Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Learn more about The Innovative Leadership Think-Tank™ at https://bit.ly/ILI-ThinkTank.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here. 

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy

• Why Smart Companies Make Bad Decisions with Mats Alvesson
• When Leadership Puts Life on the Line: Navigating Tough Decisions with Beverley McLachlin
• How AI Preserves Humanity at Ancestry with Howard Hochhauser

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Dr. Christopher Washington is the president of The Innovative Leadership Institute Think-Tank™. A strategic leader, systems thinker, and seasoned academic executive with over three decades of experience strengthening nonprofit and educational organizations, he served as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Franklin University and is a long-standing contributor to the Forbes Nonprofit Council. He previously served as CEO of Urbana University and has held leadership roles on numerous national and international nonprofit boards. 

Greg Moran is the CTO of Pyx Health, a female-led and LGBTQI+-founded company working with national health insurance plans to improve access to quality care. Through his extensive career, Greg has been a director, founder, advisor and operating executive with extensive global operations experience (U.S., Europe and Asia). He holds a strong market focus with deep technology experience, including start-up, scaling, restructuring, sales, finance, and operations.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] Welcome to Innovating Leadership: Co-creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, CEO and founder of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where leadership meets innovation and strategy becomes results. Today’s episode is one that I’ve been anticipating for a long time. We’re formally introducing the ILI Think Tank, and with it, our research focus on decision velocity: the discipline of moving from signal to coordinated action at the speed your environment demands. To help us do that, I’m joined by two people who bring complementary and essential perspectives to this work. 

Dr. Christopher Washington is the president of the ILI Think Tank. Christopher is also the Provost Emeritus of Franklin University. 

Greg Moran is ILI’s executive in residence. He’s a former chief strategy officer at Ford and a trusted voice on this program for [00:01:00] years. 

Together, Christopher and Greg are gonna walk us through the decision velocity architecture, and today we’re getting the first public look at it. So let’s begin. 

Christopher.  

Christopher: It’s good to see you.  

Maureen: You’re now leading the think tank as the president. Why did we build it, and why is decision velocity the focus for 2026?  

Christopher: We built the ILI Think Tank in response to the need to respond more quickly, both ILI and its customers and its clients and partners- Because of a different kind of environment that we’re in now. 

I mean, we’re in an environment that’s very different from two years ago. Change is arriving faster, often simultaneously, multiple changes through evolving technology and AI, workforce shifts economic conditions changing, stakeholder expectations, market disruption, you name it. 

And Greg and Maureen, you know the question before has been: when you think about organizations as systems, [00:02:00] what’s our strategy? But I think we’re moving beyond the “do we have a strategy” question to “When the environment is changing as fast as it is today, can we sense what is changing? Can we interpret what it means? Can we make timely decisions? Can we execute effectively? And then can we learn fast enough from what we’ve implemented to remain relevant?” That is why decision velocity is our research focus for 2026. 

I think people have this common misconception, when I say decision velocity, they think decision speed. 

It’s not about rushing. It’s about increasing your capacity and your organization’s capacity to move from signal — the signals that we receive in our environment that things need to change — to shared understanding, to coordinated action at the speed of the changes that we face today . 

So the think tank is really designed to help keep ILI’s leadership development and leadership systems development [00:03:00] evidence-based, board relevant, and grounded in the real challenges that organizations are facing today, Maureen.  

Maureen: Thank you. Greg, I remember in a prior podcast you talked about decision-making being one of the most important thing leaders do. 

Does what Christopher’s talking about resonate with what you’re hearing from board members and executives, and what does the pressure to decide faster actually feel like from where you sit?  

Greg: Well, as Christopher mentioned, it’s less about deciding fast, and it’s more about having the capacity to decide well on a timeframe that makes the decision particularly relevant. 

There’s a saying in race car driving that is, “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” And what it really means is you wanna make deliberate choices, and you want to make those deliberate choices relative to the let’s call [00:04:00] it the scale of the choice you’re making. You don’t wanna overreact. 

And if you make those choices deliberately, and you make them in proportion to the decision you’re making, you end up being smooth, and smooth is fast. So if you’re watching a race car on a racetrack and it looks like it’s going slow, it often is going extremely fast ’cause you’re not seeing radical movements of the car, right? 

And I’d say the same thing is true in organizational dynamics. If you can make small adjustments because you’re seeing what’s coming and able to anticipate, then you’re able to make smaller decisions, and you’re able to then have less inordinate impact on the organization. And it looks like the organization is magically adapting, when in fact it’s making small adjustments because it’s sensing better what’s coming down the pike.  

Maureen: The phrase I’ve heard for that is dynamic steering. And as a [00:05:00] cyclist this is probably relevant to you that you’re always making small adjustments. It’s constant movement, and yet to your point, it looks smooth.  

Greg: Smooth. Exactly.  

Maureen: So let’s move into the first of the six facets of decision velocity, and that’s sensing. 

The disciplined identification of meaningful environmental changes before they become a crisis. So Christopher, the foundation paper draws a sharp distinction between passive data collection and genuine sensing capability. What does it actually mean for an organization to be good at sensing? 

Christopher: I love this race car analogy because I was thinking, “What if you’re driving the race car in the rain?” You’ve gotta adjust to your environmental conditions. You gotta know your car. You know, there’s so much going on there. That really can help us understand what being good at sensing means. 

It’s a disciplined way. Being good at [00:06:00] it means that you have a sort of discipline or a disciplined way of noticing meaningful changes before both the change and the transition, the effects of change on people, becomes a crisis. Can you notice these changes? It’s not just about collecting more data. 

You can go to many organizations today, they’ll pull out their scorecards. They’ll show you their dashboards. It’s not about that. Most organizations have plenty of data. We’re in a data-rich environment in most cases. Good sensing, though, means that organizations can distinguish between early signals of change, distinguish those signals from the noise, and connect signals that are being received across the enterprise. 

Because, you know, you’ll have, for example, you have a sales department notice that perhaps there’s a change in customer behaviors. You have HR that might see that there’s increased strain on the workforce. IT might notice increased requests for AI technologies or other technologies for people to do their work . 

And [00:07:00] so you have all these sort of signals in an organization. The marketing department might read an announcement that a new product’s coming out from a different company, putting pressure on your products and services. In a weak sensing system, those signals remain scattered. Everyone has evidence that things are changing, but no one has a real big picture or a shared vision of what’s happening. 

So you’re asking what failure looks like. Maureen, If you’re in the inside, it’s easy to assume that someone else is doing the sensing or that if I see it, everybody sees it. And there are also cases where, because it’s perhaps not in my job description, that’s not what I do. 

I don’t do the sensing, so I neglect it altogether. The responsibility of sensing is really important and it’s not one that is covered in a lot of job descriptions, so neglecting activity is something that feels normal to insiders, if that makes sense. It feels normal. People are busy. They’re competent. They’re doing their job. Meetings are happening, [00:08:00] and yet they’re all missing the patterns, and so that is what failure looks like. It looks normal, and then all of a sudden a distant issue becomes a major crisis, and that’s what happens when you fail to do sensing.  

Maureen: That’s a perfect follow-up for Greg. 

How common is it for an organization to believe that it is sensing when it’s actually just monitoring? 

Greg: I’ll focus my answer here on the most common failure modes that I see around sensing. The first is there’s too much data, and the data is often used as an excuse for not reacting to the signal. 

So I’ll give a couple of examples on this, from my time at Ford. When I first came into the strategy role, we were benchmarking every other car company in the world. We had a room literally dedicated to the metrics of every other car company. And the way they, quite frankly, got used was, if [00:09:00] you didn’t want to react to a signal from one car company, you could look at a different car company and prove that the other one was making a mistake. 

And when Alan Mulally joined the company, he very wisely said, “We’re only gonna benchmark one company. It’s Toyota. They’re the best run car company. We’re only interested in benchmarking against the best. That proved to clarify and reduce the noise level and get us focused on signal versus noise. 

The second failure mode that I think is most common is the frequency of measuring or listening is way too low. Most public companies are listening mostly on a quarterly basis. That is completely inadequate in today’s world. Sticking with the Ford analogy Alan Mulally moved us from quarterly signals… very much result metric focused, which is like driving with the rearview mirror, right? 

There’s a [00:10:00] reason why the windshield’s a lot bigger than the rearview mirror, and you wanna be driving with the windshield, not the rearview mirror. When you’re focused on quarterly results and reacting to them, you’re moving way too slow. We went from quarterly result metric focus to weekly process metric focus. 

That was a big shift and a very virtuous one in terms of allowing us decision velocity in the real sense of the word. Good decisions made on a very frequent basis led to very smooth recovery of the company over the course of the next couple of years. I’ll finish with one more analogy from my days as a pilot. 

When you’re learning to fly instruments, you are taught to do an instrument scan. There’s six core instruments that you’re looking at when you’re flying in instrument conditions, and you’re in a constant scan of those six instruments. And what you’re really looking for is small signals from each of those instruments, and then you’re making [00:11:00] small adjustments in response to that. 

It’s a very tiring thing to do because you’re in a constant scan mode. The point is, if you wait too long between looking at those instruments, you can find a significant variable that’s out of range, and then you’ve gotta make a strong reaction to get it back into range, and that doesn’t always turn out well, as J.F.K., Junior, found out, to his demise. 

Christopher: Greg points out a really important piece about this. I always assume good intentions, but data is power for some people, right? If there are indicators to success that are supporting current behavior, you have to look at those when you think about changing an activity. 

And here, Greg clearly points out, a lot of organizations have these inherent structures: “We meet once a month.” That’s insufficient for what we’re talking about, and that has to change, but also the culture of what we talk about and how we talk about it in sensing also has to change. 

Maureen: That’s a great lead-in to number two of the six, [00:12:00] sense-making: the practice of shared interpretation of signals. If we don’t have that, we have fragmentation. Even when organizations detect the right signal, the next failure point is shared sensing of them, making sense of them. 

What does the breakdown look like in practice? 

Greg: Yeah. So just sticking with my example from Ford, one of the first things that Alan Mulally put in place was something called the business plan review. So I said we moved to a weekly readout. The weekly readout was real. Every Thursday morning for two hours was a business plan review, and the senior leaders of the company, i.e., the people that ran the P&Ls of the company, were all expected to be there and all expected to be personally prepared, meaning they’d already read the sensing. They already had the signal. So point number one, you’ve got to have that kind of a context set where the expectation is that the [00:13:00] decision-makers understand the signals. 

The second thing that I would point out that was really critical is that team had to be aligned on what they were trying to achieve, and we’re gonna get into this a little bit more as we get to sense-giving, but this issue of shared context is absolutely essential to make that kind of a weekly cadence of making decisions meaningful. 

Because if you’re pulling in different directions, it doesn’t matter. You’re gonna read the signals and you’re gonna interpret them differently. And so shared context is really critical for that to be effective. 

At Ford, there was a long tradition of not admitting something was not working until somebody else, made a bigger mistake so that your mistake didn’t look as bad. And the F-150 is the most important vehicle in Ford’s lineup by far. It’s the best-selling nameplate in the history of automobiles by a long shot. 

I remember [00:14:00] distinctly when the head of North America came into the weekly meeting and started the meeting by volunteering the information. His name was Mark Fields. He ultimately became the CEO of the company. And he came into the meeting and opened the meeting by announcing that the F-150 launch that we were about to do was behind schedule. 

And I remember Alan stood up and began clapping. Which seemed like an odd thing in a moment like that. But what Alan was really acknowledging is that we finally had reached this point where the shared context of our most important job is helping each other succeed at our piece of this larger story, and he saw the evidence of one of the most senior leaders in the company running by far the biggest P&L stood up and volunteered a problem, and Alan clapped, and then he said, “How can we help?” 

And that to me was a moment where you realized that shared [00:15:00] context had been achieved.  

Maureen: It’s a beautiful example. Thank you. So Christopher , what does the research tell us about why leadership teams, often composed of highly capable individuals, still fail at arriving at a shared meaning?  

Christopher: This is one of the major issues of decision velocity, and I like the notion of shared context. 

And when I wrote the white paper, I did the research on what social scientists were saying on why this shared context is really important and why coming up with shared agreements, not perfect agreements but shared understanding enough to act together is important. And so what Karl Weick suggested, is that people make sense of ambiguity through their own lenses, through their own roles, through their experiences, through their identities, through their assumptions. 

We can probably even add political motivations as Greg mentioned earlier. So the same signal [00:16:00] can mean very different things to different leaders. And I’ve been in rooms where a phenomenon has come up as a concern and people start to talk about opportunities to address the concern. 

One person sees risk. Or someone else sees opportunity. Someone else sees disruption to the workforce. Another one sees a temporary variation, so there’s a temporal component. They think this’ll blow over. And so you have all these perspectives on what’s happening. 

Shared meaning becomes more likely when we can set aside structured time for sensemaking, not just reporting, but making sense of what we’re experiencing together. There is a difference. In sensemaking, you ask questions like, “what are we seeing out there? What do we think this means to us? What assumptions are we making about this information we’re sensing? And what would prove us wrong? What decisions, does this interpretation that we now have imply? What do we [00:17:00] need to do as a result of this, basically.” And so I think decision velocity improves when those very capable people who have very different perspectives, come together and they move from a fragmented interpretation to one of a more disciplined approach and a shared meaning to what they are experiencing. 

It’s not perfect agreement, but it’s enough shared understanding so that we can act together.  

Maureen: That moves us into then number three, sense giving: aligning others around the shared meaning. And to your point, we don’t always agree, but we at least share a meaning, and that allows us to move forward. 

So sensemaking is internal. It happens within the leadership team. Sensegiving now moves us into shaping how the broader organization understands what’s changing, what it means, why it matters. So Christopher, your foundation paper describes sensegiving as [00:18:00] the moment where decision velocity becomes social rather than cognitive. 

Christopher: I love this notion of sensegiving. It’s a step that most leaders often neglect, and the really good ones are so good at it. 

Why I feel that leaders fall short here is once they understand the change, they oftentimes assume everybody else does, or they announce a decision without really helping people understand the interpretation behind the decision. 

And if you don’t help people understand the interpretation, you can create symbolic agreement, which is everybody’s head nodding, “Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna do this,” and they go off and do what they’ve always done. Or you can get passive resistance because people feel that what they’ve been doing before is the right way to do things and it takes more effort to do something different. 

Or it can just create confusion. I don’t understand why we’re doing this or what we need to do. And so sensegiving is where decision velocity becomes social. It’s [00:19:00] the leadership work of helping other people understand what’s changing, why that matters, and what we’re going to do about it, and what we need to do about it. 

Effective sensegiving is not just communication. It’s translation; the core message has to be consistent, of course, but leaders have a way of messaging and connecting to the responsibilities, the concerns, and the language of each audience that gets affected by the change. 

And so you might have a different message for your board. They might get one version. Your executive team might hear a different version. Your employees may need another. Customers, funders, partners, et cetera, might need a different version still. But core message the same but tailored to the needs of each group. 

What I see is this need to have a very coherent story that links the signals, the stakes, the decisions, and actions we need to take. 

Maureen: I love that you talk about targeting it to each audience. Greg, I wanna bring this [00:20:00] specifically to the board level. 

Greg: Well, in truth, in my experience the board plays an important role, but it’s usually after a lot of hard work has already happened. The sad reality is most boards don’t have sufficient expertise and/or data to meaningfully participate in the strategy-making work. Oftentimes what’s really happening is the leadership team of the company is recruiting the board to a strategy, and then the board is allocating resources in support of that strategy. 

And yes, you may have a chairman that is reinforcing it publicly, which is very important because the market needs to know that the board stands behind the strategy. But in reality, the hard work is usually done by the leadership team led by the CEO of a company, and then reinforced and resourced by the board. 

I do think the point that Christopher was making is [00:21:00] a very important one. It’s not sufficient to just have a shared vision, and it’s not sufficient to have even a shared strategy. Those are good and those are important, but they are insufficient to the actual execution side. What you also have to have is a shared set of assumptions about the future in which you’re going to be operating that give texture to the decisions you’re making. 

Continuing the Ford example, one of the most important things we did was align on 10 assumptions about what the future held for the car business. And honestly, it was more important that we agreed on those 10 than that we were right on those 10, because we could make decisions in that context. 

Of course, if data comes along sufficient to cause you to change one of the assumptions, you do that together. But to be honest, these were really smart people that had a lot of data. We were not wrong, but it was important that [00:22:00] we be aligned on those assumptions, because otherwise, coming up with aligned strategy and tactics is essentially impossible, because you’re viewing the world through a different lens. 

That’s another critical piece, that you have to expose to the board. They need to understand why this strategy makes so much sense, and that means exposing those assumptions and the data that drives them. And that’s where you get a board that’s like, “Oh, I get it.” 

Because they don’t, by themselves, necessarily have the expertise. They may be from other industries, they may have specific experience you’ve brought to bear, and they’ve got to be educated with respect to that in order to provide the kind of alignment that you’re talking about. 

Maureen: Let’s talk about then moving from alignment to decision-making. 

This is the practice areas that most leaders think of when they hear the word decision velocity, but the framework makes clear that reaching this stage [00:23:00] with insufficient sensing, misalignment of sense-making, and poor sense-giving has already degraded the quality of whatever decisions we can make. So Greg, how often is the decision problem actually upstream?  

Greg: So in short, the answer is almost always, maybe always. Sometimes the failure mode can be just picking a leader. Most often it happens when a new leader comes into a key role, and there’s this mentality, particularly in Western business culture, that as the new person in a role, you have to distinguish yourself from the previous person in the role. 

And so there sometimes can be a throwing out the baby with the bathwater problem where it’s like, “Forget all that, we’re doing something completely different,” and that almost never is a good idea. The predecessor in the role may have made some mistakes or may have needed to be held accountable for certain outcomes, but they’re [00:24:00] rarely dumb if they’re in that role. And so the issue is often that you’ve gotta move upstream and get the sensing network in place, do the sense-giving, create the shared context. That’s the stuff that has to happen, and it doesn’t have to take a long time. There’s great examples of that. I mean, that can happen even at the scale of Ford, a $200 billion company. That can happen in a matter of literally weeks, but it takes a commitment. And so yeah, the work is almost always upstream if you want to improve the quality of decision-making at an execution level.  

Maureen: Christopher, the research identifies several structural contributors to decisional friction: ambiguous authority, unclear risk tolerance, repeated revisiting of settled decisions, and consensus that becomes performative rather than productive. [00:25:00] Which of these patterns does the think tank’s research suggests is most common in high-performing organizations that still experience decision velocity failures? 

Christopher: Maureen, one of the most common assumptions we make is that there’s a lack of talent, that it’s a people problem in some way, the poor decision-makers. But, I’m gonna suggest that the most common one is the unclear decision architecture. 

If you have strong people working inside systems where authority is ambiguous or the risk tolerance is unclear and decisions get revisited often then you got a system problem. And I was just listening to Greg talk about, let’s say we have a group that gets together and they come up with shared assumptions about the future for a company, and it gets approved in a board. 

Well, do you have a structure to revisit that so that you can revise them, when conditions change? Or do you just wait for the next time your group gets together in a year [00:26:00] to reconsider that? Those are all really important issues, and they’re really decision architecture questions. 

In higher education for example, we had governance processes that were built for stability, careful deliberation, and legitimacy. Those are important values, but in high velocity environments where things are changing rather rapidly, those same processes that we inherited can become very slow especially when they’re not redesigned for different levels of risk and uncertainty that’s presented by the environment. 

So the system breaks down when every decision is treated as it has to go through the same path, the same level of consensus, the same approval structure. Even high-performing organizations can lose velocity when the decision system hasn’t been redesigned to consider the speed of the environment. 

That’s my thought about what’s most pressing. Now, Maureen, you’re well aware we have this research project, with the James Madison University. We’re looking at five years of leadership interviews, [00:27:00] and we’re gonna see what kind of different organization patterns are occurring. But early indication is different sectors have different challenges and different patterns that we need to consider . 

Greg: Just to add a point of emphasis. The way decisions get framed up is also a critical aspect of what we’re talking about here. And that discipline, I think, is underappreciated. Framing up valid options, making sure those valid options are thoroughly researched so that you actually know the implications. 

High-performing organizations have discipline around that. When we put in a decision framework at Ford we required one leader on the team to actually do the homework on what the options were and what the implications were, and then bring it back a week later. So you’re not, swashbuckling your way through a decision, you’re actually doing some research, and you had to come back with only valid options. 

And, one of my favorite failure modes is somebody who comes in and [00:28:00] says, “We can’t tolerate the current state of affairs here, so I’ve got two options for you to consider, Greg. One is status quo, and another is what I wanna do.” 

You just told me status quo is not an option, and then you’ve thrown it up as an option as a straw man to distract me from what you really want, which is just for me to say yes to whatever you wanna do.  

Maureen: We call that presumptive close.  

Greg: Yeah, exactly. And, and I just wanted to point out that the discipline around framing up a decision is an important part of this process. 

Christopher: I strongly agree with that point. Yes.  

Maureen: So now let’s move into number five, acting and execution. The gap between a decision and coordinated execution is where organizational momentum either builds or collapses. 

When execution stalls after a decision’s been made, what are you typically looking at? 

Greg: When you look at this kind of broader issue of [00:29:00] change management, actually getting the organization to adjust to a new course of action , it is a systemic issue, but it’s one that can be addressed in a relatively straightforward way. 

Uh, you’ve heard me say before, and I’ll probably say it again until I die, everybody acts rationally in the structure they think they’re operating in, barring a psychotic break. People are reacting to the structures that incent their behavior, and they do that with a very high degree of congruency to the structure. Super rare that you find particularly somebody in a business context stepping out of that. So if the organization is resisting change, it’s because you’ve got a structural problem. You didn’t do the hard work of adapting the organization’s incentive structure to the behavior you seek based on the assumptions and strategy that you’ve all agreed to. 

When you do that hard work, you get aligned action. When you don’t do that hard [00:30:00] work, you get Wells Fargo-like situations where you’ve got 5,000 people committing fraud by creating fake accounts for clients so that they could get their bonus for the year. That’s maybe the easiest and most classic example. 

How many of those 5,000 people started their career intending to be a federal criminal? I would argue probably none. And yet there they were, pressing the enter key to commit fraud so that they could get their bonus. That’s what happens when the misalignment is so severe that it actually incents behavior that’s not only not in the best interest of the organization, but actually illegal. 

Maureen: Greg your point is a crucial one, and you have made it in the past. The systems we create drive the behaviors that we see from people. So Christopher, your foundation paper makes a point that I find particularly [00:31:00] striking. Organizations often underestimate the degree to which even small strategic changes affect interdependent systems, so systems connected to systems.  

Christopher: I was thinking about what Greg said, and I wanna just put a emphasis on the point that from a systems theory perspective, the theory suggests that systems are perfectly designed to achieve the results they achieve. 

That’s it. So when you go to make a change, organizations that make new decisions, announce them, and then they underestimate what it actually takes across the system to activate execution, especially across interdependent systems. So I can think about small changes at a university. 

I introduce a new program, it touches marketing. It touches student affairs. They have to tell the students about the program. Finance has to create new P&Ls for the program. Every department in some way gets touched by that change. It’s also true in business. A small [00:32:00] strategic change will affect finance and staffing and technology. 

I can’t imagine the disruption that AI is causing these organizations today: the addition of AI to their processes , to improve their customer experience, compliance, culture, all of it. So execution activation requires more than just making the decision and announcing it. It requires ownership, resources, sequencing, communication, getting feedback on whether it’s all working or not. 

For boards, I think this puts a different pressure on them because you start to raise different governance questions. The governance question now becomes, how long does it take us to move from recognizing an important opportunity or risk to coordinated action? That should be a consideration for governance. 

Accountability work requires different follow-through and then making that follow-through visible to not just the executives, but also to the board. So someone owns the decisions, you know, milestones are clear, resources are aligned and [00:33:00] you can review progress on some periodic basis. It’s not a matter of asking the board, “Was this approved?” 

But, “Has this actually changed in practice?” becomes more of a question of governance.  

Maureen: The phrase that keeps coming to mind, was on functional stupidity. That idea that people who act irrationally are often within a system that is driving that behavior. 

It’s not that they are themselves stupid. But when systems drive behaviors that wasn’t intended when they were designed, we end up creating behaviors that can be damaging. And so that moves us in then to learning and adaptation, the sixth facet of decision velocity, closing the feedback loop. 

Christopher: Many organizations have these retrospectives and after action reviews, and I mentioned earlier dashboards [00:34:00] and surveys, reports. The problem is that those mechanisms do not always change our assumptions. They don’t change the decisions. They may not even change the practices. 

So the organization documents the learning without becoming more adaptive. If I were to point my finger on one difference, it’s whether the feedback has consequences. That to me is the key here. You know, high velocity learning organization does not treat learning as a meeting… you know, meeting after we do something or after the work has been done. It treats learning as part of the operating system, and it assures that the feedback has consequences. So we start to ask ourselves questions like, you know, what did we believe when we made this decision? What happened? What did we learn? What should we keep doing, stop doing, start doing, or redesign? 

These becomes really core questions to the conversation in strong learning loop organizations. Those kind of questions help us detect the friction earlier, correct assumptions faster, and avoid some of the errors that we might [00:35:00] repeat otherwise.  

Maureen: Organizations that survive will be the most adaptive, not most efficient. 

Learning and adaptation is the mechanism through which adaptability compounds over time. 

Greg: I’d make one small adjustment, and that is that organizations that are the most adaptive actually tend to be the most efficient. Efficiency is a byproduct of adaptation, and Toyota’s a great example of that, right? Toyota adapts constantly down to the very lowest level of execution, right? 

It’s why a line worker at a Toyota factory can stop the line, ’cause that’s an adaptation to a problem that got identified, right? So I would say that organizations that are adaptive tend to be very efficient relative to their peers because of that constant adaptation. The failure modes are legion across this because we’ve just described a relatively broad and far-reaching framework, and it’s easy to make a mistake at [00:36:00] any link in the chain and break the chain of that virtuous cycle. Bearing in mind all of the key elements of it and making sure that you’ve got the entire system aligned is the work of creating an adaptive organization and finish the work, right? Where it falls down is when one link in the chain gets broken, and then there’s a frustration with the whole system, and you get back to the baby out with the bathwater problem: “Well, that didn’t work, so we gotta try something different.” Well, no, you just didn’t do it, and that’s the failure mode, right? There’s no rocket science here. It’s: put the whole system in and make sure it reaches fully across the organization, and you’ll have the outcomes that you seek. 

It’s a fairly straightforward model. One easy analogy is a Air Force fighter pilot named Boyd who came up with something called the OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, and act. The essence of [00:37:00] what we’ve been talking about today is an organizational version of the OODA loop. 

Observe, orient, decide, act. Every piece of that has to happen, as Christopher just pointed out, and I’d put a point of emphasis on it. There have to be consequences. Once you’ve observed, you’ve gotta orient. And once you’ve oriented, you have to decide. And in a fighter pilot context, if you don’t decide, you’re dead. 

We don’t like to think of it in that kinda consequence level at an organizational level, but it is, ’cause organizations that don’t decide and don’t act generally underperform and fail.  

Christopher: I will say, Greg, that the OODA loop, people forget that after the A, acting, you’ve got to observe again. 

And, and- That’s  

Greg: right. That’s right. It’s a loop.  

Christopher: It’s a loop. And, and if organ- at the organizational level if the people get proficient at acting, and when things fail and they have weak learning loops it produces organizational [00:38:00] amnesia. They forget why they failed and the conditions, and they relive those failures again and again because they don’t come back and observe again. 

They’re not in a learning loop, and I think that’s the real key part of this last phase of the process. 

Maureen: So what is one leadership choice you believe senior leaders or boards should make in the next 30 days, and Greg, let’s start with you.  

Greg: I would focus on the beginning of the system first. Get that sensing system in place, increase the frequency of your listening, increase the frequency of you absorbing that listening. If you did that one thing, it’ll create sufficient insight to maybe motivate you to the rest of the system. 

Christopher: I would agree with Greg, but since he’s already said that, I’m gonna go to the second phase and say sense-making because once you do the sensing the challenge is converting all that information into some shared meaning and to do so quickly, quickly enough so that you can act. [00:39:00] So without the shared meaning, sensing does not become direction. 

Greg: It’s a fair call-out. If you don’t have that, it won’t make a difference.  

Christopher: Absolutely. So let’s go with that as the critical hinge today.  

Maureen: Thank you everyone, first Christopher and Greg for being our ILI think tank, our executive in residence, and launching the think tank publicly. 

So what we’re mapping today isn’t a collection of separate practices. It’s a single integrated capability moving from sensing to learning, and the organization that masters it will operate at a fundamentally different level of strategic effectiveness than those who do not. 

So decision velocity isn’t a technology initiative. It’s not a management training program. It’s a leadership system discipline, and it starts with the honest question: how long does it actually take your organization to move from recognizing an [00:40:00] important signal to coordinated action? 

And then what’s standing in the way of that? The think tank exists precisely to help senior leaders and boards answer that question with rigor. 

I invite you to join us in that work. Visit the think tank, sign up for the mailing list, take the decision velocity assessment, and download the foundation paper. Thank you, Christopher and Greg, for bringing the framework to life today, and thank you to all of our listeners for following and sharing our work. 

The quality of our collective leadership is one of the most important variables shaping the world we are living together. Until next time, thank you so much.