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Develop your ability “to see around corners” in six stages.
As a member of an early-stage investor group in new technologies, I often noticed a reluctance to support truly disruptive innovations and inventions, due to historical evidence that customers are slow to accept breakthrough ideas, even when the value is large. The challenge internally is even greater for leaders at mature companies seeking to stay competitive as market shifts occur.
We all remember the classic examples of missed corporate mindset changes, or mindshifts, including Blockbuster and Kodak. Blockbuster failed to anticipate the digital communication revolution when Netflix offered videos online rather than via DVDs, and Kodak didn’t foresee the switch from film to digital for photography. The objective is to transform your business quickly.
I found some practical guidance of how to lead mindshifts in your own organization in a new book, Mindshift: Transform Leadership, Drive Innovation, and Reshape the Future, by the renowned innovation evangelist Brian Solis. He details six stages of how you can accomplish mindshift changes in your own organization and in the customer market you serve.
I will summarize the stages he recommends here, with my own insights, for your contemplation and implementation:
- Receive: Open your mind to emergent trend signals. Listen carefully, observe, and process all market trend signals to facilitate unleashing your imagination and creativity. Become more open to potential harbingers of disruption via signals you were not receiving before, in whatever form they may arrive. Make this a daily priority.
- Perceive: Analyze signals to understand impact: Assess threats and opportunities to understand their meaning. Organize by themes and evaluate the narrative for important trends. Categorize by potential time frames and potential market impact to separate into fads, microtrends, macrotrends, and megatrends that grow more pervasive over time.
- Weave: Validate and prioritize threats and opportunities. Estimate the true potential of each trend and assess market trajectory including business impact. Create scenarios and stories that describe various possibilities about how the future might unfold. Include less plausible and even unlikely scenarios to stay open-minded and avoid complacency.
- Conceive: Use stories to compel decision-makers. The more impactful trends must be woven into stories that compel stakeholders to move. It’s through the power of your storytelling that you can gain true influence. You have to excite their interest and break through the filters of points of view, including biases, self-interests, and pressures.
- Believe: Assure believability to catalyze change. Your story must be relatable and convincing to move people to care. Only then will they open their hearts and minds to join in your mindshift. The best stories are created by using your team to visualize a range of experiences across different sets of customers and their relevant shopping scenarios.
- Achieve: Lead the plan for proactive transformation. Planning and strategy are the mechanism you must use to take action. This often requires an appeal to early adopters who are the most receptive to new innovations, who then ignite the wider mindshifts you need to break through the resistance and overcome any natural reluctance to change.
As you might imagine, the goal of every mindshift leader is to see breakthrough changes coming even before signals are evident and to turn them into huge new opportunities and competitive advantages. In the trade, this rare capability is called the ability to “see around corners.” It all starts with the strategies outlined above.
While the strategies outlined may not get you all the way there, I’m convinced that these elements will keep you and your organization moving in the right direction. With the pace of change and complexity continuing to increase in this expanding global economy, we all need all the help we can get to survive, thrive, and win.