Archives for posts with tag: Gary Hamel

It’s Time to Change the Way We Change

January 14, 2013 //
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We’re going through a great new series at my church, Elevation Church in Charlotte, NC, called “The New Rules of Resolution – Changing the Way We Change.” The first rule: It’s not a project, it’s a process. The second rule: It’s not achieving, it’s receiving. To listen to the current message, go here.

It’s a great topic for the new year, and it’s brought to mind a blog series I did last year on “Change.” The message yesterday reminded me of this particular post – I hope you find it helpful.

 

In our generation the rate of change has gone hypercritical.

Change has changed.

Other centuries were convulsed by famine, disease, and war, but never before have so many things been changing so rapidly. We live in a world that seems to be all punctuation and no equilibrium, where the future is less and less and extrapolation of the past. Change is multifaceted, relentless, seditious, and occasionally shocking. In this maelstrom, long-lived political dynasties, venerable institutions, and hundred year old business models are all at risk.

Today the most important question for any organization is this: Are we changing as fast as the world around us? In industry after industry, it’s the insurgents, not the incumbents, who’ve been surfing the waves of change. But they, too, are just as vulnerable to change as their victims. Success has never been more fleeting.

Given all this, the only thing that can be safely predicted is that sometime soon your organization will be challenged to change in ways for which it has no precedent. Your organization will either adapt or falter, rethink its core assumptions or fumble the future – and to be honest, a fumble is the most likely outcome.

Of course, change brings both promise and peril, but the proportion facing any particular organization depends on its capacity to adapt. And therein lies the problem: our organizations were never built to be adaptable.

Especially the church.

Honest leaders will look at the Church, and more importantly their church, and see the words above lived out all too often. Churches are built as organizations of discipline, not resiliency. Efficient ministry comes from routinizing the nonroutine, adapting a management philosophy to the real life of people. As the old saying goes, the 7 words of a dying church are “We’ve always done it that way before.”

Adaptability, on the other hand, requires a willingness to occasionally abandon those routines – but in the church, there are precious few incentives to do so. So especially in ChurchWorld, change tends to come in only two varieties: the trivial and the traumatic. A review of the average church’s history will produce long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

It’s time to change the way we change.

Inspired by Gary Hamel’s What Matters Now as part of my research for a presentation at WFX Atlanta 9/19/12

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Categories BookNotes, Change, Leadership

How to Thrive in Turbulent Times

August 8, 2012 //
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From What Matters Now, by Gary Hamel:

In the first and second centuries, the Christian church was communal, organic, and unstructured – a lot like the Web today. Within the Roman Empire, the Christian church grew from a handful of believers in AD 40 to over 31 million adherents by AD 350, making it the world’s first viral organization. By contrast, today’s mainline churches are institutionally powerful, but spiritually weak.

What’s true for churches is true for other institutions: the more “organized” and tightly “managed” they are, the less adaptable they are. Not surprisingly, the most resilient thing on the planet, the Web, is loosely organized and lightly managed, and so was the first century Christian Church. The lesson here? To thrive in turbulent times, organizations must become more disorganized and unmanaged – less structural, less hierarchical, and less routinized.

As institutions mature, the positive thrust of missions diminishes and the pull of habit strengthens – until one day, the organization can no longer escape the gravitational field of its own legacy.

No pastor would ever tell you that the goal of his or her church is to create a place where members can gather each week to be expertly entertained while congratulating themselves on their moral superiority. And yet this often seems to be the case.

Speaking to the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit a few years ago, Hamel asked the crowd “Is there a difference between ‘doing church’ and ‘doing Jesus’?”

Following a positive response, he then asked, “So where do your loyalties lie? Is it with the mission of redemption and reconciliation, or with the traditional programs and policies of your church? And if it’s the first, how would people know? What would be the evidence? Wouldn’t it be your willingness to sacrifice some of these familiar practices on the altar of a bigger purpose?”

Silence.

I’ve never met a leader who swears allegiance to the status quo, and yet few organizations seem capable of proactive change.

Gary Hamel

It’s impossible to build adaptable organizations without adaptable people – individuals who are humble, honest, and inspired.

Are you adaptable?

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Categories BookNotes, Change

What Are You Delivering?

August 7, 2012 //
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An interesting observation of the church by noted business thinker and strategist Gary Hamel:

It is worth noting that many churches adhere to the same “delivery model” for “spiritual services” and that the standard template is less the product of Biblical injunction than of habit. Unchallenged assumptions include:

  • Church happens in church
  • Preaching is the most effective way of imparting religious wisdom
  • Clergy lead while lay people follow
  • More programs equal more impact
  • The church service follows a typical order: greet, sing, read, pray, preach, bless, dismiss (repeat weekly)
  • Believers, rather than curious skeptics, are the church’s primary constituency
  • Going to church is the primary manifestation of a spiritual life
  • Church is a lecture, not a discussion
  • The primary mission of a church is to serve its members, rather than those outside the church who are searching for a spiritual connection
  • The best way to grow the Christian community is to plant little churches that are replicas of big churches
  • To bring people to faith, churchgoers need to market their beliefs more professionally rather than live them out more convincingly

What could you add to this list of things that mindlessly perpetuate the past in your organization?

If organized religion has become less relevant, it’s not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs; it’s because they’ve held fast to their conventional rituals, roles, and routines.

The problem with organized religion isn’t the “religion” bit, but the “organized” bit. Today’s mainline churches are institutionally powerful but spiritually weak

Inspired by Gary Hamel’s What Matters Now as a part of ongoing research in preparation for a presentation on change at WFX Atlanta 09/19/12

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Categories BookNotes, Change

Do You Feel Like You’ve Been Run Over by Change?

August 6, 2012 //
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In the hyperactive world we live in today, you’re either going forward or going backwards – but you’re never standing still.

Based on that premise, a lot of organizations, churches included, are going backwards. 

Historically, organizational leaders didn’t have to worry about fundamental paradigm shifts. They could safely assume that their basic business model, their way of doing things, would last forever. Over the last few decades, that thought has not only gone by the wayside, it’s been blown to the side of the road by in increased speed of, well, life.

In the case of the church, the paradigm was loyal pew-warmers who showed up each week, sat passively through the same unvarying service, dropped five dollars into the offering plate as it passed, and politely shook the pastor’s hand as they headed off for Sunday lunch.

Repeat next week.

But as we have found out over the last few decades, organizational models aren’t eternal. Increasingly, we have witnessed profound paradigm shifts in the world of business, where rigid adherence to one particular model causes the organization to atrophy when its model no longer works – or at least, works well.

What’s true for the world of physics works in the world of organizations as well – over time, entropy increases. As Gary Hamel writes in What Matters Now:

Visionary leaders pass the baton to steadfast administrators who milk the legacy business but fail to reinvent it. The bureaucrats extrapolate but they don’t rejuvenate. As the years pass, the mainspring of foresight and passion slowly unwinds. The organization gets better but it doesn’t get different, and little by little it surrenders its relevance.

Recognize the Church anywhere in that statement? Better yet, do you recognize your church in that statement?

As Christianity has become institutionalized it has become encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles, and reflexive routines.

Your church won’t regain its relevance until leaders chip off those calcified layers and rediscover its sense of mission.

 

Inspired by Gary Hamel’s What Matters Now as part of my research in preparation for a presentation at WFX Atlanta 09/19/12

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Categories BookNotes, Change, Vision

Change Without Trauma

August 4, 2012 //
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As noted in yesterday’s post, change often comes in only two varieties: the trivial and the traumatic. Frantic, crisis-driven change is a poor substitute for timely transformation. There must be a better way.

We need look no further that our body’s automatic systems for some useful metaphors.

When you jump on a treadmill or pick up some weights, your heart starts to pump more blood, automatically. When you stand in front of a large audience to speak, your adrenal glands ramp us the production of adrenaline, spontaneously. When you walk from shade to bright sunlight, your pupils contract reflexively. Automatically, spontaneously, reflexively – these aren’t the words we use to describe how our organizations change, but they should be. That should be our goal: change without trauma.

In the mind flipping, VUCA world we live in, what matters is not merely an organization’s success at a point in time, but its evolutionary success over time. I recently remarked that being a part of my church’s rapid growth was like a “rocket ride” – and then a friend reminded me that rockets follow a parabolic path, and that the satellites they launch into space ultimately come back to earth in a flaming shower of debris. Ouch!

How do you keep an organization – like your church – in “orbit?” Building a truly adaptable organization is a lot of work. It requires a shift in aspirations, behaviors, and operating systems.

  • An adaptable organization rethinks its strategy without having to walk through the valley of the shadow of death; it reinvents itself before getting mugged by the future.
  • An adaptable organization is one that captures more than its fair share of new opportunities. It’s always redefining itself, always pioneering the new.
  • An adaptable organization is more successful in attracting and retaining talent; it will have team members who are more engaged, more excited to show up every day, and are enthusiastic about their work.
  • An adaptable organization will be more productive in responding to emerging “customer” needs. It will take the lead in redefining customer expectations in positive ways.

Building a church that is as resilient as it is efficient may be the most fundamental organizational challenge facing today’s ChurchWorld leaders.

Adaptability really matters now.

Inspired by Gary Hamel’s What Matters Now as part of my research for a presentation at WFX Atlanta 9/19/12

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Categories BookNotes, Change

What Could Apple’s Passion Do for Your Team?

May 3, 2012 //
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What sort of values would an organization have to venerate if it wanted to duplicate Apple’s successes?

-          Gary Hamel, What Matters Now

For months now I’ve been circling Apple like a moth around a flame, and have now taken the plunge:

As Vision Room Curator, I will be working off of a MacBook Pro.

As if the Auxano learning curve weren’t enough, I am also transitioning from decades of PC use to the world of Apple. I’ll have to get back to you on how it’s going, but for now, a quick drop-in to noted business thinker and strategist Gary Hamel’s thoughts on Apple from his book What Matters Now.

Specifically, his answers to the question above.

Be Passionate – great success is the product of a great passion; it arises from the tireless and inventive pursuit of a noble ideal. To deliver years of exceptional performance, an organization must first dedicate itself to the pursuit of an exceptional ideal.

Lead, Don’t Follow – what gets the teams at Apple up every morning? The chance to break new ground and radically redefine the status quo.

Aim to Surprise – as a company, Apple seems committed to exceeding expectations. Jonathan Ives, Apple’s head of design, stated “When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it becomes sort of magical.” That’s the bar Apple sets for itself.

Be Unreasonable – greatness doesn’t come from compromise, from resigning oneself to the trade-offs others blithely accept. It comes from transcending trade-offs, by turning either/or into both/and. Apple gets this, and frequently challenges itself to do the impossible.

Innovate Incessantly and Pervasively – at Apple, innovation isn’t a strategy or a department; instead, it’s the basic material that goes into everything the company does. Apparently there are a lot of people at Apple who realize that innovation – in products, services, and business models – is the only strategy for creating long-term value.

Sweat the Details – Apple aims to produce products that work intuitively, seamlessly, and reliably – and this can only happen when hundreds of people take the trouble to sweat the details.

Think Like an Engineer, Feel Like an Artist – a company can’t produce beauty if bean counters win every argument. There are lots of people at Apple who work out of both sides of their brain – and understand that their customers do too.

What’s the bottom line? Apple’s unique success is a product of its unique values, which are uniquely innovation-friendly and customer-centric.

What if Apple’s passions were the norm rather than the exception…

…at your church?

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Categories Innovation, Vision

Five Types of Innovators

March 27, 2012 //
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Gary Hamel, writing in his most recent book “What Matters Now,” has an intriguing theory on five types of innovators.

Rockets

Rockets are young companies that have been boosted aloft by wacky new business models. Recent examples include Hulu, which delivers TV shows via the Web and Spotify, a music streaming service. None of these upstarts has yet been challenged to reinvent its business model – a test that history suggests many of them will fail. Like a child star whose fame dims as the years advance, many innovative organizations will become less so as they mature. However, it is worth paying attention to these streakers. While they don’t have much to teach us about how to build systematically innovative organizations, their game-changing strategies often illuminate important new categories of business model innovation.

Laureates

Laureates are companies that innovate year after year, but in narrow, technologically oriented domains. They spend billions of dollars on R & D and employ thousands of super smart team members. This group is represented by General Electric, Intel, Samsung, Microsoft and Cisco. The laureates show up regularly on “most innovative” lists, and also dominate the rankings for most patents won. Inventive as the are, the laureates are a bit one-dimensional – they’re great at pushing out the frontiers of science, but are not always so good at innovation in other areas. Nevertheless, if you want to learn something about maximizing R&D productivity, the laureates plenty to teach.

Artistes

The artistes comprise a much smaller category of innovation heroes. These organizations are in the creativity business – innovation is their primary product.  IDEO, BMW DesignWorks, and Grey New York are representative of this group. Everything about them - the way they hire, develop talent, and organize their work spaces – has been designed to provoke lateral leaps of genius. Most companies don’t have the luxury of focusing exclusively on innovation. They have to innovate while taking care of business -  like selling widgets or processing sales transactions. Your company may never be an innovator’s paradise, but you should be able to weave creative thinking into the mix and move the status quo out a little.

Cyborgs

Cyborgs are companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple – they seem to have been purpose-built to achieve superhuman feats of innovation. Long ago they left the industrial-age DNA behind, and function on management practices that have been built around principles like freedom, meritocracy, transparency, and experimentation. Cyborgs are innovative on multiple dimensions and are going to be on next year’s “most innovative” list – and the one after that. While cyborgs make most organizations feel like they’re mired in mud, you have to remember that your organization wasn’t built from the ground up to be innovative.

Born-Again Innovators

There are a few geriatrics out there who’ve cracked the innovation code. Known as born-again innovators, they are represented by Procter and Gamble, IBM, and Ford. They have been top-down behemoths who found themselves outmaneuvered time and again by less orthodox upstarts. Eventually, they saw the light and set about reordering their priorities and reassessing lifelong habits. It was not an easy process, requiring a complete retooling of a company’s management processes. To out-innovate the upstarts, a company must reengineer all of the typical management rituals that have been around for decades, replacing them with bold thinking and radical doing.

Is it possible to have innovation in ChurchWorld?

It is not only possible – it will be necessary to survive the tumultuous changes we find ourselves in. Your church may not make a product or provide a service like the organizations listed above, but you should be able to learn from the different types of innovators listed above – and apply that learning to your organization.

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Categories Innovation

Habits of Successful Innovators

March 26, 2012 //
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Successful innovators have ways of looking at the world that throw new opportunities into sharp relief. They have developed, often by accident, a set of perceptual habits that allow them to pierce the fog of “what is” and catch a glimpse of “what could be.”

- Gary Hamel. What Matters Now

Successful innovators pay attention to four things that usually go unexamined:

  • Unchallenged Orthodoxies - to be an innovator you have to challenge the beliefs that everyone else takes for granted – the long-held assumptions that blind organizational leaders to new ways of doing business. Within any organization, mental models tend to converge over time. As the years pass, the intellectual gene pool becomes a stagnant pond. Success accelerates this process: effective strategies get translated into operational policies which spawn best practices which harden into habits. Innovators, being natural contrarians, are not afraid to challenge long-held practices and beliefs.
  • Underappreciated Trends - innovators pay close attention to emerging trends, to the embryonic discontinuities that have the potential to invigorate old organizations and create new ones. Innovators are on the constant look-out for emerging discontinuities – in technology, regulations, lifestyle, values, and geopolitics – that could be harnessed to overturn old organizational structures. What this requires is not so much a crystal ball as a wide-angle lens. Innovators learn in places that their competitors aren’t even looking.
  • Underleveraged Competencies and Assets - every organization is a bundle of skills and assets. Typically these things are embedded in legacy structures, but if repurposed, they can often serve as platforms for innovation and growth. Innovation gets stymied when an organization defines itself by what it does rather than by what it knows or owns – when its self-conception is built around products and technologies rather than around core competencies and strategic assets. To innovate, you need to see your organization and the world around it as  portfolio of skills and assets that can be endlessly recombined into new products and organizations.
  • Unarticulated Needs - Innovators are good at spotting the inconveniences and encumbrances the customers have come to take for granted, and that organizational veterans mostly ignore. The goal is to amaze customers with something they could never have imagined, but having once experienced it, can’t imagine living without. In order to amaze customer with the unexpected, you must first uncover unspoken needs.  Customers, like the rest of us, are prisoners of the familiar.

Innovators who are successful again and again have developed perceptual routines that help them see beyond the ordinary. It’s time for you as a leader to help your team view the world around them with fresh eyes.

That would include leaders in ChurchWorld.

Adapted from What Matters Now, by Gary Hamel

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Categories Innovation

Great Design is…

March 12, 2012 //
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Utterly unexpected. A brilliantly designed product or service is clever and amazing. Think anything Apple.

Amazingly competent. A well-conceived product excels at what it does. It is functionally flawless. Think a Ziploc bag or Google’s home page.

Aesthetically exquisite. At the pinnacle of great design are products so gorgeous you want to hug them. Think a Porsche 911.

Conspicuously conscientious. Consumers (especially those under 30) are demanding socially responsible products and services that reflect a sense of stewardship for the environment and a passion for making a difference. Think Prius.

Unfortunately, design is still an afterthought in most organizations. Great design is less about genius than empathy – and it’s often the tiniest things that make the biggest difference.

- from Gary Hamel’s What Matters Now

For ChurchWorld Design Thinkers (Leaders)

  • What are the thoughtless little ways we irritate our members and guests and what can we do to change that?
  • What are the small, unexpected delights we could deliver to our members and guests at virtually no cost?

Design Thinking Matters.

 

Want to know more? Check out these other posts:

Design Thinking

Innovation Begins with an Eye

Brainstorming, IDEO Style

Prototyping is a State of Mind

Great Projects are Achieved by Great Teams

Practice Innovation

 

 

 

 

 

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Categories Design
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