Chapter 1 Riding the Coaster
THINK BACK to your first roller-coaster ride. For some of you, it might have been on the comet, one of the great wooden roller coasters of all time, nearly 100 years old and still in operation at the Great Escape in Queensbury, New York, after having been moved from its original location in Fort Erie, Ontario.
As you approached, the screams from those riding the coaster grew louder. What were you thinking? Was it going to be fun or terrifying? As you waited were you anxious to get to the front of the line, or were you looking around to find a way out? By the time you actually sat in the car and fastened your seat belt, were you excited or shaking?
Clank, clank, clank. As the cars climbed the first big hill, were you taking in the view with amazement or wondering how you got yourself into this mess? Did you have a premonition of doom (after all, you observed the first-aid office near the exit of the ride), or were you ready for whatever came? As you crested the first hill, did you relax going over the top or envision yourself falling offthe moon and crash-landing into the park below, scattered into tiny pieces?
You were jolted from side to side. You may have wondered as you went up and down smaller hills and around curves if your seat belt was strong enough to hold you in. You had absolutely no clue where you were going or when the ride would end. Each corner brought a new surprise.
Obviously, you survived. Other than a few small bruises, you were fine physically, albeit perhaps a little nauseated (or very nauseated). Your legs wobbled for a little while once you got off, but it felt wonderful to be alive. You had done it.
Riding the coaster is an appropriate metaphor for living in a world of complex, continuous change. Sometimes we put ourselves in a position that leaves us exposed to unknown dangers, feeling vulnerable and out of control. We feel we don’t have a choice. Standing pat is a recipe for failure. We are not sure how to get through what will happen next—and what a ride it is. We are surrounded by “churn”—everything is coming at us at once from every direction. We try to slow things down, sort it all out, and make good decisions, but we know that we’re not on top of everything. More is happening than we could possibly have seen in advance. We want to believe we have things under control, but in a very real sense we are just along for the ride.
Neither avoiding change nor minimizing its importance is an optimal way to deal with complex, continuous change (triple-C). Neither cowards nor daredevils make great leaders of this kind of challenge. Others can tell you about their experiences in managing triple-C, but until you are the one in charge, you won’t understand what it really feels like. You have to jump on board and live it. Like riding the Comet, only in hindsight will you be able to compare your imagination with reality.
If you have ridden the triple-C Comet and survived, you may believe that managing complex, continuous change is no big deal. You would be wrong, as the examples here of very intelligent leaders failing at complex, continuous change will show. You have developed an illusion of control that is simply not real. You believe that somehow, despite not knowing what will happen next, you will make the right decisions and manage your way through whatever comes your way. You believe that your choices will be the best available in the moment and that everything will work out eventually. This is a powerful delusion that is difficult to resist.
You recognize the upside of complex, continuous change. You know you can’t learn much if you don’t get on the coaster. You can’t learn if you don’t take some risks. Your organization stalls if you don’t spend some time at the edge of your experience, trying something that is scary and new. You accept that you have to place some bets, aware that you may lose but not believing you really will. Instead of facing reality, you gamble that somewhere in the confusing morass of uninterpretable signals there is one that will eventually lead you forward and toward success in a big way. You tell yourself that leadership is not for the weak and that you are strong. Despite being rocked violently from side to side, you are in command. You can handle it. You will survive. But in actuality, not everyone does survive in the real world of triple-C. The truth: business is not just a ride after all.
If a crash actually occurs, it is a shock and you meet it with either disbelief or resignation. A business plan that has worked for decades suddenly breaks down, or your best-selling product is eclipsed by someone else’s innovation. Or someone you trust does something you never imagined him capable of doing. The real world is not an amusement park. It can be a surprisingly harsh and unforgiving place. You may walk away, but not without a tarnished reputation and not without others suffering harm.
If, on the other hand, your early experiences with complex, continuous change were negative, you may have developed an aversion to change. You may now put all of your energy into protecting your organization from the world. While you tell yourself that you are being prudent, you are actually putting yourself and others at risk. Experts tell us that more organizational failures occur from avoiding change than from attempts to change successfully.
Blockbuster Video stores and Borders bookstores stayed committed to their bricks-and-mortar strategies when the world was shifting to digital entertainment. Kodak and Polaroid remained in silver-halide photography, in part due to the investments they had made in their chemical film–producing operations. American Motors and Chrysler were unable to withstand the onslaught of lower-priced and then higher-quality foreign competition. Lucent Technologies was too slow to move from mechanical network telephone switching to cheaper digital switches; and both Wang and Digital Equipment gave up leadership positions in their industries to competitors that included Apple, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dell, and IBM. Speaking of IBM, everyone knows that the reason the brand survives today is that its then-CEO, Lou Gerstner, drove a change in the company’s focus from hardware to services. HP’s attempt to follow suit was slower and not as successful. There are many more examples, but the point is that none of these companies wanted to die; in fact, they wanted to live and they thought that the best way to do so was to stay focused on what had worked for them in the past rather than taking a bold step into the unknown. So long as they still had some customers, it must have seemed like a return to profitability was just around the corner. Perhaps a new advertising campaign or a redesigned product would save them. They hoped for the best, but the truth could not be denied. They played it safe, which turned out not to be a safe thing to do at all.
Somewhere between the extremes of using all of your power and influence to protect the status quo by trying to stop change from happening and completely abandoning reason to simply “let whatever happens happen” lies the right way to lead an organization through complex, continuous change. There are many phrases to describe those who try to avoid or stifle needed change: sticking your head in the sand, being risk-averse, putting your finger in the dike, hanging on to the past, being out of touch with reality, wishing for the good old days, being too committed to your course of action, ignoring the cues, locked-in, looking in the rearview mirror, sliding into a death spiral. There are also names for those who are too quick to jump at each opportunity change presents: foolhardy, fast and loose, overly aggressive, prone to snap judgments, thrill seeking, undisciplined. What do we call those who have discovered how to manage effectively the inherent tradeoffs in complex, continuous change? Pioneers, change leaders, visionaries, balanced, intuitive, successful. This is the group in which you want to be.
If you are one of these leaders, you seek ways to reduce the risks that accompany complex, continuous change. You have gained awareness of your capacity to manage this kind of change and the capacity of others around you. You build in more safeguards by following sound change practices and increasing the processing ability of your organization to make good decisions in the moment and learn from them. You ride with your eyes open, steering the coaster instead of just going along for the ride.
If you work hard and long at learning how to lead complex, continuous change, you improve. You ascend to a position of dominance in your industry that forces others to follow your lead, eventually causing their downfall if they choose not to learn from your example. You get to control your fate.
Whether you are leading complex, continuous change or advising those who do, you must understand what is required of you to succeed. You need to be willing to revise your way of thinking about change. You also need to understand how to tell when you have exceeded your capacity to change and recognize that continuing at your current course and speed will not lead to the outcomes you desire. You will need to learn greater discipline and focus, how to think in terms of scarcity rather than abundance, and how to slow down to get faster at change. Only leaders can make the critical decisions that determine how the ride will end.