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The case of Philips Lighting shows how management coped with the ambiguous but real threats and opportunities of a highly disruptive emerging technology using three insight-producing approaches: 10; 10;∙9; Probe and learn widely. 10;∙9; Explore creative hypotheses. 10;∙9; Develop multiple scenarios. 10;

The case shows how leadership teams can effectively respond when confronted with ambiguous but potentially disruptive signals.

When assessing a potential digital disruption, leaders can begin by probing the latent needs of current as well as potential customers more thoroughly. Once ‘probe and learn’ approaches have surfaced new perspectives and strategic possibilities, the organization should generate context-expanding hypotheses about the meaning and consequences of various weak signals.

A limited number of disparate scenarios, clearly organized around a few pivotal uncertainties, provide leaders with a strategic context for interpreting ambiguous signals.

In the current VUCA environmen, when turbulence is high or major disruption is feared, all leaders need to examine at least one scenario that directly challenges the organization’s current mindset.

Given their immense value-creating potential, ecosystems?and whether to build, buy, or join one?have become a top agenda item in boardrooms around the world.

Haier, a highly successful Chinese multinational corporation has developed an effective set of practices for managing an emergent, ecosystem-based business model.

The Haier case illuminates the unique challenges of leading a sprawling, ecosystem-based enterprise that must continually evolve.

Haier employees fall into three categories? platform owners, microenterprise owners and entrepreneurs.

As a strategic innovator, Haier grouped its independent microenterprises into “Ecosystem Micro-Communities” (ECMs) of loosely connected, multi-disciplinary capability clusters organized around end users.

Shell developed a number of new methodologies to make scenario planning more meaningful to line managers. It also took steps to integrate the learning that takes place at the SBU level into the Group Planning System.

This study analyzes the variability of rates of return for 11,772 U.S. commercial banks from 1979 through 1985. The objective is to determine whether variability that is not explained by exogenous variables can be explained by prospect theory. Below target, strong correlations are shown, consistent with prospect theory. When regression analysis is applied, the results are confirmed.

As uncertainty increases, business strategies need more frequent adjustments which in turn requires leaders who excel at timely external and internal alignment. We describe six challenges such leaders need to master.

The six leadership abilities profiled in this article are based on a conceptual model that was pre-tested with selected executives. Using factor analysis and other standard tests of validity, we refined an assessment questionnaire and identified remedies. It has been taken by some 30,000 managers from diverse companies around the world.

Our main findings are that strategic leadership can be deconstructed into more basic elements and that leaders can learn to better practice its skills, habits and attitudes once they know where they are personally weakest. Various challenges complicate better integration of strategy and leadership in the heat of battle but successful leaders conquer these by honing six essential capabilities. These are the ability to anticipate, challenge, interpret, decide, align and learn. We illustrate each with examples and then provide practical advice for leaders wishing to increase their strategic acumen.

Readers can complete a 12-item assessment online (www.decisionstrat.com).

The skills that comprise strategic leadership in a world of increasing uncertainty should be viewed as a self-reinforcing system. The leadership challenge, which involves practicing six abilities while overcoming barriers to them, allows the best innovators to win the long game while making frequent tactical adjustments along the way in response to surprise and uncertainty.

The authors posit that most organizations lack sufficient capacity to detect, interpret and act on the critically important but weak and ambiguous signals of fresh threats or new opportunities that emerge on the periphery of their usual business environment. They suggest how organizations can develop this capability so they will not be vulnerable to rivals who see and take advantage of these early, easily missed signals sooner.

The authors offer a program organizations can put in place to become more vigilant and reduce their risk of being blind‐sided. They also explain the role of leaders in improving the peripheral vision of their organization.

The authors show how one large organization, the UK's BBC, used peripheral vision programs to better understand its changing environment.

The authors show how a truly vigilant organization manages a process that routinely and effectively watches for, evaluates, and responds to signals from the far reaches of its business environment that are difficult to interpret.

From the authors' six lessons, leaders can learn how to implement a program of monitoring, evaluating and responding to important events on the periphery of their normal business environment.