By Sarah Davis
Every General Counsel knows this feeling: your business is pushing boundaries, experimenting boldly, and celebrating intelligent failures as stepping stones to innovation. Meanwhile, you’re expected to provide absolute certainty and flawless legal guidance. It’s an impossible contradiction, and it can leave you feeling isolated in an organisation that’s otherwise embracing uncertainty as a path to growth.
This tension sits at the heart of modern business. Innovation has become a strategic imperative for virtually every leadership team, and rightly so. But innovative environments thrive on experimentation where, as Jeff Bezos puts it, “you don’t know if it’s going to work.” The most thoughtful organisations are working hard to become learning environments where the right kind of failure is not just tolerated but encouraged.
The challenge for General Counsels is stark: legal functions are expected to be flawless and provide total certainty, even as the business embraces a culture of learning from intelligent mistakes. You need to be agile and share a growth mindset, but no one is going to celebrate your failures. It’s a high-wire act that demands both flawless execution and strategic flexibility.
If this resonates with you, you’re not alone. Many GCs find themselves working against the rhythm of their organisation, and it can be profoundly lonely. But there are ways to bridge this gap, to become an enabler of intelligent risk-taking whilst maintaining the rigour your role demands.
Learning from the innovators: what agile methodology teaches us about thriving in uncertainty
Understanding how to navigate this challenge starts with recognising what makes organisations successful at innovation in the first place. If you’re curious about what makes for a successful learning environment, a recent Institute of Coaching podcast with executive coach and theoretical physicist Teresa Ramos on Agile methodology and coaching for the advancing wave of technological change, provides some interesting answers. Far from new, Agile methodology has been around for over the last two decades. As technology led to digital transformations across many businesses, traditional project management was no longer fit for purpose. Ramos’ podcast reminded me that an agile organisation is not only about operational changes but also about mindset change. Start, Stop, reflect, learn and then continue.
This took me back to the brilliant work of Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School. Edmondson writes masterfully about how organisations can unlock growth through intelligent failures. Her 2011 HBR article ‘Strategies for Learning from Failure’ is still an essential read in this area. Edmunson urges organisations to create a culture that embraces intelligent failure at the frontier. Failures in this category, Edmonson tells us, “can rightly be considered “good” because they provide valuable new knowledge that can help an organisation leap ahead of the competition and ensure its future growth”[1].
Although none of this thinking is new, the current pressure on business to innovate to stay in the game, has led to a resurgence of these ideas. Many organisations are now keen to become learning environments where certainty is unknown and the right type of failure is encouraged.
The demand for both flawless execution and strategic flexibility is a high-wire act.
[1] Strategies for Learning from Failure. HBR April 2011
Moving beyond the pursuit of certainty and reframing your value as an enabler of strategic flexibility
- Reframing the role: true certainty is impossible with novelty. In new terrain your role can’t be to eliminate risk, but rather to be a strategic partner in helping your business to manage and mitigate it.
- The contracts as a framework: you know things will change and you are prepared for it. Your contracts need not be rigid documents intended to cover every possible contingency, but may work better as flexible frameworks that allow for review and adjustment over time. This saves you becoming bogged down in trying to negotiate certainty for hypothetical scenarios.
- Translating risk: the GC is pivotal in preventing unintelligent failure. Edmondson gives an example of this as conducting experiments at a larger scale than necessary. Your role in translating risk by explaining the potential business impact, is invaluable in informing right-sized, calculated risk taking.
Building your system for resilience
To thrive rather than simply survive in this environment, you need to be intentional about building systems to protect your capacity and mental energy. Yet many GCs I know, don’t strategise for themselves in this way.
In an organisation that embraces continual change and is serious about a growth mindset, an honest check-in with yourself might reveal that much of the pressure you are under comes from yourself rather than your colleagues.
If this is the case, the reasons will in part be very specific to you and not subject to a quick hack but some reframing of your role can be helpful. Consider the following:
- Your external landscape: Knowing where to go to get the answer has long been part of the currency of the GC. As questions become more novel and complex, ask yourself if the trusted advisers you’ve always relied on still have the right skills. GCs now need to have more than favourite external counsel, valuable though they are, on speed dial. Have you been deliberate in building a network that includes other types of specialists?
Good governance requires boards to periodically evaluate themselves to ensure they have the right mix of skills and expertise to support the organisation’s strategic goals.
Who are your go-to economists, geo-political advisers, risk officers, ethicists? The more diverse the disciplines the better, we rarely encounter single issue questions.
- Your internal champions: A strong support network within the organisation is key. Of course, you have colleagues who like working with you and know that you and your team always get the job done. But your internal network needs not just allies, but also advocates. These are colleagues who understand not just the legal function but who understand and appreciate you and your vision for it and can help you get resources, meet goals and manage expectations.
Paradoxically, vulnerability with colleagues can build trust and support. Enlist the support of some trusted colleagues across the organisation. You don’t have to hold it all together alone.
- Master control vs. influence: Understanding what you can control (your legal advice, your team’s processes) and what you can only influence (the business’s risk appetite) can help you to focus your time, a precious resource in the environment you are in, where it matters most. It also allows you to choose the approach you take to the different issues. Consciously addressing what you are accountable for and what you aren’t can be helpful in clarifying where to spend your mental energy, an even more precious resource than your time.
- Letting go: This isn’t delegation, it’s a strategic move that frees up your GC time for high-impact work. See my colleague Kerry’s brilliant article on moving from firefighting to influencing here. Simple guidelines and existing technology can help your colleagues become more autonomous.
GCs belong at the frontiers and jagged edges of complexity and uncertainty. Adopting approaches that allow the company to innovate intelligently can help the GC be recognised as an indispensable strategic leader. If you evolve with your company culture and sharing the growth mindset, whilst protecting yourself from the pressure that can come from inhabiting that contradiction, you may even enjoy the process just as much as the most pioneering of your colleagues.
