Adaptability :: The Art of Winning
A social group, nation, team, community or corporation, that can deliberately, methodically, even joyously renew itself has an “adaptive” culture — one that delivers that much sought-after competitive advantage or simply a winning position for itself.
Simply by shortening the cycles of renewal or innovation through experimentation, such a culture will naturally find better alternatives. New ways of working, new places to work, new objectives to work towards. These are sought and found in a perpetual cycle of discovery and adaptation. Each cycle brings a deeper understanding of what is required to replace what is with something better.
Much of what it does will seem obvious to those who work for the organisation. But it will make those improvements faster and more effectively than dying organisations. They hire the same or similar people, from the same countries, with the same qualifications, and pay pretty much the same salaries and yet their results are, over time, startlingly different.
Some large organisations believe that hiring policies will solve their problems — that if they can run effective advertising campaigns and work with well—connected recruitment companies, they will get people in with the right talents, experience and personalities who will then drive the company forward.
But what are your recruits going to achieve when their initial efforts to contribute, to improve the organisation, are dismissed, ignored, or attacked? Others feel that staff retention is a top priority. But keeping the wrong people longer, making them work harder at the wrong priorities, or bribing the right people to endure the wrong culture does little for an organisation‘s strategic position.
We used to get away with treating the world as lots of parts that could be separated and reduced to things we could understand, list, and control. Inthis world, relationships are reduced to hierarchical organisational charts, roles to job descriptions, understanding the past to a set of tidy graphs in the company report, and preparing for the future is transformed… into project plans and dull—but-perfectly-formed mission statements.
This view disguises the messy, interconnected and ambiguous reality of getting things done and making things better. It avoids the truth — that the world is complex, or “woven together”, so that changes to one part of the organisation will lead to consequences in another.
One advantage of accepting complexity is that it can help us to understand how to improve the organisation as a whole by recognizing how one thing can lead to another. More importantly, it should reveal the limits of management ability to control its organisations and future.
Recognizing those limits is a healthy, necessary step in leadership development. It brings humility and a helpful pragmatism. It warns us against wasting time controlling the uncontrollable and allows us to turn instead to figuring out where we can make a difference. We can then focus on producing conditions that are more likely to result in innovation, survival and growth — the killer culture.
These conditions are connected and are based on observations arising from my latest research into hundreds of organisations that perform and innovate more than their peers. Here are three ideas for action that will make a significant difference.
l. DITCH THE DOGMA. RENT DISSENT
Saying it, as Porgy sang, don‘t necessarily make it so. Rule books will not work for all situations, experience is only vaguely remembered history, while orthodoxy can often be nothing more than the codified ignorance of the past. The problem arises when rules and mission statements are accepted as absolutely true or criticism of them becomes absolutely unacceptable — or at least ignorable — because criticism of absolute truth cannot, by definition, be worth any attention.
Galileo was forced to stand trial on suspicion of heresy in 1633, simply because he shared his belief that the earth moved around the sun. He had to recant the theory because the Catholic
Church felt that such an idea was “absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures”, he was imprisoned and publication of his works was forbidden. There was no official change in position until 1992 when Pope john Paul ll officially conceded that the earth was not stationary.
Ken Kutaragi, a Sony engineer, who decided that games consoles were the future, secretly designed a groundbreaking computer audio chip for its competitor’s new product — the Nintendo NES (or Famicom). When executives at Sony found out about this they demanded Kutaragi’s head. But he was rescued by Norio Ohga,
Sony’s chief executive, who viewed the maverick engineer as his protégé. Ohga approved the project retrospectively, allowed the chip to be completed, and supported the development of Sony’s own console.
The first Sony PlayStation sold more than 100 million units. Subsequent versions have sold another 200 million units. But it would not have happened without a CEO who supported challenges to the executive-level orthodoxy that Sony was not in the games market.
Success was the combination of the channeled power of an advocate allied to the unfettered curiosity of an innovator.
Equally damaging is the way that successful organisations become trapped in their own success so that fewer think and more just do whatever worked in the past. The result is that progressively fewer ideas travel from the center of the organisation to be implemented.
It’s better to have an in-built, formally supported distrust of dogmatic truth. Everything needs to be open to challenge.
If there is use for posters in the workplace it is in proclaiming that it is acceptable, desirable, and necessary for people to raise alternatives. Why not hire people as visionary curmudgeons? Or at the very least assign people to speak against whatever is being believed and done, someone to be grumpy and cantankerous, someone to make it all right to engage in debate?
Use outsiders as professional dissenters who can communicate hard-to- stomach opinions from anywhere — leave them independent on retainers long enough to leave them feeling secure against status quo inertia.
3. USE SLACK TO BUILD A BIGGER BRAIN
Unless slack is built into the organisation, even a willingness to ditch dogma may stall simply because there is no capacity or time to think or resources to experiment with. Most organisations have tried to slim down to the point of anorexia, cutting back on what they perceive in the misleading stock-market mirror to be flab, only to discover that those tummy tucks come at a price - including years of rehabilitation - and that a few extra pounds is useful to allow more time between meals.
Large organisations are typically large because they successfully innovated at some point in their history and are still around because they have retained sufficient slack to provide the raw materials for experimentation (or because they have not yet eaten away at their reserves).
Two examples of creative use of slack are Google and Genentech, star of biotech with a market capitalisation of $70 billion (£3.-3.7 billion).
In it’s best years, Google’s killer culture enshrined slack by dividing up every employee’s time into 70 per cent core tasks, 20 per cent related to core pursuits but determined by the individual, and 10 per cent on far-out ideas. The San Francisco initiative for city-wide free WiFi came from 10 per cent time, as did any number of ideas found on the Google labs page — which also demonstrates the importance of a shop window for ideas.
It’s no coincidence that Genentech views its culture as a competitive weapon and has a version of“Google time”. At Genentech, every Friday night there’s one or more “ho-ho’s” (local slang for a beer-drinking session), a tradition that began in the 1970s.
Every achievement is celebrated with a party, a commemorative T-shirt, a celebrity band. It’s all slack and together with 50 per cent of revenue poured back into R&D budgets it provides the raw materials for the collaboration necessary to make breakthroughs easier.
Slack is also about trusting smart people. The only result of attempting to control people is to slow down innovation. Given a collaborative, purposeful, super-lightweight system (think spider’s silk, not tissue-paper), people will self-regulate. If you need a heavier structure, then your culture still isn’t right.
3. LIBERATE THE QUICK, DIRTY, SMALL, DISRUPTIVE AND BEAUTIFUL
Many ideas that could have re-energised organisations, or even generated whole new industries, grow old, unloved and unused. Sometimes they walk out of the door with their originators to build new companies or work with competitors.
The role of the leader, in an adaptive culture, is to liberate ideas and allow them to become something of value to the world and the company. Encourage CEOs to spend more of their time as catalysts encouraging exploration.
Ricardo Semler, chief executive of Sao Paolo-based Semco, transformed the company he inherited from his father from a tradition-bound, loss-making $4 million turnover with 90 employees to a democratic model that makes $220 million, grows by 40 per cent a year, and employs 3,000 people. He refers to himself as the chief enzyme ofiicer, bringing ideas and people together and making it easier for them to react, helping them to form more complete, richer idea molecules.
Originality needs power and invention thrives in the light of corporate attention. The Motorola Razr was discovered as a discarded prototype on a chance visit by a newly appointed chief executive and went on to sell over 100 million units.
The first iPod prototype came from ideas developed by Tony Fadell, an engineer who had failed to find funding for the product until he arrived at Apple. He then worked with a company called PortalPlayer to design its innards and software, and with Jonathan Ive to design the external look and feel.
None of these things were created by Apple, but Steve Jobs’ ambitious obsession with aesthetics liberated an intrinsic desire for beauty and usability among the team. This would not have happened at any other company.
The three ideas that transformed Disney were all generated by existing members of the company in the first three months of Michael Eisner’s tenure as CEO.
He adopted a style that was playful and bold, holding informal staff lunches to liberate creativity. He led by example, proposed off-the- wall ideas, and encouraged his team to give him the ideas that might embarrass them, that went too far.
When told that a concept for standalone Disney retail stores was a small business with low margins, he answered: “Can’t a company our size try something every once in a while just because it feels right? What if it does fail? It’s still not going to cost as much as one expensive movie script.”
These three approaches alone show how a high adaptability culture seeks out new ideas, makes room for them, liberates them, and persists in doing the next, better thing pretty much regardless of hassle. It acts without the negative consequences of excessive fear of failure and instead seeks, without embarrassment, to improve the world and its own place in it.
Max Mckeown is a speaker and author of The Truth About Innovation , The Strategy Book, and Adaptability.
