Convene + Detonate: To Transform Your Organization You Must Do Both

Since coming into this role in June, I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time with our clients and our project teams across many different industries around the globe. In the majority of those conversations, I’ve found that there are two dynamics at play – convening and detonating – that at first appear incongruent but are critical to organizations’ ability to compete in the market. 

To compete, to differentiate, to better respond to customer needs and behaviors, organizations need to be convening with unconventional partners AND at the same time, organizations must detonate their many traditional business orthodoxies that no longer provide value.

Convene: What do I mean by convene? Convene is to summon, to cause to assemble – being proactive, you are the driver, you are the one bringing people together. One of the ways to be a convener is to seek out unconventional partners.

Convening with unconventional partners

?In today’s world, to truly differentiate your organization, you need to convene organizations unlike yourselves, unlike your traditional partners of the past. We all need to be thinking differently about how we do business, who we partner with and how, and who we hire.  

For example, Domino’s Pizza and Rad Power Bike. Every day there seems to be yet another new way to get food delivered. To compete in this disrupted market, Domino’s is experimenting and convening with a number of different partners – Rad Power Bike is one. It is a Seattle-based electric bike start-up that makes electric cargo bikes. According to recent news reports, those franchises using e-bike deliveries found they could make deliveries faster by not sitting in traffic and not having to park, demonstrating just a few of the benefits from convening beyond its traditional ecosystem.

Sometimes organizations that may compete with each other for customers can convene for a bigger goal. Last year, six New Jersey-based health care providers came together to lower costs and improve quality of health care for their more than 50,000 employees and family members. The consortium is using a third-party administrator and hopes that by combining their employee base, they can all benefit from economies of scale.  

Unconventional partners can also lead to inventive problem solving to make a social impact. To support National Recovery Month, the US Department of Health and Human Services teamed up with Google Maps to make it easier for people to find resources to help fight drug addiction. In the map function, people can now more easily find nearby recovery meetings and can be used as a resource for substance abuse counselors. 

A few years ago, we at Deloitte began asking ourselves, how can we be more of a convener? So, we got very intentional about understanding ecosystems and helping our clients explore new ones. We’ve been convening with and investing in accelerators, incubators and engaging more in the start-up community. Our approach to innovation has become known as Catalyst and we have set up hubs in innovation hotspots such as Tel Aviv, Palo Alto and Austin. One of the reasons for this investment is that we found a need for large organizations to better understand start-ups and vice versa. Sometimes we uncover a cultural mismatch or a company’s processes that get in the way of working with start-ups.

And that is what leads me to…detonate.

I have to admit that I don’t read many business books. In fact, I tend to avoid them and pick up a biography instead. However, one of the best books I have read in the past year is, in fact, a business book called Detonate. It was written by two Deloitte leaders, Geoff Tuff and Steve Goldbach. So much of it reflects my own personal experience with clients and in running our business that I want to share some of its key learnings.

At the very core, detonating is about not following conventional wisdom – it is about breaking with convention. It is about stopping the lazy thinking and encouraging bold new thinking. It’s about understanding human behavior – and letting that guide your decisions, not last year’s numbers.

Detonating conventional orthodoxies within our own organization is one of my favorite things to do. A question I love to ask my teams is “why are we doing it that way” and before they answer, I often say if it’s because that’s the way it’s always been done – then come back with another solution. 

For example, we are challenging our traditional way of recruiting to think differently about where we are recruiting/sourcing talent. While we recruit from many great schools, so do other “Big Consulting” firm recruits. We’re rethinking our approach and broadening our mix of schools to help differentiate ourselves and attract new talent with different skills and backgrounds. Taking a beginner’s mindset to think very differently about how we attract new, diverse talent that might be a better fit for our product engineering and data scientist needs.

It’s amazing the excitement and sometimes looks of disbelief I receive when I challenge our teams to really think about why we are doing something and if perhaps it could be done better, quicker, or even not at all?

Detonating conventional business norms that don’t add value can help you and your teams save time. For example, think about the typical internal briefing. Many times, those internal briefings include painstakingly made, time-intensive decks with a shelf-life that maybe lasts to the end of the meeting. Are your teams wasting time pulling logos from various websites or building complicated graphics? Do those logos or graphics really make a difference? Wouldn’t it be better if that person spent time thinking about the content, the idea or the questions to be answered in that meeting instead of copying and pasting logos?

There are hundreds if not thousands of other examples like that across so many businesses and organizations.

It somehow becomes expected even though it doesn’t bring any value and instead takes up precious time. Stuff like that become rote best practices, conventional way of doing things. Ask yourself – does this add value?

So much of the time, it is traditional business practices, our own self-inflicted policies/processes/procedures that leads to: that idea won’t work because of a long-standing “proven” approach or we don’t work that way. In Detonate, the authors describe four main principles that I believe are critical to leading organizations today:

1)     Focus on human behavior

2)     Have a beginner’s mindset

3)     Embrace impermanence

4)     Build minimally viable moves

None of this is easy but it is very possible. And quite frankly, it can be more fun. To me, it is more fun to come to work when you get to shake things up, come in with new ideas, have a beginner’s mindset into what is or could be possible. Embracing the impermanence and change. Convene, detonate, and have fun.