In the last blog I talked about how one of the major activities a leader does is dream. Without dreaming, the work will become stale, the mission blurry, and the organization limp. A leader must stay in the creative stage and continue to dream about what could be. This kind of future focus will make a huge difference in the life and morale of an organization. The next big thing for a leader to do, once the dream is clearly in mind, is plan. There are people who are in charge of organizations who take a haphazard, take-‘em-as-they-come approach to leadership, but I’ve never met any highly effective leader who does it that way. The leaders who consistently take their organizations and teams to new heights always plan for the results they desire. In my opinion, leaders are planners. Calculated…strategic…intentional. Leaders who get things done don’t do it by accident. When things go well, it’s because they planned and prepared for it to be that way.
I recently came across a wonderful book, Innovation the NASA Way, by Rod Pyle, who led leadership training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. One of the things that really impressed me about the stories of NASA’s innovative approach to solving life-or-death situations in the exploration of space is their planning process, particularly how thoroughly they test each and every system and procedure prior to launch. The book describes in detail the process in which every component is tested, retested, and tested again. Pyle makes this statement about the NASA way: “Think boldly, be daring, exhibit confidence, and, above all, test everything. Ducking the potential for failure can lead to disaster.” Our teams may not be dealing with life and death, and our failures may not rise to the level of being a disaster, but I believe we can learn a lot from this practice of testing before we just start doing things randomly.
Testing our theories is a way we can plan for things to go the way we want them to when we bring a new product to market, a new innovation to how we do business, or even a new way of carrying on our common mission. Testing can come through true collaborative dialogue with team members, trying out a procedure on a small scale before a major organizational shift in policy, focus groups, test markets, and many other ways that allow us to see what works and what doesn’t so that we can make changes when the stakes are reasonably low. Planning through testing is a solid method of discovering the steps we need to take to move forward, and lack of planning in this way could hinder our team’s forward movement or even shut down innovation all together. We must plan for every possible scenario so that if disaster does strike, as it has on occasion with NASA, we are prepared for it.
I encourage you to be a leader that plans for your future success by going through the process of testing, retesting, and testing again. Reach for the stars as NASA has done, following their example of making sure that you have the tools you need to get you where you want to go, successfully and safely.
Lead well.