Rearview Mirror Driving?

English literary critic and writer Cyril Connolly said, "Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising." We have all heard that the greatest enemy of future success is past success. Most of us undoubtedly look around the world and have come to expect great change. We likely accept the notion of diametric change whereby businesses are completely reinvented - a world where the past is not a harbinger of the future.

I would hypothesize that nothing in the preceding paragraph provoked much disagreement. We know that hailing a ride, the ways we communicate, shop for virtually any product and access information are fundamentally and forever changed. We accept that the world has changed rapidly and that the pace of that change is accelerating. We readily accept that in everyone else's business. That is our mental model.

The rub with mental models is that they run in the background and shape our thinking and behavior whether we intentionally endorse them or not. It is only when we pause and earnestly evaluate our values in action that we expose them.

I will put it to you that while you have readily accepted that everyone else's business is rapidly changing and will soon bear very little resemblance to its former self that your values in action may well reflect that you believe your business to be the exception. Simply, if something is working, it is natural to focus resources on it, to assume it pleases your customers and to double down on it while making sequential improvements. It is working and that is very alluring. I refer to that as driving while looking in the rearview mirror.

Viewing your business through the lens of past success is comforting but it likely does not prepare you for the future. It is however how you pay the bills so its not to be ignored.

As with most things involving mental models, the key is awareness. How much time do you spend preparing for the future? How many experiments are you running? How quickly do you abandon them if they aren't the future? How discontinuous from the past are they? Are some incremental and some indeed innovative? Is your Team deeply committed to this approach?

The last question, "is it more important to incrementally improve your business every day or to prepare it for a discontinuous future?"

The answer to that question is a resounding: Yes!

#CelebrateEverydayMiracles