Friday, February 23rd, 2024
Start-ups are brilliant at constantly scanning the external environment, soaking up insights and information, and turning it to their advantage. What’s trending in the market? What are our customers saying? Competitors doing? What innovations are coming down the line? What does this mean for us and how can we respond? And so on.
Start-ups are also brilliant at mining employees, particularly new hires, for insights and information, learning how work gets done in other organisations. Have you encountered this situation before? How did you tackle x in your previous role? Is there anything we should be doing differently? Better? And so on.
This world view (aka culture) is about being plugged into what’s happening in the world and with customers. Start-ups seek out and embrace the insights that enable them to pivot and drive change. It’s what makes start-ups so agile, innovative and able to identify and solve customer challenges.
Bigger, more established players should be doing this as well, but on the whole, they don’t. Most do the exact opposite. They are insular. And the focus is on doing more of the same (what made them successful), rather than thinking about what could be done differently (to make them successful in the future). This focus on maintaining the status quo means organizations get stuck in yesterday’s thinking. They start to lose relevance and competitive edge. It doesn’t take long to become a dinosaur in the current environment.
Unfortunately, many big companies suffer from a superiority complex, assuming that they know best. They even know their customers and their customers’ challenges better than the customers themselves. The bigger the company, the bigger the complex.
And big organizations construct barriers. They prevent information from getting out or getting in. In today’s fast-moving world, that’s a fatal error. Agility is everything now and to be agile, you have to be responsive, and you have to have your ear to the ground. You have to be plugged into that external world, listening to what customers and competitors are saying. Organizations that don’t keep abreast of change and aren’t willing to change risk obsolescence because ideas, processes, systems, products and tech date very quickly now.
Organizations need to go back to basics, starting with curiosity. What’s happening out there? What are customers excited/worried/talking about? Organizations need to embrace change and uncertainty. Tune into the world and encourage employees (at all levels) to do the same. Give them permission to explore, to try things out, to listen to what is happening externally and internally. Get them to look for the small changes and think about what they mean for your organization and your customers before they grow into big changes. You want to be ahead of the curve, not behind it.
Of course, this is a cultural thing. You can’t have a one-off project to stave off obsolescence. Organizations need to have a culture of enquiry and agility, where people have the time, the space, and the permission to look beyond the everyday. And the organization itself needs to be flexible, adaptable and open to change. What structures are preventing people from coalescing around organizational challenges? And just as importantly, what structures are needed to allow insights to surface and people to come together to work on challenges and ideas and insights? You need a combination of formal and informal structures.
What you probably don’t need is a committee. So many organizations are drowning in committees. The problem with these committees is that they are rarely agile – they run according to agendas and timescales and hierarchies. Forums are a much better, more agile way of addressing urgent issues and challenges. Organizations can set up forums, bringing people together to tackle specific areas of interest. They are often temporary in nature and non-hierarchical. This is really important. Hierarchies often promote senior voices, but you actually want all voices to be heard. It might be your newest, most junior employees that have the best external insights. They will certainly have a different voice and a different perspective to longstanding, senior employees.
Let those people on the ground – call centre staff, for example – tell you what customers are talking about. Which products or services are causing problems? Where are the glitches? Where are the routes to innovation? To happier customers?
Organizations that are hermetic, that think they know best and don’t let external insights in fail much faster and more spectacularly than those that are open to (or even better, embrace) external insights.
The next webinar in my series on Organizational Learning: Reimagined and Redefined for our time, is called Embracing insights to embrace change, and we will explore all of the above, plus:
- how to ramp up curiosity so people will want to explore new possibilities
- how to create the space and time for this to happen
- how to build the forums where this information can be processed
- how to take intelligent decisions quickly and effectively based on this data
Sign up to the webinar here (link to come)