To Gain Impact, Leaders Must Forge a New Perspective

When it comes to lasting impact, today’s leaders would be wise to remember two pivotal lessons. These lessons have the power to significantly raise their odds of achieving great impact.  

Vital lessons for leaders

The first might feel laughable: Remember that the world keeps changing. While seemingly obvious, leaders have an unconscious pattern of downshifting after overcoming change, as if change is a one-and-done thing. Even if unconsciously, they adopt a familiar mantra: “I was tested. I triumphed. Now, it’s safe to relax into a new status quo.” Then, it happens. Change comes once more. Yet, it is different than before and with an ample dose of the unfamiliar.  

This perpetual cycle is worsened by the tendency of too many leaders to unwisely approach the new challenge in a DIY trial-and-error fashion, fueled by the desire to get quickly back to normal. The pattern is only amplified when change takes form as the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) kind that now dominates. 

In such times, leaders quickly forget or conclude that while change may feel new to them, past leaders have often encountered something similar. Checking in with their stories is a powerfully simple way to avoid naively rerunning the learning-to-lead gauntlet.  

This links to the second lesson leaders shouldn’t forget: One of the most potent sources for leadership insights lies in the nonobvious. What does nonobvious mean? Looking outside your network or sector for insights is one plainspoken form of it. Looking beyond your moment in time can also give perspective and distance that can be hard to come by in the heat of the immediate. Combining the lessons, in times of great change, leaders would be wise to look to the nonobvious sources of leadership lessons past.  

Allow me to tell you a story that exemplifies both teachings. 

A lesson in leadership past: Vital to the here and now 

The story, a true one, is about an archaeologist in Northern Arizona, a leader in her field. Her decades-long work focused on ancient native American tribes, seeking to understand how they lived and thrived in the harshness of the desert southwest. Working deep within the labyrinth of the Grand Canyon, she’d come across previously unknown sites of past habitation, sites even current day elders of these ancient peoples were unaware of.  

She wanted to share with these tribal leaders what she’d found. More precisely, she wanted to show them the pottery shards and arrowheads, the storage granaries and building foundations. In other words, the things archaeologists use to define how past people succeeded and thrived. So, she took the elders deep into the canyon to show them what she’d discovered. 

At each site, she brought them straight to the artifacts. Each time she did, however, she caught the elders glancing not down at the items but up—up into the rock walls and side canyons. After this repeated at several sites, she confronted the elders. Why, she asked, were they looking up rather than down into the obvious answers she was placing right in front of them? Kindly, patiently and most of all knowingly, they gently smiled and told her. They were looking for water. The real insights, they were teaching her, came from looking up canyon. 

The power of looking “up canyon” 

The lesson was simple. Without the essential source of water, none of the rest would have come to pass. No innovative vessels for carrying or storage, no refined hunting tools suited to the terrain, no places of community, no life—nothing. In the desert, they knew, finding drinkable water isn’t obvious. You have to look deeper than you normally would. Instead, you must look in nonobvious places repeatedly. In other words, you must be in the habit of looking “up canyon,” not just where you are and what you do. Change is always present. 

The truth is, in the business and busyness of today’s VUCA environment, leaders too rarely look “up canyon.” Instead, they obsess over the obvious at their feet, the well-worn and the familiar. However, there’s always a source to anything important that lies deeper.  

The power of an “up canyon” view in business

In a fast-moving modern world, this may seem like a distant story to your day-to-day leadership task. In truth, it’s central. Management guru, Peter Drucker, famously pointed to it as the key to long-term success. He boiled it down to a question he advised leaders to repeatedly ask: “What business are we in?”  

It may sound like a question to which the answer is self-evident. However, an answer with an “up canyon view” is not. His version of looking “up canyon” was to advise leaders to answer the question not once, but five times over, revealing the most fundamental, powerful and important insight layer by layer. It was the unobvious answer, he knew, that reminds a leader where the power to succeed over the long-term actually comes from. It was the best answer, he believed, to guide them through times of change.