About the Presentation
Leadership observability: explaining our workings for ourselves and others
Keynote Speech
Ever seen an expert work on a problem and come to a solution, and it just looked like magic because you didn’t understand the steps and processes they were going through internally? You may have noticed this for exploratory testing, debugging, performance tuning – and perhaps even with your manager when they make decisions. It makes sense – leaders make multiple decisions per hour, deal with planned and unplanned situations, and decide on strategies … and we hardly ever “show our working”. If you add to that the problem that the circle of people you can ask for help shrinks – then it’s no wonder that leaders can feel overwhelmed by their activities *and* have difficulty teaching these skills to newer leaders.
Of course, if leadership was simply complicated as opposed to complex, then we would have a catalogue of activities and steps or even decision charts for each one. That’s not likely to happen, nor is it the aim of this talk. But what if we could use a mix of labelling and describing plus storytelling about our experiences to make the workings of our mind and our depth of experience more tangible and accessible? The power of labelling (giving something a name) is that we can refer to it explicitly. Then we can practise it and structure it as an activity in our mind. We can “tag” our stories with it. And we can talk about it more easily to other people to teach them. Even if my labels are different to yours – we have a basis on which to compare our thought processes and share experiences.
In this keynote, I want to build on work around narrating exploratory testing to make it more accessible for others and extend that to evaluating my activities as a leader. I’ll share my process for identifying and describing the activities I do as a CEO (for example, “making decisions”, “doing conflict”, “accepting reality”, “managing time and tasks”, “leading managers”, “staying sane”, “working strategically”). I’ll also share what those processes look like, and I’ll include stories to show how those processes were formed and are evolving. By talking about these things, we basically add “logging” to our thought processes, and so we can look at this as observability for leadership activities.
Newer leaders will get input on how to approach these activities, and leaders of leaders will be encouraged to reflect on and describe their own so that they can communicate them more easily.