Skill 4: Mobilise coordinated action
Trap: Underinvestment in buy-in & alignment
Once we have empirical evidence for what works, we need to commit to ‘firing cannonballs’ without delay. Having the best strategy in the world is of little value if you’re unable to convince people to act on it. It was a Kodak engineer, Steven Sasson, who first developed digital photography technology in 1975. At the time senior executives dismissed the technology as “interesting but not practical.” Believing consumers would never adopt it and fearing that it would cannibalise their sales of film. Given the first commercial digital camera was not released until 6 years later in 1981 by Sony, Kodak turned down the opportunity to dominate the next big technology. The ability to get people, including those senior to us, to buy into and change their way of working in line with a new strategy is our final skill. What makes this particularly challenging with adaptive change is we’re often asking people to let go of ways of working which have served them very well and which they feel very loyal to. We offer four key tips for developing our capacity to mobile people at pace. We’ll explain each of them in the rest of this section.
Picture Credit : Morio, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, Sony Mavica (1981), a “still video camera”, being the first to record images digitally onto a removable disk.
1. Use examples and facts to make the case for change concrete
Highlight the cost of not changing, then excite people about the future we can create. Engineers at Intel convinced Co-founders Grove and Moore to pivot their focus from memory chips to the emerging market of microprocessors by showing a 5-year forecast of their market share collapsing in the face of competition who could offer higher quality and cheaper alternatives. At the time, Intel was investing more and more money into marketing to slow their rate of decline. Having grabbed attention, they then were able to excite them an alternative strategy. A strategy that would only be possible if Intel acted now while it still had a respected brand name for innovation.
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Adaptive Leadership : Building your capacity to thrive in a disruptive environment
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