Matter. Julie Williamson
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a growing interstate footprint. We could not help but laugh during the research when Richard earnestly suggested that growth was tougher in 2015 than it had been in 2010 through 2013. He semi-jokingly suggested that the best years for growth were when companies were being sold below true value and real estate was being auctioned at fire-sale prices. He was optimistic in even the toughest times! It is no wonder he has grown the business his father started into the obvious choice not just for the local tradespeople, but for the disruptor (Amazon) as well.
Optimism underpins everything that follows. If you find it hard to be optimistic about your business, take a minute and think about what worries you. Is it that your current business model won’t survive? Is it a new competitor driving margins down? Perhaps it is the burden of legislation slowing your ability to service your customers. The truth is, these things most likely will continue to happen. The trick to reclaiming your optimism is to realize that disruption is actually normal—people are always finding new ways to solve problems. No single offer or business model will ever stand the true test of time. Change is how an environment continues to unlock new and vibrant forms of value, so you will have to keep moving, keep looking for where you can have the highest possible impact. And to do that, you have to be optimistic about your ability to move with the changes; you have to be willing to understand them while looking outward. It takes curiosity to find the edge of disruption and stay on it.
EXPLORE THE UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Being willing to challenge assumptions and being optimistic are the first two consistent characteristics we have observed in companies that have successfully found their edge of disruption. They all shared a third characteristic that is worth discussing. It became clear as we talked with these companies that you must have an insatiable desire to explore the unanswered questions that face your industry, your company, your team, and your customers, wherever you find them. This is fueled by a desire to know about what’s going on around you, wondering what others are doing and what might be possible. That keeps you watching for the next opportunity, pushing to understand what’s happening broadly and how you can create more value for your clients, and doing the work that matters most by solving complex problems with innovative solutions.
Unanswered questions that are worth exploring are the “what if,” the “where else,” the “how might we” questions. When was the last time you asked a curious question about your business? Do you know the basics of your industry at the moment: the stock price of your own company and those of others in your industry, the health of your suppliers, the technology changes happening for your customers, what’s going on with your competition, how new employees learn the ropes? These are serious questions—we are regularly surprised by how removed people can be from their own business and how their industry operates at a foundational level. When you lose touch with those kinds of basics, it is hard to contextualize larger, more important problems that need solving. Too often these types of questions are left up to a specific function like marketing or research and development, while the rest of us stay focused on the task at hand. This is not okay in companies that matter. Inside those companies, almost everyone is curious about their company, industry, and market—they are continually exploring. It is ingrained into the culture to be “ever forward,” as DPR calls it.
If people in your company aren’t investing in exploring those unanswered questions about how your business gets done, you will entirely miss the edges of disruption that can propel you forward. If you personally aren’t exploring, the people around you likely won’t be, either, so it is up to you to model the way. It is critical, no matter where you are in the company, that you take the time to be curious about your business and your customers, and that you allow others to explore, too.
If the people at GHX had not asked the big question of “What if we did business differently?” they wouldn’t be tracking to take billions of dollars out of healthcare for the foreseeable future. If Richard Reese had not been open to asking how the internet could be useful to his traditional wholesale supply business, he would never have become the obvious choice for Amazon. If Clarence Saunders had not been curious enough to not only explore other ways groceries could be bought, but even go as far as to design a contraption to enable those other ways, shopping would be a very different experience today. And if Homeplus had not asked how it could take the converging disruptions of the internet, shopping behaviors, and cultural norms, it would never have discovered how to create whole new shopping models for the next generation of grocery buyers.
If you have the decision-making authority to make investments, invest in the curious questions, rather than proving what you already know to be true. Anyone can prove that their assumptions are correct. History generally provides plenty of data for them. But in our opinion, paying to have history researched and restated is often a waste of time and money (although we see it happen all the time). Instead, put your resources toward exploring the unknown, the ideas that challenge those very assumptions you may want to prove.
When you are ready to invest to satisfy your curiosity, take a page from Homeplus and put your money where it matters. Homeplus could have commissioned a study on how to drive more people into the grocery store after work and then launched a splashy subway campaign promoting the value of hitting the store on the way home. Instead, it chose to explore something new and different, unlike anything people had seen before, and the value it got out of pushing to a new edge of disruption has been ongoing for years now, far beyond the original investment in the pilot.
Interestingly enough, for Homeplus, despite staggering adoption numbers at first, the subway experiment was not a complete success, at least not initially. It turned out that there were some serious flaws in the initial model, and customers quickly fell off after the first experience with the new shopping approach. Homeplus still had to spend some time learning about what was happening on its edge of disruption, so it could anchor its position as the leader in the online grocery shopping experience. We’ll dive into that in more detail in the next chapter when we unpack the challenges of learning about your edge of disruption. Even Piggly Wiggly continued to tweak and develop the shopping model that rocked the world in 1916 (earning multiple patents along the way). That’s why defining your edge of disruption is step one on the journey; learning about your edge is the next.
Bring It to Life . . .
1. Develop a “disruption chart,” listing or visually plotting the most likely disruptors your industry will face in one year, three years, and five years. Think in terms of macro-trends (social, political, economic, community, and cultural), internal developments (workforce, products, geography, structure, and leadership), and outside developments (competition, customers, regulation, technology, and supply chain).
2. Using your disruption chart, select the top five disruptors and develop three possible scenarios of how your industry will evolve over the coming years.
a. Host a diverse team of creative thinkers to engage in debate over the scenarios you have developed. The goal of the discussion should be to challenge assumptions and produce specific outcomes that the group believes are viable.
b. As you debate, compile a list of the assumptions that are the strongest in pushing you to accept or reject potential scenarios and opportunities that exist within them.
c. Do a quick “alternative assumption” on each of these that is both optimistic and future oriented.
3. Using your new assumptions, refine the scenarios.
4. Based on these new possibilities, and coming from a place of optimism, what is the one edge of disruption that you believe offers the best opportunity to evolve your existing capabilities in a way that creates more value for your team, your organization, your company, and your customers?
5. Take that edge of disruption and identify three unanswered questions you could explore in a more intentional way.
6. Identify the people and process you could engage to explore these unanswered questions.
7. START exploring!