The Paradox of Future Chasers
The Counterintuitive Shift They Need to Take to Gain Momentum
Leaders with a sense of urgency to step into the future are visionary thinkers who anticipate trends and have a bias for action regardless of challenging circumstances.
Saying that they adapt to change is an understatement. Their constant is change and motion, and they are equipped to be ahead in a paradigm of constant transformation.
Leaders wired like this live in the future, excited about possibilities and potential growth, eager to become the person who would accomplish more demanding aspirations—often wishing things and people moved faster and results happened quicker.
However, speed is not the only factor that will put you ahead.
Speed vs. Impact and Momentum: Recognizing the Trade-Off
By going fast, you may sacrifice driving impact in the systems you operate and, ironically, the capacity to inject velocity into mobilizing other players within those systems to gain momentum toward collective progress.
Impact occurs when your actions elevate and grow the system you operate within—team members, peers, management, clients, stakeholders, culture, and strategy. Momentum happens when you engage and bring that system forward with you.
Moving too quickly may mean that you’re just tiptoeing in the impact you could have in the system and the momentum you want to gain.
When leaders prioritize making choices to move ahead quickly, this can prevent them from investing time in developing team members, fostering a high-performing culture, and becoming the type of leader who would elevate the entire system. This tendency sacrifices width over length, impact over speed, and system-wide progression over individual progression.
To truly impact and grow your system, you need to assess it strategically, identifying interventions that will bring meaningful upgrades.
Succeeding at this requires a space to look at the variables in your system from a distance. You need a perspective that simply cannot be gained within the motion and speed of day-to-day activities.
To achieve this, future-focused leaders need to do the most counterintuitive thing of all: slow down.
The Trap: Resistance to Slowing Down
Some leaders wrongly believe that if they slow down to create this vital space and distance themselves from their day-to-day tasks, they will penalize their growth. But it’s precisely in that perceived suspension of progress where the secret for exponential growth lies, both for you and your wider system.
You need to be willing to suspend your (false perception of) growth and advancement to achieve something bigger for your system. This happens when you generate new insights to lead yourself, your business, and others in new and more impactful ways.
Applying the brakes to your bullet train and shifting down a gear drastically resets your state of mind and enables you to generate powerful insights that can lead to leaps in growth and impact. The secret to exponential growth lies in creating space to pause and reflect with a clear, strategic perspective. You need to go into the fishbowl.
The Shift: Go into the Fishbowl—Create Space for Strategic Perspective
"Into the fishbowl" is an analogy I use to describe the space of self-reflection leaders need outside of their hectic routines and daily demands. This space is essential for gaining fresh perspectives and generating new insights for their leadership.
Leaders can access and amplify these insights when they distance themselves from the “oceans” they lead—their businesses, teams, clients, peers, and management—and look at them strategically from afar.
From within the fishbowl, you can gain a new understanding of what’s not working in your business strategy. You can also see inefficiencies in your company and identify barriers that are stopping your team members from growing, for example.
The perspective that you gain allows you to generate new insights and ideas, which you can then bring back to your day-to-day environment to interact with your system in ways that create more impactful results.
While the ocean has not changed, but you have.
The Outcome: Gaining Lasting Momentum by Slowing Down
Even if it doesn’t seem like you’re making progress when you take perspective, when you return to the ocean—your business system—the new perspectives you’ll apply will enable you to inject focus, intention, and velocity into moving forward with your individual, team and organizational aspirations.
Many leaders think they can gain these new perspectives and operate at this level of impact and while swimming in the ocean, immersed in the motion of their day-to-day activities. While this can lead to incremental progress, the quality of insights gained by stepping back enables you to make quantum leaps in your growth rather than small steps.
The truth is that:
Quick Overview:
Leaders who are future chasers have gives them en edge to stay ahead
However, the tradeoff is that they sacrifice impact and momentum in the system.
The counterintuitive solutions to drive more impact is Slowing down to gain new perspectives.
Action: Suspend your ocean swim and go into the fishbowl—create space to think.
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