To innovate your way out of any downturn, you need to change behaviors and mindsets—starting at the very top.
Crises are adrenaline for innovation. You must make decisions quickly under extremely uncertain conditions, and you never have enough time or information to fully weigh difficult choices that may affect both employee livelihoods and the survival of the business. Yet these very constraints can unleash waves of creativity. Necessity and urgency spur ideas and dissipate inertia. Leading innovators seize such conditions to reshape mindsets and behaviors, embracing the opportunity to uncover fresh solutions and make bold bets that can reignite growth.
Being a bold innovator is a choice that must be backed by a commitment. To put the organization on a new growth trajectory requires three actions:
1. Reallocating toward the future: Place bets, backed by sufficient funds and people, on emerging profit pools while reassessing legacy decisions.
2. Embedding flexibility: Reorganize around new, crisis-inspired ways of working.
3. Hacking processes: Focus on outcomes rather than activities to increase speed.
Driving change of this magnitude must be deliberate. To spearhead transformation-related initiatives and impose accountability that ensures the changes stick, organizations should create “reimagination teams” staffed with top emerging talent. Ultimately, however, it is the business leader’s responsibility to set the course, speed, and tone of the pivot that will deliver innovation-led growth.
There are several critical roles and skills that should be represented on the reimagination team, including:
· Customer experts, including “customer-back” thinkers who understand the impact of changing market dynamics on customer needs.
· “Black hat” thinkers, often seasoned market, operations, or commercial experts who readily challenge the status quo, anticipate challenges around corners and show an aptitude for finding routes to market.
· Change champions who can embed agile ways of working and find mechanisms to scale promising projects as well as identify additional change leaders throughout the organization.
· Digital enablers, people who can rapidly ideate and prototype solutions.
Successful innovators emerge from crises substantially ahead of peers and maintain this advantage for years to come; they invest in building sustainable delivery systems for innovation. The how is far more important than the what to ensure that innovation is a predictable, stable profit-growth engine.
Those who prioritize innovation and maintain a through-cycle perspective emerge from crises stronger, with a foundation for continuing outperformance that leads to thriving.
