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

In my previous blog post I shared the general consensus that the state of leadership in enterprises today – just about all enterprises – was not good. Workshops conducted with five hundred plus executives at five universities concluded that “the world has changed” and put forth the hypothesis that this change “mandates a new kind of leader.” This hypothesis begs the question – what kind of leader does this changed environment require?

Working with David Weinberger [author of Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School] I concluded that “digitization has transformed knowledge.”  I believe that the transformation of knowledge requires us to re-frame how we think about leadership.

This is the quiet revolution which is putting so much strain on leadership today.  In an economy driven by knowledge, the transformation of knowledge is a BIG THING. And yet the transformation of knowledge [i.e., what can be known and the ontological processes of being in the know] has been only-remarked-upon-in-passing. The punch line of all this is that the transformation of knowledge has truly changed the relationship of THE Leader to knowledge.

I posit that in the previous world [BG – Before Google] leaders were the people who worked most effectively in the absence of knowledge [i.e., were comfortable acting without knowledge, making guesses]. A generation of post-World War II leaders excelled at giving the impression that they “knew it all.”

In the future world, I posit that leaders will be those who work most effectively with knowledge [i.e., know what they know; know what they don’t know; know what they need to know; and know how to know].

In a series of University-based workshops, I asked executives:

"If you were – ala Ford Motor Company – or Dr. Frankenstein asked to “design” the leader of the future…Generally speaking what one attribute would you add and what one attribute would you take out of today’s leaders?"

Leadership Knowledge Problems
The Number One trait hundreds of executives claim needs to be exfoliated from the executive suite is the belief on the part of senior management that they are the only ones “who know.” A forensic analysis of classic, snatched-from-the-headlines business debacles reveals that executive hubris [the belief of knowing] was a major factor in enterprise value destruction.

Fellow futurist Jamais Cascio classifies the all too prevalent executive pathology of choosing not to look at issues that need to be looked at as the “here be dragons” syndrome. My colleagues in the literature department have a name for this behavior as well: bovarism, the concept of purposeful ignorance,  the process of deliberate not knowing, the human will to see things as they are not.  “Here be dragons” topics are issues that organizations find dangerous to even think about [the “third rail” of executive conversation]. There’s something about a particular issue that makes people within an organization steer clear, even if it’s a potentially important problem.

The respected jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes is thought to have characterized President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as, “A second class mind, but a first class temperament.” The inverse may be applied to Nassim Nicholas Taleb who popularized the term “Black Swan” – a low probability, high impact event which is knowable but dismissed because it is so far outside the expected.

Paraphrasing former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, leaders need to make explicit the KK’s [known knowns], KU’s [known unknowns] and UU’s [unknown unknowns] of the enterprise.

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Thornton May is a Futurist and Senior Advisor and Gustin Parners. Additionally, her serves as Executive Director & Dean of the IT Leadership Academy. Follow him on Twitter <a data-cke-saved-href="http://twitter.com/deanitla" href="http://twitter.com/deanitla" target="_blank" title'"thornton="" may="" on="" twitter"="">@deanitla.