4 keys to success in todays rapidly changing business climate

4 keys to success in todays rapidly changing business climate4 keys to success in todays rapidly changing business climateGeoff Tuffis a Principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP and a senior leader of the Innovation and Applied Design practices.Steven Goldbachis also aPrincipal at Deloitte, where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer. The two recently sat down to discuss why the old business playbooks arent working anymora, and offer more insights from their new book,Detonate Why- and How- Corporations Must Blow Up Best Practices (and Bring a Beginners Mind) to Survive.This conversation has been edited and condensed. To watch the full version, click the video.GeoffYouve been a strategist for a long time, and youve talked about sources of advantage. Whats happening these days with advantage?Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreStevenWell, the long-standing advantages are getting disrupted b y new technologies that make possible businesses that are an order of magnitude better quality, or an order of magnitude lower cost. For example, in the world of radio, you used to have to spend a lot of money to erect radio towers, and now with a few lines of code, youve basically got radios business model in Spotify, which is cheaper to distribute.Or if you wanted to get a custom-made suit, you used to have to go to a tailor, right? That welches your only option. And now you can use an app like MTailor to take a 3D image of your body and upload it, and then theyll send you the same custom-made suit at a lower cost.Technological advances are driving this movement from the known to the unknown. And how are organizations responding? Theyre trying to apply the playbooks from the known world to the unknown world- and thats the dicke bretter bohren mssen were trying to solve.Remember the first day that you started your job? You probably sat down with your career advisor, and they said s omething like, If you want to be successful at this organization, here are all the things that I did when I was in your shoes. That was the recipe for success- Do what my forebears did, and you, too, can be successful.The problem is, as we transition into a world of uncertainty, we start to get system failure. Were seeing this vicious cycle where you put a business model out into the world and, all of a sudden, consumers dont like it- it fails. And then the boss comes in and says, Well, did you do what I told you to do? Did you follow the playbook?And then they start to do all the predictable things from the world of the known. They examine the data, they analyze, they try to understand what went wrong in their risk models. Then they put it back into the marketplace and, lo and behold, it fails again.Now someone more senior comes in, and all of a sudden, youre going towards a world where youre like Blockbuster video, defining your business model as, Were in thestorebusiness, elend t he DVD-to-home business.GeoffNo ones going to change their company overnight, but you do need to instill a different mindset. There were four key principles that we identified in the course of our research, two of which have to do with thinking differently.One is that at the heart of systemic change and getting rid of old playbooks is the notion that, in everything you do, focus on menschlich behavior. No matter how digital companies become, the most basic economic unit of analysis is still human behavior. And I dont just mean customers- it can be customers, employees, regulators, suppliers, or partners, but someone somewhere has to change their behavior in order for a performance curve to change.And the advanced version of that is understanding what is the accumulation of human behaviors that creates economic value for you? From the beginning of your value to the end, who are the human beings involved? And then say, If we look at the entire system, which one behavioral change would have disproportionate value for us?If we spent our time saying, What are the human behaviors were trying to drive?, and then focusing our resources on actually achieving that behavioral change, that would lead to a completely different way of doing business.The second think differently principle is about bringing a beginners mind,a well-known concept from Zen Buddhism.My favorite quote about that comes from D.T. Suzuki, and its something like, In the beginners mind, there are many possibilities. In the experts mind, there are few.One of the ways you increase efficiency is to find people who have been there, done that, or lived through that experience before, and have them bring their expertise to the table in order to make a decision. Although when you bring expertise to the table, you narrow the aperture in terms of possible solutions. But not if you bring a beginner to the table and say, Go try to do this.Imagine the average startup entrepreneur, the digital disrupter- when they come to a challenge, they dont say, Jeeze, how do I execute on this using my legacy business system? No, they say, How would I do this better? How would I better achieve the behavioral change that Im after?StevenRight. If you think differently, youve also got to be willing to act differently. The thing that professionals need to do the most is focus on minimum viable moves. We took that idea from the world of product design, which often starts with mindestens viable products, and extended it to almost any business decision that you can make How could you do something in a small manner that would help you learn about the human behaviors youre trying to cause?GeoffAnd you have to do it super quickly- just go out and try it.Steven Super quickly and super cheaply. Particularly if youre in that uncertain world, you want to figure out to what extent you can change the behavior that you need to change. Can you do it? How much will it cost? Youre going out and constantly testing, consistent ly making minimally viable moves.When I was atForbesmagazine, we wanted to corner the market on the CueCat, a device that allowed you to scan a barcode on a print advertising page, and it would take you to a webpage. We wanted to know if we could create more value for advertisers by creating more engagement, so we were going to be bold and send out a million CueCats to our subscribers. But the issue was the cost of the devices and mailing it to them- it was a good chunk of money.This was the year 2000, and the CueCat was a wired device. You had to use it while you were plugged in to your desktop computer, and as it turns out, people dont always read theirForbesmagazine sitting in front of their desktop. They like to read it, say, on a plane, or a train, or the subway.So it turned out our hypothesis was wrong- we couldnt change the behavior. But that doesnt mean that it wasnt worth testing- it just means we didnt need to send the CueCat to a million people.We could have sent it to ju st thirty,watched what they were doing, and figured it out.GeoffIt sounds like the opposite of the old world, which is all about analysis. Dont get rid of data completely, because youll still have some opportunities where its going to work. But these minimally viable moves are all about, Lets not spend time analyzing- lets just go try it.StevenExactly. And to clarify, when we say that the data is no good, we mean the historical, syndicated data that already exists. We want to create new data by going out and giving our customers something to respond to in the real world.So if the third principle is about making minimal viable moves, the fourth one is embracing impermanence. If you make a move today, you cant be so wedded to it that you wont be willing to blow it up later. The world is moving really fast, so that move is not likely to last forever.Its silly when people ask questions like, If I stay in this organization, where will I be in 15 years? Wed have to assume that we can pred ict the steps of an organizations evolution, and thats just no longer a relevant conversation. We have to be willing to embrace that we dont know what might happen, and therefore, we should be more focused on the things that are working today, and what we can learn about the future.What advice would you give to people who want to apply some of these ideas?GeoffThe first thing to do, especially if youre in a position of authority, is to ask different, better questions. Dont ask about the return on investment,ask about return on behavior.We should care about financials, but forecasts should be based on observable outcomes in the market. So if I were to ask you, Can you figure out what the return of driving this behavior versus that behavior would be?, I bet youd see significant change throughout the entire system.What advice would you give?StevenI think youve just got to pick something and try it. Dont overanalyze it. Whatever problem youre facing, go figure out how you could design a test, or design something to try in the real world. Were spending way more time trying to learn about something before we make a choice- instead, lets decide today and see the response. Thats the best way to study something.This article first appeared on Heleo.