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 is the director of research at the National Preparedness Leadership
Initiative and writes frequently about leadership and resilience.
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Leaders-Need-to-Slow-Down-to-Speed-Up?gko=d2785&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20161103&utm_campaign=respB
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