Wise leaders build agile, inclusive, and sustainable businesses. But how can you do that in times of crisis? Here are eight mental models for building inner resilience to take responsible and sustainable actions in VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) situations.
When it comes to situations like the current pandemic, the climate emergency, and other societal challenges at a global scale, we don’t need leaders who only rely on their survival instincts or find opportunistic ways to leverage a crisis.
We need leaders who consciously use their intuition, logic, and emotions to choose appropriate emergency responses. We need wise leaders.
Why? Because wise CEOs create the best results in both the short and long term for the benefit of both society and the bottom line.
That’s the conclusion of a survey of 100 CEO emergency responses over the past 30 years, conducted by Navi Radjou and Prasad Kaipa, who are also co-authors of From Smart to Wise: Acting and Leading With Wisdom.
We need leaders who not only rely on their survival instincts or find opportunistic ways to leverage a crisis. We need leaders who consciously use their intuition, logic, and emotions to choose appropriate business responses that benefit society. We need wise leaders.
In their article, “Leading With your Head and Your Heart”, Radjou and Kaipa show how wise CEOs like Unilever’s Paul Polman and companies like Siemens and Danone are transforming their businesses into wise enterprises.
But what can a wise leader concretely do on a personal level to build inner resilience for taking responsible and sustainable actions in challenging times?
We’ve reached out to leadership transformation expert Sandja Brügmann, The Passion Institute, to co-create an infographic based on her eight mental models for wisdom leadership.
“For a while now, in CEO circles, we’ve talked about the world being VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous), and Covid-19 is showing us how interconnected and interdependent we all are. So we need leaders to navigate these uncertainties wisely if we want a safer and more thriving world for us all,” explains Brügmann, who helps organizations embed sustainability, wisdom, and purpose into the core of their business strategy and leadership skills.
We hope that this infographic will inform and inspire CEOs and serve as a reminder for all of us on how to take personal leadership and deal with the more “daily VUCA” situations.
If you are interested in integrating and leading through these principles, join The Passion Institute’s Wisdom Leadership Network, facilitated by Sandja Brügmann.
Sandja Brügmann is an internationally recognized leadership and business transformation expert, founder of The Passion Institute, a leadership development and business strategy consulting company specialized in the intersection of business strategy, consciousness, purpose, & the new paradigm of organizational design and leadership.
