Are you a Demolitionist or an Incrementalist?
The world is changing pretty fast and it’s leaving some teams behind in it’s wake. At Reinvention Labs, I help teams to find ways to catch up. I help teams to reinvent the way they work. Change has never been more important.
But there are many ways to change.
As we get to know each other more, I will show you that some of the things you and your team have been doing are things you’ve been doing for quite a while. The way people learn, the way teams decide, and the way organizations share information hasn’t really changed in decades. But the whole world around us has changed quite a bit in that time.
I’ve worked with many different kinds of teams in the world. And I know that entrenched industry leaders with deep customer relationships and money in the bank don’t have the same change profile as a new startup with one chance to make it big. Similarly, a company that makes mobile phone games doesn’t have the same reinvention profile as an organization in healthcare or aviation. Those teams have people’s lives in the balance when they make decisions.
And that’s ok. Each of our teams is different.
In the coming months, we’re going to talk about change, experimentation, and trying new things. Before we get there, it can be helpful to identify your desire for breaking out of the status quo balanced together against your comfort with blowing shit up. This way it will be easier for you to identify the change tactics that are best for you at this stage of your organization’s life.
As we work to create the Future of Teams together, there are two questions that will help you to understand your propensity for change.
What is your team’s willingness to reinvent themselves?
What is your team’s need for different outcomes?
The answers to these two questions work together to create what we refer to as your Reinvention Profile.
What is your team’s willingness to reinvent?
The first variable that matters is your team’s willingness to reinvent the way things are. Before we go further, it will be helpful to understand where you and your team are on this spectrum. These are some of the questions that help you to gauge how much pushback there might be as you try to reinvent the way you work on your team.
How comfortable is your organization with challenging the status quo?
If I told you to stop checking email for a year, would you tell me I was insane?
Even if it sounds impossible, would you be willing to consider an experiment?
Does change take a long time because getting alignment across decision-makers is challenging?
As you reflect on those questions, think about whether you believe you are either: low willingness, or high willingness. There’s no right answer here. Both ends of this spectrum are necessary in the world.
What is your team’s need for different outcomes?
The second reinvention parameter that we need to examine is your organization’s need for different outcomes.
How comfortable are you and your team with the current results your team is getting?
Are things generally fine and moving in a positive direction?
Are you moving too slow for your customers? Or are you beginning to lose in the market?
Are you struggling to attract or retain great employees?
How critical is it for you and your team to pull themselves to a new place?
Again, think about these questions for a bit and then identify whether you have high-need for different outcomes, or low-need for different outcomes.
Here’s what that looks like in a graphic. Given the combination of those two dynamics, most teams will generally find themselves at one of the three places. Each place on the Reinvention Profile Matrix has a name to make it easy to remember where you fall. The three profiles are Incrementalists, Explorers, and Demolitionists. Which one are you?
Incrementalists
The first group are the Incrementalists. Incrementalists have a low willingness to reinvent and a low need for different outcomes. These are the cautious teams. Your team is an Incrementalist team if slow, controlled, gradual change is best for you and your team at this time, and your state in the world is not pushing more urgency on you.
I’ve worked with teams in many different organizations over the years, and the vast majority of them are in this group. Small controlled, incremental changes are optimal for many teams because they avoid putting the things that ARE working in jeopardy. Very large organizations typically have a lot of things that ARE working. So sure, there may be some issues. But those issues are not so dramatically severe that the team is willing to blow up everything about the way they communicate, collaborate, or implement new tools and processes. Something important could break.
Incrementalists are innovators too. They just innovate slowly.
Explorers
The second group is the group called the Explorers. Some teams, for many various reasons, have a heightened urgency to create different outcomes for their people, their teams, and the customers that they serve. Maybe they just desire and aspire for these different outcomes – maybe different outcomes are being pushed for from customers or the increasingly-competitive workforce. When teams are looking to create new outcomes, their willingness to reinvent often begins to increase a little.
The Explorers are the teams in the middle of both scales. They have a medium willingness to reinvent and a medium need for different outcomes. This group is willing to try bold new things. But they do those bold new things in a controlled way. Imagine, instead of getting the whole organization to try a small incremental change, an organization clusters a small pilot team to try working in a bold new way. If it works, they try a second larger pilot team. And then a third. And after a while, the whole organization is working in a dramatically new way.
This is how Explorers drive big changes without big risk. We’ll talk about this more in the coming weeks.
Demolitionists
There’s a third group at the top right of the matrix. I call this group the Demolitionists. Demolitionists aren’t afraid to blow stuff up and burn the existing ways of working to the ground. Nothing is sacred. They’re willing to try bold new, organization-wide changes because speed is everything… or because things are deteriorating so rapidly, there’s increasingly less and less to lose.
I have experiments and tactics in my keynote for the Demolitionists too. Some of these things might sound extreme. But don’t worry, all of the experiments in this book are real experiments, practices, and tactics that I’ve either done myself, or that I’ve seen real teams do. These tactics led to successful, high-performance, and happy teams with happy customers. Some of the best teams in the world – teams like Spotify, Atlassian, and Google as well as a bunch whose names will be less familiar.
So are you:
a Demolitionist?
an Explorer?
or an Incrementalist?
What about your team or your organization’s executive team? Would they answer in the same way?
What about the other two groups?
Some of you might be thinking, “What about the two other corners of this matrix?”
The Gamblers
What about the people, teams, and organizations at the top left? These are the teams that have a high willingness to reinvent, but a low need for different outcomes? These are the Gamblers. The teams that move fast and break things. These are the teams that have nothing to lose. These are the teams that are throwing one big, bold, gamble at the market. These are often startups that are trying to break into a new industry. Bad news: Occasionally they do get lucky, but the majority of the time these teams fail.
The Disrupted
And, finally, there’s one more segment at the bottom right. The teams that have a low willingness to reinvent, but a high need for different outcomes. More bad news: those are the companies that won’t be around very much longer. These are the Disrupted. These are the companies that fail to see the urgency for change, innovation, and reinvention until it’s too late. I’m writing my “The Future of Teams” book, to help make sure that this doesn’t happen to you and your team.
Remember, everyone is different
Every team has valid reasons for their place against those two axis. Also keep in mind that your answer, and your organization’s answer might be different. Think about them both. Understand if you, your team, and your organization’s leadership have the same answers to these questions.
This will all be important later as we create the Future of Teams, together.