A confession: I don’t brush my teeth before bed.
My wife chastises me every night. Not because my breath is disgusting or she is worried about my dental health (we should note that she has had 10x as many cavities as I have), but because she doesn’t understand how I could skip such an important step in getting “ready for bed.” The routine required for her to get ready to sleep, motionless, for 8 hours, is more complex than the process a professional athlete goes through before their biggest game.
Which begs the question, what exactly is she getting ready for?
In one way or another, we are all getting ready for something. We may not be aware of it, but our actions reflect our anticipated future. Dee Hock, Visa Founder and organizational psychologist, says that we are always anticipating the future to be chaotic, orderly, or to have control over it and that our behaviors follow our view of the future. Let’s take a simple example: an emergency in your home. If you expect chaos you may have an emergency kit in your car and multiple fire extinguishers in your home. If you expect order you may have had an emergency exit discussion or two with your family. If you anticipate control, you don’t do any of those things but believe you’ll be able to get everyone to safety were something to happen.
What is your view of the future? What are you getting ready for?
If you lead an organization, what is your organization getting ready for?
Most believe that our businesses, especially in the US, should be getting ready for unprecedented chaos. Referencing the unprecedented rate of profit for US based Fortune 500s, Richard Dobbs recently wrote,
”It has been a remarkable era, but it’s coming to a close. Although corporate revenues and profits will continue to rise, the overall economic environment is becoming less favorable, and new rivals are putting the Western incumbents on notice. Many of the new players are from emerging markets, but some are surprise intruders from next door, either tech companies or smaller technology-enabled enterprises. Those competitors often play by different rules and bring an agility and an aggressiveness that many larger Western companies struggle to match.”
The environments in which organizations now exist are moving so quickly that, as Dobbs suggests, up and to the right outcomes can longer be assumed. Global competition abounds. Technology moves faster than we can digest. Revolution begins in a tweets’ time. In an age of unpredictability, more than ever, we must be ready.
In this Navalent Quarterly (and over the next three months of posts here on our blog) we will spend time discussing what it means to be ready. We see readiness as a posture of proactivity that informs a practice of reactivity. Both of which require foresight and forethought. Readiness is about both being able to adjust when crisis comes or our external environments throw us a curve ball, and being able to slow down and consider alternative conditions that you and your business have never seen. In the posts that follow we will consider these readiness ideas through the lens of executive leadership, innovation, conflict, and organizational change.
After my wife finishes her 12 Step Sleep Schtick, she crawls into bed and onto her Casper mattress. Perhaps you have heard of the young, bed-in-a-box company. They are just one example of companies (Leesa, Helix, and Tuft & Needle are others) who are threatening to overthrow traditional mattress makers. Traditional mattress manufactures had always assumed that their larger, heavy products were immune from e-commerce. So much so that the number of mattress showrooms doubled in the early 2000’s. But flat pricing, free shipping, and 100-day-return-policies attract shoppers who don’t want to step into a showroom and pay insane mark-ups. And just like that, a once stable industry was thrown into chaos.
Our hope is that in the posts that follow you will discover what it means to be READY as a leader and an organization. And that as you do so you won’t find yourself sleeping through the trends, threats, and changes that could leave you and your profits helpless.