How to build teams that transform

Introduction

Life teaches us that the only constant is change. We make changes all the time, some big and some small. The big changes may be frightening because they mean that life will never be exactly the same. There is of course a significant difference between being able to survive or to thrive, and many organisations are going to find the ability to thrive becomes increasingly difficult. There are three reasons for this:

1.   The degree of change going forward is greater than the degree of change that has occurred in the past.

2.   The type of change is changing. Previously you could change and reset; today there is no reset.

3.   Our research show that traditionally the ability and preparedness to keep changing is often what separates the best from the rest.

Consider this: more than half the companies that made up the FTSE 100 in 1999 have left the index, transforming the makeup of the group of leading UK shares. In terms of the Fortune 100, 74% have disappeared since 1980.

Everyone wants innovation but… 

Almost every CEO of major companies will tell you that innovation is one of their key capabilities. In fact, the figure is 97%. From this you could be forgiven for thinking that every major company has a strong commitment to and support for innovation capabilities, but our research says something different.

Roughly half of business leaders do not believe their company has a strong innovation plan. They do not believe they have enough time to work on new ideas, and they generally lack the capabilities to execute those ideas.

P and F team foundations

Once there was a time in business when you could experience a change and then return to a period of relative stability. Nowadays the changes are occurring continuously, one on top of another. There is no rest and there is no getting ready. In the heat of this apparent chaos, it is hard for people to maintain perspective.

This situation reminds us of a story about a young girl who comes home from school one day and asks her mother, “Why does Daddy work so late every night?” The mother replies, “Well sweetheart, your Daddy doesn’t have the time to finish all his work during the day.” The little girl then says, “Then why don’t they put him in the slower group?” 

Alas, there are no slower groups. Constant change is a way of life in business now and there are three distinct kinds of responses that organisations are making to the need for change today:

1. The first organisation believes change is not necessary
2. The second is not fixated on yesterday’s formula for success
3. The third is focused on the future, committed to creating new ways of competing

With the first group out of the race we’re left with the last two, which brings us to this important question: Which approach is better?

• Improving what is (incremental improvement)?

Or

• Creating what isn’t (transformational development)?

Answer: Both

So, although both the design and execution of P and F teams are critical, as we discussed in previous articles, it is the F team piece that we will focus on here.

Creating the Future

The ability to establish and build F teams is about how to create the future. So, how do we think about that?

Let us begin with the question of time. A lot of the thinking about the future necessarily revolves around the chronology of future events. We can be pretty sure that science one day will cure cancer or, like in an episode of Star Trek, perhaps people will be able to instantaneously travel through space. The deeper question is when will these things happen?

That question is better answered in parts. The first part is the technological part. Generally, as a rule we tend to underestimate how quickly and easily innovations happen. For example, if you had asked a group of senior military officers and scientists in the mid 1930’s if they could imagine a weapon that was capable of destroying entire cities, they would have shaken their heads. Yet in less than ten years they had a weapon that was capable of doing exactly that.

The nuclear bomb, like most key innovations, was created in a frenetic and dizzying rush. Alexander Graham Bell started working on the idea of the telephone in the 1860. By 1876 the device worked. So, from a technological point of view things work quickly. Having said that, technologies have to be socialised. The first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan in 1945. When would you say we figured out how to contain the technology? You might argue we still have not. But it took at least another 40 years before the world could breathe a little more easily. If Bell invented the telephone in the 1870’s, when did the invention gains public acceptance? Probably the 1920’s: almost 50 years. Why? Because it took the world that long to figure out what it was. For a great deal of that time, telephone companies considered it to be just a business instrument.

So, time and time again, we have seen with new technology that the technological part is fast, but the social part takes for ever. Part of what F teams do is the second, harder part.

In the 1990’s Philip Tetlock, a young Canadian psychologist, was at a meeting on American-Soviet relations. The meeting featured some of the world’s leading experts on the Cold War. The purpose of the group was to make predictions about the superpower conflict. What struck Tetlock is how contradictory the predictions of the so-called experts were, which meant logically that a significant number of them had to be wrong. Tetlock decided to test this idea and for the next 30 years he immersed himself in the largest prediction study ever conducted. Tetlock ended up gathering information on an astonishing 82,000 predictions and from it he came to a remarkable conclusion. People would have been better off tossing a coin.

For those of us who are interested in owning the future, this was a sobering fact. The circuitous path that humans take to adapting and responding to innovation and change is hard to predict. But Tetlock wasn’t finished. After sorting through the data, he identified a small group of people who were rather good at making predictions. Who were they?

These people were:

• Open-minded and willing to change course
• Generalists, not specialists
• Able to look at the problem from a number of different perspectives
• Curious, with an endless sense of wonder.

The ability to change

Many people will tell you that culture is the most important thing you need for innovation to happen. We used to share that view. However, the last 25 years of working with hundreds of teams have led us to a deeper understanding. Whether you are a billionaire CEO or someone dreaming of their next big idea, the most important thing you need in the future is the ability to change fast.

This is not as easy as it may sound; there are many things holding us back. 

Our dependency on the past

What have all of the above four things got in common?

Feedback

1. NASA’S Solid Fuel Booster Rockets are 4 feet 8.5 inches wide.
2. If you want to understand NASA’s choice you would have to go back over 2,000 years to the Roman Empire. The Romans travelled over their vast empire using their two-horse war chariots. Those chariots would tear up the roads, creating deep ruts. So that you would not break a wheel on your own chariot you would have an axle width the same as theirs, which was 4 feet and 8.5 inches, which was related to the size of their horses. Soon everyone's wagon would have an axle that was 4 feet and 8.5 inches wide.
3. When the first railways were built, they were created for mining carts pulled by horses. So, they made those railway tracks 4 feet 8.5 inches wide.
4. When the supper fast trains were built capable of doing over 200 miles an hour many of them continued to be built on tracks that were 4 feet 8.5 inches wide.
5. Logically when NASA began making and transporting the Solid Fuel Boosters from Utah to Florida, they took into account that they may need to fit on tracks that were, you have guessed it, 4 feet 8.5 inches wide.
6. The critical point is that we are more dependent on our past decisions than we realise.

Breaking free

Over time, as part of human nature, we find fixed paths to travel along, just like those deeply grooved ruts of the chariots from the days of the Roman Empire. We see this application of “grooved thinking” again and again in the development of human civilisation and eventually we end up in a place that makes no sense. This is a result of what we call the Seven Dependency Grooves:

1. The subtlety of opportunity
2. The brain creates shortcuts
3. It’s easier to do nothing
4. Make decisions that increase future choices
5. We do what we have always done
6. The linear thinking trap
7. Incremental v breakthrough change

We’ll discuss these later in the article.

The importance of creating urgency

How do businesses see their own performance? We have found it plots like this:

Self-perception and performance

About 20% of businesses are in the Troubled category: things are bad and they know it. They declare a crisis, and then operate with a sense of urgency that helps them to create alignment and momentum. 

On the other end of the spectrum there is a very small group of highly disruptive organisations that are permanently “paranoid” about their performance and competitors. Such organisations include operations such as Google, Walmart and NASA. They fear disruption so much that they have ongoing workshops, innovation programmes, and cultural imperatives to support creativity. They perpetually fuel urgency and they are the peak performers.

In the middle group, people believe things are going well. Unfortunately, that is the worst group to be in, because usually it signals complacency and a blindness to the upcoming pace of change. We know that over 50% of them will be disrupted in the next decade.

For individuals, the conclusions are the same. If you are down on your luck and urgently looking for new ideas, you are in a great spot. Most great ideas come from similar times of urgency. If you aren’t feeling urgency, there is probably an opportunity somewhere that you are missing out on. 

Make decisions that increase future choices

We tend to make decisions that get short term results, not realising that certain choices can fix us to the path we are on and reduce our future potential.

A CEO client once said: “You make 10,000 decisions in your career, but just three of four choices account for your entire success.”

The reality is that certain choices have a continuous impact. The subjects that someone choose in school informed the decision about which degree to take, which in turn leads to a career choice. We can spend our lives in a very narrow groove, determined decades earlier.

We do what we have always done

For evolutionary reasons we are prewired to be loyal, consistent and disciplined about our craft. Often these traits serve us well, enabling us to provide for our families and thrive. However, these traits can have a dark side, which is that success makes us complacent, repetitive and protective.

A million years ago, we were hunters, nomads, living an eat or be eaten existence. Then about 10,00 years ago everything changed; most became farmers, planted seeds and stay put. After 10,000 years of farming, we repeat whatever led to last year’s harvest.

Archaeological studies show that ancient hunter-gatherers were better nourished than farmers for most of history. As hunters, we continually learned to adapt to the environment. As farmers, we repeat what we did last year. 

For the first 250 years of the industrial revolution, our mind set was one of farming. Over the last 10 years in particular we have had to learn to become hunters again.

In a P and F team sense, P teams are about farming - incremental improvement - and F teams are about hunting.

In almost any task we start as hunters, but we become farmers once we become proficient. When we start something new, we are curious, insatiable and willing to destroy, because we have nothing to lose. This is the mindset of an F team.

Incremental change v breakthrough.

Breakthrough, by definition, is something that is outside of our comfort zone. The preparedness to move out of your comfort zone into your development zone is one of the key things that differentiates a Peak Performer from a merely good performer. There are four types of breakthrough that are important.

1. Making choices - be careful what you say no to. To achieve this, you have to identify what are the decisions or opportunities that exist outside the comfort zone of yourself, your team your organisation. Solicit outside opinion as to what this means. Discuss whether this idea should become a part of what you do. If it remains outside of what you do, have a partnering fund, where you can decide to partner with others to make the things outside of your comfort zone happen.
2. Recognise how your own expertise can blind you. Beware of falling into the traps of being an expert. You stop asking curious questions and therefore you start to miss what everyone else misses. To avoid this, it is critical to remain humble, continue to ask questions, recognise the blinding power of your own expertise, and take the advice that you would give to others.
3. Deep dive into your curiosities – ask the deeper searching questions to yourself and your clients; as you do this, challenge what is possible. See the answers from different perspectives and pursue your next customer, not only the ones you already have.
4. Identify the diamonds in the rough. To identify the things that you and other miss you need to break rules, push harder, or pull if others are pushing, act sooner, fail faster and never, ever give up.

Final thoughts

Rob McEwen bought a gold mine in Toronto 162 years after the gold rush. After six years of searching, he found no gold. So, he committed a basic error - he gave his most precious data away, his seismic maps. He offered a $500,000 fortune to anyone who could tell him where his lost gold might be. Surprisingly, he received 1,400 submissions. They had applied advanced physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics: in other words, an array of tools that he had never used before. Half of the targets were new and 80% of them hit gold. The gold mine unlocked more than ￡39 billion worth of gold. By looking at the same data with a different perspective, creative people from an array of industries were able to find gold that couldn’t be found before. This tale is a metaphor for how your future can unfold.

Synesi Consulting helps businesses and the people in them to become peak performing. We understand what the very best organisations do, and work with companies like yours to give you the skills, plans and structures to do the same.

www.synesiconsulting.co.uk