A few days ago I sent off a tweet referencing a wonderful article in the Financial Times. Noriko Hama did an excellent job discussing the leadership failures in the current crisis in Japan in “Japan’s nuclear policies: gutsy but witless“.
This led to an email response from Dr David FitzGerald, a research neurologist at the Department of Veteran Affairs’ RR&D Brain Rehabilitation Research Center in Gainesville Florida. His area of study is post traumatic brain injuries so he knows quite a bit about the way people think…and don’t think.
It seems to Dr FitzGerald that it’s not so much that the politicians and executives in Japan were witless…although they certainly were that…but more that they lack imagination. As we keep hearing, “no one imagined that we could have such a huge earthquake (the plant is right on a major fault line), followed by such a huge tsunami (the very word comes from Japan, the center of tsunamis throughout history), followed by the catastrophic failure of the plant safety systems (see Chernobyl and Three Mile Island).”
A similar failure of imagination seems to have occurred at BP leading to the Gulf oil spill. “We’ll never have a problem and if something does happen the blowout preventer will work perfectly and shut down the well so there’s really no reason to worry about lax safety standards, numerous violations of government regulations, and managers pushing the workers even after hearing them talk about problems.”
Group think takes over. Who is going to be the brave one, risking career and the probability of personal destruction, to use their imagination and suggest that, yes, such things really can happen.
After all, no one else is worried.
Just because something is rare does not mean that it will not occur…see Fukushima Nuclear Plant and BP Gulf Oil Spill…or that the result will not be catastrophic.
True leadership does not shirk from the tough discussions. True leadership means helping people face the unfaceable, think about the unthinkable, prepare for the unimaginable…something noticeably lacking in supposed leaders the world over these days.
True leadership means using your imagination to think about what may occur in the future as well as what is happening this quarter, and then fashioning a vision and message that catch people’s attention and emotion and enables you to guide them to choices that lead to a better future in spite of current problems.
True leadership means being willing to put your career on the line…always.
