The Not So Obvious or Easy Answer

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Last week, I shared that 74% of executives believe that their organizations will cease to exist in ten years. They believe that strategic transformation is required, but cite the obvious problem of organizational  inertia and the easy scapegoat of people’s resistance to change.

Great.  Now we know the problem.  What’s the solution?

The Obvious: Put the Right People in Leadership Roles

Flipping through the report, the obvious answers (especially from an executive search firm) were front and center:

• Build a top team with relevant experience, competencies, and diverse backgrounds
• Develop the team and don’t be afraid to make changes along the way
• Set a common purpose and clear objectives, then actively manage the team

The Easy: Do Your Job as a Leader

OK, these may not be easy but it’s not that hard, either:

• Relentlessly and clearly communicate the why behind the change
• Change one thing at a time
• Align incentives to desired outcomes and behaviors
• Be a role model
• Understand and manage culture (remember, it’s reflected in the worst behaviors you tolerate)

The Not-Obvious-or-Easy-But-Still-Make-or-Break:  Deputize the Next Generation

Buried amongst the obvious and easy was a rarely discussed, let alone implemented, choice – actively engaging the next generation of leaders.

But this isn’t the usual “invite a bunch of Hi-Pos (high potentials) to preview and upcoming announcement or participate in a focus group to share their opinions” performance most companies engage in.

This is something much different.

Step 1: Align on WHY an “extended leadership team” of Next Gen talent is mission critical

The C-Suite doesn’t see what happens on the front lines. It doesn’t know or understand the details of what’s working and what’s not. Instead, it receives information filtered through dozens of layers, all worried about positioning things just right.

Building a Next Gen extended leadership team puts the day-to-day realities front and center. It brings together capabilities that the C-Suite team may lack and creates the space for people to point out what looks good on paper but will be disastrous in practice.

Instead, leaders must commit to the purpose and value of engaging the next generation, not merely as “sensing mechanisms” (though that’s important, too) but as colleagues with different and equally valuable experiences and insights.

Step 2: Pick WHO is on the team without using the org chart

High-potentials are high potential because they know how to succeed in the current state. But transformation isn’t about replicating the current state. It requires creating a new state.  For that, you need new perspectives:

• Super connecters who have wide, diverse, and trusted relationships across the organization so they can tap into a range of perspectives and connect the dots that most can barely see
• Credible experts who are trusted for their knowledge and experience and are known to be genuinely supportive of the changes being made
• Influencers who can rally the troops at the beginning and keep them motivated throughout

Step 3: Give them a clear mandate (WHAT) but don’t dictate HOW to fulfill it

During times of great change, it’s normal to want to control everything possible, including a team of brilliant, creative, and committed leaders. Don’t involve them in the following steps and be open to being surprised by their approaches and insights:

• At the beginning, involve them in understanding and defining the problem and opportunity.
• Throughout, engage them as advisors and influencers in decision-making (
• During and after implementation, empower them to continue to educate and motivate others and to make adaptations in real-time when needed.

Co-creation is the key to survival

Transforming your organization to survive, even thrive, in the future is hard work. Why not increase your odds of success by inviting the people who will inherit what you create to be part of the transformation?

Image credit: Pixabay

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According to Executives

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

One day, an architect visited the building site of his latest project. There he saw three people all laying bricks. He asked each what they were doing. “I’m laying bricks,” the first responded. “I’m building a wall,” said the second.  “I’m building a cathedral,” exclaimed the third.

The parable of the Three Bricklayers is a favorite amongst motivational speakers, urging their audiences to think beyond today’s tasks and this quarter’s goals to commit to a grandiose vision of eternal success and glory.

But there’s a problem.

The narrative changed

The person who had a vision of building a cathedral? They now believe they’re building ruins.

Is the C-Suite Quietly Quitting?

Recently published research found that three out of four executives believe that “without fundamental transformation* their organization will cease to exist” in ten years. That’s based on data from interviews with twenty-four “current or former CEOs who have led successful transformations” and 1,360 survey responses from C-Suite and next-generation leaders.

And, somehow, the news gets worse.

While 77% of C-suite executives report that they’re committed to their companies’ transformation efforts, but 57% believe their organization is taking the wrong approach to that transformation. But that’s still better than the 68% of Next-Gen executives who disagree with the approach.

So, it should come as no surprise that 71% of executives rate their companies’ transformation efforts as not at all to moderately successful. After all, it’s hard to lead people along a path you don’t agree with to a vision you don’t believe in.

Did they just realize that “change is hard in human systems?”

We all fall into the trap of believing that understanding something results in commitment and change.

But that’s not how humans work.

That’s definitely not how large groups of humans, known as organizations, work.

Companies’ operations are driven only loosely by the purpose, structures, and processes neatly outlined in HR documents. Instead, they are controlled by the power and influence afforded to individuals by virtue of the collective’s culture, beliefs, histories, myths, and informal ways of working.

And when these “opaque dimensions” are challenged, they don’t result in resistance,

They result in inertia.

“Organizational inertia kills transformations”

Organizations are “complex organisms” that evolve to do things better, faster, cheaper over time. They will continue doing so unless changed by an external force (yes, that’s Newton’s first law of motion).

That external force, the drive for transformation, must be strong enough to overcome:

1. Insight Inertia stops organizations from getting started because there is a lack of awareness or acceptance amongst leaders that change is needed.
2. Psychological Inertia emerges when change demands abandoning familiar success strategies. People embrace the idea of transformation but resist personal adaptation, defaulting to comfortable old behaviors.
3. Action Inertia sets in and gains power as the long and hard work of transformation drags on. Over time, people grow tired. Exhausted by continuous change, teams progressively disengage, becoming less responsive and decisive.

But is that possible when 74% of executives are simply biding their time and waiting for failure?

“There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

Did you see the crack in all the doom and gloom above?

• 43% of executives believe their organizations are taking the right approach to transformation.
• 29% believe that their organizations’ transformations have been successful.
• 26% believe their company will still be around in ten years.

The majority may not believe in transformation but only 33% of bricklayers believed they were building a cathedral, and the cathedral still got built.

Next week, we’ll explore how.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Managing Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

When a project is stuck and your team is trying to manage uncertainty, what do you hear most often:

1. “We’re so afraid of making the wrong decision that we don’t make any decisions.”
2. “We don’t have time to explore a bunch of stuff. We need to make decisions and go.”
3. “The problem is so multi-faceted, and everything affects everything else that we don’t know where to start.”

I’ve heard all three this week, each spoken by teams leads who cared deeply about their projects and teams.

Differentiating between risk and uncertainty and accepting that uncertainty would never go away, just change focus helped relieve their overwhelm and self-doubt.

But without a way to resolve the fear, time-pressure, and complexity, the project would stay stuck with little change of progressing to success.

Turn Uncertainty Into an Asset

It’s a truism in the field of innovation that you must fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Falling in love with the problem ensures that you remain focused on creating value and agnostic about the solution.

While this sounds great and logically makes sense, most struggle to do it. As a result, it takes incredible strength and leadership to wrestle with the problem long enough to find a solution.

Uncertainty requires the same strength and leadership because the only way out of it is through it. And, research shows, the process of getting through it, turns it into an asset.

Three Steps to Turn Uncertainty Into an Asset

Research in the music and pharmaceutical industries reveals that teams that embraced uncertainty engaged in three specific practices:

1. Embrace It: Start by acknowledging the uncertainty and that things will change, go wrong, and maybe even fail. Then stay open to surprise and unpredictability, delving into the unknown “by being playful, explorative, and purposefully engaging in ventures with indeterminate outcome.”
2. Fix It: Especially when dealing with Unknowable Uncertainty, which occurs when more info supports several different meanings rather than pointing to one conclusion, teams that succeed make provisional decisions to “fix” an uncertain dimension so they can move forward while also documenting the rationale for the fix, setting a date to revisit it, and criteria for changing it.
3. Ignore It: It’s impossible to embrace every uncertainty at once and unwise to fix too many uncertainties at the same time. As a result, some uncertainties, you just need to ignore. Successful teams adopt “strategic ignorance” “not primarily for purposes of avoiding responsibility [but to] allow postponing decisions until better ideas emerge during the collaborative process.

This practice is iterative, often leading to new knowledge, re-examined fixes, and fresh uncertainties. It sounds overwhelming but the teams that are explicit and intentional about what they’re embracing, fixing, and ignoring are not only more likely to be successful, but they also tend to move faster.

Put It Into Practice

Let’s return to NatureComp, a pharmaceutical company developing natural treatments for heart disease.

Throughout the drug development process, they oscillated between addressing What, Who, How, and Where Uncertainties. They did that by changing whether they embraced, fixed, or ignored each type of uncertainty at a given point:

As you can see, they embraced only one type of uncertainty to ensure focus and rapid progress. To avoid the fear of making mistakes, they fixed uncertainties throughout the process and returned to them as more information came available, either changing or reaffirming the fix. Ignoring uncertainties helped relieve feelings of being overwhelmed because the team had a plan and timeframe for when they would shift from ignoring to embracing or fixing.

Uncertainty is Dynamic – You Need to Be Dynamic, Too

You’ll never eliminate uncertainty. It’s too dynamic to every fully resolve. But by dynamically embracing, fixing, and ignore it in all its dimensions, you can accelerate your path to success.

Image credit: Pexels

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