We interact with various business leaders, different executives, senior management and even those at the frontline. As organizations grow bigger, and scale, there’s an art that gets lost. Everything becomes a science. Everything gets replaced by rules and templates. That intuitive aspect, the art, the natural feel for what really works get lost. Everybody becomes a block-by-block performer. They simply learn the rules of pairing. That A should be paired with B. No one knows why, they simply follow the rules to the dot.
We had a scenario where a store had two padlocks, one by security and one by the stores team. Then one day we asked the stores team; “why do you have a security padlock?” No one could figure out the reason. They all had adopted the rule and fitted in. It was nowhere in the procedure, it’s a culture everyone followed. Well, the real reason is that this was meant to be a double-block, to prevent a one-fail system to the stores.
Pareto gave a rule, the 80-20% rule. That 20% of the people in the organization were responsible for 80% of the results. Today, we are stating a new rule as the Ortega Group: “99% of what organizations know is wrong. Only 1% is right. The challenge is no one knows the 1%.” And indeed, when you test out most reasons organizations give for their success, you realize they cannot be replicated for success in the next financial year. Most big organizations stumble on year-on-year growth. The CEOs (most serve 3-year terms) ride out waves of success, others ride out waves of failure. Few can incisively explain these waves and what caused them. For if the reasons they gave were true, then results could be replicable. But that’s never the case.
Organizations do not know their 1%, their gold, their winning formula. Although most people win, only a few know their winning formula. That’s why most organization innovation tends to kill the winning formula. Most organizations can’t explain how they got to a given point. It’s the dilemma. We are advocating for a new mindset that starts to challenge everything they hold to be true and sacrosanct in the company, 99 percent of that is just wrong, it doesn’t work. It’s mere myth. Organizations must challenge themselves to figure out their 1% that works, and once that’s found, it should be refined and scaled. That’s the true innovation formula, it’s the success of organizations that last.
Photo by Randy Laybourne on Unsplash