Get Your Organization to Behave Like a Startup - Part 2

For those of you that found the first part of this series intriguing, Part 2 explains the conditions where AC2T may be the right lever to use.

One of the challenges in established organizations is innovation.  With processes, procedures, and culture revolving around a company’s core products and services, enabling creative thinking is often more evolutionary than it is disruptive.  With the velocity of change and the emergence of new entrants on a continuous basis, companies are often faced with having to be self-disruptive as a matter of survival.  Getting leaders, teams, and employees to ‘think outside the box’ is easier said then done.  In fact, even when encouraged to be creative, employees often resort to familiar methods of problem-solving and critical thinking they are more accustomed to.  The more established the team, the more likely that entrenched thinking will dominate the approach to solving problems and coming up with new products and services.  The following statements are typical in organizations that have become stuck:

A major trap organizations fall into is groupthink.  This is particularly true in organizations with incredibly strong culture.  It’s amazing to discover that it doesn’t take very long for a new employee to embrace a company’s environment and lose their objectivity; culture is an incredibly powerful force that shapes attitudes and behaviors in a surprisingly short period of time.  Suddenly, you find yourself in situations where there is little or no dissenting perspective and you have entire teams absolutely convinced they have the right answer.  Such strength of consensus is often confused with confidence.  Where you have teams (or entire companies) heavily invested in their legacy or heritage products/systems/solutions, the prospect of disruption is a powerful innovation deterrent.  This is precisely why the AC²T model is designed to shield team members from the crowd and culture long enough to surface new ideas and cultivate them enough to determine viability.

In addition, organizations can often become perplexed when faced with a growing string of failures and/or losses.  Having been successful in the past following a prescribed approach, they have difficulty understanding why customers suddenly find their offering less desirable.  One symptom of this attitude is when you find employees blaming the competition for their loss.  For example, you might have heard someone declare they had lost because the competition “bought in” or the customer is “naïve” to believe that another solution will meet their needs.  When failure or loss is met with excuses and blame, this is another signal that innovation stagnation has taken hold.

AC²T therefore is best suited when an organization has one or more of the following warning signs:

·      Seasoned team unwilling to encourage and embrace dissenting opinions, particularly when it comes to how the company goes to market and what product/service mix they offer.

·      A long heritage of success accompanied with established legacy solutions that have been declared “off limits” to innovation or change.

·      Blaming or excuses when faced with loss or failure targeted toward the competition and/or customer.

 Part 3 in this series will outline the principles and key features that make an AC2T effort successful.

Duane Grove is founder of Connect2Action, a strategy execution specialist at the intersection of employee engagement and executive leadership, igniting innovation as a lever to accelerate your growth.  Follow Duane on Twitter @connect2action and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.  Learn more by visiting www.connect2action.com.

The Absence of Conflict

For most of us, conflict is a very uncomfortable topic.  The very word itself often evokes a strong, negative emotional reaction.  When we think of conflict, our mind often races to a past experience where we were locked in a dispute with someone and things went terribly wrong, feelings were hurt, and in some cases damage was done.  For many, conflict is something to be avoided at all cost.  I would contend however that conflict is not understood and the absence of conflict is actually a warning sign that something is going wrong, especially when the stakes are high.

Organizations that aren’t embracing conflict on a regular basis are missing opportunities for growth.  It is in conflict where diverse perspectives are brought to the fore, carefully examined, and progress is set in motion.  Let me offer a more personal perspective to make my point.

My wife and I have worked with married and engaged couples for many years.  The numbers of couples we have supported are more than I could ever recall.  The one thing we have always addressed with them is conflict.  Too many couples believe that the absence of conflict in their relationship is a good indicator of happiness and success yet this couldn’t be further from the truth.  In our experience, conflict is the fuel that challenges a couple to learn from each other, grow closer together, and become more sensitive to each other.  We’ve met couples that bragged about the fact they hadn’t had a major disagreement in years.  However, when we really got them to open up, we always found issues they had both buried for years choosing not to address them for fear of offending their partner.  Instead of being open and honest, these issues simmer under the surface and inevitably explode on the scene with a fury.  In some cases, those very same couples found themselves in divorce court dealing with “irreconcilable differences” because the issue had progressed to the point that made it nearly impossible to deal with.  Had they had the courage and concern to surface their concern initially rather than bury it, it would have been far more likely they could have worked through it. 

Organizations rely upon trusting and open relationships to grow.  The clients I’ve worked with over the years that have valued conflict and were willing to deal with differences of opinions, personality clashes, and the myriad of other issues that are present in any group of people, are far more healthy than those that sweep them under the rug.  When leaders squelch conflict, they simply push it into the shadows where it smolders until something happens and a wildfire erupts.  At that point, all the firefighting technology and techniques in the world aren't likely to dampen the flames; the damage has been done.  If the rumor mill is the most active form of communication in your organization, it is very likely that you have a culture that discourages conflict.  Warning, warning, warning!  When leaders declare either openly or through their behavior that disagreements that have to do with them are “off limits”, they are shutting down dialog and taking communication undercover.  Trust me, it will surface again and probably at the point you can least afford it.

This should not be construed as a call for open warfare.  Dealing with conflict in a positive and constructive way requires skill, patience, and the highest degree of transparency.  Leaders who are willing to be questioned and encourage divergent perspectives are more likely to surface issues sooner where they can be dealt with and worked through.  Yes, the process can create discomfort, but in my experience, people get better at it over time and produce teams that are more productive, trusting, and willing to engage.  It takes practice and consistency.  Leaders who behave more like explorers are far more likely to encourage critical thinking and are open to divergent perspectives and new information.  This is where the leaders are separated from managers.  Managers have a tendency to oversee the process of “turning the crank” of the company engine without questioning while insisting that others do the same.  Leaders on the other hand are open to change and willing to question the status quo.

Conflict therefore should become a value in your organization and fuel for your growth engine.  Getting good at embracing conflict takes practice and there are many reputable firms that can help an organization develop the right skills and culture that turns conflict into a positive force.  I have personally used the Crucial Confrontations work from VitalSmarts and the work of Conversant Communications, both which I would highly recommend.  Simply deciding to shift the perspective on conflict in your organization is just the first step, and if your leaders haven’t been coached and trained in how to support the right environment, then getting some professional help should be considered.

I would encourage you to evaluate the attitudes and role of conflict in your organization and ask yourself how you’re really doing.  Constructive conflict can lead to innovation, growth, and create a work environment that people want to be engaged in and supportive of.  Don’t run from conflict, take a step toward it!

Duane Grove is founder of Connect2Action, a strategy execution specialist at the intersection of employee engagement and executive leadership, igniting innovation as a lever to accelerate your growth.  Follow Duane on Twitter @connect2action and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.  Learn more by visiting www.connect2action.com.

When is Change Really Change?

Fall is upon us and with it comes the change in weather, the leaves turning and falling away, and the gradual decline in temperatures.  Fall is a period of transition and while some are eager for the change (Fall happens to be my favorite season), others dread its signal that Winter will soon be upon us.  Change is an inevitable fact of life.

Just over the last week, I have experienced an extraordinary amount of “change” in my personal and professional life.  With this convergence of some very significant situations that will affect my family and myself immediately and over the rest of our lives, I began to reflect upon when that “change” actually occurred.  It turns out, that several of the situations now present to me have in fact been in motion for months and in one case, for years.  It was only just within the last week that awareness of the realities of these events became known and recognized.  So when does change actually become change?  In other words, were these in fact changes when they first occurred without my awareness of them, or did they become change at the point that I recognized their reality?  Even more importantly, at what point did it really matter?  An even deeper question I’ve pondered is whether or not their reality is fact, perception, or some combination.  It’s like that age-old question:  if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around, does it make a sound?

Change is fundamentally an experience, not an event.  Because change is a constant in every aspect of our universe, it is the experience of that change filtered through our perceptions and attitudes that determines its nature, not the change itself.  Here is a basic fact: different people can reach very different conclusions yet experience the same event.  A situation for one person may not even rise to their awareness while another may view it as catastrophic.  I often use this simple example.  Most of us have witnessed an auto accident or perhaps had the unfortunate experience of being in one.  The attending officer must gather statements from as many people as possible in order to piece together a conclusion on what happened.  Keep in mind that each witness or victim observed the same event, yet the conclusions could be as unique and different as each and every individual present.  How can so many people have witnessed the same thing yet come to a very different set of observables and had a different experience?  It’s all in perception; perception shaped by attitudes, experiences, emotional state, and a myriad of many other factors.  So how does all this relate to change?

Change doesn’t happen to us, it’s in how we choose to perceive, interpret, and respond, that determines if an event becomes a moment of change in our lives or is simply another event.  When you come to understand that the reality of change is a decision that you control, it can create a much broader range of possibilities; you suddenly have options!  I’ve often marveled at people who are seemingly standing in the center of a cyclone yet seem unmoved and calm as if the sky is blue, birds are singing, and the sun is warming their skin.  You wonder how in the world such peace and calm can be found in the midst of so much turmoil.  But what may seem as chaos and gloom to one person is relatively harmless to another. 

Can change then be judged by some measure of magnitude?  Here again, the event is in the eyes of the beholder.  While a majority of people might conclude that a significant change has happened, it doesn’t mean consensus; there might still be others that look upon the event and yawn.  So magnitude is also a relative measure and not a reliable indicator of the significance of an event.

A great reflection to use when you’re facing into a moment of change then is to shift your perspective.  Look at others who may be directly involved and those that are on the periphery.  How are they interpreting the experience and what reaction(s) are they having?  Assume for the moment that their perspective is correct and yours is misguided.  Allow yourself to experience the event as if you were literally in their shoes.  Take the role of the traffic officer collecting witness statements, and then with that additional information, draw your own conclusion.  Taking the time to reflect before acting may just save you time and frustration while allowing you to be more circumspect in judging the situation.

Duane Grove is founder of Connect2Action, a strategy execution specialist at the intersection of employee engagement and executive leadership, igniting innovation as a lever to accelerate your growth.  Follow Duane on Twitter @connect2action and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.  Learn more by visiting www.connect2action.com.

Get Your Organization to Behave Like a Startup - Part 1

In this first of a 4-part series, I will introduce a process that has been successfully used to ignite entrepreneurial behavior inside of large, established organizations.  The Actionable Creativity and Collaboration Team (AC²T) model is a framework that has been the catalyst for a wide range of applications and is something you can apply across industries and with organizations of varying size.  In this first part, I will describe what AC²T is and its benefits.

The Actionable Creativity and Collaboration Team (AC²T) model is a framework that can be used to accelerate development of innovative solutions where organizations become stuck in traditional thinking, can’t break out of old practices, or face difficulty surfacing new ideas within their culture and processes.  AC²T is designed for highly intractable problems requiring a degree of innovation beyond the established norms of a team or where groupthink has brought a team to a standstill.  The model is equipped to foster ‘intrepreneurship’ (entrepreneurship within a large organization) and can be adapted for groups of any size.  The basic concept is to charter a small team to act as a new business start-up to solve a specific problem without the constraints of the parent organization.  In this 4-part series, the AC²T model, implementation steps, and guidelines will be provided so you can charter and implement the process in your own organization.

Benefits of the AC²T Approach

The AC²T framework has consistently resulted in disruptive ideas that have game-changing potential for the company.  By emulating the conditions of a start-up within the organization and isolating them so that team members are unencumbered by traditional thinking, ideation begins to bloom and creativity is dramatically increased.  Once ideas have been generated and one or more potential solutions are briefed to the executive team, the application or adaptation of those ideas can be put into action.

Aside from the direct benefits of the AC²T approach, there are a number of other important advantages that should not be overlooked.

First, AC²T team members are given opportunity to develop new leadership skills during the process.  When the group is chartered, it is given the flexibility to determine how it will function as a team.  A team leader is not pre-determined when selected and the team members may decide to select a leader or to function without one.  Teams are left to journey through the forming-storming-norming-performing cycle and to work out mechanisms for decision-making and team management.  This gives each team member the opportunity to explore and discover the strengths and weaknesses of each other and themselves as well as seek ways to manage through them.

Project management skills are also a key benefit of the AC²T approach.  AC²T team members should be selected from early career professionals.  Therefore, it is unlikely that most if not all members would have had leadership and project management experience prior to the AC²T project.  Further, the tight constraints of time and budget used in an AC²T project forces team members to structure their effort and manage their time and money in a way that will enable them to meet their objectives.  This kind of pressure forces the team to function in creative ways, increases focus on project objectives, and structures their work in a way that is highly efficient.

The requirement to develop and deliver a compelling executive brief at the end of the AC²T project helps to develop and tune communication skills.  The team must create a briefing that is convincing at an executive level taking into account not just technical characteristics, but business and other factors as well.  This helps develop business case development skills and broadens the experience of team members.  From an executive perspective, a well-executed AC²T project enables leaders to test early career employees, identify employees with untapped potential, and select individuals for additional challenges and stretch assignments.

Stay tuned for the next article which will describe the conditions that may benefit from an AC²T approach.

Duane Grove is founder of Connect2Action, a strategy execution specialist at the intersection of employee engagement and executive leadership, igniting innovation as a lever to accelerate your growth.  Follow Duane on Twitter @connect2action and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+.  Learn more by visiting www.connect2action.com.