Unlearning in Business
When established corporates enter new terrain
Let’s assume you are the CEO of an established corporation in the manufacturing industry and you want to enter the field of digital solutions. You know your business, you’ve built a stable organization and optimized processes around your core field of business — and you’re actually doing pretty well. How hard can it be to build up the necessary team and skills to achieve similar success in the digital era?
Nowadays, companies not only need to adopt new skills when entering new fields of business or technology, they also need to let go of old and accustomed habits or processes, basically the status quo of how things are done — the justification that that’s “the way we’ve always done things here”. Sound familiar?
Change is a difficult process as it affects an organization as a system and, with that, often a large portion of the people working inside the organization as individuals. Not to mention, change is always hard for humans. You need to go down an unknown path, leave your comfort zone etc. You know the story. So how can we achieve success in volatile situations like these?
Barry O’Reilly describes unlearning as “the process of letting go, reframing, and moving away from once-useful mindsets and acquired behaviors that were effective in the past, but now limit our success.”
In order to start to unlearn, organizations need to recognize the situation they are in first.
So what are the signs that may be indicating that you might have to change something? You could ask yourself how long it usually takes to get a certain product out the door in your organization from scratch to release, or how long it takes to integrate customer feedback into your product from the point of knowing about it until you ship the first improved version.
If you are counting in your mind just how many quarters that might take, you most likely need to take action if you want to succeed in the digital age. Release cycles of 2 weeks or less are the reality, if you think about mobile apps for example. Companies like Spotify run multiple experiments at the same time in their live product, with users often not even noticing that they are part of an experiment, in order to discover potential improvements for the product. For a conventional hardware product, like e.g. a screwdriver, this is impossible.
Seeing it from a different perspective, these fast feedback possibilities give you the chance to refine your product, e.g. every two weeks, with new or improved features and roll it out to > 80% of your active users within just a few days. If you are in an industry manufacturing heavy machinery, these lead times are from a different planet — or rather from a different universe. The possible pace is breakneck, and an organization that is used to longer cycle times needs to be ready to cope with this pace.
Minimize risk by running safe-to-fail experiments early on in the process — and continue doing it.
In order to know what the right thing to improve is, you need to involve users in the process of product evolution to make sure you deliver value to them as often and as consistently as possible.
Don’t be afraid to show unfinished iterations of a product to your customers — invite them to give feedback and let them participate in the process of shaping the product. This can even lead to customers becoming your strongest advocates in the market without having to put your money on marketing.
But still: Things will fail and that’s fine. John Cutler (among others) often speaks about new initiatives or features as bets (remember? reframing is the keyword here) — you do not know if they will succeed when they are out in the wild, even if you did your homework properly (i.e. prototyping, user testing etc.). Reframing a feature (or even a product) as a bet gives you a very different perspective as it removes the mental model of the finiteness of a certain iteration of a product. Instead it allows you to see it as just one step on the product evolution path over time.
Unfinished is good. It leaves space for innovation.
Let’s consider the following 3 questions, with your organization in mind:
- Is it possible to run experiments easily with your users and/or customers using a not yet finished increment of your product?
- Are you getting people that are new to your field into your product development process?*
- Think about your last product that was not successful in its respective market — would it have been possible to “kill it” just before the market launch?
*referring to Russell L. Ackoff here “Changes in a field are never created by experts, but from outsiders looking at the field.” That might be a bit too black-and-white but it definitely bears some truth. If you are familiar with Zen Buddhism the “Shoshin” (beginner’s mind) might come to mind as well — if not you should check it out.
If the answers to those questions were no, you should probably consider increasing the steepness of your company’s unlearning curve — maybe even if you’re not planning to step into digital? You might be surprised by the outcome.
BTW did you notice that the word “transformation” didn’t appear a single time in this article so far? There is a reason but that’s probably another story to tell.
This article was written for Sclable’s blog on Medium.
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