Disruption Proof

The pandemic marked a point of acceleration for corporate digital transformation. The companies that performed the best were digital or had at least adopted a digital age mindset. Not surprisingly, companies who never had product managers are now forming product management teams.

These organizations are now living in a world where the product is never done and their systems, structures, and processes must reflect that. The product management function is the right group to design, test, and iterate upon those systems.

To succeed, companies must at some level be digital ready:

For a long time economists thought demand existed before supply was created.

On this LinkedIn audio event special Brant Cooper discusses the evolution of Innovation Labs. 

In this episode Brant goes over the common errors associated with innovation labs and the real pivot they need to make in order to survive their 3-5 year lifespan. 

Innovation labs have expertise but it's not invention. They excel at exploration work and exploration is the solution for how companies should deal with uncertainty. 

Therefore this idea of turning the innovation lab into a source that can drive exploration using KASE (Kickstart, Accelerate, Scale, Endure). 

Innovation labs have been hip for the last decade or so yet the story is that they only last 3-5 years. 

Something is up here. 

It's not up to the innovation labs or teams to produce innovation. I know, it sounds like a paradox. What it should really be about is an innovation mindset. 

The difference is the output. Innovation is defined differently by every department in a company. 

Therefore sticking the responsibility of innovation for a whole company when every part of the company wants different outcomes is a tall order.

So with this mindset having an innovation mindset allows the team to be entrepreneurial and find growth opportunities for the business that's outside it's core revenue.  

Corporate HR teams are facing unprecedented uncertainty: hybrid work, the “big quit”, and “silent quit”. To make things worse, an exhausted, burned-out workforce.

Most re-orgs cut into muscle not just fat.

As we head into an uncertain economy in 2023 and businesses plan for the year ahead re-orgs are likely.While re-organizing parts of the business might improve some efficiencies, it’s often disguising leadership problems, rather than real productivity issues. 

The end result is a bias toward making people work harder, not smarter.If you’re looking for a true solution to more efficient workflow then re-orgs should be thought of from the bottom-up, not top-down: empower the bottom thin out the top.

You want the organization to be able to react to changes to its environment, which generally occur at the edge, not the center. Agile teams define work needed. New information is relayed to the top. Leadership alters strategy, communicates plans and allocates resources.

What’s so interesting about KPIs and OKRs is every few years there’s a new framework for metrics, but essentially, they’re always about outcomes. So, what are the desired outcomes? 

We want more customers. 

We want happier customers. 

We want more revenue, more growth, and more market share. 

That's going to keep the bosses happy and their bosses happy. And ultimately, will make investors and Wall Street happy.

The challenge is when we’re down levels from those mega-desired outcomes, we don't feel like we can influence them too much.

The trap that many corporations are falling into is the belief that digital transformation is viewed as mostly a technological thing. They think that they can hire a bunch of software engineers or outsource to development companies and that'll solve their digital transformation issues. That couldn’t be further from the truth as there’s a human side to digital transformation.

Their aspiration to be a Silicon Valley-type tech company that has a mix of entrepreneurism, agility and speed makes them believe that tech is the end all be all solution.

And while technology is disruptive to the business, that is not disruptive innovation. That is actually a purposeful re-imagining of how you structure and manage your work. It's recognizing that the real disruptions are external to the company mostly in the form of pandemics, ransomware attacks, supply shocks, energy grid collapses, the big quit etc.

What COVID should have taught us is that that's the new norm. These disruptions that are going to continue to ripple across our economies and ripple across the business is the new norm. All the companies that are sitting around waiting to return to the new normal will fail. Those companies that continue to attempt top-down transformations or reorganizations will continue to just shift, move around deck chairs on the Titanic, to coin a phrase.

So the question becomes immediately is how do you start exploring in the core?

How do you reduce uncertainty in your business? 

Exploration is the norm. It’s not necessarily because people think of it that way, but because the default nature of a new business is not knowing. There is no blueprint yet for building, marketing, selling and delivering new value for customers. The first step is (or ought to be) understanding the market needs. This requires interviewing potential customers and running experiments all before building any of the product.

In established businesses, leaders and employees assume the blueprint they use to execute on the business is fixed. But as the last few years demonstrate, little is fixed. Pandemic, war, supply chain issues, ransomware attacks, inflation–it’s crazy out there! All these events ripple across the business landscape, disrupting the markets. The blueprint maybe doesn’t work anymore.

How do you fix that?