Tag Archives: disruption

Navigating Industry Disruptions with Confidence

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, disruption is the new normal. Companies that manage to thrive amidst continuous change aren’t necessarily those with the most resources but those that are agile, innovative, and prepared. As we navigate industry disruptions, understanding how to adapt and innovate becomes crucial.

The Essence of Disruption

Disruption can arise from various avenues—technological breakthroughs, regulatory shifts, market dynamics, or global events. The key to navigating these disruptions lies not only in responding to them effectively but anticipating them and embedding adaptability into the organizational fabric.

Case Study 1: Netflix – From DVDs to Streaming

Netflix’s journey is perhaps the quintessential case study of strategic adaptability and innovation. Originally a DVD rental service, Netflix faced significant challenges as technology favored streaming over physical discs. The impending obsolescence of its original business model didn’t deter Netflix; instead, it served as a catalyst for transformation.

By investing heavily in streaming technology and content production, Netflix successfully pivoted to a digital-first model. This shift not only retained its customer base but expanded it exponentially across the globe, making it a leader in content streaming. The company’s commitment to innovation didn’t stop at distribution; Netflix then disrupted the industry again by producing original content, winning numerous accolades, and setting new standards in the entertainment sector.

Lessons Learned

Anticipate shifts in consumer behavior to stay ahead.
Invest in technology to support scalable change.
Don’t just adapt; innovate to define new industry standards.

Case Study 2: LEGO – Reinventing Through Innovation

LEGO’s story reflects a different, yet equally powerful narrative of navigating industry disruption. In the early 2000s, LEGO faced a significant crisis—falling sales, high debts, and the growing allure of digital games threatened its core business model based on physical play.

LEGO’s response to this disruption was multi-faceted. They realigned their product strategies focusing on core themes that resonated with their customer base like City, Star Wars, and Technic. More importantly, LEGO embraced digitalization, launching video games, movies, and interactive experiences that extended its brand universe beyond physical bricks.

The introduction of the LEGO Ideas platform also marked a pivotal innovation, allowing fans to design new sets with the potential for actual production. This not only sparked greater brand engagement but harnessed the creativity of its community, reinforcing customer loyalty and market relevance.

Lessons Learned

Engage with your customer community for insights and innovation.
Diversify offerings to stay relevant across changing consumer preferences.
Leverage your brand’s strengths while exploring new growth avenues.

Strategies for Confidence in Disruption

Based on the insights from the case studies above, the following strategies can help organizations confidently navigate disruptions:

Build an Agile Culture

Cultivate a culture that embraces change. This means encouraging experimentation, tolerating failures, and iterating quickly. When employees are empowered to innovate and adapt, the organization becomes inherently more resilient.

Continuous Learning and Development

Equip your workforce with the skills needed to address future challenges. Investing in employee development fosters a dynamic environment ready to tackle new technologies and methodologies.

Customer-Centric Innovation

Your customers are your greatest source of feedback and inspiration. Design your products and services around their evolving needs to stay relevant. Use data analytics to glean insights and mold your strategies.

Conclusion

Navigating industry disruptions requires confidence, foresight, and an innovative spirit. Organizations that understand and implement these principles can not only survive disruptive forces but thrive in them. By embedding adaptability into your DNA, like Netflix and LEGO, you can pivot strategically and emerge stronger in any competitive landscape.

Image credit: Pexels

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Taking Personal Responsibility – Seeing Self as Cause

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Taking Personal Responsibility – Seeing Self as Cause

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our last two blogs on Taking Personal Responsibility, we stated that when people aren’t taking personal responsibility, they cannot be accountable, they will fail in their jobs, and their teams, and fail to grow as individuals and as leaders. Taking personal responsibility is an especially crucial capability to develop self-awareness and self-regulation skills in the decade of both disruption and transformation. It all starts with seeing self as the cause of what happens to us, rather than baling it on the effects events and problems have on us! Where people can learn to recognize the structures at play in their lives and change them so that they can create what they really want to create in their lives, teams, or organizations.

In the last two blogs, we shared a range of tips for shifting people’s location, by creating a line of choice, to help them shift from being below the line and blaming others for their reactive response, to getting above the line quickly. Through shifting their language from “you, they and them” to “I, we and us” and bravely disrupting and calling out people when they do slip below the line. How doing this allows people to also systemically shift across the maturity continuum, from dependence to independence and ultimately towards interdependence.

In a recent newsletter Otto Scharmer, from the Presencing Institute states “Between action and non-action there is a place. A portal into the unknown. But what are we each called to contribute to the vision of the emerging future? Perhaps these times are simply doorways into the heart of the storm, a necessary journey through the cycles of time required to create change”.

Creating the place – the sacred pause

When I made a significant career change from a design and marketing management consultant to becoming a corporate trainer, one of the core principles I was expected to teach to senior corporate managers and leaders was taking personal responsibility.

Little knowing, that at the end of the workshop, going back to my hotel room and beating myself up, for all of the “wrongs” in the delivery of the learning program, was totally out of integrity with this core principle.

Realising that when people say – those that teach need to learn, I had mistakenly thought that I had to take responsibility for enacting the small imperfections I had delivered during the day, by berating myself, making myself “wrong” and through below the line self-depreciation!

Where I perfectly acted out the harmful process of self-blame, rather than rationally assessing the impact of each small imperfection, shifting to being above the line where I could intentionally apply the sacred pause:

Hit my pause button to get present, accept my emotional state,
Connect with what really happened to unpack the reality of the situation and eliminate my distortions around it,
Check-in and acknowledge how I was truly feeling about what happened,
Acknowledge some of the many things that I had done really well,
Ask myself what is the outcome/result I want for participants next program?
Ask myself what can I really learn from this situation?
Consciously choose what to do differently the next time I ran the program.

I still often find myself struggling with creating the Sacred Space between Stimulus and Response and have noticed in my global coaching practice, that many of my well-intentioned clients struggle with this too.

The impact of the last two and a half years of working at home, alone, online, with minimal social interactions and contact, has caused many of them to languish in their reactivity, and for some of them, into drowning in a very full emotional boat, rather than riding the wave of disruptive change.

Being the creative cause

In our work at ImagineNation, whether we help people, leaders and teams adapt, innovate and grow through disruption, their ability to develop true self-awareness and be above the line is often the most valuable and fundamental skill set they develop.

It then enables us to make the distinction that creating is completely different from reacting or responding to the circumstances people find themselves in by applying the sacred pause.

When people shift towards seeing self as the cause they are able to create and co-create what they want in their lives, teams or organization by learning to create by creating, starting with asking the question:

What result do you want to create in your life?
What is the reality of your current situation?

This creates a state of tension, it is this tension that seeks resolution.

In his ground-breaking book The Path of Least Resistance Robert Fritz, goes on to describe and rank these desired results as “Fundamental Choices, Primary Choices, and Secondary Choices.”

Because there is one thing that we can all do right and is totally in our control – is to shift towards seeing self as the cause and make a set of conscious choices, with open hearts, minds, and wills, as to how we think, feel and choose to act.

“We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.”

We all have the options and choices in taking responsibility, empowering ourselves and others to be imaginative and creative, and using the range of rapid changes, ongoing disruption, uncertainty, and the adverse pandemic consequences, as levers for shifting and controlling, the way we think, feel.

Benefits of seeing self as the cause and being above the line

Applying the sacred pause to make change choices in how we act – and being brave and bold in shifting across the maturity continuum, will help us to cultivate the creativity, interdependence, and systemic thinking we all need right now because it:

Helps people self-regulate their reactive emotional responses, be more open-hearted and emotionally agile, and helps develop psychologically safe work environments where people can collaborate and experiment, and fail without the fear of retribution or punishment.
Enables people to be more open-minded, imaginative, and curious and creates a safe space for continuous learning, maximizing diversity and inclusion, and proactive intentional change and transformation.
Promotes ownership of a problem or challenging situation and helps develop constructive and creative responses to problems and an ability to take intelligent actions.
Gives people an opportunity to impact positively on others and build empowered trusted and collaborative relationships.
Enables entrepreneurs and innovators to invent creative solutions and drive successful innovative outcomes.
Building the foundations for accountability, where people focus their locus of control on what they promise to deliver, enables them to be intrinsically motivated, and take smart risks on negotiating outcomes that they can be counted on for delivering.

Tips for seeing self as the cause and operating above the line

Taking personal responsibility and seeing self as the cause involves:

Acknowledging that “I/we had a role or contributed in some way, to the fact that this has not worked out the way “I/we wanted.”
Clarifying the outcome or result in you want from a specific situation or a problem.
Seeking alternatives and options for making intelligent choices and actions, and using the language of “I/we can” and “I/we will” to achieve the outcome.
Replacing avoiding, being cynical and argumentative, blaming, shaming, controlling, and complaining with courageous, compassionate, and creative language and acts of intention.
People become victors who operate from “self as cause” where they are empowered to be the creative forces in their own lives by making fundamental, primary, and secondary change choices.
Trust your inner knowing and deep wisdom that everything has a specific and definable cause and that each and every one of us has the freedom to choose how to respond to it.

Back to leadership basics

As Stephen Covey says, people need to deeply and honestly say “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday” because it’s not what happens to us, it’s our reactive response to what happens that hurts us.

Being willing to step back, retreat, and reflect on the gap between the results you want, and the results you are getting all starts with stepping inward, backward, and forwards, using the sacred pause, to ask:

What happened? What were the key driving forces behind it?

How am I/we truly feeling about it?

What was my/our role in causing this situation, or result?

What can I/we learn from it?

What is the result/outcome I want to create in the future?

What can I/we then do to create it?

As a corporate trainer, consultant and coach, I found out the hard way that developing the self-awareness and self-regulation skills in taking personal responsibility and seeing self as the cause is the basis of the personal power and freedom that is so important to me, and almost everyone else I am currently interacting with.

It’s the foundation for transcending paralysis, overwhelm, and stuck-ness and activating our sense of agency to transform society and ourselves.

This is the third and final blog in a series of blogs on the theme of taking responsibility – going back to leadership basics. Read the previous two here:

Find out about our learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, starting Tuesday, October 18, 2022. It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique context.

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Taking Personal Responsibility – Creating the Line of Choice

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Taking Personal Responsibility - Creating the Line of Choice

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In our last blog, we described how people’s personal power is diminished when they don’t take personal responsibility for the impact of their behaviors and actions and the results they cause. Where many people are feeling minimized and marginalized, anxious as a result of being isolated and lonely, worrying about losing their security and freedom, and dealing with the instability in their working environments. Resulting in many people disengaging from the important conversations, job functions, key relationships, workplaces, and in some instances, even from society. Where managers and leaders lack the basic self-awareness and self-regulation skills to control the only controllable in uncertain and unstable times, is to choose how to respond, rather than react to it.

We have a unique moment in time to shift their defensiveness through being compassionate, creative, and courageous towards helping managers and leaders unfreeze and mobilize to exit our comfort zones. To take intelligent actions catalyze and cause positive outcomes, that deliver real solutions to crises, complex situations, and difficult business problems.

Why do people avoid taking personal responsibility?

People typically avoid taking personal responsibility for reasons ranging from simple laziness, risk adversity, or a fear of failure, to feeling change fatigued, overwhelmed, or even victimized by the scale of a problem or a situation.

Resulting in a range of different automatic defensive, and a range of non-productive reactive responses including:

Avoidant behavior, where feel victimized and targeted, people passively “wriggle” and the buck gets passed onto others, and the real problem or issue does not get addressed or resolved.
Controlling behavior, where people ignore their role in causing or resolving the real problem or issue, and aggressively push others towards their mandate or solution, denying others any agency.
Argumentative behavior, where people play the binary “right-wrong” game, and self-righteously, triggered by their own values, oppose other people’s perspectives in order to be right and make the other person wrong.

Creating the line of choice

At Corporate Vision, we added a thick line of “choice” between “personal responsibility” and “blame, justification and denial” to intentionally create space for people to consider taking more emotionally hygienic options rather than:

Dumping their “emotional boats” inappropriately onto others, even those they may deeply care about,
Sinking into their habitual, and largely unconscious default patterns when facing complex problems, which results in the delivery of the same results they always have.
Not regulating their automatic reactive responses to challenging situations, and not creating the vital space to pause and reflect to think about what to do next.

To enable them to shift towards taking response-ability (an ability to respond) and introducing more useful options for responding in emotionally agile, considered, constructive, inclusive, and creative ways to the problem or the challenge.

Noticing that when we, or others we interact with, do slip below the line to notice whether to “camp” there for the long term or to simply choose to make the “visit” a short one!

Doing this demonstrates the self-awareness and self-regulation skills enabling people to take personal responsibility. Which initiates ownership and a willingness to be proactive, solutions, and achievement orientated – all of which are essential qualities for 21st century conscious leadership that result in innovative outcomes that result in success, growth, and sustainability.

Shifting your location – from “you, they and them” to “I, we and us”

Developing the foundations for transformational and conscious leadership involves:

Supporting people to acknowledge and accept that the problem or challenge is not “out there” and is within their locus of control or influence.
Shifting the “Maturity Continuum” to enable leaders and managers to be both independent and interdependent.
Creating a line of choice to think, act and do things differently.
Calling out people when they slip below the line.

It involves supporting people to let go of their expectation that “they” or someone else, from the outside, will fix it, and supporting them to adopt a stance where:

“I” or “we” can and are empowered to do it,
“I” or “we” are responsible for getting above the line,
“I” or “we” can choose a different way of being, thinking, and acting intelligently in this situation.

Developing conscious leadership

At any time, everyone is either above or below the line because it is elemental to the type of conscious leadership we all need to survive and thrive, in a world where people are seeking leaders, managers, and working environments that require interdependence.

To operate in the paradigm of “we” – we can do it; we can cooperate; we can combine our talents and abilities and create something greater together.

We cooperate together by creating the line of choice where we call out to ourselves and others when we slip below it, to get above the line as quickly as possible.

Where interdependent people and communities combine their efforts, and their self-awareness and self-regulation skills with the efforts of others to achieve their growth and greatest success by increasing:

Transparency and trust,
Achievement and accountability,
Diversity and inclusion,
Experimentation and collaboration.

All of these are founded on the core principle of taking personal responsibility, which is an especially crucial capability to develop self-awareness and self-regulation skills in the decade of both disruption and transformation.

Bravely calling out self and others

When we take responsibility for managing our own, “below the line” reactive responses, by habitually creating the line of choice, we can bravely call out ourselves and others when we slip below it.

Because when we don’t call ourselves and others we interact with, we are unconsciously colluding with their emotional boats, default patterns, and automatic reactive responses, which inhibit their ability to effect positive change.

When we safely awaken ourselves and others, we can get back above the line quickly and choose different ways of being, thinking, and acting intelligently in the situation.

Alternately, people aren’t taking personal responsibility, they cannot be accountable, they will fail in their jobs, and their teams, and fail to grow as individuals and as leaders.

In fact, developing a habitual practice of emotionally intelligent and conscious leadership by safely and bravely disrupting ourselves and our people, in the face of ongoing uncertainty, accelerating change, and continuous disruption.

This is the second in a series of three blogs on the theme of taking responsibility – going back to leadership basics.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Disrupt Yourself, Your Team and Your Organization

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Disrupt Yourself, Your Team and Your Organization

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Moving into a new year is always a time for retreating and reflecting to accelerate growth and harvest new ideas from our feelings, thoughts, and learnings gleaned from the last two years of disruption, extreme uncertainty, and instability. Whether you are actively seeking to disrupt yourself, your team, and your organization to effect sustainable success this year, or not, we all have the opportunity to adapt, innovate and grow from the range of challenging events that impacted us in the past 24 months. This is why it might be useful to see these disruptive events as positive, powerful, and impactful forces for creating new cracks in your own, or your team or organizational soil – to sow some imaginative, creative, and inventive seeds for effecting positive change in an unstable world.

To see them germinate the desired changes you want for yourself, your team, and organization and deliver them, to survive and thrive in 2022.

We are all being challenged by disruption

Our status quo and concepts of business-as-usual have all been significantly disrupted, resulting in a range and series of deep neurological shocks, that have shaken many of us, our teams, and our organizations, to our very cores. Some of us adapted to a sense of urgency and exploited the opportunity to reinvent, iterate, or pivot our teams and organizations, towards co-creating individual and intentional “new normals” and just “got on” with it. Some of us have continually denied, defended, and avoided making changes, where many of us have sunk deeply into our fears and anxieties, falsely believing that our lives, and our work, would eventually go back to “normal”.

This is because a significant number of our habitual, largely unconscious mental models and emotional states, were disrupted, largely by events beyond our individual and collective control. Causing many of us to experience “cognitive dissonance” (a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors that produce feelings of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance) from the chaos, discomfort, confusion, and conflict.

Which saw many of us, disconnect cognitively and emotionally, from the current disruptive reality, where some of us secretly hoped that “it will all go away” manifesting and festering fundamentally and unconsciously, as inherent neurological immobility, (freeze, fight, flight) resulting in many areas as resistance to change.

Why disrupt yourself, your team, and organization?

Yet disruptive change is inevitable, the speed and pace of exponential change cannot be stopped, the range of complex and wicked global and local problems that need to be solved collectively, aren’t going away.

Job security and full-time employment, as hybrid and virtual work, and technology accelerate, are becoming “things of the past” as the workplace continues to destabilize through digitization, AI, and automation.

Whilst the war for talent also accelerates as the great resignation sets in and people make powerful, empowered life balance decisions and are on the move globally.

Taking the first steps to disrupt yourself, your team, and organization

In this time of extreme uncertainty, we have a unique moment in time, to disrupt ourselves, teams, and organizations by:

Hitting our individual, collective mental, and emotional pause buttons, to retreat from our business-as-usual activities, and take time out to reflect upon paying attention and qualifying:

How specifically have I/we been disrupted?
How have our people, teams, and customers been disrupted?
What are some of the major collective impacts on our organization’s current status and how might these impact our future growth potential and overall sustainability?
How connected are we to an exponential world, how can we ensure that our feelings, thoughts, and actions, connect with what is really happening to us, our teams, and our customers?
What causes disconnection and how might we manage it to be more mentally tough and emotionally agile in an extremely uncertain future?
What really matters to us, our teams, organizations, and customers – what do our people, teams, and customers really want from us?
What are some of the key elements of our organizational strategy to enact our purpose and deliver our mission?

Generating safe, evocative, provocative, and creative conversations, that evoke deep listening and deep questioning, about how to individually and collectively reconnect, revitalize, rejuvenate and reenergize people, teams and organizations to survive and thrive through asking:

How can we engage and harness our people and teams’ energies in ways that mobilize their collective intelligence to evoke new mindset shifts and new ways of thinking and acting?
What are some of the key mindsets and traits we need to disrupt, shift, and cultivate to be successful to adapt and grow through disruption?
What skills do our leaders and teams need to learn to think and act differently to shift the organizations culture to deliver our strategy?
How might we shift our teams and organizations to be agile, and redesign our organizations for both stability and speed?
What does it mean to us, our teams, and organizations to be creative, inventive, and innovative – How might we shift our teams and organizations to be more creative, inventive, and innovative?
What are the new behavioral norms that will support and enable us to execute agile and innovative changes?
How might becoming agile and innovative help our people, teams co-create a healthy, high-performing, and sustainable organizational culture?
How might becoming agile and innovative add value to the quality of people’s lives and help our customers flourish?

Becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable by developing our peoples, teams, and our organizational “discomfort resilience” and dance of the edge of your comfort zones through:

Creating safe environments where people and teams are allowed to experiment, have permission, and are trusted to practice, make mistakes as they move through difficult emotions, and take little bets in low stake situations.
Intentionally breaking organizational routines and habits, to create space in people’s brains for new neural pathways to be developed.
Enabling people and teams to become mindful of their triggers, to interrupt their automatic reactions.
Equipping people and teams to thoughtfully and intentionally respond to situations, that make them uncomfortable and risk-averse, by knowing how to think differently.
Bringing more play into the way people work, encourages people to be imaginative, inquisitive, curious, and improvisational, to seek different ways of thinking and acting, that really make a difference in how work gets done.
Support people and teams to learn by doing, and failing fast, without the fear of blame, shame, and retribution, despite it being risky to do that.

Why not disrupt yourself, your team, and organization?

The future is going to be full of disruptive events and circumstances that will impact is our families, communities, team, and organizations, and the conditions of extreme uncertainty and disruption are not going to go away. In fact, they are fundamental to what might be described as our collective “new normal” and it’s up to you to disrupt yourself, your team, and organization, to lead, adapt and grow, to survive and thrive through it.

Find out about The Coach for Innovators Certified Program, a collaborative, intimate, and deep personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 8-weeks, starting May 2022. It is a blended learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of a human-centered approach to innovation, within your unique context. Find out more.

Contact us now at mailto:janet@imaginenation.com.au to find out how we can partner with you to learn, adapt, and grow your business, team and organization through disruption.

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Innovation Requires Going Fast, Slow and Meta

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GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the regulatory filing for Facebook’s 2012 IPO, Mark Zuckerberg included a letter outlining his management philosophy. Entitled, The Hacker Way, it encapsulated much of the zeitgeist. “We have a saying,” he wrote. “‘Move fast and break things.’ The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.”

At around the same time, Katalin Karikó was quietly plodding away in her lab at the University of Pennsylvania. She had been working on an idea since the early 1990s and it hadn’t amounted to much so far, but was finally beginning to attract some interest. The next year she would join a small startup named BioNTech to commercialize her work and would continue to chip at the problem.

Things would accelerate in early 2020, when Karikó’s mRNA technology was used to design a coronavirus vaccine in a matter of mere hours. Just as Daniel Kahneman explained that there are fast and slow modes of thinking, the same can be said about innovating. The truth is that moving slowly is often underrated and that moving fast can sometimes bog you down.

The Luxury Of Stability

Mark Zuckerberg had the luxury of being disruptive because he was working in a mature, stable environment. His “Hacker Way” letter showed a bias for action over deliberation in the form of “shipping code,” because he had little else to worry about. Facebook could be built fast, because it was built on top of technology that was slowly developed over decades.

The origins of modern computing are complex, with breakthroughs in multiple fields eventually converging into a single technology. Alan Turing and Claude Shannon provided much of the theoretical basis for digital computing in the 1930s and 40s. Yet the vacuum tube technology at the time only allowed for big, clunky machines that were very limited.

A hardware breakthrough came in 1948, when John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain invented the transistor, followed by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce’s development of the integrated circuit in the late 1960s. The first computers were connected to the Internet a decade later and, a generation after that, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

All of this happened very slowly but, by the time Mark Zuckerberg became aware of it all, it was just part of the landscape. Much like older generations grew up with the Interstate Highway System and took for granted that they could ride freely on it, Millennial hackers grew up in a period of technological, not to mention political, stability.

The Dangers Of Disruption

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with a bold idea. “We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact,” he wrote. That vision was central to how he built the company and its products. He believed that enabling broader and more efficient communication would foster a deeper and more complete understanding.

Yet the world looks much different when your vantage point is a technology company in Menlo Park, California then it does from, say, a dacha outside Moscow. If you are an aging authoritarian who is somewhat frustrated by your place in the world rather than a young, hubristic entrepreneur, you may take a dimmer view on things.

For many, if not most, people on earth, the world is often a dark and dangerous place and the best defense is often to go on offense. From that vantage point, an open information system is less an opportunity to promote better understanding and more of a vulnerability you can leverage to exploit your enemy.

In fact, the House of Representatives Committee on Intelligence found that agents of the Russian government used the open nature of Facebook and other social media outlets to spread misinformation and sow discord. That’s the problem with moving fast and breaking things. If you’re not careful, you inevitably end up breaking something important.

This principle will become even more important in the years ahead as the potential for serious disruption increases markedly.

The Four Disruptive Shifts Of The Next Decade

While the era that shaped millennials like Mark Zuckerberg was mostly stable, the next decade is likely to be one of the most turbulent in history, with massive shifts in demography, resources, technology and migration. Each one of these has the potential to be destabilizing, the confluence of all four courts disaster and demands that we tread carefully.

Consider the demographic shift caused by the Millennials and Gen Z’ers coming of age. The last time we had a similar generational transition was with the Baby Boomers in the 1960s, which saw more than its share of social and political strife. The shift in values that will take place over the next ten years or so is likely to be similar in scale and scope.

Yet that’s just the start. We will also be shifting in resources from fossil fuels to renewables, in technology from bits to atoms and in migration globally from south to north and from rural to urban areas. The last time we had so many important structural changes going on at once it was the 1920s and that, as we should remember, did not turn out well.

It’s probably no accident that today, much like a century ago, we seem to yearn for “a return to normalcy.” The past two decades have been exhausting, with global terrorism, a massive financial meltdown and now a pandemic fraying our nerves and heightening our sense of vulnerability.

Still, I can’t help feeling that the lessons of the recent past can serve us well in creating a better future.

We Need To Rededicate Ourselves Tackling Grand Challenges

In Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he explained that we have two modes of thinking. The first is fast and intuitive. The second is slow and deliberative. His point wasn’t that one was better than the other, but that both have their purpose and we need to learn how to use both effectively. In many ways, the two go hand-in-hand.

One thing that is often overlooked is that to think fast effectively often takes years of preparation. Certain professions, such as surgeons and pilots, train for years to hone their instincts so that they will be able to react quickly and appropriately in an emergency. In many ways, you can’t think fast without first having thought slow.

Innovation is the same way. We were able to develop coronavirus vaccines in record time because of the years of slow, painstaking work by Katalin Karikó and others like her, much like how Mark Zuckerberg was able to “move fast and break things” because of the decades of breakthroughs it took to develop the technology that he “hacked.”

Today, as the digital era is ending, we need to rededicate ourselves to innovating slow. Just as our investment in things like the human genome project has returned hundreds of times what we put into it, our investment in the grand challenges of the future will enable countless new (hopefully more modest) Zuckerbergs to wax poetic about “hacker culture.”

Innovation is never a single event. It is a process of discovery, engineering and transformation and those things never happen in one place or at one time. That’s why we need to innovate fast and slow, build healthy collaborations and set our sights a bit higher.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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We’re Disrupting People Instead of Industries Now

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We're Disrupting People Instead of Industries Now

In 1997, when Clayton Christensen first published The Innovator’s Dilemma and introduced the term “disruptive innovation,” it was a clarion call. Business leaders were put on notice: It is no longer enough to simply get better at what you already do, you need to watch out for a change in the basis of competition that will open the door for a disruptive competitor.

Today, it’s become fashionable for business pundits to say that we live in a VUCA era, one that is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, but the evidence says otherwise. Increasingly researchers are finding that businesses are enjoying a period that is less disruptive, less competitive and less dynamic.

The truth is that we don’t really disrupt businesses anymore, we disrupt people and that’s truly becoming a problem. As businesses are increasingly protected from competition, they are becoming less innovative and less productive. Americans, meanwhile, are earning less and paying more. It’s time we stop doubling down on failed ideas and begin to right the ship.

The Productivity Paradox

In the 1920s two emerging technologies, internal combustion and electricity, finally began to hit their stride and kicked off a 50-year boom in productivity growth. During that time things changed dramatically. We shifted from a world where few Americans had indoor plumbing, an automobile or electrical appliances to one in which the average family had all of these things.

Technology enthusiasts like to compare the digital revolution with that earlier era, but that’s hardly the case. If anybody today was magically transported 50 years back to 1970, they would see much they would recognize. Yet if most modern people had to live in 1920, where even something as simple as cooking a meal required hours of backbreaking labor, they would struggle to survive.

The evidence is far more than anecdotal however. Productivity statistics clearly show that productivity growth started to slow in the early 1970s, just as computer investment began to rise. With the introduction of the Internet, there was a brief bump in productivity between 1996 and 2004, but then it disappeared again. Today, even with the introduction of social media, mobile Internet and artificial intelligence, we appear to be in a second productivity paradox.

Businesses can earn an economic profit in one of two ways. They can unlock new value through innovation or they can seek to reduce competition. In an era of diminished productivity, it shouldn’t be surprising that many firms have chosen the latter. What is truly startling is the ease and extent to which we have let them get away with it.

Rent Seeking And Regulatory Capture

Investment decisions are driven by profit expectations. If, for instance, a firm sees great potential in a new technology, they will invest in research and development. On the other hand, if they see greater potential influencing governments, they will invest in that. So it is worrying that lobbying expenditures have more than doubled since 1998.

The money goes towards two basic purposes. The first, called rent seeking, involves businesses increasing profits by the law to work in their favor, as when car dealerships in New Jersey sued against Tesla’s direct sales model. The second, regulatory capture, seeks to co-opt agencies that are supposed to govern industry.

It seems like they’re getting their money’s worth. Corporate tax rates in the US have steadily decreased and are now among the lowest in the developed world. Occupational licensing, often the result of lobbying by trade associations, has increased fivefold since the 1950s. Antitrust regulation has become virtually nonexistent, while competition has been reduced.

The result is that while corporations earn record profits, we pay more and get less. This is especially clear in some highly visible industries, such as airlines, cable and mobile carriers, but the effect is much more widespread than that. Keep in mind that, in many states, legislators earn less than $20,000 per year. It’s easy to see how a little investment can go a long way.

Decreasing Returns To Labor

With businesses facing less competition and a more favorable regulatory environment, which not only lowers costs but raises barriers to new market entrants, it shouldn’t be surprising that the stock market has hit record highs. Ordinarily that would be something to cheer, but evidence suggests that the gains are coming at the expense of the rest of us.

A report from MicKinsey Global Institute finds that labor’s share of income has been declining rapidly since 2000, especially in the United States. This is, of course, due to a number of factors, such as low productivity, automation, globalization. Decreased labor bargaining power due to increased market power of employers, however, has been shown to play an especially significant role.

At the same time that our wages have been reduced, the prices we pay have increased, especially in education and healthcare. A study from Pew shows that, for most Americans, real wages have hardly budged since 1964. Instead of becoming better off over time, many families are actually doing worse.

The effects of this long-term squeeze have become dire. Increasingly, Americans are dying deaths of despair from things like alcohol abuse, drug overdose, and suicide. Recent research has also shown that the situation has gotten worse during Covid.

We Are Entering A Dangerous Decade

Decades of disruption have left us considerably worse off. Income inequality is at record highs. Anxiety and depression, already at epidemic levels, has worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic. These trends are most acute in the US, but are essentially global in nature and have contributed to the rise in populist authoritarianism around the world.

Things are likely to get worse over the next decade as we undergo profound shifts in technology, resources, migration and demographics. To put that in perspective, a demographic shift alone was enough to make the 60s a tumultuous era. Clearly, our near future is fraught with danger.

Yet history is not destiny. We have the power to shape our path by making better choices. A good first step would be to finally abandon the cult of disruption that’s served us so poorly and begin to once again invest in stability and resilience, by creating better, safer technology, more competitive and stable markets and a happier, more productive workforce.

Perhaps most of all, we need to internalize the obvious principle that systems and ideologies should serve people, not the other way around. If we increase GDP and the stock market hits record highs, but the population is poorer, less healthy and less happy, then what have we won?

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pexels

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At the Heart of Successful Digital Transformations are Humans and Data

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At the Heart of Successful Digital Transformations are Humans and Data

Digital transformation has become an overused buzzword.

When most people speak about digital transformation, they are really speaking about digitization, digitalization, or digital strategy.

They are all very different and none of them are digital transformation.

Let’s look at each of these four terms so that we can be very clear about what we are talking about:

Digitization – Digitization is the process of converting information into a digital (i.e. computer-readable) format (source: Wikipedia)
Digitalization – Digitalization is the adaptation of a system, process, etc. to be operated with the use of computers and the internet (source: Oxford Dictionary)
Digital strategy – In the fields of strategic management, marketing strategy, and business strategy, digital strategy is the process of specifying an organization’s vision, goals, opportunities and related activities in order to maximize the business benefits of digital initiatives to the organization (source: Wikipedia)
Digital transformation – A digital transformation is the journey between a company’s current business operations to a reimagined version from the perspective of how a digital native would build the same business operations leveraging the latest technology and scientific understandings of management science, leadership, decision science, business and process architecture, design, customer experience, etc. (source: bradenkelley.com)

At the heart of successful digital transformation, innovation, disruption, and even customer experience are two things:

Humans
Data

Digital transformation is not about digitizing physical objects, systems, or processes or about building a strategy for operating in the digital space, although all of those things may play a part, but it’s about people, the information they want, and the information you have – and information comes from data.

If you have the right data, connected in the right ways it turns into information, and when you consider the information you possess through the right lenses, you can create the knowledge and insights necessary to understand your customers’ needs and your future business success. But many organizations start building a digital transformation approach without putting a solid human-centered data foundation in place to build success on top of.

Where Insights Come From Braden Kelley

Insights are developed from the connection, distillation and analysis of data, information and knowledge to identify WHY the behaviors occur at all. Building upon my “Where Insights Come From” framework above, let’s look at an example of the distillation of data into insights:

DATA will tell us that we sold 20 black cars, 19 blue cars and 17 white cars in Atlanta.
INFORMATION identifies that we sold more black cars than any other color in Atlanta.
KNOWLEDGE helps us see that we sold 20 of 100 available black cars, 19 of 50 available blue cars, and 17 of 17 available white cars in Atlanta, meaning that Atlanta residents are crazy about white cars and we should be making more of them.
INSIGHTS will tell us that the white cars sold out because people prefer white cars that stay cooler in the hot sun, and so perhaps in addition to building more white cars we should experiment with offering more light colors for sale in Atlanta.

Looking through the insights lens forces us to focus on why things are happening and go beyond what the data, the information, or even our intelligence is telling us to get to the human influence on the situation we are evaluating.

The insight lens forces us to look carefully at the data we are gathering to identify whether it will help us answer the WHY question and identify situations where we need to make modifications in our data strategy to help answer the WHY question or to commission separate research to answer it.

Focusing on insights helps us be more empathetic, human-centric and to break out of the vicious cycle of gathering data just because we can.

But, it is only when we gather the right data and connect it all together that the magic happens. When a customer calls in, you can only anticipate their needs if your data is connected. For example, if your phone system doesn’t know all of the following, you are likely to underwhelm your customer:

Two weeks ago they purchased the latest version of your product
They called customer service last week
Sentiment analysis of the call recording indicates it was a problem call
A replacement product was shipped out
Before yesterday they haven’t called customer service for seven years
They have been a loyal customer for fifteen years
They purchased an extended warranty on their previous product but not this one
They received the shipment of an accessory yesterday

Customers don’t want to start from the beginning every time they call, but most companies do exactly that because their data lives in silos, it’s not connected, and they’re drowning in technical debt. Customers hope companies know them, and can anticipate their needs, but too often we let them down.

Every time a customer has a great experience – somewhere else – this becomes their new baseline. The companies moving the humans to the center of everything that they do (including their employees) are changing the game for everyone.

But it’s not all about delivering better customer service & support. When you create a human-centric data model free from silos, it empowers you to progress from creating better service to an overall improved customer experience, and beyond towards improved products & services and insight into marketing and innovation opportunities that will keep your company resonant and relevant.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help in creating a human-centric data model that pulls your customers and employees to the center of everything you do, they’ll thank you for it, and your shareholders will too.

Accelerate your change and transformation success

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The Importance of Continuous Learning in a Disruptive World

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Strategies for fostering a culture of learning and adaptability to stay ahead of industry shifts

The Importance of Continuous Learning in a Disruptive World

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s fast-paced and dynamic world, industries are constantly evolving due to disruptive technologies, changing consumer demands, and global trends. To stay ahead of these shifts and succeed in the long run, organizations must foster a culture of continuous learning and adaptability. In this article, we will explore the significance of lifelong learning while presenting two compelling case studies that exemplify successful strategies for fostering a culture of learning and adaptability.

Case Study 1: Google’s 20% Time

Google, renowned for innovation and cutting-edge technology, has become a global leader by embracing a culture of continuous learning. One of the most notable initiatives at Google is the concept of “20% time.” This concept encourages employees to dedicate 20% of their work time to pursue passion projects that align with the company’s objectives but are not necessarily part of their regular responsibilities.

Through the 20% time concept, Google fosters a culture of curiosity, creativity, and adaptability among its employees. Engineers, for example, have used this time to develop groundbreaking projects such as Gmail and Google News. By allowing employees to explore their interests and learn new skills autonomously, Google enables continuous growth and encourages innovative thinking, putting the company at the forefront of technological advancements.

Case Study 2: Airbnb’s Employee Learning and Development Program

As a disruptor in the hospitality industry, Airbnb recognizes the importance of continuous learning and development to navigate industry shifts. To instill a culture of learning, Airbnb has implemented an employee learning and development program that emphasizes up-skilling, cross-functional training, and embracing new technologies.

Through this program, employees are encouraged to develop new skills by pursuing certifications, attending conferences, or participating in online courses. Additionally, the company organizes regular cross-functional training sessions where employees can gain insights into different departments and take part in collaborative problem-solving activities.

Airbnb’s commitment to continuous learning has enabled employees to adapt to changing market demands and emerging technologies. By equipping their workforce with diverse skill sets, Airbnb has been able to pivot quickly, branching into new business areas, such as experiences and luxury rentals, to maintain its competitive edge in the hospitality industry.

Strategies for Fostering a Culture of Learning and Adaptability:

1. Encourage Personal Development Plans: Encourage employees to create personal development plans that align with their career goals and the organization’s objectives. Regularly revisit and update these plans to foster continuous growth.

2. Embrace Cross-Functional Collaboration: Promote cross-functional collaboration to encourage knowledge-sharing and allow employees to learn from colleagues in different roles or departments. This fosters adaptability and a deeper understanding of the company’s overall operations.

3. Emphasize Up-skilling and Re-skilling: Invest in training programs and resources that enable employees to acquire new skills and adapt to emerging technologies. This investment not only benefits the organization but also empowers employees to future-proof their careers.

4. Allocate Time for Learning: Embrace flexible work schedules or initiatives such as Google’s 20% time to allow employees dedicated time for self-directed learning and experimentation. This autonomy fosters a culture of continuous learning and innovation.

Conclusion

The disruptive world we live in demands a culture of continuous learning and adaptability. Through case studies of companies like Google and Airbnb, we have seen how embracing lifelong learning and fostering adaptability are crucial for staying ahead of industry shifts. By implementing strategies such as personal development plans, cross-functional collaboration, and up-skilling initiatives, organizations can create a culture of learning that enables employees to thrive, innovate, and drive success in the face of disruption. Embracing continuous learning is no longer an option; it is an essential strategy for organizations to remain competitive and thrive in the years to come.

Bottom line: Understanding trends is not quite the same thing as understanding the future, but trends are a component of futurology. Trend hunters use a formal approach to achieve their outcomes, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to be their own futurist and trend hunter.

Image credit: Pexels

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Innovative Strategies for Disrupting Traditional Industries

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Innovative Strategies for Disrupting Traditional Industries

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

There’s a buzzing chorus reverberating across industries, from tech realms to manufacturing hubs: “Innovate or perish.” More firms, innovators and thought leaders are challenging traditional business operations to tap into a world of possibilities. The catalyst? Innovative strategies. These tactics have the capacity to disrupt existing industries and birth new paradicms. Today, we’ll examine some of these game-changing strategies with an analytical lens, focusing on two case studies to drive the point home.

1. Systemic Innovation with a Human-Centric Approach

Emphasizing systemic innovation means understanding that an industry’s fundamental frameworks and processes aren’t exclusive compartments but interconnected systems. Today’s innovators are levering this invision and merging it with a focus on enhancing human experiences – customers, communities, and the workforce.

Case Study: Airbnb

Consider Airbnb, which flawlessly implemented this strategy to disrupt the global accommodation industry. Airbnb realized that the essence of travel was not just in accommodation but an enriching, personalized experience. It redefined the customer experience by leveraging underutilized resources—vacant rooms and homes, allowing homeowners to become service providers. The travel industry: disrupted – the user experience: elevated.

2. Harnessing Advanced Technologies for New Value Propositions

Advanced technologies have wired us into a new era of business. They are powerful tools offering novel ways to deliver value. Beyond product improvements, they offer newer models of business, partnerships, and customer engagements.

Case Study: Tesla

The automotive industry is a poster child for such disruption, with Tesla, Inc. at the forefront. Tesla harnessed advanced battery technologies and stepped outside the internal combustion engine’s boundaries. Tesla’s innovation didn’t stop at product; it extended to challenge traditional dealership models by selling directly to the customer, thus fostering a closer customer relationship. Additionally, they leveraged software to provide continuous improvements via over-the-air updates, turning their cars into upgradable software platforms.

3. Embracing Strategic Alliances, Collaborations and Open Innovation

Innovative corporate strategies no longer limit companies to go about their innovative journey alone. Strategic alliances, collaborations or open innovation are reshaping products, services and the nature of competition itself.

Case Study: Microsoft and Linux

In the IT world, an example of profound disruption is Microsoft’s admission into the Linux Foundation. Once fierce competitors, Microsoft realized the power of Linux’s open-source software and adapted an open innovation strategy that embraced collaboration over competition. The unexpected alliance shook the industry and spurred Microsoft’s evolution.

Conclusion

These case studies are simply enlightening tips of the disruptive iceberg. Innovative strategies are not about obsoleting traditional models. Instead, they’re about deconstructing, questioning, and re-imagining traditional systems to create new pockets of value. From a holistic perspective, our mandate as business leaders should not just be to ride the wave of industry disruption, but to seek, facilitate, and manage these waves of transformation.

Adopting innovative strategies may not be optional anymore, but the exciting reality is the capacity for every organization to become a change-maker, a disrupter, and a leader in its own right. You might just be a game-changing strategy away from rewriting the rules of your industry.

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: misterinnovation.com

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Overcoming Resistance to Change in Designing for Disruption

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Effective change management strategies to address resistance and encourage adoption of disruptive ideas

Overcoming Resistance to Change in Designing for Disruption

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s fast-paced business environment, organizations that fail to adapt to change risk falling behind the competition. Designing for disruption requires a forward-thinking approach that challenges the status quo and embraces innovative ideas. However, implementing disruptive strategies can often be met with resistance from employees who are comfortable with the way things have always been done. In this thought leadership article, we will explore effective change management strategies to address resistance and encourage adoption of disruptive ideas, using two case studies to illustrate how organizations can successfully navigate the challenges of change.

Case Study 1: Uber

One of the most disruptive companies in recent years, Uber revolutionized the transportation industry by introducing a technology-driven platform that connects riders with drivers. However, implementing this disruptive idea was not without its challenges. Taxi drivers and traditional transportation companies vehemently opposed Uber’s entry into the market, leading to regulatory battles and public protests.

To overcome resistance, Uber employed effective change management strategies that focused on communication, collaboration, and empathy. The company engaged in open dialogue with stakeholders, including government officials, to address concerns and find common ground. Uber also invested in training programs to educate drivers on the benefits of the platform and provided support to help them adapt to the changing landscape.

By taking a proactive approach to managing resistance, Uber was able to successfully navigate the challenges of change and establish itself as a disruptor in the transportation industry.

Case Study 2: Airbnb

Another example of a disruptive company, Airbnb transformed the hospitality industry by offering homeowners the opportunity to rent out their properties to travelers. Despite its innovative business model, Airbnb faced resistance from traditional hotels and regulatory agencies that viewed the company as a threat to their business.

To address resistance, Airbnb implemented a series of change management strategies that focused on education, transparency, and collaboration. The company launched a public relations campaign to educate the public about the benefits of the sharing economy and worked with regulators to create policies that balanced the needs of both hosts and guests.

By building relationships with stakeholders and demonstrating the value of its platform, Airbnb was able to overcome resistance and establish itself as a disruptor in the hospitality industry.

Conclusion

Designing for disruption requires a proactive approach to managing resistance and encouraging adoption of innovative ideas. By implementing effective change management strategies, companies can address concerns, build trust, and inspire employees to embrace change. Through open communication, collaboration, and empathy, organizations can successfully navigate the challenges of disruption and position themselves as industry leaders. As Uber and Airbnb have demonstrated, overcoming resistance is possible with the right approach and a commitment to driving positive change. By adopting these strategies, organizations can design for disruption and thrive in an ever-changing business landscape.

Bottom line: Futurists are not fortune tellers. They use a formal approach to achieve their outcomes, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to be their own futurist.

Image credit: Pixabay

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