Disruption, which happens gradually then suddenly, is both a risk and an opportunity. In her important new book about strategic agility, Seeing Around Corners, Rita McGrath explains Agile firms must not only see around corners, but they must also take action.
One of the most striking points is how slowly big disruptions take to happen. Disruption happens agonizingly slowly. It’s like watching a hurricane move slowly through the Caribbean. We know that when it strikes, its impact will be devastating. Yet residents have been hearing about it so long, they can hardly bring themselves to take action to avoid the consequences.
The same thing occurs in business. Corporations like Kodak and Blockbuster, full of very smart well-educated people, watched as the forces of disruption gathered until it was finally too late to do anything to avert disaster. In the case of Kodak, it was even Kodak itself that invented the digital technology that would eventually upend its own core photography business.
There are many steps firms can take to spot coming inflection points. They include opening themselves to “critical communication with people who may disagree or who may have different vantage points,” and “getting out of the building,” not closeting themselves with like-minded people. They should use small, agile, empowered teams for reversible experimental decisions and encourage “little bets that are rich in learning, ideally distributed across the organization.”
But seeing around corners is not enough. The key is firms have to act in the face of impending change. McGrath says, “the real heroes of galvanizing the organization are typically not the top management.” Those with real insights into strategic agility are often the people close to the coal face of the organization … who often have flashes of real insight into what is going on. Senior leadership’s role is often more about providing a space for those insights to be heard, recognizing the ones that are significant, and empowering those with the most knowledge to do something about them.”
The book also examines the role of leaders in ambiguous and uncertain environments and offers examples of how to get beyond the command-and-control mindset. The key, she says, is being “discovery-driven.” This means that as a leader you have to stop pretending you know all the answers. In a highly uncertain and fluid environment, neither you nor anybody else has answers. Arguing about being ‘right’ or having a detailed plan going eighteen months out is just wasting your breath. Instead, articulate and pinpoint the major uncertainties and how you might gain some insight into them.”
With a discovery-driven mindset, value is created in an Agile fashion, with iterative steps all along the development cycle, not just realized at the end. As with other kinds of innovation projects, the assumption that the entire system must be built to realize any value at all is extremely dangerous.”
As Jeff Bezos has said, seeing inflection points coming is typically not the biggest challenge. It’s seeing their implications for the taken-for-granted ways we do business, deciding which vector your organization will pursue, and then bringing the organization along that allows it to navigate through an inflection point and come out stronger on the other end. It’s also thinking through the long-term benefits for the organization, even if the short-term transitions are somewhat painful.