The story
Avy Leghziel is an executive coach and strategic consultant. He is Italian and lives in Brazil. When COVID hit, he was a senior manager at a tourism company, with about 12,000 people in its professional development and leadership programs. Overnight, none of them could meet in a room.
“Maybe chaos is not a problem.”
The skill at work: Keen Observation (Skill 2)
Keen Observation is the skill of getting on the balcony: stepping out of the action to see the patterns below. For years Avy had been the go-to person for working more productively. In the chaos of COVID he learned that working harder on the dance floor was not enough. He had to go up to the balcony and watch.
He saw that the obvious fix was not the real problem
It was tempting to treat the crisis as a technical issue: what used to happen in a room would now happen on Zoom. Avy’s team saw that it “doesn’t really translate that easily.” The whole experience had to be redesigned so that it still built better professionals.
He noticed the limits of his own strength
Avy had spent most of his life searching for the most productive way to work. Then he realized “productivity wouldn’t solve the problem.” Whatever he did, he depended on the pandemic and on how the people around him reacted to it.
He asked what others were not seeing
Instead of copying the crowd, Avy asked questions from the balcony. If all his competitors were shutting down operations, did he have to shut down too, or was there something they were not seeing? If his team was working longer hours, would that bring more results, or should he be the one to say: work better, not more?
He made time to observe and to reflect
Avy says you cannot even reach those questions unless you “invest significant time in both observing and learning” what is happening around you, and in reflecting on what all that data means.
He learned to prefer the mess
Avy used to prefer clients who came with a blank slate. Now he prefers the ones who arrive with conflict, lost clients and erratic cash flow, because “you have so much data” to work with. The mess is richer than the clean page.
What happened
Six years ago Avy opened his own practice, focused on how people act and learn within chaos. His invitation to leaders today: maybe chaos is not a problem. Every surprise is “showing you something you didn’t know about the system you’re working in.”
Try this
Think of the last surprise that upset your plans. Step onto the balcony and write one full sentence that answers this: what did this surprise show me about my team, my market or myself that I did not know before?
More stories
Reading the signals: Alvaro Montoya’s story of Keen Observation →
Noticing the empty playground: Ruhaan Kumar’s story of Keen Observation →
A Hidden Stream of Information: Avy Leghziel’s story of Emotional Literacy →
This article is our interpretation of Avy’s story, based on the conversation on The Adaptive Edge Podcast. The framework names are ours; the events and lessons are his own.