Heart of the Art

When business environments change, businesses must change or become irrelevant. There’s plenty of good case examples of those that have done this successfully and those that have not. Looking back, these cases tend to illustrate the good choices made and great actions taken. They rarely highlight the uncertainty of the moment. How that moment also gave rise to some bad choices. How people weren’t clear when to move, or to where. How often in these moments, although judgement played a role, luck was also a decisive factor. How might you lessen a dependence on luck, tipping the odds of success in your favour?

Seeing that the environment is changing is not the hard part. Determining the rate of change and the implications of that change is harder. Do you make a move now or later? Will what looks promising in a new technology or environment be the change that sticks or become simply an early experiment that plays no role in the world to come? How much of the currently profitable resource do you divert to a new and untested situation?

A big mistake in such moments is to contract out the learning that you’ll need to succeed. Advisory firms sharing what others are doing is helpful, but they, and their other clients, are in the same position as you. Gazing into the future, their view, like yours, is obscured. They might valuably cross-fertilise some of what is now being seen, but that will inevitably be incomplete. It may show a potential route forward, but your route needs to begin from where you now are.

Stepping across a threshold into a new environment begins from where you are now. The business is probably performing well. You can see the signs of change but so much is invested in how things are currently done. People, products and processes are in tune with present needs. It feels a safe place. To take a step into the unknown carries new risks. What would give confidence to you and your organisation that, not only can you take that step, but that it is a step in a positive direction?

That confidence is built through a virtuous pattern of enquiry, sense-making and adaptation. Once learned the organisation can repeat this pattern, as often as necessary. It is how you grow the capability for organisational adaptation. Enquiry, sense-making and adaptation flow in a cycle from one to another.

Enquiry looks like teams in your organisation, sponsored at the highest level, actively seeking to determine what is happening in their environment. The good news that in their everyday work, with customers and suppliers as well as each other, you have access to a huge body of data that already exists. And you might also want to enquire specifically into the big questions that, if answered, move you into the new paradigm.

Sense-making, like enquiry, is already happening every day, most often in an informal and unstructured way. The learning doesn’t spread across the organisation when sense-making is add-hoc or within specific and defined areas. If your enquiry teams are mixed, by age, expertise, business function, and if they connect well to each other and the rest of the organisation, the sense-making becomes a collective act. There is a common ‘a-ha’ moment. And like the neural connections in your brain, the organisation begins to re-pattern itself around the new circumstance.

Adaptation means shifting your existing products and processes to match what is now needed, reestablishing equilibrium with your environment. If you have contracted out your enquiry and sense-making, then the adaptations proposed will make no sense to your people. If you have fully involved your organisation in these processes, sponsored at senior level, then the change just seems like a natural evolution of ‘what we do’. It won’t need big ‘change programmes’ with their limited success rates to make it happen.

Designing this virtuous pattern into organisational life is a leadership act. As leaders this is at the heart of your purpose. Learning the art of it is a crucial leadership skill. With it, as the environment changes, stepping across the threshold feels more confident as risks are mitigated by increased awareness and commitment. The pattern of enquiry, sense-making and adaptation allows you and the business to move forward with conscious, confidence and competence into what is to come.