When Barry Libenson arrived at Experian as Global CIO in 2015, he devoted his first few months to speaking with customers. Everywhere he went he heard the same thing: they wanted access to real-time data. On the surface, it was a straightforward business transformation, but Libenson knew that it was far more complicated than that
To switch from batch processed credit reports to real-time access would require a technology transformation—from an on-premise to a cloud architecture—and in order to develop cloud applications effectively, he would have to initiate a skills-based transformation—from waterfall to agile development.”
So what at first appeared to be a straightforward initiative was actually three separate transformations stacked on top of one another. To make things even more difficult, people had good reason to be hostile to each aspect. Still, by being strategic about overcoming resistance from the start, he achieved a full transformation in less than three years.
Understanding Cognitive Biases
One of the key concerns about Libenson’s program at Experian was that the company would lose control over its business model. The firm had prospered selling processed credit reports. Giving customers real-time access to data seemed to undercut a value proposition that had proven itself over decades, almost as if McDonald’s decided to stop selling hamburgers.
These were not casual criticisms. In fact, they reflected instinctual cognitive biases that are deeply rooted in our consciousness. The first, loss aversion, reflects our tendency to avoid losses rather than seek out new gains. The second, called the availability heuristic, reflects our preference for information that is easy to access and internalize, such as the decades of profits generated by credit reports rather than the vague promise of a new cloud-driven business model.
A similar dynamic is plays out between the Black Lives Matter movement and police unions. One could argue, with significant evidence, that the smart play for police unions would be to come to some accommodation with protesters’ concerns to avoid more draconian policies later on. Yet after meticulously building their power base for decades, they have shown little willingness to make concessions.
Libensen and his team were able to navigate these challenges with two key strategies. First, he started with internal API’s, rather than fully open applications, as a keystone change,. That helped bridge the gap between the initial and desired future state. Second, the program was opt-in at first. Those program managers who were excited about creating cloud-based products got significant support. Those who weren’t were left alone.
Navigating Asymmetrical Impacts
Another obstacle to overcome was the fact that some people were more affected than others. In the case of Experian’s skills-based transformation from waterfall to agile development, which was essential to making the business and technology transformations possible, the change hit more senior personnel harder than junior ones.
Many of the project managers at the company had been doing their jobs for years—even decades—and took great pride in their work. Now they were being told they needed to do their jobs very differently. For a junior employee with limited experience, that can be exciting. For those more invested in traditional methods, the transition can more difficult.
Here again, the opt-in strategy helped navigate some thorny issues. Because no one was being forced to switch to agile development, it was hard for anyone to muster much resistance. At the same time, Libenson established an “API Center of Excellence” to empower those who were enthusiastic about creating cloud-based products.
As the movement to the cloud gained steam and began to generate real business results, the ability to build cloud-based projects became a performance issue. Managers that lagged began to feel subtle pressure to get with the program and to achieve what their colleagues had been able to deliver.
Overcoming Switching Costs
Experian facilitates billions of transactions a month. At that scale, you can’t just turn the ship on a dime. Another factor that increased the risk is the very nature of the credit business itself, which makes cybersecurity a major concern. In fact, one of Experian’s direct competitors, Equifax, had one of the biggest data breaches of the decade.
Every change encounters switching costs and that can slow the pace of change. In one particularly glaring example, the main library at Princeton University took 120 years to switch to the Library of Congress classification system because of the time and expense involved. Clearly, that’s an extreme case, but every change effort needs to take inevitable frictions into account.
That’s why Libenson didn’t push for speed initially, but started small, allowing the cloud strategy to slowly prove itself over time. As win piled upon win, the process accelerated and the transformation became more ingrained in the organization. Within just a few years, those who opposed the move to the cloud were in the distinct minority.
As General Stanley McChrystal explained in Team of Teams, he experienced a similar dynamic revamping Special Operations in Iraq. By shifting his force’s focus from individual team goals to effective collaboration between teams, he may have slowed down individual units. However, as a collective, his forces increased their efficiency by a factor of seventeen, measured by the amount of raids they were able to execute.
In every transformation, there is an inherent efficiency paradox. In order to produce change for the long-term, you almost always lose a little bit of efficiency in the short-term. That’s why it’s important to start small and build momentum as you go.
Leveraging Resistance To Forge A New Vision
Any change, if it is important and potentially impactful, is going to encounter fierce resistance. As Saul Alinsky noted, every revolution inspires its own counter-revolution. That’s why three quarters of organizational transformations fail, because managers too often see it as a communication exercise, rather than a strategic effort to empower those who are already enthusiastic about change to influence everyone else.
In the case of Experian’s move to the cloud, the objections were not unfounded. Offering customers real-time access to data did have the potential to upend the traditional credit report business model. Switching to a new technology architecture does raise cybersecurity concerns. Many senior project managers really had served the company well for decades with traditional development methods.
As Global CIO, Libenson could have ignored these concerns. He could have held a “townhall” and launched a major communication effort to convince the skeptics. Yet he did neither of these things. Instead, he treated the resistance not as an obstacle, but as a design constraint. He identified people who were already enthusiastic about the shift and empowered them to make it work. Their success built momentum and paved the way for what became a major transformation .
In fact, Experian’s cloud architecture unlocked enormous value for the firm and its customers. The company’s API hub made good on Libenson’s initial promise of supporting real-time access to data and today processes over 100 million transactions a month. It has also enabled a completely new business, called Ascend, now one of the company’s most successful products.
The truth is that bringing about fundamental, transformational change takes more than clever slogans and happy talk. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. You need to be clear-eyed and hard-nosed. You need to understand that for every significant change, there will be some who seek to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive.
The difference between successful revolutionaries and mere dreamers is that those who succeed anticipate resistance and build a plan to overcome it.
Like many others, I invested time in isolation during the pandemic to engage in various online learning programs. As a highly credentialed coach to many global Agile and SCRUM leaders in major international and local organizations, I enrolled in an Agile coach certification program and enthusiastically attended all daily sessions. It was a disastrous learning experience, verifying my perception of the Agile community’s focus on a prescriptive rules-driven process to agility. The Agile Manifesto’s highest priority is satisfying customers through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software; only two of the 12 principles mention people – “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project” and “the best architectures, requirements, and design emerge from self-organizing teams.” So, with this in mind, what might be some of the benefits of integrating a technological and process-driven disciplined approach towards humanizing agility?
I am a conceptual and analytical thinker, an entrepreneur, and an innovator who is acknowledged as a global thought leader on the people side of innovation. I also teach, mentor, and coach people to be imaginative, inquisitive, and curious, always asking many open questions. I empower, enable, and equip them to become change-agile, cognitively, and emotionally agile and develop their innovation agility. The presenters responded to my method of inquiry by assuming that I knew nothing about Agile despite knowing nothing about my background.
As a result, they failed to certify me without communicating or consulting with me directly, despite my meeting all of the course evaluation criteria and having more than 10,000 hours of facilitation and more than 1,000 hours of coaching experience on the people side of change. I also have a comprehensive background in humanizing total quality management, continuous improvement, and start-up methodologies in major organizations.
I contacted the training company and challenged their decision, only not to be “heard” and be paid lip service when confronted by a rigid, linear, conventional, disconnected approach to agility and its true role and capability in catalysing change, innovation and teaming.
This is especially true considering the senior SCRUM and Agile leaders I was coaching at the time experienced very few problems with Agile’s disciplined process and technological side. They specifically requested coaching support to develop strategies to resolve their monumental challenges and complex issues involving “getting people to work together daily” and operating as “self-organizing teams.” How do they go about humanizing agility?
Making sense of agility
Despite my disappointment, I bravely continued researching how to make sense of agility and link and integrate it with the people side of change, innovation, and teams. I intended to enable leaders to execute agile transformation initiatives successfully by combining a human-centered approach to agile software development through humanizing agility.
Agility refers to a leader, team, or organization’s ability to make timely, effective, and sustained changes that maintain superior performance. According to Pamela Myer’s book “The Agility Shift”, – an agility shift is the intentional development of the competence, capacity and confidence to learn, adapt and innovate in changing contexts for sustainable success. We have incorporated this approach into our innovation learning and coaching curriculum at ImagineNation™ and iterated and pivoted it over the past 12 years in empowering, enabling and equipping people to become “agility shifters” by humanizing agility.
Humanizing agility differently
Agility can be humanized and expanded to include change, cognitive, innovation, and organizational agility, all powerfully fueled by people’s emotional energy. This is fundamental to achieving success through non-growth or growth strategies and delivering equitable and sustainable outcomes that will make the world a better place for all humanity.
It involves identifying pivots, unlearning, learning, and relearning, embracing new approaches, frameworks, and tools, and developing new 21st-century mindsets, behaviors, and skills.
Humanizing agility involves empowering, enabling, and equipping people to be, think and act differently autonomously and competently, especially in the conflicted, chaotic, unstable post-COVID world of emerging unknowns.
Like innovation, agility is contextual.
Humanizing agility supports people to adapt, grow and thrive, become nimble by enabling:
Teams to deliver product releases as shorter sprints to collect customer feedback to iterate and pivot product development.
Leaders, teams, and organizations respond quickly and adapt to market changes, internally and externally.
People must think and feel and be able to quickly make intentional shifts to be effective, creative, inventive, and innovative in changing contexts.
That empowers, enables and equips people with the mindsets, behaviors, and skills to adapt, grow, and thrive by developing their confidence, capacity, and competence to catalyze and mobilize their power to move quickly and easily, think creatively and critically to make faster decisions and solve complex problems with less effort.
Humanizing Agility – The Five Elements
1. Emotional energy
Emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels creativity, invention, and innovation.
Understanding and harnessing this energy inspires and motivates individuals to explore and embrace creative thinking strategies in partnership with AI.
Emotional energy catalyses people’s intrinsic motivation, conviction, hope, positivity, and optimism to approach their world purposefully, meaningfully, and differently.
When people are true to their calling, they make extra efforts and are healthier, which positively impacts their well-being and improves their resilience.
2. Change agility
Change agility is the ability to anticipate, respond, be receptive, and adapt to constant and accelerating change in an uncertain, unstable, conflicted world.
It involves developing a new perspective of change as a continuous, iterative, and learning process that has to be embedded in every action and interaction, not a separate standalone process.
Requiring the development of new mental models, states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills to drive business and workforce outcomes that are critical for an organization to survive and thrive through any change.
Change becomes an ongoing opportunity, not a threat or liability, and humanizing agility in the context of change agility is a core 21st-century competency for leaders, teams and coaches.
Cognitive agility refers to how flexible and adaptive people can be with their thoughts in the face of change, uncertain circumstances, and random and unexpected events and situations. Being cognitively agile helps people break down their neuro-rigidity and eliminate any core fixed mindsets; it supports their neuro-plasticity and develops a growth mindset and ability to perceive the world through multiple lenses and differing perspectives.
Humanizing agility in the context of cognitive agility enables people to make sense of and understand the range of challenges, problems, and paradoxes at the deeper systemic and surface levels, preparing them for smart risk-taking, effective decision-making, and intelligent problem-solving.
4.Innovation agility
Innovation agility is the extent to which people develop the courage, compassion and creativity to safely deep-dive into and dance with cognitive dissonance—to passionately, purposefully, and apply creative tension and develop neuro-elasticity, to play in the space where possibility lives—between the present state and the desired creative, inventive, and innovative outcome.
To empower, engage, and enable people to use their human ingenuity and harness their collective intelligence to be innovative in the age of AI by adapting and growing in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, which is appreciated and cherished.
5.Organizational and leadership agility
Organizational agility involves developing an ability to renew itself, adapt, innovate, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, uncertain and unstable operating environment. It requires a paradoxical balance of two things: a dynamic capability, the ability to move fast—speed, nimbleness, responsiveness and stability, and a stable foundation—a platform of things that don’t change to provide a rigorous and disciplined pillar.
Organizations and leaders prioritizing humanizing agility also prioritize differing and creative ways of being, thinking and acting. They maintain their strength by focusing on their core competencies while regularly stretching themselves for maximum flexibility, adaptiveness and resilience.
Finally…. Imagine humanizing agility
Imagine what you could do and the difference we could make to people, customers, organizations, communities and the world by humanizing agility in ways that embrace and embody the five elements of agility to harness the human ingenuity and people’s collective intelligence guide vertical, horizontal and transformational changes the world and humanity need right now.
Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.
Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.
Image Credit: Pexels
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Leadership is about relationships. And the cornerstone of just about every relationship is respect.
When employees feel respected, they are more engaged, motivated, and productive. But many managers struggle to convey their respect to team members. Consequently, colleagues often experience a sense of being undervalued, disconnected, or even inferior. It is difficult to envision individuals who harbor such sentiments being able to their best work ever.
In this article, we will outline how to make employees feel respected through five actions leaders can take to build a respectful work environment.
Check-In Often
The first action leaders can take to make employees feel respected is to check-in often. By staying in contact with your team members on a regular basis, you show that you value their work and progress. That’s why regularly checking in with team members through one-on-one meetings is essential for making them feel respected. During these check-ins, ask about their work progress and if they need any resources or support. But beyond just work-related checking in, this is a time to check in with them on a deeper level as well. Show genuine interest in their personal lives and let them choose how much they want to share. They may not answer right away, as it takes time to grow comfortable with sharing personal information at work. But inquiring about it still demonstrates that you care about them as individuals and not just as employees.
By maintaining open lines of communication and regularly checking in, you create a supportive and respectful environment where employees feel heard and valued.
Ask for Input
The second action leaders can take to make employees feel respected is to ask for input. Employees involved in the decision-making process feel like their perspective and knowledge is respected. You don’t need to agree to follow every decision they make, and you don’t even need to let them make the decision. But you should absolutely seek out their input before you decide. By asking for their input, you show respect for their expertise and that you value their opinions. And you recognize that others may have different perspectives and access to information that you may not have. Even if their input is not ultimately followed, it is crucial to explain the reasoning behind the decision. In fact, asking for input helps you better explain to employees why a decision was made that they may disagree with, while still helping employees understand that their input was considered and respected.
By actively seeking input from your team members, you foster a culture of collaboration, trust, and respect.
Demonstrate Trust
The third action leaders can take to make employees feel respected is to demonstrate trust. Trust is a fundamental aspect of creating a respectful work environment. And the research on how trust develops suggests that trust isn’t given or earned, it’s built over time through a reciprocal process. When people feel trusted, they’re more likely to respond with trustworthy behavior. And in a work-context, this means leaders ought to go first by demonstrating they trust their employees. This often takes the form of giving employees more autonomy. Set clear standards and expectations but allow them to find the best way to meet them. By giving autonomy, you show that you trust your employees’ abilities and judgment.
However, it is important to balance autonomy with accountability. While giving employees the freedom to work in their own way, ensure that they are still accountable to the team and the organization’s goals. This balance between trust and accountability creates a respectful and empowering work environment.
Referee Conflicts
The fourth action leaders can take to make employees feel respected is to referee conflicts. Conflicts within a team can be detrimental to a respectful work environment, but they can also be hugely beneficial. It just depends on the type of conflict and how it is handled. Personal conflicts need to be resolved and eliminated quickly. But task-focused conflicts can benefit the team by making ideas stronger and making final decisions better. As a leader, this means referring task-focused conflicts to ensure they stay productive. Establish ground rules for conflicts, such as starting with positive feedback before addressing disagreements. This helps create a safe space for open and productive discussions. Additionally, teach your team members how to have productive conflicts that lead to better ideas and solutions.
By encouraging task-focused conflict and working to find productive resolutions, you foster a culture of respect and continuous improvement.
Give Fair Feedback
The final action leaders can take to make employees feel respected is to give fair feedback. Providing direct and fair feedback is essential for helping employees improve and grow. When giving feedback, focus on both the positive aspects and areas for improvement. By acknowledging their strengths and offering constructive criticism, you show that you value their efforts and are invested in their professional development. Where many leaders go wrong is in spending too much time on constructive criticism and not enough time on positive elements of one’s performance. That’s not fair. Fair feedback ensures that the conversation is proportionate to the overall performance of the employee. If their work is 90 percent positive and 10 percent needing improvement, then the conversation should be 90 percent positive. This not only helps the constructive criticism be better received, but it also helps the employees know their contribution is valued.
By giving fair feedback, employees not only grow faster but they grow in their feeling of being respected.
Creating a respectful work environment requires consistent effort and commitment from leaders. By regularly checking in with team members, involving them in decision-making processes, demonstrating trust, refereeing conflicts, and giving fair feedback, you can make employees feel respected and valued. Remember, a respectful work environment leads to higher employee satisfaction, engagement, and productivity—in other words, employees who feel respected are employees able to do their best work ever.
Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator, was so inspired by a speech by Airbnb cofounder and CEO that he wrote an essay about well-intentioned advice that, to scale a business, founders must shift modes and become managers.
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who’ve tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.
With curiosity and an open mind, I read on.
I finished with a deep sigh and an eye roll.
This is why.
Manager Mode: The realm of liars and professional fakers
On the off chance that you thought Graham’s essay would be a balanced and reflective examination of management styles in different corporate contexts, his description of Manager Mode should relieve you of that thought:
The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it’s up to them to figure out how. But you don’t get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.
Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
Later, he writes about how founders are gaslit into adopting Manager Mode from every angle, including by “VCs who haven’t been founders themselves don’t know how founders should run companies, and C-level execs, as a class, include some of the most skillful liars in the world.”
Founder Mode: A meritocracy of lifelong learners
For Graham, Founder Mode boils down to two things:
Sweating the details
Engaging with employees throughout the organization beyond just direct reports. He cites Steve Jobs’ practice of holding “an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart.”
To his credit, Graham acknowledges that getting involved in the details is micromanaging, “which is bad,” and that delegation is required because “founders can’t keep running a 2000 person company the way they ran it when it had 20.” A week later, he acknowledged that female founders “don’t have permission to run their companies in Founder Mode the same way men can.”
Yet he persists in believing that Founder, not Manager, Mode is critical to success,
“Look at what founders have achieved already, and yet they’ve achieved this against a headwind of bad advice. Imagine what they’ll do once we can tell them how to run their companies like Steve Jobs instead of John Sculley.”
Leader Mode: Manager Mode + Founder Mode
The essay is interesting, but I have real issues with two of his key points:
Professional managers are disconnected from the people and businesses they manage, and as a result, their practices and behaviors are inconsistent with startup success.
Founders should ignore conventional wisdom and micromanage to their heart’s content.
Most “professional managers” I’ve met are deeply connected to the people they manage, committed to the businesses they operate, and act with integrity and authenticity. They are a far cry from the “professional fakers” and “skillful liars” Graham describes.
Most founders I’ve met should not be allowed near the details once they have a team in place. Their meddling, need for control, and soul-crushing FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) lead to chaos, burnout, and failure.
The truth is, it’s contextual. The leaders I know switch between Founder and Manager mode based on the context. They work with the passion of founders, trust with the confidence of managers, and are smart and humble enough to accept feedback when they go too far in one direction or the other.
Being both manager and founder isn’t just the essence of being a leader. It’s the essence of being a successful corporate innovator. You are a founder, investing in, advocating for, and sweating the details of ambiguous and risky work. And you are a manager navigating the economic, operational, and political minefields that govern the core business and fund your paycheck and your team.
Image credit: Pexels
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Brian Higgins On Driving Verizon’s Customer Experience Vision
GUEST POST from Shep Hyken
If you have the best product in the world, that’s nice, but it’s not enough. You need a strong customer experience to go with it.
If you have the best service in the world, that’s nice, but it’s not enough. You need a strong product to go with it.
And one other thing. You also need customers! Without them, it doesn’t matter if you have the best product and the best service; you will eventually go out of business.
That’s why I’m excited about this week’s article. I had the opportunity to have an Amazing Business Radio interview with Brian Higgins, the chief customer experience officer at Verizon Consumer. After a career of 20-plus years working for one of the most recognized brands in the world, he has a lot to share about what it takes to get customers to say, “I’ll be back.”
Verizon is one of the most recognizable brands on the planet. A Fortune 50 company, it has more than 100,000 employees, a global presence serving more than 150 countries, more than $130 billion in annual revenue and a market cap of more than $168 billion.
Higgins made it clear that in addition to a premium network and product offerings, there needs to be a focus on customer experience with three primary objectives: addressing pain points, enhancing digital experiences and highlighting signature experiences exclusive to Verizon customers/members. They want to be easy to do business with and to use Customer Experience (CX) to capture market share and retain customers. What follows is a summary of Higgins’ most important points in our interview, followed by my commentary:
Who Reports to Whom?: With Verizon’s emphasis on CX, one of the first questions I asked Higgins was about the company’s structure. Does CX report to marketing? Is CX over sales and marketing? Different companies put an emphasis on marketing, sales or experience. Often, one reports to the other. At Verizon, sales, revenue and experience work together. Higgins says, “We work in partnership with each other. You can’t build an experience if you don’t have the sales, revenue and customer care teams all on board.” The chief sales officer, chief revenue officer and chief experience officer “sit next to each other.”
Membership: In our conversation, Higgins referred to Verizon’s customers as customers, members and subscribers. I asked which he preferred, and he quickly responded, “I would refer to them as members.” The membership is diverse, but the goal is to create a consistent and positive experience regardless of how individuals interact with the company. He sees the relationship with members as a partnership that is an intricate part of their lives. Most people check their phone the moment they wake up, throughout the day, and often, it’s one of the last things they check before going to bed. Verizon is a part of its members’ lives, and that’s an opportunity that cannot be mismanaged or abused.
Employees Must Be Happy Too: More companies are recognizing that their CX must also include EX (employee experience). Employees must have the tools they need. This is an emphasis in his organization. Simplifying the employee experience with better tools and policies is the key to elevating the customer’s experience. Higgins shared the perfect description of why employee experience is paramount to the success of a business: “If employees aren’t happy and don’t feel they have the policies and tools they need that are right to engage with customers, you’re not going to get the experience right.”
Focus on Little Pain Points: One of the priorities Higgins focuses on is what he refers to as “small cracks in the experience.” Seventy-five percent of the calls coming in to customer care are for small problems or questions, such as a promo code that didn’t work or an issue with a bill. His team continuously analyzes all customer journeys and works to fix them when needed. This helps to minimize recurring issues, thereby reducing customer support calls and the time employees spend fixing the same issue.
The Digital Experience: Customers are starting to get comfortable with—and sometimes prefer—digital experiences. Making these experiences seamless and user-friendly increases overall customer satisfaction. More and more, they are using digital platforms to help with the “small cracks in the experience.” Employees also get an AI-infused digital experience. Higgins said Verizon uses AI to analyze customer conversations and provide real-time answers and solutions to employees, demonstrating how AI can support both employees and customers.
Amplifying the Power of One Interaction: The final piece of wisdom Higgins shared was about recognizing how important a single interaction can be. Most customers don’t call very often. They may call once every three years, so each interaction needs to be treated like it’s a special moment—a unique opportunity to leave a lasting positive impression, one that leaves no doubt the customer made the right decision to do business with Verizon. Higgins believes in treating the customer like a relative visiting your home for a holiday. He closed by saying, “You’d be amazed how getting that one interaction with a customer right versus anything less than right can have a huge impact on the brand.”
Higgins’ vision for Verizon is not just about maintaining a superior network. It’s about creating an unparalleled customer experience that resonates with every interaction. As Verizon continues integrating advanced AI technologies and streamlining its processes, the focus continues to be on personalizing and enhancing every customer touchpoint, creating an experience that fosters high customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Digital transformation is hardly new. Advances in computing create more powerful infrastructure which in turn enables more productive operating models which in turn can enable wholly new business models. From mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to the Internet to the Worldwide Web to cloud computing to mobile apps to social media to generative AI, the hits just keep on coming, and every IT organization is asked to both keep the current systems running and to enable the enterprise to catch the next wave. And that’s a problem.
The dynamics of productivity involve a yin and yang exchange between systems that improve efficiency and programs that improve effectiveness. Systems, in this model, are intended to maintain state, with as little friction as possible. Programs, in this model, are intended to change state, with maximum impact within minimal time. Each has its own governance model, and the two must not be blended.
It is a rare IT organization that does not know how to maintain its own systems. That’s Job One, and the decision rights belong to the org itself. But many IT organizations lose their way when it comes to programs — specifically, the digital transformation initiatives that are re-engineering business processes across every sector of the global economy. They do not lose their way with respect to the technology of the systems. They are missing the boat on the management of the programs.
Specifically, when the CEO champions the next big thing, and IT gets a big chunk of funding, the IT leader commits to making it all happen. This is a mistake. Digital transformation entails re-engineering one or more operating models. These models are executed by organizations outside of IT. For the transformation to occur, the people in these organizations need to change their behavior, often drastically. IT cannot — indeed, must not — commit to this outcome. Change management is the responsibility of the consuming organization, not the delivery organization. In other words, programs must be pulled. They cannot be pushed. IT in its enthusiasm may believe it can evangelize the new operating model because people will just love it. Let me assure you — they won’t. Everybody endorses change as long as other people have to be the ones to do it. No one likes to move their own cheese.
Given all that, here’s the playbook to follow:
If it is a program, the head of the operating unit that must change its behavior has to sponsor the change and pull the program in. Absent this commitment, the program simply must not be initiated.
To govern the program, the Program Management Office needs a team of four, consisting of the consuming executive, the IT executive, the IT project manager, and the consuming organization’s program manager. The program manager, not the IT manager, is responsible for change management.
The program is defined by a performance contract that uses a current state/future state contrast to establish the criteria for program completion. Until the future state is achieved, the program is not completed.
Once the future state is achieved, then the IT manager is responsible for securing the system that will maintain state going forward.
Delivering programs that do not change state is the biggest source of waste in the Productivity Zone. There is an easy fix for this. Just say No.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
Image Credit: Unsplash
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
You know that asking questions is essential. After all, when you’re innovating, you’re doing something new, which means you’re learning, and the best way to learn is by asking questions. You also know that asking genuine questions, rather than rhetorical or weaponized ones, is critical to building a culture of curiosity, exploration, and smart risk-taking. But did you know that making a small change to a single question can radically change everything for your innovation strategy, process, and portfolio?
What is your hypothesis?
Before Lean Startup, there was Discovery-Driven Planning. This approach, first proposed by Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath and Wharton School professor Ian MacMillan in their 1995 HBR article, outlines a “planning” approach that acknowledges and embraces assumptions (instead of pretending that they’re facts) and relentlessly tests them to uncover new data and inform and update the plan.
It’s the scientific method applied to business.
How confident are you?
However, not all assumptions or hypotheses are created equal. This was the assertion in the 2010 HBR article “Beating the Odds When You Launch a New Venture.” Using examples from Netflix, Johnson & Johnson, and a host of other large enterprises and scrappy startups, the authors encourage innovators to ask two questions about their assumptions:
How confident am I that this assumption is true?
What is the (negative) impact on the idea if the assumption is false?
By asking these two questions of every assumption, the innovator sorts assumptions into three categories:
Deal Killers: Assumptions that, if left untested, threaten the idea’s entire existence
Path-dependent risks: Assumptions that impact the strategic underpinnings of the idea and cost significant time and money to resolve
High ROI risks: Assumptions that can be quickly and easily tested but don’t have a significant impact on the idea’s strategy or viability
However, human beings have a long and inglorious history of overconfidence. This well-established bias in which our confidence in our judgment exceeds the objective (data-based) accuracy of those judgments resulted in disasters like Chernobyl, the sinking of the Titanic, the explosions of the Space Shuttle Challenger and Discovery, and the Titan submersible explosion.
Let’s not add your innovation to that list.
How much of your money are you willing to bet?
For years, I’ve worked with executives and their teams to adopt Discovery-Driven Planning and focus their earliest efforts on testing Deal Killer assumptions. I was always struck by how confident everyone was and rather dubious when they reported that they had no Deal Killer assumptions.
So, I changed the question.
Instead of asking how confident they were, I asked how much they would bet. Then I made it personal—high confidence meant you were willing to bet your annual income, medium confidence meant dinner for the team at a Michelin-starred restaurant, and low confidence meant a cup of coffee.
Suddenly, people weren’t quite so confident, and there were A LOT of Deal Killers to test.
Make it Personal
It’s easy to become complacent in companies. You don’t get paid more if you come in under budget, and you don’t get fired if you overspend. Your budget is a rounding error in the context of all the money available to the company. And your signing authority is probably a rounding error on the rounding error that is your budget. So why worry about ten grand here and a hundred grand there?
Because neither you, your team, nor your innovation efforts have the luxury of complacency.
Innovation is always under scrutiny. People expect you to generate results with a fraction of the resources in record time. If you don’t, you, your team, and your budget are the first to be cut.
The business of innovation is personal. Treat it that way.
How much of your time, money, and reputation are you willing to risk? What do you need your team to risk in terms of their time, money, and professional aspirations? How much time, money, and reputation are your stakeholders willing to risk?
The answers change everything.
Image credit: Pixabay
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
There’s an old adage that says we should never let a crisis go to waste. The point is that during a crisis there is a visceral sense of urgency and resistance often falls by the wayside. We certainly saw that during the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital technologies such as video conferencing, online grocery and tele-health have gone from fringe to mainstream in record time.
Seasoned leaders learn how to make good use of a crisis. Consider Bill Gates and his ‘Internet Tidal Wave‘ memo, which leveraged what could have been a mortal threat to Microsoft into a springboard to even greater dominance. Or how Steve Jobs used Apple’s near-death experience to reshape the ailing company into a powerhouse.
But what if we could prepare for a trigger before it happens? The truth is that indications of trouble are often clear long before the crisis arrives. Clearly, there were a number of warning signs that a pandemic was possible, if not likely. As every good leader knows, there’s never a shortage of looming threats. If we learn to plan ahead, we can make a crisis work for us.
The Plan Hatched in a Belgrade Cafe
In the fall of 1998, five young activists met in a coffee shop in Belgrade, Serbia. Although still in their twenties, they were already grizzled veterans. In 1992, they took part in student protests against the war in Bosnia. In 1996, they helped organize a series of rallies in response to Slobodan Milošević’s attempt to steal local elections.
To date, their results were decidedly mixed. The student protests were fun, but when the semester ended, everyone went home for the summer and that was the end of that. The 1996 protests were more successful, overturning the fraudulent results, but the opposition coalition, called “Zajedno,” soon devolved into infighting.
So they met in the coffee shop to discuss their options for the upcoming presidential election to be held in 2000. They knew from experience that they could organize rallies effectively and get people to the polls. They also knew that when they got people to the polls and won, Milošević would use his power and position to steal the election.
That would be their trigger.
The next day, six friends joined them and they called their new organization Otpor. Things began slowly, with mostly street theatre and pranks, but within 2 years their ranks had swelled to more than 70,000. When Milošević tried to steal the election they were ready and what is now known as the Bulldozer Revolution erupted.
The Serbian strongman was forced to concede. The next year, Milošević would be arrested and sent to The Hague for his crimes against humanity. He would die in his prison cell in 1996, awaiting trial.
Opportunity From the Ashes
In 2014, in the wake of the Euromaidan protests that swept the thoroughly corrupt autocrat Viktor Yanukovych from power, Ukraine was in shambles. Having been looted of roughly $100 billion (roughly the amount of the country’s entire GDP) and invaded by Russia, things looked bleak. Without western aid, the proud nation’s very survival was in doubt.
Yet for Vitaliy Shabunin and the Anti-Corruption Action Center, it was a moment he had been waiting for. He established the organization with his friend Dasha Kaleniuk a few years earlier. Since then they, along with a small staff, had been working with international NGOs to document corruption and develop effective legislation to fight it.
With Ukraine’s history of endemic graft, which had greatly worsened under Yanukovych, progress had been negligible. Yet now, with the IMF and other international institutions demanding reform, Shabunin and Kaleniuk were instantly in demand to advise the government on instituting a comprehensive anti-corruption program, which passed in record time.
Yet they didn’t stop there either. “Our long-term strategy is to create a situation in which it will be impossible not to do anti-corruption reforms,” Shabunin would later tell me. “We are working to ensure that these reforms will be done, either by these politicians or by another, because they will lose their office if they don’t do these reforms.”
Vitaliy, Dasha and the Anti-Corruption Action Center continue to prepare for future triggers.
The Genius of Xerox PARC
One story that Silicon Valley folks love to tell involves Steve Jobs and Xerox. After the copier giant made an investment in Apple, which was then a fledgling company, it gave Jobs access to its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He then used the technology he saw there to create the Macintosh. Jobs built an empire based on Xerox’s oversight.
Yet the story misses the point. By the late 60s, its Xerox CEO Peter McColough knew that the copier business, while still incredibly profitable, was bound to be disrupted eventually. At the same time it was becoming clear that computer technology was advancing quickly and, someday, would revolutionize how we worked. PARC was created to prepare for that trigger.
The number of groundbreaking technologies created at PARC is astounding. The graphical user interface, networked computing, object oriented programing, the list goes on. Virtually everything that we came to know as “personal computing” had its roots in the work done at PARC in the 1970s.
Most of all, PARC saved Xerox. The laser printer invented there would bring in billions and, eventually, largely replace the copier business. Some technologies were spun off into new companies, such as Adobe and 3Com, with an equity stake going to Xerox. And, of course, the company even made a tidy profit off the Macintosh, because of the equity stake that gave Jobs access to the technology in the first place.
Transforming an Obstacle Into a Design Constraint
The hardest thing about change is that, typically, most people don’t want it. If they did, it have already been accepted as the normal state of affairs. That can make transformation a lonely business. The status quo has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. The path for an aspiring changemaker can be heartbreaking and soul crushing.
Many would see the near-certainty that Milosevic would try to steal the election as an excuse to do nothing. Most people would look at the almost impossibly corrupt Yanukovych regime and see the idea of devoting your life to anti-corruption reforms as quixotic folly. It is extremely rare for a CEO whose firm dominates an industry to ask, “What comes after?”
Yet anything can happen and often does. Circumstances conspire. Events converge. Round-hole businesses meet their square-peg world. We can’t predict exactly when or where or how or what will happen, but we know that everybody and everything gets disrupted eventually. It’s all just a matter of time.
When that happens resistance to change temporarily abates. So there’s lots to do and no time to waste. We need to empower our allies, as well as listen to our adversaries. We need to build out a network to connect to others who are sympathetic to our cause. Transformational change is always driven by small groups, loosely connected, but united by a common purpose.
Most of all, we need to prepare. A trigger always comes and, when it does, it brings great opportunity with it.
How one man’s innovation provided the missing link for a 20th century agricultural revolution
GUEST POST from John Bessant
There’s a lot of good stuff which comes out of Ireland. Leaving aside the wonderful music, the amazing countryside (complete with its ‘soft’ rain) and some excellent food and drink (including a drop or two of the black stuff to which I am occasionally partial). But it’s also a country which punches well above its weight in terms of ideas — it’s got a reputation for being a smart economy basing its progress on putting knowledge to work. Creating value from those ideas — innovation.
That’s something which you’ll find not only in the universities and hi-tech companies dotted across the landscape but also down on the farm. Farming’s a tough business — anyone who watches the series ‘Clarkson’s Farm,’ will recognize the multiple challenges farmers face, battling all that Nature can throw at them when she’s in a bad mood plus rising costs, increasing regulation and volatile markets. It’s a field (ouch) where innovation is not just a nice to have, it’s essential.
And in Dromara, County Down there’s a statue erected to honor a man to whom many farmers, not just in Ireland but around the world, have cause to be grateful. Harry Ferguson.
Of course farming innovation isn’t new; it’s been at the heart of our progress towards being able to feed ourselves and so move beyond subsistence to doing something constructive with our newly-found spare time. Like building cities and societies. Think back to your school days and you’ll recognize many of the key innovations which enabled the ‘agricultural revolution’, increasing productivity to help feed a growing population. The early days were all about ingenious implements — Jethro Tull’s seed drill, (1701), Cyril McCormick’s reaper (1840), John Deere’s steel plow (1847) — all these and hundreds of other innovations helped move the needle on farming practices.
But better implements still faced the limitations of power — and that aspect of innovation remained unchanged for centuries. We’d moved on from back-breaking manual labor but for centuries we relied on animals, primarily horses, to pull or occasionally push our implements. Power was the agricultural equivalent of the ‘philosophers stone’ for alchemists, the secret which would turn base metals into gold (or farms into more productive units). So with the advent of steam power in the early 1800s it looked like it had been discovered; as factories, mines and even early railways were showing, a steam engine could harness the power of many horses.
But (in an early example of the hype cycle) the promise of steam power failed to deliver — largely for technical reasons. Steam engines were big and heavy which meant they had to stay in one place with their power distributed to where it was needed by elaborate systems of pulleys, belts and wheels. They were unreliable and dangerous with an unpleasant tendency to explode unpredictably. For certain tasks they held out promise — they could plow a simple flat field ten times as fast as a team of horses— but their inflexibility limited their application.
Traction engines provided a partial solution since these machines could carry out basic tasks drilling and plowing. Though they were often too heavy to work directly on muddy fields they had the advantage of power which could quickly be moved to where they were needed. Set them up on the side of a field, hook them up to relevant implements like plows and put them to work. When the job was finished, uncouple everything and move on to the next field (as long as it was fairly flat and big).
(Interestingly it was the traction engine which inspired Henry Ford to work on transportation. Reflecting on his first encounter with a traction engine on the family farm he said ‘I remember that engine, as though I had seen it only yesterday, for it was the only vehicle other than horse-drawn I had ever seen….it was that engine that took me into automotive transportation’).
So steam power wasn’t really going to change the farming world. But another innovation was — the internal combustion engine. Engineers around the world had seized on the possibilities of this technology and were working to try and come up with a ‘horseless carriage’, something which Karl Benz managed to do with his Motorwagen in 1885 in Germany. It didn’t take a big leap of imagination to see another location where replacing horses could have an advantage — and John Froelich, an engineer from Iowa duly developed the first gasoline-powered tractor, mounting an engine on a traction engine chassis in 1892.
Unfortunately he wasn’t able to make the machine in volume, producing only four tractors before closing down the business. But others were more successful; for example in 1905 the International Harvester company produced its first tractor, and in 1906 Henry Ford invested over $600,000 in research for tractors, building on his growing experience with cars. An early outcome was the ‘Automobile plow’, a cross-over concept using the Model T as the base.
Pretty soon, just as in the personal transportation marketplace, hundreds of entrepreneurs began working on tractor innovation; a classic example of what Joseph Schumpeter (the godfather of innovation economics) would call ‘swarming’ behavior. By 1910 there were over a thousand tractor designs on offer from 150 different companies.
A key part of Schumpeter’s theory of how innovation works is that many of the early entrepreneurs active in a new field will fail, whether for technical or business reasons, and there will be convergence along key dimensions — setting up a technological trajectory along which future developments will tend to run.
That was certainly the case with tractors; key pieces of the puzzle were coming into place like an ability to deal with difficult terrain by using all-wheel drive (offered by John Deere in 1914) and the trend towards smaller (and more affordable) machines, pioneered by the Bull Company. Agricultural shows began to feature tractor demonstrations which allowed farmers to see first-hand the relative benefits of different machines and an early front runner in the move towards widespread market acceptance was International Harvester with their light and affordable Titan 10/20 model.
This was a growing market; by 1916 over 20,000 tractors had been sold in the USA. As with many innovations once the ‘dominant design’ has emerged for the basic product configuration emphasis shifts to the ways in which they can be made — process innovation. Those players — like Henry Ford — with experience in mass production had a significant potential advantage. His Fordson brand became the benchmark in terms of pricing and other manufacturers often struggled to compete unless they were large, like the John Deere company which offered its Model D in 1923 for around $1000. Ford had priced aggressively to try and capture the market, originally offering the Fordson for $200 in pre-sales advertising , but eventually selling the tractor in 1917 for $750 ( a price at which he was actually making a loss).
Ford understood the principle; he’d used it to open up the automobile market by offering ‘…to build a car for the great multitude’ at a price that multitude could afford. But things were a little more complex down on the farm. At first sight tractors seemed a great idea not least because of their running cost advantages. Animals, while a flexible source of power, were also a big cost since they needed food, shelter and veterinary services, plus there was an opportunity cost in terms of land needed to grow their feed which could otherwise be sued for more profitable crops. It took around 6 acres per horse over the farming year. Tractors ran on kerosene, becoming widely available and at low cost; and they only burned this fuel when they were working.
Ford’s strategy appeared to pay off; by 1923 he had over 75% of the US market . Yet only five years later things had deteriorated so much that the company exited the business. What led to this dramatic shift was a series of challenges to which cost advantages based on process innovation weren’t the answer. Product innovation once again became a key differentiator. This time the issue wasn’t around simply replacing the animal power unit with a mechanical one; it had everything to do with what you connected that power up to.
Early tractors solved the connection problem with a simple drawbar, essentially a metal stick to which you could attach different implements. Which worked fine when the going was flat, the surface dry, the field large and simple. Unfortunately most farming also involves uneven ground, plenty of mud and rain-filled potholes, trees and other obstacles and small fields with uneven boundaries. To cope with all of that you need a utility tractor — not for nothing was the IH Farmall a runaway success in the 1920s — the name says it all. Having spent a significant amount (for a small farmer) on buying your lightweight utility tractor you want it to carry out much more than just row crop duties — helping out with a wide range of construction and maintenance operations down on the farm,.
In particular one innovation which helped endear International Harvester to many a farmer’s heart was the ‘power take off’ device — essentially making power available to be hooked up to a variety of different implements. Introduced in 1922 this opened up the market by massively increasing the versatility of tractor. All manner of attachments — seed drills, rotary cutters, posthole diggers, snow throwers — all could be run off the core PTO. We could draw an analogy to today’s IT world; buying a tractor without the ability to attach tools to it would be like buying a computer without software.
Which brings us back to Harry Ferguson (in case you thought we’d lost the Irish connection). Because connecting farm implements to tractors became his passion — and the basis for a highly successful business. In doing so he provided the platform on which so much could happen, much as Steve Jobs with the smart-phone enabled users to find and deploy the apps they wanted . And along the way he was able to help Henry Ford re-enter and revive his tractor business.
Ferguson was born 1884 in County Down, Ulster and grew up in a farming family — though he wasn’t particularly taken with the life. Nor was he that keen on school either, dropping out at the age of 14. What saved him was a love of reading and a fascination with all things mechanical — which in the early 20th century was a good interest to have. His brother helpfully opened a repair shop to cater to the emerging motor trade and Harry joined him, kindling enough focused motivation to study at Belfast Technical College. Arguably, though, his skill set was less around the mechanical detail than in the front office — sales and PR. He persuaded his brother to sponsor him and he proved adept at motor car and cycle racing — even persuading his brother to fund the development of Ireland’s first airplane which Harry then learned to fly!
Eventually he set up his own automobile business, May Street Motors, in Belfast in 1911 and one of his first appointments (a 21 year old mechanic, Willy Sands) proved to be crucial in his subsequent success. Sands was a gifted engineer; he remained with Ferguson for nearly fifty years, working in the backroom and helping develop the technologies which built business success.
Ferguson was quick to spot an opportunity in the emerging tractor market and managed to obtain a franchise for sales and service of the John Deere Overtime tractor which was being built in the UK. That gave Ferguson and Sands extensive experience in the way the tractor was put together, the repairs it needed and the context into which it was being applied.
The miseries of the Great War on the home front included food shortages and problems with imports so the British government were urgently seeking anything which could help out with farm productivity — including subsidizing investment in tractors. Harry played a part in this when he was given a contract for the Irish Board of Agriculture in 1917 to oversee government-owned tractor maintenance and production records. The duo traveled the country to advise farmers, help set up equipment like plows and understanding the problems farmers faced in deploying the tractor. For example soil compaction, caused by the heavy weight of tractors and plows of the time, was a common complaint.
All of this honed their skills at repairs and improvements to the current stock of tractors in Ireland; their next break came when conversion kits for the Model T car began to appear to create a car/tractor. Ferguson took a franchise for the Eros, a kit which involved putting larger rear wheels on the car, together with a chain transmission to them and installing a bigger radiator to cope with the engine load. His experience with farmers paid off; he realized that this lighter weight car/tractor could solve the soil compaction problem and so got Sands to design a lightweight plow for the Eros.
This — the ‘Belfast plow’ — was launched in 1917 and was the first farm implement bearing Ferguson’s name; it was half the weight of a standard plow and crucially used a clever idea for the hitch connecting the tractor to the plow. This meant that the load from pulling the plow was shared equally by all four wheels instead of just the rear ones; this made it easier to steer and drive.
But Henry Ford was not about to let the tractor opportunity market fall into the hands of conversion kits for Model Ts; instead he commissioned design and manufacture of his own tractor with a large slow turning engine. He persuaded the British Ministry of Munitions to purchase 6000 units in return for his setting up a factory in Ireland. The Fordson tractor (as it was called) arrived in 1917 but quickly ran into problems as farmers began to use it. In particular it had a worrying tendency to flip over on its back if it hit an obstacle; its powerful engine and the relative lack of weight on the front end meant it could be pulled over by an obstacle or an unexpected drag while plowing. Nonetheless its arrival spelt the end of conversion kits — and dealt a blow to Harry Ferguson’s dream.
He was nothing if not resilient; in true entrepreneurial style he turned the arrival in force of Fordsons to an opportunity, adapting his lightweight plow for use with the tractor. In particular they worked on their hitch system so that it helped overcome the tendency for the front wheels to rear up; their design included a clever depth control device — a floating skid — which stopped the problem happening when the plow dug too deep and pulled the tractor over.
This worked well with the plow but for other implements they realized depth control could be enabled by the use of a hydraulic lever which adapted to the terrain. Putting all of this together led them to a system which worked on a variety of implements including disc harrows and cultivators. In 1925 Ferguson was granted a patent for this three point hitch — and it became the basis on which he built his future success. It was the key to unlocking the puzzle of how to connect power to implements and became the dominant design, one which is still widely used today.
The significance of this design should not be underestimated, and it’s something explored in depth in an excellent review by Scott Marshaus at the University of Wisconsin. Even though other factors helped contribute to the major increase in agricultural productivity like fertilizers, better seed strains and environmental management of pests the importance of completing the mechanization cycle is central. Yes, you can replace horses and mules with machine power but you can’t plant the seeds or distribute the chemicals unless you have the means to connect power with application. Which was the problem that Ferguson did so much to solve.
Just when all looked promising the market weather changed once again, another shift triggered by the business strategy of Ford. After years of making a loss the company decided to exit the tractor market in 1927, choosing instead to concentrate resources on their new Model A automobile. Which left Ferguson with no market for his Fordson-fitting plow.
So he (and Sands, as ever working away diligently in the backroom) developed their own lightweight tractor based on the Fordson design. They included their 3 point hitch and the prototype ‘Black Tractor’ appeared in 1933. Ferguson then went into partnership with the David Brown company to manufacture what became known as the Ferguson Brown Model A; production started in 1936. Disagreements quickly followed with Brown wanting to make a bigger tractor so Ferguson pulled out of the venture.
Instead he took one of the production Model A tractors into Henry Ford’s back garden — literally. In 1938 he showed it off and tested it against the Fordson and another tractor from Allis-Chalmers at Ford’s Fair Lane country estate. It performed so well that Ford wanted to make a deal on the spot and after brief discussion the two men shook hands. This handshake deal put a version of the tractor, called the Ford-Ferguson Model 9N into production in 1939 and it sold over 10,000 in its first year. By 1940 the factory was churning out 150 per day.
All should have been plain sailing but Ferguson’s prickly nature posed problems. He was, in many ways, a classic example of an entrepreneur, seeking opportunity wherever he could find it and adapting setbacks to become new directions for development. However he was also, according to his biographer Colin Fraser,‘someone who combined the extremes of subtlety, naiveté, charm, rudeness, brashness, modesty, largesse and pettiness; and the switch from any one to another could be abrupt and unpredictable. And, he had a penchant for confrontation.”
He had hoped that Ford in the UK would start production after the end of WW2 and he wanted a seat on the board; when this was rejected he threatened to walk away and start production on his own. But his position was weak; what he didn’t know was that Henry Ford 2nd, who took over in 1945, had discovered that the tractor business was still losing money at a desperate rate. He also discovered that the Ford-Ferguson 2N was being sold at a loss to Ferguson for resale to his dealers, an arrangement that cost Ford $25 million. Not surprisingly Ford wanted to stop and Ferguson was advised that 1947 would be the last year of the handshake agreement.
Ferguson fought back, putting his own version of the Ferguson/Ford tractor into production in 1946 in a war-surplus British factory. But competing with Ford was always going to be difficult; in response Ford introduced a new version, the Ford Model 8N in 1947, conspicuously missing the ‘Ferguson’ name from the badge. Ford’s engineers had tried to improve and sidestep Ferguson’s patented ideas but the core 3 point hitch and hydraulic system were retained. Although Ford’s marketing and distribution muscle backed him into a corner Ferguson in turn fought back, suing Ford in 1948 for $251 million for infringement of these patents.
Ferguson eventually won the bitter dispute and used some of the $9.25 damages agreed to continue to make tractors in the UK. But his attempts at working independently in the USA failed and eventually he merged his business with the Massey-Harris company in 1953.He retired from the tractor business but continued to develop ideas for the world of motor sport, including creating the first four wheel-drive system for use on Formula One racing cars.
He died in 1960 as a result of a barbiturate overdose; the inquest was unable to conclude whether this had been accidental or not. A sad end for someone whose passion and drive had helped enable the later stages of the agricultural revolution. But he left a powerful innovation footprint in farming soil all around the world. remembered in the tractor brand which bears his name and in the 3 point hitch design which is still in widespread use.
When the work is new for them, they don’t know how to do it. You’ve got to show them how to do it and explain everything. Tell them about your top-level approach; tell them why you focus on the new elements; show them how to make the chart that demonstrates the new one is better than the old one. Let them ask questions at every step. And tell them their questions are good ones. Praise them for their curiosity. And tell them the answers to the questions they should have asked you. And tell them they’re ready for the next level.
2. Do it with them, and let them hose it up.
Let them do the work they know how to do, you do all the new work except for one new element, and let them do that one bit of new work. They won’t know how to do it, and they’ll get it wrong. And you’ve got to let them. Pretend you’re not paying attention so they think they’re doing it on their own, but pay deep attention. Know what they’re going to do before they do it, and protect them from catastrophic failure. Let them fail safely. And when then hose it up, explain how you’d do it differently and why you’d do it that way. Then, let them do it with your help. Praise them for taking on the new work. Praise them for trying. And tell them they’re ready for the next level.
3. Let them do it, and help them when they need it.
Let them lead the project, but stay close to the work. Pretend to be busy doing another project, but stay one step ahead of them. Know what they plan to do before they do it. If they’re on the right track, leave them alone. If they’re going to make a small mistake, let them. And be there to pick up the pieces. If they’re going to make a big mistake, casually check in with them and ask about the project. And, with a light touch, explain why this situation is different than it seems. Help them take a different approach and avoid the big mistake. Praise them for their good work. Praise them for their professionalism. And tell them they’re ready for the next level.
4. Let them do it, and help only when they ask.
Take off the training wheels and let them run the project on their own. Work on something else, and don’t keep track of their work. And when they ask for help, drop what you are doing and run to help them. Don’t walk. Run. Help them like they’re your family. Praise them for doing the work on their own. Praise them for asking for help. And tell them they’re ready for the next level.
5. Do the new work for them, then repeat.
Repeat the whole recipe for the next level of new work you’ll help them master.
Image credit: misterinnovation.com
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.
