Forget the pandemic, it’s conformity that kills big business. Embrace the ‘irregular’.
We are on the verge of a moment of truth for pretty much every established business. Despite riding out the pandemic and the great working from home experiment, it seems few lessons have been learned. Innovation has stalled, employees are uninspired and customers are largely apathetic to their brand.
This isn’t sustainable. The past decade or so has seen big companies focus on measurable efficiencies and the mitigation of risk. Somehow settling for anemic growth became accepted so long as nobody bet the ranch or rocked the boat. To survive in 9–5 jobs these days you need to be a part politician, part accountant, covering your arse and meticulously documenting your value. Excel, PowerPoint and McKinsey (or Deloitte, if your budget requires a cheaper suit) have become default settings, tools to over-rationalise the process and demonstrate the single ‘right’ answer.
But I have good news, because this isn’t our monotonous future. Change, as always, comes from the fringe, initiated by pioneers with courage and guts, daring to to differ. This is our ‘irregular’ future.
I love the word ‘irregular’. Mostly because almost every breakthrough comes from someone saying ‘that’s weird’ or ‘this doesn’t fit’. There are irregular people who don’t fit a mold, irregular processes that can appear out of sequence and irregular ways of thinking and working that are not the way we’ve been taught. Rules are there to be broken, or at least bent.
It starts with people. A full time, career ladder mindset isn’t what it used to be. Instead, technology is empowering us to work much more flexibly, jumping from place to place, adding the most value where we can. It’s making us question legacy educational structures and job requirements. Companies are now being built by ‘liquid super teams’, a concept procurement and (the awfully titled) human resources functions need to get with the times on.
The old ways of working and outdated methodologies may help better understand what has happened, but they tend to be pretty awful at grasping potential futures. I look back at some of the ways we blindly applied design thinking and realize we missed a lot, seeing the world through blinkers, spent more time being democratically nice and lacked the ability to make big game decisions.
So what can an established business do about this? Well for starters they need to start making friends outside their traditional circles, get comfortable with complexity and explore a world existing structures don’t encourage.
Irregulars find their creativity through play, choosing to ignore convention, knowing when to question what they believe to be true and when to have the conviction to take a punt. Few of these things are permitted in the corporate world. Instead, this is exactly what companies must continuously be doing!
All companies know they need to innovate, and by that I mean actually do things that are new and different. As much as many with ‘innovation’ in their title would like it to be so, debating nice slides with 2x2s doesn’t cut it. If you’re not continuously launching and experimenting new ideas, products or business models then you’re not doing innovation. You might as well write a cookbook and not bother making any of your recipes.
We need to create generations of new ventures, placed outside of the corporate walls because the existing structures just don’t work for this to have an impact. And do that, here’s an idea.
Rather than calling the same old professional services firms, or standing up internal teams with all the baggage from the way you work today, what if we hired corporate anti-heroes? Comedians / entrepreneurs / drug dealers / artists / sex workers / outlaws / engineers / job seekers see a very different world and have backstories far more interesting than boring business school consultants, so make it their job to kill your company by creating what comes next. Not only does this mean you have a stake in the future, but it also keeps the core business on its toes today.
And selfishly, it’s what I want to be doing with Irregular Studio, a collection of pioneering thinkers and makers, hugely experienced in their fields with broad perspectives, loosely affiliated and set up in a way to collaborate and take on the big and interesting challenges.
We’re experimenting with new approaches to re-imagine business futures, bringing together the weird and wonderful to give established companies a new way to make the future happen.
