The Only Constant in Business Is Change

Entrepreneurial Squiggles: What are they and how do you effectively lead your team through them?

Amina Islam

The havoc wreaked worldwide by the coronavirus has demonstrated our economic system’s vulnerability to destructive, even invisible, forces of nature. While the global economic impact is yet to be assessed, fear is running amok, grounding planes, locking down countries, sending financial markets plunging, disrupting supply chains, and slowing down businesses.

Even though the current disruption to organizations is happening at an unprecedented rate and scale, you, as an entrepreneur have always lived in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world that requires you to continuously navigate entrepreneurial squiggles. Even before the coronavirus, there were always multiple reasons entrepreneurial squiggles existed.

There are three key reasons that I would like to talk about. Firstly, every business is built on certain hypotheses and assumptions that can only be tested once you go to market.

And as Mike Tyson says, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Secondly, companies need to undergo changes to remain competitive, thanks to global dynamic forces such as advances in technology. So in order to grow, you would continuously need to course-correct in response to whatever signals the market is sending your way.

Lastly, a situation we are now painfully familiar with is that things tend to happen out of the blue that may catch you off guard.

“The only constant thing in business is change,” says Fred Swaniker, founder of the African Leadership Group. “The signals that tell me when it’s time to squiggle are two; impact and cash. If the direction we’re moving is not helping make progress in either, it’s time to re-evaluate and squiggle.”

So how do you lead your team effectively through organizational squiggles?

• Use every squiggle as a learning opportunity: Rather than relying solely on your current institutional knowledge, develop its capacity to learn because you never know what changes coming your way would require you to adapt to. For example, companies are currently learning a lot about putting in place remote work policies thanks to this pandemic, even considering making managing distributed teams a permanent thing and not renewing their office space leases in the foreseeable future.
• Review and test all your options: It’s easy for organizations to think in the short-term and reflexively react to this crisis by laying off staff, but a study conducted within the U.S. airline industry after the September 11 terrorist attacks showed that even though layoffs were intended to foster recovery, they ended up inhibiting long-term recovery throughout the 4 years after the crisis. So before going for layoffs, crowd-source ideas from your employees on how best to manage this squiggle, review and test all of your options, and most importantly lead with compassion.
• Keep your finger on the pulse of what is going on in the market, and keep iterating your product: Steve Jobs once said, “Some people say, ‘Give customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, “A faster horse!”

While this quote may have inadvertently caused adverse attitudes towards market research, there is indeed a tremendous value in listening to what your customers are saying about your product. You might discover that people actually prefer the online delivery method of your product rather than the in-person one so you might consider making that the norm. Conducting market research is key to unveiling new opportunities as you become more attuned to your customers’ needs and pain points, which in turn feeds into the continuous improvement of your products/services and user experience.

• Build organizational resilience: Whenever an organization undergoes any type of change, resistance is bound to happen so communication is key. You need to continuously communicate the importance of this change. You also need to bring employees and staff onboard by asking them to participate in the co-design and implementation of the new change. Make it clear that continuously adjusting to new realities shows resilience, which is a predictor of entrepreneurial success according to this research which analyzed the effect of the three dimensions of resilience (hardiness, resourcefulness, and optimism) of small enterprise owners on their success through a longitudinal study.
• Remember the vision: While it is true that you might change directions a lot, this does not mean that you continuously change your vision as well. It is said that a plane is off-track 90 % of the time, and yet ends up reaching its destination nonetheless. So the vision is the one thing that should stay constant.

Taking organizations through squiggles and managing organizational change is an optimization challenge. It requires implementing the change while minimizing employee resistance and cost, and simultaneously maximizing the effectiveness of the change effort. Every squiggle or change must be used as an opportunity to learn and build organizational resilience.

What organizational squiggles have you had to adapt to during the coronavirus pandemic? Tell us more about your experiences and how you handled them.

About the author: Amina Islam is the Innovative Learning Lead for Xcelerator , where she works with the product team to develop new programs. She received her Ph.D. from Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in 2017. Amina is always excited about new ideas and explores them in writing on her Linkedin profile and ahscribbles.com.