62 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW SPRING 2020 SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
DISRUPTION 2020: LEADING WITHOUT BLINDERS
Some leaders who have successfully managed
transformative change have touted the value of
mindfulness. Aetna’s Bertolini was an early advocate
of advancing meditation programs at his company,
and in 2014, the company hired a chief mindfulness
officer. Bertolini credits mindfulness for easing
chronic pain he suffered after a skiing accident and
when recovering from a rare form of cancer. He says
it also improves his ability to process information
and make sharp strategic decisions: “With so many
things going on, whether in a small or large organi-
zation, you can get frozen by attempting to process it
all instead of being present, listening, and focusing
on what really matters.”^15
Another example of the power of mindfulness
comes from Pierre Wack, who advanced and pop-
ularized the idea of scenario planning while
working at Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s and
1980s. Wack was influenced by Russian guru
Georges Gurdjieff and practiced meditation in
India. Successful scenario planning, Wack noted,
requires “being in the right state of focus to put
your finger unerringly on the key facts or insights
that unlock or open understanding.”^16 He noted
that the value of scenario planning is not about
developing specific plans that will actually be im-
plemented or getting to the “right” scenario but
about helping leadership understand that the fu-
ture can be dramatically different from the present,
while fostering a deeper understanding of the
forces driving potential changes and uncertainties.
The approach, he said, gives managers something
“very precious: the ability to reperceive reality.”^17
By sharpening his ability to toggle between present
reality and future possibility, Wack and his team
transformed scenario planning from a passive ma-
nipulation of data into an active tool to stretch
thinking and advance discussions. This helped
Shell to see what others missed and weather oil
shocks in the 1970s and 1980s significantly better
than its competitors.Transform Thy Organization
Of course, it is not enough to transform just the
person at the top. Too often you see a single-shot
transformational leader. That is, a leader seems to
transform an organization, but then the organiza-
tion backslides when the leader departs. Forexample, A.G. Lafley drove substantial change at
Procter & Gamble as CEO from 2000 to 2009, but
the company stumbled so badly when he stepped
down that he was asked to return. Lou Gerstner was
an icon for transformation during his time at IBM,
but by the time Sam Palmisano turned the CEO
reins over to Ginni Rometty, IBM had missed the
cloud computing revolution and its touted Watson
platform was struggling to deliver results commen-
surate with its hype. Tim Cook has been a strong
steward at Apple, boosting growth and strengthen-
ing its services business, but he simply hasn’t
matched the disruptive magic of Steve Jobs. Single-
shot leaders might have the personal ability to
toggle between different mindsets, but they seem to
struggle to codify core elements of their unique
approach and institutionalize them.
Kegan and coauthor Lisa Laskow Lahey noted
in An Everyone Culture that you can create a delib-
erately developmental organization (DDO) that
consciously upgrades an entire organization’s ca-
pacity to grapple with disruption. Bridgewater, the
world’s largest hedge fund, is a good example. It
seeks to base the organization not on founder Ray
Dalio’s charisma or his intuition but rather on de-
cision rules, which Dalio calls principles, hardwired
into its systems. Some of the fundamental princi-
ples include radical transparency, where the goal is
to review people “accurately, not kindly”; recog-
nizing that internal exploration and struggle is
important (“pain + reflection = progress”); and
sharing and supporting project work with com-
plete transparency. Bridgewater gives employee
feedback not just to boost short-term performance
but to enhance long-term capacity. It consciously
helps its employees develop reflective muscles to
understand defensive routines and blind spots and
to improve their ability to acquire, process, and
make sense of multiple forms of data. This com-
mitment to developing everyone’s “sense-making”
capacity as a mission-critical component of long-
term performance sets DDOs like Bridgewater
apart.
Two final examples worth mentioning for their
transformative efforts are SAP and Johnson &
Johnson, which are helping staff develop creatively,
emotionally, and mentally to tackle larger chal-
lenges such as disruption. SAP has trained more