To Build, You First Have to Break
All organizations are organized to at least preserve existing performance. It’s the same with people. Built first to survive beyond all else.
Don’t get me wrong, ideally we all want to improve, but mission one tends to be: preserve what we’ve done thus far. That’s hugely important, especially for initial scale. But it’s also a problem because it prevents meaningful, dramatic or even transformational change. It limits any breakthrough results.
In order to achieve breakthrough results, you have to actually dismantle part of that structure, the beliefs, the process and/or that environment to create something new and higher-performing in its place.
Easy to say. Very difficult to do.
There’s a Fortune 200 company in the tech hardware space that has done quite well. And true to form, like many large companies (standard in large companies), they’ve created systems and processes that have made them successful and operative at scale; however the consequence of that is preserving purely incremental performance.
I’ve worked with a lot of large companies in my day and almost inevitably they are full of super smart, super committed people. Routinely they are solving very hard problems so what’s left unsolved is incredibly hard and complex.
For example, this tech hardware manufacturer was dealing with things like...
How to shorten time to market? (Time to market was a very big deal for them, it would take them 18 months to launch a new product.)
How to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of the new innovations the R&D department was coming up with.
And how to limit risk around taking 18 months to get a product to market without even knowing if the customer would like it.
Traditional processes and standards, with their command and control frameworks, don’t allow for creativity, quick responses and the agility that every person and company needs these days.
Solutions to these seemingly “unsolvable” problems are often not obvious and may actually feel counter-intuitive, or the problems would have been solved already. In fact, solutions can be so elusive that they’re often written off as impossible to even consider and what’s left is frustration or resignation as the only result. Furthermore, generation of new ideas slows, performance drops, and left unchecked, it can ultimately be the end of a company or career.
There’s a place for “consulting”, “strategy” and “coaching” to revise processes but it will not pay off unless it can be translated into the beliefs team-members have and is melded into the structures and habits going forward. If it was just the right strategy, that’d be easy. What’s needed is something that meaningfully impacts the beliefs people have to give a new, much higher performing future.
What this Fortune 200 company did was they went the other direction. Instead of just trying to fix a “process” they turned inward to impact their business frameworks (specific components of their structure and internal beliefs) in a meaningful way by dismantling some of what was already there. Over ten weeks, they started unpacking their roles, examining how their individual personalities were helping or hurting them, and where they were really adding value and where they were just adding cost.
Doing this kind of work not only lasts beyond the latest strategy, it becomes a force multiplier over time yielding seemingly outsized results. That’s because it’s not aimed at just increasing company knowledge (there’s plenty of that already), it’s aimed at increasing fitness and performance of the organization as a whole.
In doing the work of very intentionally dismantling and rebuilding, the company was able to:
Get new products to market in 5 months instead of 18!
Better balance of new innovations with the risk of getting to market on time.
And found a way for quick market tests to understand the opportunity before risking an entire product lifecycle on a hunch.
These kinds of results don’t have to be uncommon but the fitness or ability to have this kind of impact does not simply come from gaining new knowledge. By working on organizational framework, beliefs and environment, performance can be well above any linear or incremental gains that would otherwise be expected. It doesn’t happen overnight, but a new approach can be constructed — first you sit in that new approach, then crawl, then walk, run, and soon enough fly to results that seemed previously unachievable.
Especially these days, just improving a little bit every year, or worse, merely surviving, leaves companies and individuals less open to the next innovation, the next opportunity, and more vulnerable to leaving internal problems unsolved or being more susceptible to fallout from outside circumstances ending a company or career. How fit was Blockbuster to take on Netflix? How fit was the taxi industry to take on Uber? How fit was your company to take on the necessary changes with COVID?
Join me and special guest John Patterson, CEO of Influence Ecology, for a special webcast around how to build a culture of breakthrough growth. John has been a business partner and long-time friend that understands the challenges of breaking down what’s not working before rebuilding, and maybe more importantly, how to do it. He’s also one of the architects for the huge gains in performance at that Fortune 200 company.
The workshop will be April 21st at 7:30pm MT focused around how and why people and companies get stuck in the status quo and an effective process for how to avoid it. You’ll also get to see one of my favorite things in this work… discovering the value and detriment of your natural behavior. It’s a can’t miss and I look forward to seeing you there!
As you look at your business (or even yourself) after reading this blog, think about what you first need to break before you rebuild. Think about how you can step back from the goals you have to work on the frameworks you’re using to get there. And think about how you are disrupting your current systems or processes for the opportunity to create something new.