Last week I read this insightful article (many thanks for sharing, José Miguel Moreiro!) where INSEAD’s Organisational Behaviour Professor Li Huang explained how uncomfortable scenarios stimulate creativity. Human beings, used to our famous comfort zone, we are not likely to feel the need to do things differently unless there is a disruption (generally an external one) forcing us to change.
It is quite clear that with most organisations happens exactly the same. Even if, throughout the last years, they have been talking about transformation, investing on innovation projects & departments and writing the word VUCA a thousand times in dozens of presentations, in real life everyone was absorbed by their corporate politics (whose intensity is directly proportional to the size and turnover of the above mentioned company). Everything related to the concept “transformation/ innovation / change” was often delegated to an external partner, as if it was a chore that should be outsourced instead of planned and executed from the inside. In a scenario where, until then, everything run according to forecasts based on criteria of the 20th century, which was the urge to think and act from the inside in a different way? Issues such as punctual sales downfalls were apparently solved with a patch here and a patch there or maybe by introducing some efficiency actions (which applied reductions on budgets that should not be reduced). So, inertia made companies dive into a sort of somnambulism from which only an unexpected event could wake them up.
External disruption left companies naked. Right now, solutions will not be found going from office to office, creating powerpoints or hiring a report. Buying an advertisement campaign is useless (this is really annoying to see the same storytelling over and over again, regardless of the product the ads try to sell us). Now it’s the time to resort to the very essence and authenticity of an organisation: its people. Now it’s the time our people, regardless of their seniority or department, are not treated as followers but as contributors whose creativity and talents are not wasted in their Instagram, but used to collectively create a better version of our organisation: an organic-sation where each head counts and where not only the heads sitting on strategy have something to say. The big disruption makes organisations look deep inside. Do not stop there. It’s time to act from the inside.
