Last month at Tech Talent North's Eastern edition, Fahd Alhattab kicked off the conference with a powerful keynote on building high-performing teams and embracing disruptive leadership. Fahd’s insights challenge leaders to balance operational efficiency with a culture of exploration, empowering teams to innovate actively and adapt swiftly to industry disruptions.

Key takeaways from our feature article::

• Culture of Adaptability: Encourage a mindset where team members are prepared to pivot and experiment, creating an environment that views challenges as opportunities for growth.
• Empower Teams with Autonomy: Effective leadership means giving team members the freedom to make decisions and innovate, especially those who are closest to the day-to-day work.
• Prioritize Psychological Safety: Building trust within teams allows for open communication, enabling individuals to feel safe taking risks and sharing new ideas without fear of failure.

The Business of Exploit and Explore

Unfortunately, when it comes to leveraging disruption, most organizations are not Warren Buffet or even Jimmy Buffet for that matter.

“Most organizations are not in a healthy innovation position, which is why when external disruption happens, they see it as a disruption to their business versus a wave they can ride,” said Fahd. “And I think this is the kind of first piece that I'd like to get out there—if you're not in a position to take innovative advantage and ride the wave that is emerging, then not only do you get disrupted and upended, but you miss the opportunity.”

Right now, that opportunity is the AI revolution, Fahd notes, but the same has held true for every technological disruption from the printing press to the Internet to social media. What has held true throughout is that some companies harness the disruption to powerful effect while others succumb to the imperfect storm.

“We’ve always had these disruptions, and some companies not only hold together, but ride them and I think it comes down to one central paradigm—the concept of explore versus exploit as it applies to business,” said Fahd. “The exploit side of a business is when you want a high return of capital with low risk and is all about managing efficiencies. We know this product works and if we pump $10 into marketing, we get $20 out.  It's systemized. We know people like it, so let’s exploit the opportunity to create capital by delivering value to make us some money.”

How long that value holds to be exploited, be that product, service or talent, is another question entirely as Fahd points out—which puts a whole new onus on the explore side of the equation, particularly for tech entrepreneurs for whom the cutting edge is most often their competitive edge.

“You can only exploit that market for so long until the return on that service starts to drop and people go, I don't need really good typewriters,” said Fahd. “Then there is the explore side of the business where the tinkering, innovation, new ideas, services and products—whole new ways of doing things—emerge.”

The challenge is, Fahd notes, that the longer a business exists the more it shifts to purely exploit mode, the less time they spend in explore mode where the entrepreneurial aspect and employee interests reside. Unfortunately, if that exploit/explore ratio creeps past a healthy 80/20, many companies are not only unable to unleash that inner unicorn in the face of external disruption, but stand to lose profits and talent from their previously stable business.

Fahd illustrates the point by looking at the great rush to ‘go online’ during the pandemic.

“Everyone made a big jump to get stores online during Covid, but the truth is that if you hadn’t already moved online, you missed the boat, because to get your store online—in time, in a good way and actually catch the wave—was just too difficult and too costly for those not ready for it,” said Fahd.

Fresh Futures in Return to Founder Thinking

Interestingly, Fahd does not put the fault for that lack of flexibility on leadership alone, but the broader systemic failures brought on by poor scaling  of once enshrined core values and an antiquated notion of command and control amongst many bloated management trees.

“Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator, said that all the founders need to get back into the business and take on founder mode instead of hiring too many professional managers and executives and thinking they should just be able to run things.’” said Fahd. “What he’s getting at is that we hire people who are really good at exploitation management—the managing of budgets and people and lining up of projects and deadlines and making sure that the conveyor belt runs perfectly on time.  The higher density of management, the more structure and efficiency we create—but you can efficiently do the wrong thing.”

Hence the need for Unicorn Labs and Fahd’s mission to move the leadership and reflective managerial mindset into the exploration space—the entrepreneurial leader’s domain.

“There is a real need for entrepreneurial leadership to create space for that exploration to happen. We need strategic and innovation skillsets to be part of a management that supports that too, all of which is key to entrepreneurial leadership,” said Fahd. “Regular management is about putting out fires, while entrepreneurial leadership is about starting fires. If your business is not starting enough fires in new areas, then you're not exploring enough.”

A Messy Discipline with Measurable Results

In fact, while a bit of mess is essential, Fahd also teaches the discipline of innovation management systems, bringing forward a business model canvas to establish experiments and turn them into quarterly goals—and serves as good operating system for innovation once created.

“Artists are messy, but they're disciplined. I think this is key to understand. People think that messy is chaotic, but there is a disciplined approach that allows us not to be become the Goliath to someone else’s David,” said Fahd. “The reality is that with every technological disruption there are a number of David versus Goliaths, and the Goliaths are too slow to move because they're entrenched in a command and control leadership style. They are entrenched in an eight-year strategic plan that they wrote at an off-site somewhere and they're unable to be nimble enough to go here are some new opportunities.”

“Make no mistake, innovation takes discipline,” said Fahd, who often hears pushback against the messiness innovation can bring. “Don’t get me wrong, at least 80% of your business should actually still be in the exploit portfolio because you still need to make enough money to fund your explorative ideas. That’s because exploration and innovation do not make money until we can move it over to the exploit side of the portfolio.”

“It’s all about taking a disciplined approach to innovation. It's about experimentation and cutting the business model into pieces and then looking at which pieces of the model you might disrupt,” said Fahd. “You don't need to change the entire business model, just explore different aspects. What if we change our channels in which we reach our customers? What if we change this one key resource and reduce the cost? What if we change the type of customer we went after just for this campaign? Those little experiments reveal a lot in an explorative environment.”

Fahd notes that this is why the small has traditionally outpaced the big when it comes to exploration.

“Smaller companies do better in the explorer mode because usually there aren’t the big executive salaries and people don't care about the money as much when they’re already not making money. There’s just less risk than a large company betting against a $2 million campaign,” said Fahd. “It's why we often see young upstarts and smaller companies be more nimble. They can ride the wave of external disruption better than big companies, because they don't have a lot to lose, so they're not afraid of taking a chance experimenting.”

It is a lesson that Fahd has been teaching clients large and small for over a decade, and one that has definitively resonated in dynamic industries like tech, but Unicorn Labs is now courting a far wider clientele in the post-pandemic world.

“We've been teaching entrepreneurial leadership for a while and typically customers have been start-ups and tech, but now we get government agencies, nonprofits, and all sorts who tell us they want this flavour of entrepreneurial leadership,” said Fahd. “When I ask them what that means to them, I hear, ‘Well, we want people who are going to start things, move things, be bold and make decisions.’ Then I have to tell them what true empowerment really looks like because it brings just an ounce more chaos to the control environment and causes a bit more conflict, but it is good. It is healthy.”

The Perils of Business as Usual

Given that those holding control status today are those still making healthy profits off of their exploit portfolios and benefit most from the status quo, Fahd understands the resistance to change.

“Unfortunately, the peril of staying the course is that you're going to lose out on talent, technology and market share,” said Fahd. “When you see management with a need for everyone to come back into the office it is most often just an indication of poor leadership skills—of an inability to manage this new workforce and figure out how to maximize its potential—because the data is clear. When we need the team to go and execute, we need to let them go so they can be more productive, and we can be more nimble in how we manage.”

In the tech industry, where innovation is quintessential, that empowerment is critical, but as Fahd notes, requires some entrepreneurial energies to replace exploit-focused management.

“It’s not all upon the leader. We need management to learn to be in the explore phase too. I think this is the next revolution of HR. We don't need the strict structure in order to ensure the productivity of an employee,” said Fahd. “Ultimately, for disruption and innovation to occur we need for managers to develop not just their self and team leadership skills, but to learn to think entrepreneurially just like their founding teams because innovation has to be fostered in order to cascade. It can't just be with the founder and the executive team coming up with new ideas.”

Laying the Foundation for Innovation

So how does Fahd bring that entrepreneurial leadership mindset to the forefront to inspire management, employees and results alike?

Unicorn Labs’ Six Levels of High-Performing Teams—grounded in psychological safety and aspiring to all-encompassing vision—provides the working model for clients and workshops. Fahd dives into the heart of the matter.

Mastering the Math of the Unicorn 

Resultantly, the goal of Unicorn Labs’ leadership development programs is building high-performing teams by ultimately turning managers into unicorns—minus the horn.

“It’s still leadership, but it’s a focus on teams. It’s not about you—yes, in the process you are going to work on yourself—it’s about your ability to create an environment for your team,” said Fahd. “So we need to establish what we call the Six Levels of High-Performing Teams because there are different levels of teams.”

Some, quite literally, don’t add up to the sum of their parts.

“The ultimate team that we want is the 1+1=3 team—the team that can actually create more than the sum of its individuals. That's why we hire a team in the first place,” said Fahd, while pointing to the foundations of Unicorns Labs Six Level model for what is needed to create that team. “Psychological safety is fundamental to moving into empowerment and effective communications with room for productive conflict. This is key because if we cannot empower, which really entails moving decisions into the hands of those closest to the problem, we cannot get anywhere close to innovation.”

With those roots established, the opportunity opens up move up and forwards—where the culture of leadership, strategy and purpose and the all-encompassing vision reside—with a focus on developing a leadership and management both open to exploration and capable of riding the waves of disruption to previously unseen shores of profit.