal perfection. Rather, it’s a trajectory of growth, evolution, a path forward, and a willingness to see one’s whole self and learn from mistakes. There is such a power to stand in our center with nothing to defend. I certainly didn’t get here by being a perfect human, far from it. I’ve failed, I’ve fallen, I’ve missed. The pain of those situations called to me and awakened me to do my part. It made me take responsibility for what I was missing.”

 According to Robbins, as old structures fall away, the process can be painful, messy, clunky, frustrating, and awkward. This is especially true if we focus on what was, rather than switching toward what life has to offer now. “Leaders recognize that new decisions and actions need to be made to serve the present,” says Robbins. “As much as the death of the old can be uncomfortable, we humans are incredibly adaptable, intelligent, and inventive. Understanding the seasons of transformation and cycles of life allows us to acknowledge that what was, may never be again. We often think of transitions in terms
of life and death, the end of a relationship, or loss of a job, but life is usually more nuanced than that.” 

 Robbins doesn’t think we got to where we are today by being perfect and safe. “We got here by having the courage to step into the unknown and take a leap of faith, despite the adversity. If we develop the willingness to embrace the natural seasons of life, we can lead those we love with grit and grace into the next season of growth and re-creation.”