Create a Culture of Change: Three Questions to Transform Your Business
What made your business successful in the past won’t necessarily make it successful in the future. We’re growing our companies in a period of immense and rapid change, and how you approach this turmoil will shape the success of your business and brand.
A company’s ability to adapt and transform may be its greatest competitive strength.
On June 1st, Stanley McChrystal, retired four-star U.S. Army general, appeared on The Daily Show to promote his new book, Team of Teams. During his interview with Jon Stewart, McChrystal made a profound statement:
“The future, when you look forward, is complex. Therefore, it is fundamentally impossible to predict. …You’re not going to come up with a hundred-year plan, a fifty-year, or even a five-year plan. You’re going to come up with general directions and frameworks, and you better learn everyday. Because that’s the world we’re in now.”
His statement hit me like a ton of bricks. If the U.S. military with all its resources and might cannot predict five years into the future, how can we hope to as businesses?
But as McChrystal went on to say, “That’s the world we’re in now … What we really got to do is approach things with an awful lot of humility that says, what we’re going to do is approach things with the reality that we’re going to have to adapt constantly and iterate.”
Change is not a choice. Change is our reality.
Build Change Into Your Culture
In 2013 and 2014 I interviewed over 150 business owners and CEOs of small- and mid-size companies. I was conducting research for my book, Sticky Branding (released earlier this year). With almost every interview I heard a stories of transformation.
Creating a culture of change was a common theme amongst the companies I profiled for my book.
For example, Icebreaker, a manufacturer and retailer of merino wool outdoor clothing, has codified their culture of change. They call it “shedding our skin.”
Jeremy Moon, founder of Icebreaker, said, “I’ve never defended the status quo. I feel anxious if we are not in a constant process of reinvention.”
A constant process of reinvention can be very disconcerting. As human beings we seek structure and routine, and we are naturally resistant to change. But we have to fight this natural tendency.
Companies that grow Sticky Brands not only embrace change, they relish it.
Three Questions to Drive Change
To shed the skin, Icebreaker does a deep dive into their operations every three years and asks three very deliberate questions:
- Where are we today, and where do we need to move towards?
- What’s working, and what isn’t working?
- Who here is part of the team moving forward, and who has stopped growing and cannot keep up?
These are amazing questions. If you delve into them and really let them challenge your assumptions, you can come up with some incredible insights—insights to lead change in your organization.
The Conflict of Efficiency and Change
One of the most counterintuitive lessons I took from Stanley McChrystal is our desire for efficiency can hold you back. He explains, “Organizations that get very happy with being efficient … now don’t work. And it’s disorienting people.”
McChrystal continues, “The reality is because you can’t predict the future, I think we’re going to have to work on being adaptable and gear ourselves and our organizations that way.”
I often sum up this sentiment with the phrase “What made you successful won’t make you successful.” Holding on to past systems and strategies is not an answer. It may create a feeling of short-term security, but that should be a warning sign that trouble is close by.
It’s the organizations that embrace change and adapt rapidly that are growing Sticky Brands.
