221 - A Great Leader
“A great leader is one who is willing to risk saying yes.” – Benjamin Sisko However, a great leader doesn’t merely pop into existence. They are supported by many others, and part of that support involves reducing uncertainties, quantifying risks, and highlighting the potential and probable gains, all of which make it easier for a leader to say yes. Such a leader is the voice of a collective intelligence to which many may contribute.
What is likely to change in the coming years is the types and level of such support offered to leaders, and how effectively and frequently leaders communicate with the constituent members of the collective intelligences they act as the voice of. Many studies have shown how leaders are typically very disconnected from the majority of useful feedback that lower rungs of their corporate hierarchies routinely confront. This is largely because the functions through which information filters up to the CXO level, particularly in larger companies, are often both highly lossy and heavily biased.
For example, picture a corporate structure with a hierarchy 8 tiers tall, offering 7 opportunities for lossy and biased communication up the chain, each of which causes additional delays. It is from such scenarios that we get the more troubling figures, like CXOs only being aware of an abysmal 4% of problems their company faces.
Compare that to another example, where instead of information moving up a long chain, every employee interacts with the same continuously learning system, with human-like concept learning, understanding, and reasoning. That system functions as a sort of “living” digital mind for the company, aware of all of the problems it faces that are voiced by any member, and able to study, validate, qualify, and quantify these problems. Such a system can also proactively interact with all members of the corporate collective, asking clarifying questions, testing hypotheses, cultivating more effective bi-directional communication, and so on.
With access to such a resource, an executive team could ask for support in making any decision and receive the company’s full potential depth and breadth of knowledge and understanding, updated in real-time, and fully explainable beyond even what is possible with humans. To put some numbers to that, a wise decision with many nuances both considered and accounted for in the proposed solution could be made in 1/10th the time required of the same process today. Taking it a step further, in the spirit of Amazon’s favored methods, reversible solutions could easily be prioritized in this process.
The difference between the two amounts to an insurmountable advantage within any competitive system, as far wiser decisions can be more quickly, and with greater support from employees spanning all levels of a company. Companies, like the human body, could within them contain a functional and integrated human-like intelligence, built from the collective intelligence of all members of the company.
