Title : Disruptive Ideas
Author : Leandro Herrero
The Big Idea
In a time when organizations simultaneously run multiple corporate initiatives and large change programs, Disruptive Ideas tells us that – contrary to the collective mindset that says that big problems need big solutions – all you need is a small set of powerful rules to create big impact.
In his previous book, Viral Change, Leandro Herrero described how a small set of behaviors, spread by a small number of people, can create sustainable change. In this follow-up book, the author suggests a menu of 10 'structures', 10 'processes' and 10 'behaviors' that have the power to transform an organization.
These 30 disruptive ideas can be implemented at any time and at almost no cost; and what's more... you don't even need them all. But their compound effect – the 10+10+10 maths – will be more powerful than vast corporate programs with dozens of objectives and efficiency targets.
Why You Need This Book
This book will appeal to people at different levels of management or leadership – those who want to reshape their culture by enhancing working practices and in general aiming at greater organizational effectiveness. Its practical nature will appeal to all who want to implement key ideas that have the power to transform any organization, without having to embark upon a massive change management program.
Structures
TEAM 365: THE TEAM THAT (ALMOST) DOESN’T MEET. In ‘team 365’ mode, the meeting is an occasional event, something that happens when needed. It’s not the center of activity for the team. Instead, the emphasis is on the team as a continuous collaboration structure. The meeting is merely a device for occasional needs. Literally, Team 365 is always meeting, so it doesn’t really need to meet. Well, almost.
In team 365, the project leader is also a ‘project leader 365’, not just the information traffic warden pre, during and post-meeting. Project leaders facilitate continuous discussion and the working together of members, whether in duos, trios or bigger groups.
DOUBLE HATS (ONE BOSS IS NOT ENOUGH). How can you implement double hats? Assign competing or parallel responsibilities. This is not a simple division of the cake or a justification for doing two jobs for the price of one. At senior level, make double hats a requirement. Watching a key competitor and having broader managerial responsibilities at the same time works very well for them!
SHADOW JOBS. Through shadowing, knowledge gets spread and extra expertise is created. It may be a bit counterintuitive when you implement it for the first time, particularly if you pay too much attention to the ‘Focus Police’, who will be horrified. But it will pay off. Like any other of these 10+10+10 disruptive ideas, this one has the potential to transform the organization into a true knowledge sharing one, where the risk of losing corporate I.Q is minimized.
EVERYTHING A PROJECT. ‘Everything is a project’ is a powerful philosophy. It injects discipline into what we do. If you work in an organization that has ‘projects’ and ‘other things’ (not called projects), you may be at risk of having two separate worlds with different standards. When we say Joe works on a project or is a member of project X, we usually mean that he is part of a group that has objectives, timelines, milestones and resources.
MANAGEMENT BY INVITATION. Most management teams are formed by what the organization chart dictates; by an ‘accidental’ reporting line. There may be alternative arrangements, but the principle is one of ‘by invitation only’. A principle that forces you to stop taking for granted the fact that membership will happen automatically or that grade or rank are a form of entitlement. It may be counterintuitive at first, but it is very effective. Much of the counterintuitive aspect comes from the fact that we tend to have pre-conceived ideas about how the organization should work.
FIXED-TERM TEAMS. To fix a term for teams and their membership sounds like yet another ‘obvious’ thing to do, but the reality is that in many cases teams seem to have a life of their own and tend to drag on well beyond their ‘sell-by date’. It should be a simple discipline to design a beginning and an end for teams, with their goals, objectives and milestones mapped out in between.
NET-WORK, NOT MORE TEAMWORK. Teams are predictable structures. They are very good for operational delivery, but not so good for strategy or innovation. A certain degree of ‘groupthink’ is always present. Putting the net-work before the teamwork ensures the continuous flow of new ideas. If the old saying “If you have two people who think the same, fire one of them!” were to be applied to teams, the world population of teams would shrink by 50%.
SUPPORT FUNCTIONS ARE BUSINESSES (‘MARKET TESTED’). Support functions such as HR, Finance or IT should survive the market test. Could they become self-contained businesses with their own portfolio of clients? If the answer is no, chances are you could outsource all of them. If the answer is yes, don’t let them go.
MEMBERSHIP BIDS. Inviting bids from your own internal market for the membership of a project or team will create a culture where these membership decisions are assessed on their own merits and not in a ‘management by default’ mode. The consequences are significant.
HOME EFFECTS. Projects of any kind need a home, a place where they belong. This may sound trivial and just like another ‘obvious thing’. However, in the organization there are often many things that seem to be homeless. They don’t really belong anywhere. People in organizations tend to determine their own loyalties. There are people happy to belong to a global enterprise and its global objectives, but more frequently you will find that people are happier to belong to a particular project or to the endeavors of a particular country.
Processes
INTERNAL CLOCKS. Organizational business life is rhythmical and cyclical with clocks set externally to mark things such as ‘quarters’ and ‘year end’. This tends to orchestrate internal cycles, but also creates straightjackets. You should create your own internal clocks, your own internal game.
DECISIONS PUSHED DOWN (AND IN REAL TIME). When a decision is made by a management team in a satisfactory way, it can create a good feeling of completion and achievement. But if that decision could have been made at a lower level in the organization, then completion and feeling good about it don’t equal effectiveness. Push decisions down to the lowest possible level.
SCAN FOR TALENT, FIND A JOB. Scanning for talent and then bringing it into the company should be part of everybody’s job description, particularly at senior level. And it should be a real objective with consequences for their bonus, not just a nice idea they pay lip service to.
FIX ACCOUNTABILITIES (IF NOTHING ELSE). If you look around your organization, you must be able to map these areas of accountability and responsibility in a way that is clear (everybody can understand it) and transparent (everybody is informed).
FAKE PROJECT, BEAT OUTLOOK. Calendars manage us and not the other way around. Protecting people’s space and time is a project to be taken seriously. Treat your time and other people’s time as the most important project. Apply the same discipline you use for other projects. That includes fixing meetings with yourself.
UNCLUTTERING. Many corporate initiatives compete for airtime in the employee’s hearts and minds. Unnecessary organizational complexity and its associated terminology is a significant feature of modern corporate life. You need simple, ruthless and urgent uncluttering – not reengineering. Clean up and do less.
3-WAY, 365 PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL. Performance appraisal should be an ongoing process, not just an end-of-year affair. It should also be 3-way: supervisor à employee; employee à supervisor and both à ‘the system’. This ongoing circle (top-down, bottom-up) and asking “Do you have what you need?” is a powerful disruptive rule leading to true transformation. It’s not the usual way. But it works miracles.
FACE IT, DON’T EMAIL IT. Reducing email communication in favor of more direct ‘face-to-face’ contact is in itself a powerful way of transforming the corporate environment and of boosting precious social skills. E-mail is as addictive as slot machine gambling, but it has not been recognized as an illness yet.
LESS POWERPOINT, MORE STORIES. Stories travel better across the organization than clinical PowerPoint presentations. They have the power to create organizational glue. Switching to stories and slide-less presentations is a small revolution in itself, but with great positive consequences.
BE IMPERFECT. To accept and embrace imperfection and mistakes as a path to progress means that there will be practical and visible implications:
Create the Hall of Fame of Mistakes where mistakes are publicly displayed. Once you start (and if you are in senior management, I suggest you put your mistakes up first), it will be contagious and people will have no problem sharing them.
Ask for decisions based on imperfect data and the associated risk assessment.
Accept lower probabilities of success.
Spend time on scenario planning and discussion, on exploring and ‘prototyping’ ideas.
Have conversations about risks and their behavioral consequences.
Police, spot and highlight instances where mistakes have been punished.
Behaviors
GO TO SOURCE (AND TURN THE VOLUME DOWN). Invalidated rumors (corporate, project, group, individuals), minor issues and personal or group fears are reinforced by passing them along. There is only a fine line between benign rumors and a toxic atmosphere. Also, half-truths have a tendency to spread faster than the real truth. By constantly decreasing the decibels and going to the primary source of information to clarify issues, you will detox the organization fast and you will create a culture of transparency.
KEEP PROMISES. Keeping promises is a simple behavior that has the power to boost accountability, credibility and trust, all in one. Just imagine for a second that everybody in your organization kept their promises! It’s so simple that it’s easily trivialized. ‘Keeping promises’ as a behavior needs to be reinforced by acknowledging it when it happens and by showing the benefits.
COLLABORATION (‘THE VOLUNTEERS’). Collaboration is the new competitive advantage. The current business environment (be that in a private or public company, or an NGO) can be described with one single word: interdependence. Virtually no job can be done in isolation. Success, any kind of it, depends on somebody else’s success. This is the reality, both at macro social and micro social levels.
REWARD OUTPUTS. In managerial terms, you reward inputs (e.g. effort) because you want outputs (e.g. productivity). In behavioral terms, if you reward inputs, you will get more inputs and not the outputs you were really after. Rewarding effort does not necessarily lead to a better outcome. It only leads to people making more efforts.
BEHAVE LIKE AN INVESTOR. Employees are investors of their own human capital. They are no different from any other kind of investor. Therefore, performance appraisals should first focus on how the (human) capital has grown. By doing this, you can transform the organization. Everything from plain management to HR management would be completely different. Which is as scary as it is exciting.
RESPECT THE PAST, LEAVE IT TO ARCHAELOGISTS. These are 10 approaches for dealing with the past:
Past as pride and pillar. Looking back, you can see the foundations, the raison d’être, the justification for today’s existence.
Past as baggage and shame. Looking back, you recognize the mistakes and the liabilities; the things you wish never happened.
Past as pain. Sometimes the past can be of a haunting nature: it is there all the time to remind you of something, to ask you for understanding/relief/an explanation.
Past as vacuum filler. People who use the past to fill a vacuum are sometimes insufficiently linked to the present.
Past as comfort. A benign form of the above, this is the ‘been there, done that’ approach.
Past as rear-view mirror. ‘Rear-view mirror’ people and organizations constantly look at the past for reference, almost automatically and unconsciously, like when driving.
Past as predictor. What happened before is seen as a good way to predict the future and therefore deal with uncertainty. People who use the past as a predictor of the future live rather linear lives, determined by previous experiences.
Past, what past? This is another extreme, which is more frequent than you think. People and organizations can easily go into denial mode and survive like that for a long time.
Past as perspective. Some people seem to manage to use the past as a healthy perspective for their own present reality. Healthy detachment is one of the best-kept secrets.
Past as a profession. For some reason, some people choose to become historians, palaeontologists, archaeologists or psycho-analysts. They all have a (probably genetic) fascination with the past in common.
ASK THE QUESTION. Asking “What is the question?” - i.e., what are we trying to address; what is the real issue on the table or why are we doing this? - is a behavior that can spread virally very fast. All it takes is a few people to start the practice! The potential to re-direct ideas and avoid big fiascos is enormous.
LOSE CONTROL. The more ‘command-and-control’ you practice, the less control you actually have and the more you’ll have to command. In today’s organizational life, there is little room for the ‘and’ between the words ‘command’ and ‘control’. If anything, it is ‘command and be a slave to it’. Lose control and you will actually gain more control.
CAN IT BE DONE DIFFERENTLY? There is no such thing as an innovative culture. There are only cultures where people do innovative things. These sorts of cultures are created by innovative behavior, such as seeking unpredictable answers and always asking “can this be done differently?”
TALK THE WALK. Talk the walk is highly viral because people will see you doing something and then they will hear about the philosophy or the rationale behind it. Seeing the behavior is the first step to successful imitation. Start with the action, follow up with the words. It doesn’t get more disruptive than that!
Final Words
It would be a terrible idea to allocate one ‘energy point’ to each disruptive idea, because you only need a few to have real transformation. And if you want to get serious transformation faster, do it virally. Start somewhere, choose some champions and make sure they know how to reinforce behaviors and how to spread the chosen ideas to other parts of the organization.
