Found at all levels of the workforce but often stifled by managers, gig mindsetters are disruptors who upend business as usual and bridge gaps while achieving surprising outcomes and charting new directions. Six case studies of early adopters illustrate how it is shaping business in diverse fields: science and technology, industrial energy, healthcare, financial services, agricultural commodity trading and legal services.
Too often, when leaders realize they need to reinvent, it is too late. Organizations reluctantly reinvent in times of crisis because of some market turbulence or an upstart competitor is eating into their P&L sheet. When they do this in desperation or as a last resort, they rarely reinvent effectively and they rarely survive. In their book, “Stall Points”, Matthew S. Olson and Derek van Bever revealed that once an organization experiences a major stall in its growth, it has less than a 10% chance of ever enjoying its previous levels of success.
In episode 4, we focus on The Mystics in an episode called “The Age of Heretics Part 4: Pierre Wack and the Origins of Scenario Planning” with Art Kleiner This is part of a longer series based on the book The Age of Heretics with Art Kleiner.
In such cases, the eye “narrows in” on the potential opportunity or threat and we become blinkered. Huberman shares the visual example of a person looking into a forest when the pupil is dilated. You can see in the image below when a stressed (dilated) eye looks into a forest, it only sees the tree in the forest, everything else blurs into the background.
I once worked in a large bureaucratic organisation. I was struck by many aspects of the toxic culture, but one aspect of the experience remains with me to this day. Many people in the organisation appeared visibly much older than the age they actually were. It didn’t take long to figure out why and it had nothing to do with genetics or environmental pollution, but everything to do with caged lifeforce. It led to an effect I call the “Reverse Dorian Gray” effect. Before I explain what this is, a very quick recap of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray may help (skip if you know it already).
We welcome friend of the Innovation Show and author of yet another fantastic book, Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company, Whitney Johnson.
Just as innovation-focused restaurants have realised it is better to structure reinvention in a different way to repetition, established companies must empower different teams to manage and conduct reinvention efforts within their organisations. Once they have stumbled upon a successful product, then they can transfer it to an execution team to perfect, refine and replicate. These are different modes of being, thinking and measuring.
The Social Animal with Elliot Aronson
I am preparing a workshop for a client designed for a group of newly minted leaders. I want to demonstrate the differences between leaders and managers. However, I also want to highlight that being a leader and manager is also contextual, in certain cases we need to be more “managerial” (or theory X) in our approach while in other scenarios, we need to exercise our leadership skills (theory Y). Beyond these contextual situations, we must be aware that we manage things, but we lead people. Furthermore, when we operate in a world where both the problem and solution are known, management is useful. However, when we live in an unpredictable world, our inner leader must emerge.
it is vital for organizations and individuals to reinvent in permanence, to constantly build capabilities before we need them. When we do need new capabilities, it is often too late.