 Hello, my name is Geoff Watts and welcome to Agile Esop, Leadership Fables, where I take the famous fables of Esop and apply them to today's Agile Leadership Challenges. Today's story is called The Ant and the Grasshopper and if you're sitting comfortably, I'll begin. Once upon a time in a gorgeous green grassland in the English countryside lived a grasshopper called Graham. Graham was a happy grasshopper and was incredibly popular in the insect community because he loved to sing and dance. He'd even formed a band called the Arthropods and they played almost continuously. Their music was equal parts entrancing and entertaining and they enjoyed performing almost as much as the other insects enjoyed listening to them. As spring turned to summer, Graham realized he particularly enjoyed performing in the warm with the sun beating down. It certainly beats scrabbling around for food like some of the other insects were doing. Graham didn't understand why they were so bothered collecting food because there was so much around to eat. Adam the Ant was particularly diligent in his food collection even in those summer months and even though he tried to convince Graham to store up some food for the winter, Graham preferred instead to sing and dance. Adam worried about Graham but assumed he had his own plan and focused instead on collecting enough food to see him through the winter. As the summer months began to wind down, Adam saw that Graham was still singing and dancing, enjoying himself. Of course, eventually the weather turned and suddenly there wasn't much food around and things turned cold. Graham realized that he was going to go hungry but he was too late to find food for the winter now. In desperation, Graham went to see Adam the Ant to ask if he could spare some food and although Adam felt sorry for Graham, he didn't have enough food to feed them both through the winter. So, over the course of the winter, sadly Graham went hungry while Adam was able to survive comfortably thanks to his hard work over the summer months. Graham made a vow that next year he would continue to enjoy singing but he would set aside a lot more time to prepare for the winter. The end. We might consider the chores of our role. Everyone's got aspects of their job that they enjoy more than others and it's really easy for us to focus on the bits of our role that we find the most enjoyable and in the short term we probably don't really see or feel any real consequences from procrastinating and putting off our responsibilities and obligations. But what we're really doing is we're storing up problems for the winter. For example, we might find ourselves focusing more on the day-to-day hands-on aspects of our leadership role. You know, find ourselves stuck in lots of really urgent, very important meetings, making lots of decisions, fighting fires as opposed to walking the floor and talking to the people who are actually doing the work and listening to what's actually going on. Very easy to do especially if we enjoy fighting fires. Agile leaders really need to be constantly inspecting and adapting, not just what they're doing but what their team's doing, what's going on in the wider organisation and what's going on in the wider market and industry that we're operating in. And reflecting on what's going on and what we're doing and how it's working just isn't really as exciting as doing things now. The immediate gratification of tackling a problem right now is so enticing and actually stopping, taking time out to reflect, think, listen, talk feels like doing nothing when actually it's the equivalent of stop piling our seeds for the future. Agile leaders are constantly reflecting not only because it increases their effectiveness but also because they realise they're acting as role models for the people in their organisation. To create an agile organisation, we're looking to create people who are resilient, reflective, proactive, self-managing and so demonstrating some of those behaviours ourselves as leaders is going to increase the chances of those behaviours being copied within the culture. Agile leaders will be constantly encouraging, coaching, mentoring and tweaking the organisation based on how the circumstances are evolving in the complex environment that they're operating within. Think of the seeds from our story as capabilities of our people. In order for us to be responsive, to be resilient, to be able to cope with the changing circumstances of the future, we need to develop the confidence, the experience, the resilience, the proactiveness of our people. And every time we solve something straight away, we're undermining our people's ability to do things themselves. And when things are changing constantly, as a leader we can't always be there, we can't be the ones constantly making the decisions. And quite often the more complex the environment, the lower the chance there is of us actually having the answer anyway. Another way of thinking about our seeds from our story is as tokens of goodwill, a certain degree of credit that people will give us, the benefit of the doubt if you like. Quite often leaders will spend that goodwill, quite frivolously, quite early on in their leadership. And when it comes to the winter from our analogy, they don't have enough goodwill left to spend to help people get through those challenging times or those tough times. And our goodwill often comes from doing the parts of our leadership role that perhaps don't get the headlines. It's not about making fancy pronouncements or grand gestures. It's doing the little things. It's speaking to people, listening to people, letting people know that we're going in the right direction. Because our leaders are going to be operating in circumstances with higher volatility, volatility brings anxiety. And when people are anxious, we need more of what we might call the basics of leadership, the fundamentals. Again, not those parts of the role that grab the headlines, but the fundamentals. But when we're operating in times of complexity and volatility, we find ourselves much easier drawn to the grand gestures, the firefighting, the immediate problems that need resolving those urgent meetings. And what people really need is some confidence, some reassurance, some listening to. If you think back to our story, those summer months where Graham was singing and dancing and enjoying himself, those are the times when things are going well, when anxiety is low, the sun is beating down, there's plenty of food around, there's little stress. And those are the times when it's really tempting to indulge ourselves in the bits of our role that we really enjoy, because we don't really see the need for the chores. But those are exactly the times when we should be topping up our tokens of good will, where we should be investing our time and developing our people. Because when the winter comes, that's when we'll need it. So I'm going to invite you to think about what aspects of your role as a leader, you might be putting off procrastinating, maybe subconsciously. And in the short term, you're not really seeing the consequences of, but in the long term, you may be storing up problems. And I challenge you to take some action on some of those chores, to build some of them into your weekly timetable, get back to the basics of leadership, start looking at building up that aspect of good will, and the capabilities of your people, to cope with the uncertainties and the complexities of the future. I hope you've enjoyed this first episode of Agile Esop Leadership Fables, and I look forward to you tuning in to the next episode.