Edge Perspectives with John Hagel

Images Matter - Shaping Our Current Social and Political Discourse

I recently wrote about the growing fear produced by the mounting performance pressure of the Big Shift. As fear grows we have a natural human reaction to hold onto what we have. While very understandable, that reaction can also be very dangerous and lead us to miss the expanding opportunities created by the Big Shift.

The two most prominent images – walls and safety nets - dominating much of our conversation these days are manifestations of our fear and desire to hold onto what we have. I would suggest that we would benefit from shifting to two other images – bridges and launch pads – that can cultivate hope and excitement and motivate us to pursue expanding opportunity.

Walls and safety nets

One side of our political spectrum has become obsessed with walls. These walls – either physical or virtual - are designed to protect us from a range of perceived threats that may vary depending on what part of the world we are in – immigrants, foreign competition and subversive ideas. There’s an understandable desire to create barriers that will insulate us and help us hold onto what we have.

On the other side of the political spectrum, there’s growing discussion about the need for safety nets that will help people who lose their jobs or suffer some other kind of adversity to recover. It’s interesting that the discussion of safety nets often uses the term “bounce back” – the key goal is to help people to return to their previous state. Once again, the goal is help us to hold onto what we have and, if we lose anything, to recover what we’ve lost as quickly as possible.

Here’s the irony – while both sides of the spectrum are becoming increasingly polarized and hostile to the other side, at some fundamental level, they’re both driven by the same fear, and the same desire to hold on to what we already have. Their view of who the enemy is and what the threat might be clearly differs, but they share a feeling of fear and the same protective urge to help people address the threats ahead.

But, here’s the problem with both sides – they hold a very static view of the world in terms of the resources that can be deployed and the opportunities that can be created. It’s all about protecting what we have in the face of growing threats.

Fixed versus growth mindsets

In this context, I’m reminded of the wonderful writing of Carol Dweck in her pathbreaking book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In that book, she made an important distinction between two mindsets that appear to shape most of our behavior – a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. As she describes it, “in a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits.” In contrast, “in a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point.”

While her focus was on the mindset of the individual and their beliefs about themselves, I suspect these beliefs in turn shape broader beliefs about society. If we hold a fixed mindset about ourselves, we’re likely to hold a fixed mindset about society and the resources that are available to it. On the other hand, if we hold a growth mindset, we’re more likely to see the opportunity to create more and more impact and value as we cultivate the resources available to us and find ways to expand them.

But, what shapes these mindsets? There are many factors at work, but this is where there’s an opportunity to refer to my earlier perspectives on mindset and heartset. I suggested there that we don’t pay enough attention to the role of emotions in shaping our beliefs and perceptions.

In this context, I would suggest that fear tends to shift us to a fixed mindset and a focus on protecting the fixed resources and capabilities that we believe we have. This is all understandable and a natural human reaction to perceived threats.

Bridges and launch pads

But, what can we do to overcome the fear and shift our focus from threat to opportunity? Here’s where images matter. Walls and safety nets focus on the threat and the need to protect what we already have. What’s the alternative? I suggested above that perhaps we should shift our attention to bridges and launch pads.

What do these images suggest? Bridges are about connecting areas that were previously separated – they’re about bringing people together. The underlying belief in building bridges is that we’ll benefit from connecting with others that we couldn’t previously reach. They focus on the opportunity created by connecting people.

If you’ve been following our work on scalable learning, you’ll know that I am a strong believer that there are powerful network effects to learning. The more of us who come together with a shared goal of learning, the faster we’ll all learn. Opportunity to develop more of our potential is unlimited but to address that opportunity more fully more of us need to come together. That’s where bridges come in. And, like walls, these bridges can take on both a physical or virtual form – the key is finding ways to connect more people more effectively at scale so that they can achieve more of their potential together.

That brings me to my other image – the launch pad. I find this image much more intriguing than the safety net image because the key is to launch people into new arenas that are very distant and full of potential to learn. Rather than bouncing people back to where they were, the goal with a launch pad is to take them to much higher terrain and to accomplish things that were never accomplished before. The goal is to move forward rather than bounce back. The mindset when confronting adversity should be how to use it as a growth opportunity to accomplish even more, rather than simply going back to where one was. Imagine what we could accomplish if our programs and initiatives to help people in trouble were designed to help them get to even higher ground rather than just returning them to where they were.

Another benefit of the launch pad image is that it doesn’t just wait for people to fall and then catch them. Launch pads could be for everyone, especially the marginalized people in our population who never had the opportunity to begin with. They haven’t fallen – they never had the opportunity to get up in the first place. What would happen if we were committed to create launchpads for everyone?

If we focus on bridges and launch pads, we begin to see the opportunity that can surface if we come together with the goal of helping each other to achieve more of our potential. There still may be fear (after all, bridges have been known to collapse and rockets have exploded on launchpads), but we’re inspired by the opportunity that awaits on the other side and more willing to overcome the fear and take some risk in order to achieve far more for ourselves and for others.

The bottom line

Images matter. We need to look beyond the images to find out why we picked them in the first place and what kinds of emotions they foster. We also need to challenge ourselves to find images that can motivate us to achieve more of our potential. The story of human progress is the quest to achieve more, not just for ourselves but those who matter to us. If we abandon that quest and give in to fear, we’ll accomplish less and less as we isolate ourselves and settle for bouncing back to what we had in the past.

Small moves, smartly made

Small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion – that’s the sub-title of my last book, The Power of Pull. It’s been a key theme of my work for decades, but it’s coming back to bite me.

I find that a lot of people have grabbed on to this message to justify incremental actions with limited funding, while holding out the expectation that they will potentially lead to big results. I’ve long been a skeptic of massive top down programs – whether it’s companies, governments or any other institutions. But let me also say that I am deeply skeptical about incrementalism and lots of small moves.

Many people glide over the phrase “smartly made” in the sub-title, but that’s what enables small moves to set big things in motion, rather than just consuming time and effort with minimum results. Let me try to unpack what that means to me.

Unpacking smartly made
“Smartly made” isn’t easy, it’s really, really hard. It’s all about understanding context and dynamics and being relentlessly focused on how to achieve the most impact with the least investment of time and resources.

I’ve developed at much greater length the increasing importance of context in the world that is evolving around us. Understanding context has always been important but, for reasons that I discuss elsewhere, it’s becoming more and more critical for impact given the forces that are re-shaping our global economy and society.

Understanding context has always been challenging, but it’s becoming more challenging on two fronts. It used to be that we could narrowly define context and focus on a small slice of the world around us – whether it’s a specific industry, geographic market or customer segment. In a world shaped by the Big Shift, everything is becoming more and more connected, so those small slices are being deeply shaped by broader forces.

In more stable times, we were also able to take a snapshot of our context at a given point in time and focus on understanding that snapshot. No longer. Our context is rapidly evolving, shaped by the exponential changes of the Big Shift. If we just focus on the snapshot, we’re at serious risk of being blindsided. We need to “zoom out” and anticipate what the context could look like years, and even decades, down the road.

Many of us are overwhelmed by this and shrink our horizons to just focus on small moves that respond to whatever is going on at the moment. While understandable, that’s not being smart. It’s a formula for failure as we spread ourselves more and more thinly across a lot of “small moves” that never get any critical mass of resource or attention. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, rather than reducing risk, portfolios of small moves can often be the highest risk approach of all.

A key part of “smartly made” is investing the time and effort required to look ahead and understand the dynamics of the broader contexts evolving around us. Of course, we can get consumed by that exercise as well.

So, another part of smartly made, is focusing on the context and dynamics that matter. Again, that’s not easy, but a key approach is to focus on identifying “influence points” – those locations that exist in all complex adaptive systems that have a disproportionate impact on the evolution of the broader system. If one can target and occupy one or more of those influence points, one can achieve far greater impact in broader systems than all the other participants, and do it with far less resources than might otherwise be required to achieve impact

Another dimension of “smartly made” is making explicit choices based on this assessment of influence points and evolving context. Rather than just randomly or opportunistically pursuing small moves, the key is to invest the time and effort required to proactively choose the small moves that have the greatest potential for high impact. Don’t just react. Focus and anticipate, and be relentless in finding the most promising ways to achieve great impact with few resources.

Yet another aspect of “smartly made” is to move as quickly as possible to action so that one can begin to learn from the impact achieved. There’s a strong bias to action and to define early milestones that can help the participants to refine their approach to get even more impact.

Finally, and perhaps most challenging, another dimension of “smartly made” is a commitment to rapidly scale impact. The participants are relentless in challenging each other to get more and more impact – these are not just “experiments”, they’re the launch pad for something really, really big and there is a commitment to set really big things in motion and scale them rapidly. The goal is not just linear impact and improvement, but exponential impact driven by accelerating performance impact.

Those of you who have followed our work will likely recognize a close parallel between these various dimensions of “smartly made” and the business practices that we’ve identified as key to accelerating the performance of front line workgroups. Our belief is that everyone, everywhere should be trying to become more focused on the small moves that have the greatest potential to set big things in motion.

Why is this such a big opportunity?
Here’s the point. In the Big Shift world we’re entering it’s possible to create much more value than would have been imaginable a few decades earlier, and to do it with far less resources and much faster than would have been possible a few decades earlier. That’s the expanding opportunity side of the Big Shift – exponential technology development and other, related forces are driving the growth of some businesses and other kinds of institutions at a rate that would have been unimaginable in our industrial era.

But we need to be smart about it. With so much change happening so quickly, we can also get easily distracted and lost in the events that compete for our daily attention. I love paradox – small moves are both necessary and dangerous. The key is whether they’re smartly made.

And the paradox is that there’s not just expanding opportunity. There’s also mounting performance pressure. If we don’t make small moves smartly, we’re likely to face diminishing returns until we’re finally squeezed out of our comfortable seats. So, this isn’t just an opportunity; it’s an imperative.

Bottom line
Rather than focusing on the small moves, we need to focus on the really big things that can be set in motion. We need to invest the time and effort to look ahead and look around in ways that can help us to see those really big opportunities and only then work back to identify the small moves we can make today and pursue aggressively to set those big things in motion. As we find those small moves, we need to be relentless in pursuing them and scaling them. Commitment is key.

So far, I’ve been talking about small moves, smartly made in an institutional setting. But, guess what? The same principles apply in our personal lives. We have an ability to have far greater impact and to achieve far more of our potential than would have ever been possible in the past. But the same principles apply – it can’t just be with random small moves. They need to be smartly made in the context of a deep understanding of the expanding opportunity that we all can address. And (some of you knew this was coming), we’ll be much more successful in setting these big things in motion if we are truly passionate about the opportunity – motivation is ultimately the key.