How To Lead A Quest

2 The Curse of Efficiency

Righto: chapter 2. First, though, let me tell you something about one of the biggest challenges of writing a book — getting the sequence right. I want to unpack so much goodness with you, but before we get there, we need to appreciate the context that goodness serves. The concepts of this book are best shared in a certain order, so that the value of ideas may be fully appreciated.

You might have already noticed, but what we are doing here in part I is essentially ‘framing the problem'. This is an incredibly useful thing to do if you're looking to prime people to be more receptive to an idea. And the idea of this book is a big one — leaders need to systematically go against the grain of default thinking, efficiency and busyness (heresy!), and pioneer uphill, through doubt, angst and uncertainty (madness!) in order to future-proof relevance and obtain strategic advantage. This is too important a notion to not have the problem framed correctly first.

Now you're probably somewhat savvy with The Curse of Efficiency already. And you probably recognise that relentless busyness crowds out our time for good strategic development and meaningful progress. But we can't jump to the answer just yet. After all, leading quests means pursuing better questions — not easy answers. And as you'll discover in part III, staying within the angst of the challenge, resisting ...