I’ve written about the paradox of the Big Shift – the forces reshaping our global economy are simultaneously creating exponentially expanding opportunity and mounting performance pressure.
Here’s the challenge. In a world of mounting performance pressure, we have a natural human tendency to shrink our horizons. We focus only on the short-term. We focus only on ourselves. We focus only on external events that threaten us. Our horizons become narrower and narrower – as individuals, as institutions and as a society. While understandable, these tendencies also can generate a vicious cycle – the more we shrink our horizons, the more pressure we experience, which leads us to shrink our horizons even more.
How do we escape this vicious cycle and move from pressure to opportunity? We have to start by expanding our horizons – looking ahead, looking around and looking inside. I’m going to focus here on what this means for our institutions, but a similar imperative exists for us as individuals and as a society.
Look ahead
As institutions face increasing pressure, they begin to move away from long-term strategies and embrace flexibility and agility. The key is to sense and respond to whatever is happening in the moment – that’s a winning strategy.
I’ve become a strong proponent of an alternative approach to strategy that I call zoom out/zoom in, something that I learned by working with some of the most successful tech companies in Silicon Valley. This approach to strategy starts by zooming out 10-20 years and challenging leadership to develop a shared view of what their relevant markets or industries might look like then and what the implications would be for the kind of company they will need to be in order to be successful in that market or industry.
The zoom in side seeks to build alignment and commitment within the leadership regarding the 2-3 initiatives they could pursue in the next 6-12 months that would have the greatest impact in accelerating movement towards the longer-term destination. The goal is to ensure that a critical mass of resources are committed to these short-term initiatives.
By looking ahead to identify the really big opportunities that could be targeted given the exponential changes playing out in our global economy, this approach pulls leaders out of the short-termism that drives our institutions and helps them to see beyond the short-term pressures that consumes their attention.
Look around
That leads to a second opportunity to expand our horizons – rather than just focusing on ourselves, we need to focus on others around us and explore the potential to come together to achieve things that we could never accomplish on our own.
This requires understanding the unmet needs and motivations of others. In the zoom out effort that I mentioned before, institutions too often stay focused on their own needs and capabilities rather than starting with the unmet needs of the customers and other stakeholders they are serving. The really big opportunities out in the future start with unmet needs of others. Look around while looking ahead.
Then, as we start to focus on addressing those unmet needs, we need to look around to see who could help us have even greater impact more quickly in addressing those unmet needs. In the exponential world we are entering, leverage is a key driver of success – learning how to achieve greater impact with fewer resources. We need to put ourselves in their place and understand what would motivate them to join forces with us.
And, don’t just focus on economic motivation of others. It was Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, who challenged me one day when I was talking about risk and rewards as motivators and said that the real need was to focus on fear and hope. Emotions (or heartset) ultimately are much more powerful motivators.
And, as we look around, let’s avoid a transactional view of others and instead focus on how we can build long-term, trust-based relationships. These trust-based relationships will be key to unlocking the potential to learn faster together by addressing significant performance challenges that require collaborative effort to solve. If we can unlock that scalable learning potential, we can drive even greater motivation to collaborate over an extended period of time.
If done right, looking around can unleash a powerful third form of growth. Most institutions today think of growth in terms of two options – make or buy – either grow organically or do a major acquisition. As I’ve written elsewhere, there’s a third path to growth that’s not yet on the agenda, but needs to be – leveraged growth. How can we connect with and mobilize a growing number of third parties to add value to our customers and stakeholders while capturing some of that value for ourselves?
By looking around, we can also pursue shaping strategies that restructure entire markets or industries, rather than remaining content with simply anticipating and adapting to whatever changes are coming.
Look inside
This is the most challenging approach to expanding horizons. In times of mounting performance pressure, we understandably begin to be driven by fear. Since fear is generally viewed as a sign of weakness, we tend to want to avoid acknowledging the fear. We hide from our emotions, and focus on the avalanche of short-term events and the flood of external data that can distract us from what is going on within us.
But, if we don’t understand the emotions that are shaping our thoughts and actions, we will have little hope of achieving the kind of impact that will be needed to thrive in an exponentially changing world. We need to look within and explore the emotions that are driving us. We need to feel the fear.
Rather than living in denial, we need to accept and understand those emotions. Then we need to find ways to evolve those emotions so that we can move from fear to hope and excitement. The real goal here is find the passion of the explorer that I believe resides within all of us and is waiting to be discovered and cultivated.
Let me be clear. I don’t believe we’ll ever eliminate fear as an emotion within us. Again, it is a natural and understandable emotion in a world of mounting performance pressure. Instead, we need to cultivate other emotions that will help us to move forward in spite of that fear. Those who have the passion of the explorer definitely feel fear – they are attempting things that have never been done before where there is a high risk of failure. But they are driven by the excitement of achieving greater impact and that helps them to move forward despite the fear that lurks within.
In this context, we need to understand how expanding horizons on other dimensions can also help us to address the fear that may be holding us back. By looking ahead, we can begin to see inspiring opportunities that we might never have imagined possible. Those opportunities can help to draw out hope and excitement.
By looking around, we can begin to see others who are similarly motivated to address those opportunities. We’re not alone. We can draw support and energy from others, especially if we focus on building deep, trust-based relationships where we can feel comfortable sharing our emotions and be more willing to rely on others as we embark on this journey together.
Bottom line
We need to find ways to overcome mounting performance pressure and harness the exponentially expanding opportunities created by the Big Shift. The only way to do that is by expanding our horizons. We need to look ahead, look around and look within. And we can’t just do one of those. We need to do all three together.
And we can’t just look. We need to act on all three dimensions, because the most powerful way to learn is through action.
And we shouldn’t just do this at the level of our institutions. We need to do this as individuals and as a society. The biggest rewards will come when we expand our horizons on all three levels – individuals, institutions and society.
And the rewards will be monumental. We have an opportunity to achieve far more of our potential as we begin to see how, by coming together, we can address opportunities that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago.
Spot on, John!
https://www.brainyquote.com/photos_tr/en/k/khalilgibran/101694/khalilgibran1-2x.jpg
Further, if I may repeat a law:
The harder a problem, the greater the reward, the lesser the competition.
Conversely, the easier a problem, the lesser the reward, the greater the competition.
Yet further:-
Ants have little anxieties over food, shelter or play. Ditto with almost every other species except humans. With mindsets, shouldn’t humans be a thousand-fold ahead, not trailing fractions behind?
Why aren’t above obvious to humans? Answer: #False_Dichotomies — the toot reason why Asia STOPPED producing quantum leap creations since Spice Trade Asia in 1450 CE, when up to then it was responsible for almost ALL of them.
Posted by: Balapillai | November 05, 2019 at 11:12 AM
Spot on, John!
https://www.brainyquote.com/photos_tr/en/k/khalilgibran/101694/khalilgibran1-2x.jpg
Further, if I may repeat a law:
The harder a problem, the greater the reward, the lesser the competition.
Conversely, the easier a problem, the lesser the reward, the greater the competition.
Yet further:-
Ants have little anxieties over food, shelter or play. Ditto with almost every other species except humans. With mindsets, shouldn’t humans be a thousand-fold ahead, not trailing fractions behind?
Why aren’t above obvious to humans? Answer: #False_Dichotomies — the toot reason why Asia STOPPED producing quantum leap creations since Spice Trade Asia in 1450 CE, when up to then it was responsible for almost ALL of them.
Posted by: Balapillai | November 05, 2019 at 11:12 AM