Slow, Afraid, and Clinging to the Past

Have you ever seen a timid trapeze artist?

Seth Godin reminds us why you haven’t:

“Of course not. There aren’t any; they either get fired or they get killed.

If you hesitate when leaping from one rope to another, you’re not going to last very long.

And this is at the heart of what makes innovation work in organizations, why industries die, and how painful it is to try to maintain the status quo while also participating in a revolution.

Gather up as much speed as you can, find a path and let go. You can’t get to the next rope if you’re still holding on to this one.”

I’ve worked with and observed quite a few leaders who have spent their careers sitting on the fence. They talked a lot about the need to innovate, to transform for an emerging era, and yet it remained overwhelmingly a whole lot of talk and very little progress.

My intention isn’t to bash them here. Truly. I recognize and respect the pressures they faced, from investors to boards to colleagues to employees to customers. It’s easy to come down hard on these leaders. But it’s also easy to see why so many of us fail to act even if we can see the need for change and extol its virtues.

We often work in ossified organizational cultures that push back against substantive efforts to evolve.

Established compensation structures may tend to reward short-term performance over long-term investment.

The demands of Wall Street may reinforce an obsessive focus on hitting quarterly targets.

And fear of failure, imposter syndrome, and all manner of societal pressures conspire to keep us stuck.

As the pace of change accelerates, as the gap widens between what is demanded and what you are prepared to offer, those who hesitate are indeed lost.

Sunk costs are sunk. Opportunity costs are real.

It’s scary to let go of what worked in the past to leap into an uncertain future.

It is demonstrably hard to know exactly what to do when things are changing so quickly.

But you know what else is hard? Suffering the consequences of our unwillingness to let go.

If what you’re doing isn’t working, then it’s worth asking yourself: why am I working so hard to defend the status quo?

Oh, and don’t even get me started on the US presidential race.

This post is adapted from material in my new book Leaders Leap: Transforming Your Company at the Speed of Disruption , available in hardcover, Kindle, and Audible formats, and appeared on my blog at www.stevenpdennis.com.