Part 1: Challenge the pattern and learn the five F's

You've said that in order to challenge the prevailing organizational wisdom, leaders need to develop "kaleidoscope thinking." What is "kaleidoscope thinking," and what are some ways to promote it?
The way a kaleidoscope works is: a set of fragments forms a pattern, but the pattern isn't fixed. You can shake it, twist it look at it from a new angle, that's how our minds work. It's a style of thinking that says you can challenge the pattern. You can take the same elements of your organization or the same technologies that lots of other people are using and you can combine them in creative new ways that lead to new innovations.

My friend John Taysom, the founder of Reuter's Greenhouse Fund which invested in a lot of technology start-ups, used those partnerships to bring new ideas to Reuters. He himself was a kaleidoscope thinker because he saw the possibilities in these new technologies to totally transform their business from sending news and financial information on private networks to sending them on the Internet and becoming an Internet company.

There were a lot of people at his company who didn't understand what he was doing. To change their thinking he took them on field trips. He brought a group of executives to Silicon Valley and exposed them to entrepreneurs and also to activities that would shake them out of complacency. At one point he had them racing electric cars in a parking lot. It was fun but it also challenged their assumptions about the new cars because they were seeing the cars and how well they worked.

It's about putting people in circumstances where they see a challenge to their existing belief. The problem with companies that resist change is that they are too internally focused and their leadership is not exposed to experiences that would cause them to "shake the pattern" a little, to see a new possibility.

I've read that you believe that "everything can look like a failure in the middle." What are some ways to get unstuck from what you call the "Sticky Moments in the Middle of Change?
This is my favorite truth of management and, in fact, of life. You need the persistence and perseverance to go around obstacles. When we start new things there is always a lot of promise and hope, it's an awful lot like starting a marriage. With every project and new venture in companies, whatever you imagine at the beginning isn't what actually takes place later. When you are starting something new, you have no way to predict what you'll encounter.

One of the reasons that many older companies have trouble changing is because they evaluate people on whether they stuck to their plan. But if you want innovation and change, you have to be flexible. You can't stick to your plan.

One of your strengths is the ability to distill big concepts into bite-sized, digestible pieces. For example your four F's of the necessary characteristics of organizations in a time of rapid change. What are the four F's?
They are the need to be focused, fast, flexible, and friendly. I sometimes add a fifth which is "fun."

o Focused: It's important to focus on your areas of greatest strength. o Fast: You can't have bureaucracy get in the way. You can't be slowed down by turf battles. Empower people to develop their ideas before there is a crisis or a need for a major change in the business. o Flexible: You need an organization in which people can work smoothly across different departments, different levels of the company. o Friendly: You need to work through partners. You need to have a closer, more intimate relationship with customers and suppliers and know that if you are going to be focused that you are going to need partners to do the things that you can't do or shouldn't do because they do it better. o Fun: If it's not fun, nobody is going to want to do it. By that, I mean that it feels pleasurable to go to work every day and they have a sense of mastery, achievement and meaning in their work lives.

What were the most-reported barriers to change experienced by your respondents in the Global E-culture survey?
There was a tendency for the older, larger companies to face more internal barriers and for the smaller, newer companies to face external barriers. The smaller, newer companies who were not at all inhibited about change had problems with finding a market, finding partners, getting vendors online.

For the larger, older companies, the barriers were people barriers and organizational barriers. The people barriers were related to top management skepticism or that top management didn't use the technology themselves, or they didn't know what the right thing to do was and they were unwilling to permit experiments. This is like what I said before about plans.

The cluster of barriers I found most interesting had to do with turf and territory. It was managers unwilling to give up their turf and divisional rivalries getting in the way.

Continued...