Assets, again

One of the more challenging habits of agile leadership (though, they all are, at varying levels) is that of looking first to the assets around you. It’s hard because it requires an appreciative mindset that not all of us come into the world with, or that has been diminished over time. But it is possible to cultivate it in yourself and in others. This week, a LinkedIn post reminded me about the importance of assets, again. (my apologies, as I can no longer find the post, you’ll have to trust me on this one!)

Think of an environment in which the available assets are constrained. You might think of an urban area that’s been hollowed out. Or a rural community. Or an under-resourced region of the world. Think even more constrained – as in, out-of-this-world constrained. How about space?

In the Lab’s trainings, we sometimes bring up the example of the Apollo 13 flight to illustrate the idea of linking and leveraging in the way the crew put together some things they had on the spaceship to deal with a life-threatening crisis. It’s a good illustration, but it’s rooted in a moment of crisis, which isn’t always the environment that participants are facing. More often, they’re in a situation in which the trends have been decades-long and chronic.

It turns out there’s another example of overcoming resource constraints in the world of space travel. Imagine you’re at NASA, thinking through the many technical challenges to a space flight that’s any longer than a few days. They are legion – as we learned when the Lab did some work helping NASA build better partnerships across its units (we talk a bit about this in the Strategic Doing book, and you can read more about it on this site here, here, here, and here). One of the most obvious challenges is food. As all of us that have lugged groceries up a flight of stairs know, food can be heavy, and take up lots of, well, space. Not ideal if you’re planning space travel.

Put yourself in that situation with your agile leadership “glasses” on, and look around to see what assets you have that are either already in a spaceship, or that you could get in there given the enormous weight and storage constraints. I am willing to bet that one you did not consider is…air. Guess what? It turns out that it could be a source of food: “air protein.” So: think about your assets, again.

I love the phrase that this video introduced me to: localized resource sourcing. In other words: what are the assets you have right around you? Maybe you can get more assets into your network over time (not an option up in space), but what do you have right now, right here? Start with those. Human creativity is a resource that is not constrained – you just need to unleash it, by bringing people together, helping them think appreciatively, and then finding ways to move into action in even small ways.

We offer both online and in-person trainings to help you develop your “localized resource sourcing” and many other skills (our next one is coming up soon!), and we can work with your teams to jump-start the process. Just reach out to us for a conversation to explore the options to help move ideas into action.