" We’re heading into a world characterized by big events, big forces, and massive storms. We’re going to be vulnerable little specks high on the mountain when the storm hits out of nowhere. And if we’re not prepared, we’re going to die up there. Or we’re going to be in real serious trouble. We need to understand what separates those who do well from those who don’t do well when the world spins completely out of our control. We just finished six years of what we call our turbulence research".
"We are now, I think, having to adjust to dealing with a world that is going to be ferocious. We don’t have any practice with that. What I’ve learned from the turbulence research has already started to affect my life. I’ve become a total paranoid, neurotic freak. It has shown me the importance of building in big shock absorbers".
Scroll down and/or click into this item to find the full list of companion links from the book,"Wheel$pin: Regaining Traction in a Fast Changing Business World by Maximizing Your Organizational Agility" organized in numerical order in which they appear in the book and by chapter/page number.Each link will take you to additional content, materials and resources as refereneced in the book. Scroll down and/or click into this item to see the full list. Enjoy.
Supplement your learning and application with online content, giving you pragmatic tips, techniques, and tools that will continue evolving over time. The book acts as a portal and keystone summary to this online content which will keep you up to date by referencing new events, stories, case-studies and ideas.
Also, in this first booklink, here are links to files containing all the graphics from the book, full-size and animated, for you to use any way you choose—perhaps to bring your team up to speed or put on your wall as reminders. Due to file size of the Power Point files, here are several componet files you can download:
What happened in that cockpit that day? Watch the video at the In the Driving Seat channel on YouTube
Recovering and listening to the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded in its final report that the cause of the crash was pilot error and specifically: "the failure of the flight crew to monitor flight instruments during the final four minutes of flight and to detect an unexpected descent soon enough to prevent impact with the ground. Preoccupation with a malfunction of the nose landing gear position indicating system distracted the crew’s attention from the instruments and allowed the descent to go unnoticed"
In his 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge explains the difference between detail complexity and dynamic complexity:
"The reason that sophisticated tools of forecasting and business analysis, as well as elegant strategic plans, usually fail to produce dramatic breakthroughs in managing a business—they are all designed to handle the sort of complexity in which there are many variables: detail complexity. But there are two types of complexity. The second type is dynamic complexity, situations where cause and effect are subtle and where the effects over time of interventions are not obvious. Conventional forecasting, planning and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity. The real leverage in most management situations lies in understanding dynamic complexity not detail complexity."(The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge, 1990).
In other fields of work that are acutely journey-oriented, the dynamic skills required are already highly developed, experientially and in the field, from which we can learn. Consider these scenarios:
Being a Vistage Chair is about helping our members interpret leading-edge thinking and experience from speakers and each other. It’s about helping them translate that into relevance and applicability in their particular business, in their particular situation, and with their particular needs and wants. It’s about facilitating their commitment and accountability for applying these ideas, sustaining them, and driving them through to results. It’s about “resulting.” Tapping into the power of a peer group process, we help them tackle all three dimensions of being In the Driving Seat, to be architects of their journey, creating traction in business and in life.
Being In the Driving Seat of organizational agility is complicated, and there is a lot to master. It is a long, rocky path, with no quick and easy payoffs and long stretches on the plateau. Dabblers, Obsessives, and Hackers hate the plateau (Dabbler, Obsessive, Hacker or Master?) whereas Masters learn to love the plateau, keep plodding along, and wage war against the barrage of the quick fix, fast temporary relief, bottom line, anti-mastery mentalities.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin.
Darwin became intrigued by the diversity of species he saw all around the world, which were highly suited to their local environment and yet clearly had shared origins. He wondered what process could explain this, and eventually, in 1859, he published his Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, explaining:
In his 2007 book, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, Roger Martin puts it well:
“The leaders I have studied share at least one trait, aside from their talent for innovation and long-term business success. They have the predisposition and the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea. Integrative thinking is my term for this processor—more precisely, this discipline of consideration and synthesis—that is the hallmark of exceptional businesses and the people who run them.”
The airframe of a modern jet fighter plane (such as the F-22 or the F-35) is not designed with gliding in mind. Unlike other aircraft for which the airframe is structured for gliding, a modern jet fighter is designed to be implicitly unstable and in a state of disequilibrium. If you turn everything off, it crashes. Plain and simple. What keeps it in the air under normal circumstances? The fly-by-wire computers, keeping it stable by making micro-adjustments many times a second to cope with the disequilibrium.
In his 2005 book, "A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age", Daniel Pink explains:
“We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to an economy built on the inventive, empathetic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age. Today, the defining skills of the previous era—the “left brain” capabilities that powered the Information Age—are necessary but no longer sufficient. The “right brain” qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning increasing will determine who flourishes and who flounders. For individuals, families, and organizations, professional success and personal fulfillment now require a whole new mind"
In their 2007 book, "Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty", Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe say:
“Unexpected events often audit our resilience. They affect how much we stretch without breaking and then how well we recover. Some of those audits are mild. But others are brutal. Unrecognized mild audits often turn brutal. High Reliability Organizations (HROs) practice a form of organizing that reduces the brutality of audits and speeds up the process of recovering".
“We hear a lot about execution these days, which is encouraging. But strategy and execution are only as good as the traction they create and sustain, on a higher road of a breakthrough journey."
“As an executive and then CEO of small-to-medium sized and fast-moving businesses, I experienced an ever increasing sense-of-void. As the pace of business and change accelerated, my experience of most coaches, consultants and trainers coming into my office offering to help was that they didn’t really understand the nature of the seat I sat in everyday..." read more...
And if we’re not prepared, we’re going to die up there. Or we’re going to be in real serious trouble. We need to understand what separates those who do well from those who don’t do well when the world spins completely out of our control. We just finished six years of what we call our turbulence research".
Scroll down and/or click into this item to find the full list of companion links from the book, "
![250px-Charles_Darwin_seated_crop[1].jpg](http://www.sherpaalliance.com/components/com_mojo/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/250px-Charles_Darwin_seated_crop[1].thumbnail.jpg)
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin.
In his 2007 book, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, Roger Martin puts it well:
The airframe of a modern 
In his 2005 book, "A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age", Daniel Pink explains:
In their 2007 book, "Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty", Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe say:
Execution Excellence: Missing-in-Action
Mike's Own Journey
See Mike giving one of his keynote speeches,