There are moments in a business that are full of uncertainty. Sometimes you thrust that uncertainty onto yourself— for example, when you start a new business or try to create a new product. Sometimes that uncertainty is thrust upon you, like it is now during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I am going to be very honest right now: I wrote this blog a year ago. It was during a time when members of my own team were driving me mad with their seemingly insatiable obsession with details. However, I couldn’t say exactly why they were driving me mad. I only knew that they were. What was happening?

In his 1979 book, The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander tells a wonderful story of two barns. The first was extremely long, over 240 feet, and instead of having doors at the end (where you usually find them) they were in the middle on both of the long sides. The second barn was nestled into the side of a hill, had three stories instead of two, and five doors. The barns were unique, completely different, and yet instantly.

You may be wondering, what is the relationship between high-performance organisations and Cloud Native? It’s quite simple, really. Cloud Native is a sociotechnology, meaning it encompasses technical elements, like containers and Kubernetes, social elements, like strategic leadership, and sociotechnology elements, such as microservices.

At Container Solutions, we differentiate between leadership and strategic leadership. Both involve inspiring a group with a vision of the future. Both involve connecting a starting point, A, with an endpoint, B. Both have a transformational effect on the leader and group members. The difference lies in the results, which have to be judged objectively. Whereas the leader makes changes, the strategic leader makes adaptive changes, successfully.