Late last year I was able to check off a bucket list item of mine: to do a TED talk. I spoke about the need to shift our worldview from one of striving for stability to one of dealing effectively with continual change, in a talk entitled “Is Stability What We Should Strive For?” You can see the full 18 minutes below, and I’m interested to hear your comments and thoughts.
At the end, I describe some of the characteristics of emerging organizations that are thriving (rather than thrashing) in our global, networked, connected, hyper-fast, technologically driven world. It is an interesting list – and I wonder how your organization stacks up to it, where:
- Organizations are built for change and agility – by design. Where core processes like HR and accounting provide stability, but most every others area is freed to focus outward, experiment, and quickly change.
- Jobs are flexible – depending on what is needed now – and knowing that what is needed now may not (and likely will not be) what is needed 2 years from now. And that’s OK.
- People are seen as investments, and not expenses. Where what matters is not how little headcount you can get by with, but what is in the heads of the people you do have.
- All understand that learning is the job of a lifetime – and doesn’t end when you get your degree.
- We look forward more than backward; creating as well as problem-solving.
- New ideas are expected, encouraged and nurtured, rather than being dead on arrival and greeted with a chorus of “that won’t work here”.
- Innovation can come from anywhere in the organization – not just in certain departments or from select people or relegated to places called “skunk works”.
- There is deep understanding that innovation requires testing and that not all tests succeed. Where failure is expected and seen as a natural part of the process, not a career killer.
- Once an idea is proven, there are processes in place to quickly execute on it – to bring it to market or to implement it. Not years – perhaps months or at best quarters.
- There is a rigorous “letting go” of what is not working – quickly, efficiently and in all areas.
- We abandon this notation that the leaders in our organizations should be omniscient and all powerful and always know the way, but instead that together we can find the way.
- Leadership can arise from anywhere in the organization – and it is expected that leadership is shared. That no one person has a monopoly – and work is done knowing that “we” are better than “me”.
- Work gets done in a network, a messy web of interaction – that is done across the organization and across the globe.
- We abandon rigid hierarchy as too rigid, too slow, and too formal to make decisions quickly, and too distant from people with the best view of the situation.
- Organizations, big and small, realize that their remit is bigger than just short-term profits and a financial bottom line. That they impact people and the planet and that matters just as much as creating stockholder wealth. And that the better people and the planet fare, the more sustainable the organization is in the long term.
