Your Environment Signals the Need for Change

This week’s lesson was about how to bring the outside in to increase the sense of urgency. The basic idea is that people up and down the hierarchy of an organization, along with systems throughout the organization, identify and track the external influences on the business. This includes opportunities and threats coming from competitors, customers, or changes in the regulatory environment.

As I read the chapter, I thought a lot about how often I’ve heard some variation of the statement “it’s not us, it’s them.” This comes in the form of:

• “The customer is hard to work with.”
• “We can’t get the customer to get back to us.”
• “The customer is expecting the impossible.”

Before you continue reading, stop and reflect on whether you have also experienced this, or worse, whether you are also guilty of rationalizing why you have failed to deliver to your customer.

I don’t mean to suggest that customers aren’t hard to work with or unreasonable, but I do mean to orient you on the bigger picture - meeting the customer’s needs is the only way have a sustainably successful business.

Being customer-focused is only one external factor on our business. Chapter 4 presents seven ways to seek out the relevant information about all of the components that make up our external environment, but we also have to be intentional about how we deal with that information. We have to resist the urge to explain away what the outside world is telling us in a way that absolves us from needing to make a change.

Story Time

Once, I heard a team lead present something that went like this. “We delivered an exceptional capability to the customer, and I am very proud of the hard work that went into developing it over the last year. The members of the team are incredibly smart and accomplished what was thought to be impossible.”

I bet you can’t guess where this is going…

Everyone praised the team. I can’t remember the exact line of questioning that drew this next piece of information out but at some point we also learned that the capability was incompatible with the customers’ operational environment so they would NEVER BE ABLE TO USE IT.

SAY WHAT?!!

Yep, a years’ worth of work down the drain.

When the team lead was asked about how it came to this, he dismissed the questions with an umbrella statement that it has been impossible to get any information from the customer about how to fit into their operational environment.

WHAT?!!

So, you mean to tell me that this customer has asked for this work to be done, paid for it to be done (we were paid throughout the project) but wouldn’t provide you the information needed to actually use it. Could that be possible?

And before you say “well they already paid for it so what’s the problem?” I would encourage you to think about the bigger picture. Sure, you got paid but you have two problems that require change:

1. Your company doesn’t understand the customer. This will have downstream ramifications that negatively impact your ability to win future work with this customer and may potentially damage your reputation even wider.
2. You have a team lead who has no idea what’s important. How were the right questions not asked ahead of time? If you knew there was a gap in understanding their needs, why did you not raise it sooner? What is the impact to the team’s morale when they learn their tool will sit on the shelf and how does that affect your ability to retain this amazing talent that you’ve lauded if you continue to work with this client in the future?

Leadership is all about big picture thinking. Bringing the outside in is necessary to correctly evaluate the state of your business or team and identify the need for change in the first place.

How to Bring the Outside In

A Sense of Urgency highlights the following seven techniques that we can use to better understand our external environment:

1. Sending people out
2. Bringing in people
3. Bringing in relevant data in an eye-catching manner
4. Listening to customer-interface employees
5. Creating video about the outside
6. Widely sharing what is learned instead of shielding others from possibly troubling news
7. Changing the visuals

I won’t detail each of those items. I highly recommend reading the book for yourself if you want to know more about how to use them. Instead, it is worth noting that there is at least one technique that can be used by anyone in the organization AND that they aim to increase urgency by appealing to the heart as well as the head.

But what if you aren’t running an entire company?

The lessons from this chapter can also be applied to any team. The definition of “outside” just might be different. If you’re running a team within an organization, your definition of “outside” might include:

• Other teams and their priorities
• The overall direction and goals of the company
• The ability of talent acquisition to bring in the right candidates to fill open roles on your team
• The number of resources allocated to your team

You’ve convinced me! How can I learn more?

In a previous post, I shared that my leadership studies over the last few years have been deeply focused in three areas: general leadership acumen, strategy development and design thinking for innovation. There’s a very clear link with the techniques identified in this week’s lesson and design thinking.

In a nutshell, design thinking is a powerful methodology that can be used in any situation where there are people at the end of your product or service offering. By that definition, it can be applied to almost anything.

The first step of design thinking involves fully understanding that person or group of people. There are lots of ways to do this and some overlap heavily with the techniques in this chapter. For that reason, I recommend the study of design thinking.

Some additional resources that might help us further develop an appreciation for and the ability to bring the outside in:

• Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change by Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth and Scott D. Anthony
• Disruptive Strategy Course offered through Harvard Business School Online

I found this chapter to be full of useful examples and I am excited to try the various techniques out in the near future. If you are following along, I hope you are excited too. Thank you for reading!