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become innovators but lacked the tools and support
to realize them. Under the leadership of Paul
Cobban, chief data and transformation officer, the
bank redesigned its offices, changed its meeting
styles to encourage equal participation and greater
collaboration, and introduced a new innovation
team with an unusual mandate: Under absolutely no
circumstances should the innovation team innovate.
Instead, the team’s mission is to enable the broader
community to incorporate the behaviors that enable
successful innovation.^11
Transform Thyself
To see these lies for what they are and successfully
transform their organizations, leaders first need to
transform themselves. Successfully responding to
disruption requires executives to simultaneously
reinvent today’s business while creating tomor-
row’s business. More specifically, they have to find
new ways to solve customer problems while at the
same time scoping out new growth opportunities.
The challenge isn’t just that these missions are in
conflict and involve periods of chaos and uncer-
tainty; it also is that they require fundamentally
different mindsets and approaches.
Research by longtime Harvard professor Robert
Kegan found that most leaders lack the cognitive
flexibility required to “toggle” between being disci-
plined and entrepreneurial. Kegan terms this
flexibility self-transforming, where leaders have the
ability to “step back from and reflect on the limits
of our own ideology or personal authority; see that
any one system or self-organization is in some way
partial or incomplete; be friendlier toward contra-
diction and opposites; [and] seek to hold on to
multiple systems rather than project all except one
onto the other.”^12 Unfortunately, other research
suggests that no more than 5% of high-performing
managers have achieved this level of leadership.^13
It’s not surprising that so many leaders lack this
capability. Most grew up in a world that was either
disciplined or entrepreneurial but rarely both and
almost never both at the same time. And leadership
development (with rare exceptions) hasn’t caught
up with this emerging need. To transform them-
selves, leaders must focus more on mindsets,
awareness, and inner capacities to combat basic
biases that make it hard to make decisions in uncer-
tainty and toggle between different frames. There
are no quick fixes here. But research increasingly
suggests the best starting point is to embrace what
broadly goes under the term mindfulness.
To some, the word might sound squishy and New
Agey, but meditation and related practices that use
breathing to tune into thoughts and sensations
have widely documented health benefits, such as
boosting energy and lowering stress. More critical,and for our purposes here, mindfulness boosts
awareness, increasing a person’s ability to step back,
pause, and become aware of not just habitual
thought patterns, but also emotional reactions.
As Potential Project managing director Rasmus
Hougaard has noted, mindfulness is not about just
doing more but also seeing more clearly what is the
right thing to do and what is just a distraction.^14
Mindful leaders can, for example, “see” their
reactivity, giving them the tools to identify and
overcome the deceptions of disruption. A mindful
leader is better at toggling between different mind-
sets: a disciplined focus on transforming today’s
business and more entrepreneurial thinking to cre-
ate tomorrow’s business. Mindfulness is a powerful,
scientifically validated tool for improving self-
awareness, which is a critical and underappreciated
tool for senior leaders confronting the challenges of
disruptive change.To see these lies for what they are and successfully
transform their organizations, leaders first need to
transform themselves.