JimCarroll

“Every industry-changing breakthrough begins with a simple question: Why do we still do it this way?” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Of all the phrases I’ve come to hate over the years, it’s this one: “But we’ve always done it this way!”

So what!

I won’t bother repeating that phrase often wrongly attributed to Einstein. The point is this – you are guaranteed to fail if you keep doing the same thing in the face of constantly changing circumstances. You are bound to become irrelevant if your routine never changes when everything else does. It’s a certainty you will fall behind if your product never changes but your customers and industry do.

Need I go on?

The simplest way to get ahead is to ask yourself this simple question: “What if we stop doing it the way we’ve always done it?” That frees you up to explore new ideas, opens you up to new ways of thinking, and cracks open wide the door to bold and fresh concepts.

The folks at Blackberry/RIM saw a device with a keyboard, and presumed they would always build the same thing. Steve Jobs saw the iPhone, which transformed a mobile phone with a keyboard into a pocket-sized computer, rendering the Blackberry obsolete overnight. Behind that was the simple premise: “what if we stop thinking the same way about mobile devices?” And that type of thinking is the thinking that leads to big, bold breakthroughs.

Always start out by having the courage to ask, “why do we still do it this way?”

 

“The organizations that look most ready for the future are often the ones most blind to the fact that they aren’t.” – Futurist Jim Carroll

“The moment you think your future is guaranteed is the moment it becomes certain that it isn’t.” – Futurist Jim Carroll

One thing about the idea of innovation is that it’s easy to spot when the setup isn’t right for it to happen! I’ve gone into a lot of organizations that look great on paper, but underneath the surface, they’re actively set up to fail.

Not from a lack of ideas, but because they’re trapped in a loop of excuses, slow execution, and legacy thinking. I can usually see this during the keynote planning conference calls – little signals, small comments, careful observations when I’m chatting with the people who are bringing me in.

Here’s ten red flags. See how many apply.

1. The Nostalgia Trap. Every idea looks exactly like last year’s idea with a fresh coat of paint. People seem to be more focused on what was, rather than what could be.

2. The Informed Delusion. There are mountains of historical data to justify the old strategy, but no insight for potential new directions.

3. The Clarity Trap. Everyone is frozen, avoiding decisions while waiting for “the dust to settle.” They don’t realize that clarity is a myth.

4. Accelerated Incompetence. You think tech fixes everything, so there is a rush to automate a broken process – but no one asks why the process is broken in the first place!

5. Over-Administeration. Everyone is busy firefighting today’s fires. There’s zero time available to anyone to look out at the fringes where the real trends are born.

6. The Permission Deathtrap. Every initiative requires three approvals, two committees, and a pilot program that runs eighteen months. By the time you’ve finished getting things moving, your competitor shipped the product.

7. Generational Blindness. There’s a lot of older leadership who make exclusive decisions about a future they know very little about, all while shutting out the digital natives who actually live in it.

8. The Crushing of the Misfits. The corporate culture rewards smooth compliance and groupthink. The rebels, outliers, and oddballs are the exact people who get the future done – and are actively ignored.

9. The Addiction to Consensus. Every bold idea gets smoothed over through so many layers of agreement that by the time it arrives, it’s bland, dead, unimaginative.

10. Dissidents are shunned. Someone who sees a failing strategy stays quiet. No one ever tells the truth about what’s going wrong.

Take a hard look at your team meetings this week. If your culture is built on protecting yesterday instead of running at tomorrow, it’s time to change the physics of how you operate.

Fast beats slow.

Bold beats old.

Get moving.

“If the future belongs to those who are fast, know that excuses are slow. Solutions are speed.” – Futurist Jim Carroll

Here’s what I’m thinking about this Monday morning: the reality check on human nature in the corporate world.

Over the years, hundreds of my keynotes have focused on concepts related to innovation: how to understand it, how to embed it within a team, how to achieve it. That has allowed me the unique opportunity to observe first hands that works and what does not.

And with that came my realization, more than 20 years ago, that above all, successful innovation relies on the ability of a team to achieve speed. Let’s call it ‘escape velocity’ – the ability to get away from the shackles of this current moment and align successfully to the next one. I have warned leadership teams that size no longer guarantees survival; agility does.

That message has worked its way into my written work. If you look back at the thousands of blog posts I’ve written since 2002, a permanent thread ties them all together: velocity. I I even codified this philosophy into the title of my book, The Future Belongs to Those Who Are Fast.

With this, I also know that there is a a dark, slow-moving twin to corporate speed: people who seem to be in the business of manufacturing excuses.

Excuses won’t get you anywhere. Action does. And in that context, speed matters.

And coming up with excuses for moving slowly is at the core of your organization, you’ve got a big problem. If your day-to-day work consists of explaining inaction, you aren’t innovating successfully. You are manufacturing failure. And in that reality, you need to think about tipping the scales: the number of excuses you manufacture should never exceed the solutions you find.

When every trend impacting you is moving at exponential speed, waiting for 100% clarity isn’t prudent. It’s a choice to fail.. True innovators don’t have time to engineer an airtight alibi for why a project didn’t launch.

They are too busy running low-stakes experiments and crashing through boundaries to try to chase success.

Be that person!