Guiding leaders into the Digital Age

  Sudhanshu Palsule

By Madushka Balasuriya

Q: You describe yourself as a ‘Social Commentator’. Can you elaborate on that?

A: In my work as someone who advises leaders, and works with people to try and get them to develop, it was one of the things I realised I was already doing but didn’t have a name to it. I was like an anthropologist; going into places, observing what was going on and then being able to create a pattern or narrative out of it. 

What happens with a lot of people who work inside organisations or even people who lead in societies is that they don’t actually see what’s going on because they’re so inside the problem itself. They need someone from the outside who can come and give them a picture of what it is, give them a narrative that they can understand and connect the dots. I think that’s what I do, I help people connect the dots. What you heard me do today was about connecting dots in what I think is happening around the world as we speak right now. 

But the same is true for personal development; I could spend an evening talking to you and asking you questions, and at the end of it I could tell you some of the dots I see as connecting in your life, stuff that you’re probably not aware of because you’ve stopped thinking about it. I like to do that.

Q: Let’s speak briefly about your background. What has brought you to this point in your career?

A: Well, my background is a strange one, I studied quantum physics at university, so I was trained as a physicist. But I think I got very interested in trying to learn about how human beings learn, I think that was to me the most important thing. 

Secondly it was about human development – how can we actually learn to be more effective as human beings, not just at work but also in life. And I found that for a lot of us we’re not good at connecting those dots, we don’t see ourselves as people who have a story, a story that allows us to connect the past with the present and the future. We lose touch with all that, we get busy, we get disconnected, we lead fragmented lives, and sometimes it just takes another person to help connect those dots. So that’s really what brought me into it. 

I got interested in psychology as a result, so for the past few years I’ve been a student of psychology and neurology. I think a lot is happening in brain studies right now that’s giving us a wonderful insight into how the human brain works. I think it’s very important from a leadership point of view to understand what holds us back, some of the unconscious biases we all carry inside us – and many of those are biological.

For me leadership has become a thing where we are actually – I call us human becomings, we’re not human beings yet – works in progress, we’re not the finished product. And each one of us has the responsibility in our lifetime to learn to overcome some of those biases so that we become fully human. I see my work and leadership as a humanising process where we learn to become truly human at the end of it.

Q: Do you have examples of corporations which have taken your advice on-board, addressed their biases, and pre-empted disruption in their industry?

A: Yeah, there are examples, but it’s a slow process. First of all it needs the endorsement of someone at the very top to allow it to happen. You cannot just do this without permission and endorsement. Secondly, it is a slow process. It’s really about practicing a different mindset. 

Let’s take an example that comes from outside of business: revenge. Revenge is one of the most basic emotions in human beings. That’s why so many soap operas all over the world have that same theme, that motif of revenge. It’s the most basic human emotion; you did this to me, I’m going to do this to you. To overcome that and actually move to a level of forgiveness and compassion is the journey of humanisation. Does it happen instantly? No, it takes practice. I may fail the first six times, or even after I get it I may fail again, so I can spend a whole lifetime actually trying it again and again. That to me is the whole process of discovery. 

One of the words I often use nowadays is discovery, I don’t talk of knowledge anymore. It is a completely new field which we have to get into and I took the example of revenge to just point that out. If you take a look at South Africa and what Nelson Mandela was able to achieve as one human being, where they set up an entire reconciliation program for the victims to come face-to-face with the perpetrators of the crime – in some cases they had killed members of their family – and for the perpetrator to say “I’m sorry” and for the victim to say “I forgive you” on a mass scale, can you imagine what that social movement must have been like? But it came out of a group of people that included Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, who themselves had gone through that humanising process where they had learnt to forgive. 

To me that’s what leadership is all about at the end of the day: the senior person of the organisation, at the top, being on the journey themselves and then allowing the same thing to happen in other parts of the organisation. It’s all about asking yourself, what are the different conversations we can have that we’ve not been having? What are the new actions we can take? What new behaviours can we try out? It’s about trying it out again and again and again. 

As for disruption that comes from the outside, yes, so many times what holds us back in our companies is not knowledge or ideas – there’s enough of that – is that we simply don’t allow conversations to happen where those ideas and that information can flow all the way through. Sometimes I think it’s the job of senior management to get out of the way and let go. However, that’s not easy.

Q: You’ve said that one of the biggest concerns for any leader is the concept of risk. How do you go about convincing leaders that the risk of inaction sometimes outweighs the risk of actually taking action and pre-empting change?

A: I’ll answer it in two parts. On the one hand, there is the whole biological problem we have as human beings when it comes to risk. We are fundamentally risk averse. In the brain, if you ever were to choose between risk and reward you would go for reward. So we’re hardwired actually to not take risks. We’ve got to learn to take risks, that’s number one.  Secondly, we’ve got to understand there is such a thing as taking a risk because you overcome the fear of taking the risk. Very often the fear we have is not of the risk itself, it’s about the fear of taking the risk. It’s about wondering “what will people think of me?” It’s about being vulnerable. It’s about losing that self-image we’ve created for ourselves. It’s all those things that come in the way and we’ve got to overcome them.

Q: You’ve seen and experienced both Western and Eastern cultures, yet despite distinct differences between the two, the problems with leadership and averseness to change and risk remain the same. Where is it easier to manage these problems and how do you adapt your advice to the different cultures? 

A: On the one hand, you’re right the fundamental issues of risk and reward are the same for all people. But there are cultural overtones. Many of our cultures in the East come from a scarcity economy, where there was not enough some time ago for everyone to have so we are little risk averse because you keep worrying about what would happen if it all runs out. So that scarcity economy is built into our thinking. 

This is the same for the post-war generation in Europe, for example, they had the same problem but they were able to overcome that later on because there was an abundance that came later. However, on the other hand, I would say our ability to take risks in this part of the world is probably more because we’re able to play with things here that they’re not able to do in the West. In the West there has got to be a process around it, there has got to be a whole regimented thing around it. So it’s not an easy question to answer in terms of whether it is easier here or easier there. 

All I can say is, if you take a look at the United States, it continues to be the centre of innovation in the world even now. And that’s because you have an entire culture formed around not carrying the burden that Europe carries even today, that is the burden of hierarchy, the burden of the establishment, the burden of social pressures, the burden of titles. The US just became free from that. Silicon Valley was a creation of that kind of independent thinking, and there’s no reason why we cannot do that over here where the younger generation, who are relatively more free than the older generation, can actually go into startups and create that economic engine in places like Sri Lanka. I’m very optimistic about it from what I’ve seen so far.

Q: Leadership comes in varying scales, the largest of which is heading a nation. What have you identified as the biggest threat facing leaders globally?

A: That’s a fabulous question, I would love to write a book on that! Like many, I had great hopes for US President Barack Obama when he made it into the White House. What an amazing time that was when we actually got him into the White House. And you realise at the end of eight years how hampered he has been by the political process that does not allow things to happen. That’s one problem: our political institutions are old, they are based on almost primitive ways of governance, and we need to change some of that. 

Secondly, coming back to the human brain, I don’t think the human brain has matured to a point where we can genuinely collaborate and tackle global issues globally. That’s why I take the example of global warming; just when we think we have an agreement, we’ve got China and India who say they’re not going to sign anything. Why? Because they say, “you guys have polluted for the last 50 years, now it’s our turn to do that.” We’re never going to find a solution if we don’t agree and collaborate on the big issues. And we cannot do that because we’re not hardwired to do ‘systems thinking.’ 

I would love to see a new generation of people, such as the kids in today’s schools, who learn ‘systems thinking’ and mindful leadership. They learn that from now, so that by the time they grow up there’s hope for a different kind of leadership. But if you want me to be optimistic about the current crop of politicians in the world, absolutely not.

QQ: Do you not think it will be too late by the time the youth of this generation grow up?

A: I want to stay optimistic. I want to believe that there will be technologies that will be created that will alleviate some of the problems. I want to believe that we will transform our education system, that there will be a bunch of kids growing up today who 20-25 years from now will lead mindfully. But it’s looking bleak. 

Q: It’s fascinating that this conversation which started off as one surrounding corporate leadership has evolved into one surrounding the leaders of tomorrow, and one of the most pressing problems of our time – global warming. Do you see parallels between a political establishment that blunts the Obamas of this world and pushes back against the likes of Bernie Sanders, and a corporation’s inherent distrust of change in its industry even if it's leader might be looking to embrace it?

A: It’s a complex situation. I am beginning to challenge what is known as the “Great Man” theory, the belief that there will be that one person – we deliberately use the word ‘man’ not ‘woman’ – that one superhero, that one man, who will take a company or a society and lead that way out. It’s becoming more and more complex for that to happen, it’s not easy anymore. I’d rather we start thinking along different lines, where we start thinking in terms of leadership at various levels where we have distributed leadership in ways that people connect with each other differently. We have smaller manageable movements happening in many different areas.  It’s not that just one man is going to take us out of that, I think the time for that is gone. I really feel there’s got to be something different happening from a leadership position. I also think more women in leadership positions would make the world a much better place, because as several studies have shown, women are better at working as a part of system, which makes it better than the sum of its parts.

Pic by Upul Abayasekara