Leaders Need
to Slow Down to Speed Up
It has never been more
important for leaders to learn from and respond quickly to economic, political,
and competitive changes. In a world where change is
constant, that response must be rapid and inspiring.
Some of the changes
business leaders face, such as demographic trends, can be predicted reasonably
well. Others — technology, for example — are much more difficult to anticipate.
In a 2015
Fortune survey of CEOs, almost three quarters
responded that the “rapid pace of technological innovation” was the greatest
challenge to their companies.
It’s not a matter of if but when your
assumptions about your market will be upended. How can leaders learn to adapt
quickly to new knowledge and trends — to disrupt themselves before others do?
Speed and agility in learning are critical. How fast is fast enough?
According to Barry
O’Reilly, coauthor of Lean Enterprise:
How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale, your true competition is moving like lightning —
“three-to-five iterations ahead” of what you are aware of. That may be a
traditional rival or an upstart that’s just a faint blip on your radar. And
it’s as true if you’re operating in tech or manufacturing as it is if you’re
battling global terrorism. Development cycle times are shortening, as are
customer adoption trends and windows of competitive advantage, O’Reilly told
me.
This fits with what I increasingly hear and
experience in my work: Executives and government officials are now speaking in
terms of an infectious-disease evolution model — learning through constant and
rapid iteration — rather than linear approaches to innovation.
Yet most organizations are
still built to create and preserve stability through their hierarchies,
approval processes, and even hiring
practices that emphasize “cultural fit.” Existing
products and business units have powerful constituencies that can swat down new
ideas they see as threatening. Clayton Christensen’s famous theory of disruptive
innovation has been illustrated numerous times by
incumbents slain by competitors initially dismissed as not good enough. In
fact, legacy companies sometimes welcomed that competition because it allowed
them to off-load low-margin customer segments and concentrate their energies on
more lucrative opportunities. That is, until they were fully displaced by
insurgents.
I asked O’Reilly what he’s learned about what
fuels and what confounds large organizations that try to disrupt themselves. He
told me that the biggest issue is that while C-level teams often espouse the
need to transform, they generally mean everyone but them. “The problem is,” he
said, “those are the very people who need to transform the most.” They are the
people who determine strategy and allocate resources — and they are also the
most likely to squelch new ideas if they haven’t been involved in discovery and
development.
O’Reilly identified six principles of
effective self-disruption.
1. Allot enough time.
O’Reilly takes teams of
senior executives out of their offices for full-time innovation immersion
experiences. They create tangible, and sometimes
radical, new business models or product and service offerings for four weeks at
a time. Yes, that’s right — a month. I am constantly pressured to make my
seminars shorter, so I was astounded to hear someone insisting on prolonged,
focused executive attention. “A one-day workshop or a short education course
has two fatal drawbacks,” O’Reilly said. “Participants learn theories but don’t
have time to exercise them, and people tend to come in in love with pre-baked
ideas rather than exploring completely new terrain. The problem with
transformation is never a lack of ideas. It’s lack of behavior change. That
simply takes time, deliberate practice, and multiple iterations of learning and
reflection.”
2. Go to a different
physical space.
Familiar surroundings
reinforce traditional thinking, according to O’Reilly. And the office is full
of distractions: chats with colleagues in the hallway, the temptation to duck
into one’s office to catch up on email, and the like. While O’Reilly has taken
some teams halfway around the world, more often he uses a local entrepreneurial
coworking space where executives will experience more vibrant energy and
attitudes while still being able to go home for the night.
3. Define the principles of
working together.
Senior executives are often
more attuned to analyzing and approving than to doing. That mind-set has to
change for transformation to gain momentum. O’Reilly says that executives need
to embrace these principles: “Think big, learn fast, start now” catalyzes
action; “build the right thing. Then build it the right way” helps leaders
focus on discovery rather than over-refining a nascent concept; and “create
feedback loops with our customers” encourages executives to get out of their
corporate bubble to engage with customers.
4. Create psychological
safety.
Leaders at all levels
need to embrace risk. To do that, they must feel safe among their colleagues
when they share ideas. Further, there needs to be an understanding of people’s
strengths, weaknesses, fears, and aspirations in order to get them working
productively. O’Reilly explained that while four weeks seems like a long time,
it really is not in terms of building a highly functioning team engaged in new
creative activities. As Google
validated, a high-performance team needs to be
comfortable taking risks and even failing in front of each other.
5. Introduce design
thinking.
Coaching in the principles
of design thinking is also essential — this human-centered
approach to innovation draws from designers’ toolkits. The method focuses on
the people whose problem you are trying to solve, then the technology you’ll
use to solve it, and finally the business model that will make it profitable.
In legacy businesses, one of the last two steps often comes first, which can
drastically narrow the possibilities for creation.
6. Commit to keep it going.
No matter how successful
the off-site experience, enthusiasm can quickly dissipate after reentry into
day-to-day business activities. To maintain momentum, O’Reilly asks
participants to commit to a certain amount of time each week to continue to
develop the new innovations. “You have to have a cadence to meet and work on
it,” he said. Otherwise, even the best new ideas will die.
Reinvention is never easy. It requires a
willingness to look beyond current success — sometimes contemplating the demise
of highly profitable products and services. Leaders must have the courage to
ask hard questions and open their minds to imagine new possibilities. The
alternative? Ask the many companies that have fallen off the Fortune 500…or
worse.
Eric J. McNulty
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Leaders-Need-to-Slow-Down-to-Speed-Up?gko=d2785&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20161108&utm_campaign=respA
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