By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

As I was writing my latest book, The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics, I came across the concept of Type I leaders [actually I stumbled across the idea of Type I problems and made the inference that Type I problems required Type I leaders]. Type I leaders are unstructured problem solvers. They come into a situation; figure out what is going on and make a determination regarding what is important/what is trivial and lay out a course of action. We are living in a world defined by Type I problems. Unfortunately we also seem to be living in a world suffering a deficit of Type I leaders.  Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group, asserts we are living in a “G-Zero” world. What he means by this is that the major nations of the world are essentially operating with ZERO leadership. Organizations need to hire, retain and develop executive development programs that cerebrate and celebrate Type I leaders.

A Type I leader, upon consolidating their understanding of the chaotic situation which confronts them sets about changing things – putting in place frameworks, practices, and metrics designed to make it easier for Type II [pattern-recognizers] and Type III [rule-based] leaders to contribute to meaning making and value creation. Type I leaders lay out the game that other people play.

In the human scale health care environment a Type I leader would be a primary care physician. These individuals process all kinds of structured and unstructured data, ultimately arriving at a conclusion [in this case a diagnosis] of what the path to health should be. In the case of cancer, one goes to an oncologist who will run tests, analyze the data and develop hypotheses about what type of cancer it is and what type it isn't. The oncologist will then embark on a course of therapy, and the feedback from how you respond confirms or disproves her hypotheses. There are no pat answers to these kinds of unstructured problems. This is a classic Type I problem handled by a properly prepared Type I leader.

Type II leaders are clinicians who act in a pattern-recognition mode. With Type-One diabetes - If you're always thirsty, you urinate frequently, you're losing weight, and your eyesight is blurry, you have diabetes. The pattern is so clear it doesn't take nearly the skill to diagnose and treat conditions in the pattern-recognition area as it did up in the problem-solving mode.

Type III healthcare problems can be treated in a rules-based mode -- like, if the test strip turns blue, you're pregnant. That takes even less skill.

In the geopolitical sphere General George Catlett Marshall who served as the United States Army Chief of Staff during World War II and as the chief military adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the quintessential Type I leader. Labelled the "organizer of victory" by British war time Prime Minister Winston Churchill he was the guy who chose the team that led the U.S. Army in World War II. Following the war he was the guy who designed the first ERP – the European Recovery Plan - which came to be known in popular culture as the “Marshall Plan.” Marshall was a master of meaning making.

Modern organizations are currently confronted by four disruptive technologies [Social, Mobile, Analytics/Big Data and Cloud]. Only twenty-five percent of the Global 2000 have designated a Type I leader to figure out what these technologies really mean.

What are we/what can we do about that?