How many times have you heard the saying welcome to the world of “Changing Your Lens,” a powerful tool and approach that can transform the way we tackle problems. This concept revolves around the idea of altering our perspective to address challenges more effectively.
A great quote by Stephen R. Covey:
“To change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.”
Changing one’s lens in leadership involves adopting new perspectives and paradigms, and building on innovation, empathy, and adaptability.
This transformative approach opens avenues for growth and collaboration. It enriches decision-making by considering diverse viewpoints and encourages a more inclusive and dynamic organisational culture. Leaders can leverage this shift to better navigate challenges, inspire teams, and drive positive change.
Broadened Perspectives: Shifting perspectives allows leaders to interrupt their current thinking, break any beliefs they have of a particular situation and can see beyond traditional boundaries. By embracing diverse viewpoints and considering various angles, leaders gain a more comprehensive understanding of situations. This broadened perspective enhances decision-making, strategy development, and problem-solving.
Enhanced Innovation: A changed lens creates an environment conducive to innovation. Leaders who actively encourage thinking outside the box and value diverse ideas create a culture that thrives on creativity. This not only leads to innovative solutions but also cultivates a dynamic and forward-thinking organisational culture.
Improved Adaptability: Leadership demands adaptability, and changing one’s lens is a powerful tool in building this trait. Adaptable leaders can navigate uncertainty, respond to change effectively and guide their teams through transitions. This flexibility allows leaders and their teams to remain relevant and resilient in a rapidly evolving business landscape.
Empathy, Compassion and Connection: A shifted perspective encourages leaders to empathise with their team members and situation. Understanding different viewpoints and acknowledging individual experiences builds stronger connections. Using a compassionate approach (empathy plus action) builds a positive work environment, enhances team morale, and promotes a culture of collaboration.
Inclusive Decision-Making: Leaders who change their lens prioritise inclusivity in decision-making. They recognise the value of diverse voices and experiences, ensuring that decisions are representative and considerate of all stakeholders. This inclusivity not only leads to better decisions but also promotes a sense of belonging within the team.
Enhanced Problem-Solving: Problems become opportunities for growth when leaders change their lens. They approach challenges with a fresh mindset, seeing possibilities where others see obstacles. This mindset shift fuels effective problem-solving, encouraging resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity.
Personal and Professional Growth: Changing one’s lens is a catalyst for personal and professional growth. It challenges leaders to continuously learn, adapt, and evolve. This commitment to growth not only benefits the individual leader but also sets a positive example for the entire organisation.
Building Trust helps to make challenging conversations easier, teams more integrated and employees more engaged. Exploring ways in which trust can be built can help individuals and companies create stronger relationships and healthier cultures.
Trust within organisations boosts productivity and employee engagement, helps leaders and teams to focus on what is important and reduces friction. Furthermore, while an issue of cross-generational relevance, organisational trust is particularly important to the younger members of the workforce: millennials and members of Gen Z.
Transparency, enablement and a culture of trust boost their loyalty and commitment, while a lack thereof can be a primary reason to leave an employer.
Therefore, building trust within organisations is not only key to withstanding current challenges, but will pay off in the future. To inspire decision makers to lead with the next generation in mind, leaders have more work to do to leverage the power of trust in their organisations, and this presents the opportunity for new paradigms
Appreciating the ease or product replication globally it is always believed that there is a journey of discovery relating to business models and business model innovation which is profound.
This ultimately leads to a discovery of what is the core job to be done for customers and does your business model play in the blue ocean or red ocean. Business model innovation is currently untapped in most organisations and is a wonderful approach to reinventing the customer experiences of the future. Most organisations fail to take this opportunity. The ability to truly define one’s distinctive competitive advantage is critical as businesses look to define and innovate around their current and future business models.
Managing through change is complex and requires a well thought approach. Many attempts at business model innovation fail. To change that, executives need to understand how business models develop through predictable stages over time — and then apply that understanding to key decisions about new business models.
Surveying the landscape of recent attempts at business model innovation, one could be forgiven for believing that success is essentially random. For example, conventional wisdom would suggest that Google Inc., with its Midas touch for innovation, might be more likely to succeed in its business model innovation efforts than a traditional, older, industrial company like the automaker Daimler AG.
But that’s not always the case. Google+, which Google launched in 2011, has failed to gain traction as a social network, another great example is Daimler, who has built a promising venture, car2go, which has become one of the world’s leading car-sharing businesses. Are those surprising outcomes simply anomalies, or could they have been predicted?
To our eyes, the landscape of failed attempts at business model innovation is crowded and becoming more so as management teams at established companies mount both offensive and defensive initiatives involving new business models.
We’ve decided to wade in at this juncture because business model innovation is too important to be left to random chance and guesswork. Executed correctly, it has the ability to make companies resilient in the face of change and to create growth unbounded by the limits of existing businesses. Further, we have seen businesses overcome other management problems that resulted in high failure rates.
For example, if you bought a car in the United States in the 1970s, there was a very real possibility that you would get a “lemon.” Some cars were inexplicably afflicted by problem after problem, to the point that it was accepted that such lemons were a natural consequence of inherent randomness in manufacturing.
But management expert W. Edwards Deming demonstrated that manufacturing doesn’t have to be random, and, having incorporated his insights in the 1980s, the major automotive companies have made lemons a memory of a bygone era.
To our eyes, there are currently a lot of lemons being produced by the business model innovation process — but it doesn’t have to be that way.
In my experience, when the business world encounters an intractable management problem, it’s a sign that business executives and scholars are getting something wrong that there isn’t yet a satisfactory theory for what’s causing the problem, and under what circumstances it can be overcome.
This is what has resulted in so much wasted time and effort in attempts at corporate renewal. And this confusion has spawned a welter of well-meaning but ultimately misguided advice, ranging from prescriptions to innovate only close to the core business to assertions about the type of leader who is able to pull off business model transformations, or the capabilities a business requires to achieve successful business model innovation.
The difference between product vs business model innovation is that it is not the attributes of the innovator that principally drive success or failure, but rather the nature of the innovation being attempted. Business models develop through predictable stages over time and executives need to understand the priorities associated with each business model stage.
Business leaders then need to evaluate whether a business model innovation they are considering is consistent with the current priorities of their existing business model. This analysis matters greatly, as it drives a whole host of decisions about where the new initiative should be housed, how its performance should be measured, and how the resources and processes at work in the company will either support it or extinguish it.
McKinsey’s Growth Categorization – Growth Strategy
A small but growing number of companies are business reinventor’s, setting a new performance frontier for their companies.
Research shows that 8% of companies, are moving to adopt a strategy of horizon 3 reinvention.
Horizon 3 unlocks benefits including improved financials, the ability to achieve perpetual breakthrough innovation, increased resilience in the face of any disruption and an enhanced ability to create value for all stakeholders.
86% of companies are transformers. They focus on transforming parts of their business rather than the whole and tend to treat transformation as a finite program rather than a continuous process.
6% of companies are what we call optimizers, focused on functional transformations limited in scope and ambition. Technology is not a significant enabler of their transformations.
It is well-documented that people need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable. When done well, human-centred design enhances the user experience at every touch point and fuels the creation of products and services that deeply resonate with customers. Design is empathic, and thus implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business.
The essence of design thinking is human-centric and user-specific. It’s about the person behind the problem and solution, and requires asking questions such as “Who will be using this product?” and “How will this solution impact the user?”
The first, and arguably most important, step of design thinking is building empathy with users. By understanding the person affected by a problem, you can find a more impactful solution. On top of empathy, design thinking is centred on observing product interaction, drawing conclusions based on research, and ensuring the user remains the focus of the final implementation.
Design thinking informs human-centred innovation. It begins with developing an understanding of customers’ or users’ unmet or unarticulated needs. The most secure source of new ideas that have true competitive advantage, and hence, higher margins, is customers’ unarticulated needs. Customer intimacy, a deep knowledge of customers and their problems helps to uncover those needs.
There are clear financial benefits to pursuing horizon 3. Companies that use reinvent using horizon 3 report generating higher incremental revenue growth, more cost-reduction improvements and higher balance-sheet improvements than companies in transformation.
Finally, the external environment has moved from a VUCA world to a BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible) where the contextual operating environment is accelerating at a pace that we can barely keep up with. Today more than ever these entrepreneurial leadership characteristics are needed in all industries and at all levels in organisations.
‘’Entrepreneurial Leadership’’ is a positive leadership mindset that emphasizes the strategic management of risk and dynamic changing ecosystems. Entrepreneurial leaders look for new opportunities and ways to innovate as individuals and as part of a team. These qualities often contrast with traditional leadership methodologies that emphasize following processes and procedures in an orderly, predictable way to minimize risk.
Leaders need to harness the power of relationships, put people first, enabling them to take on and solve daunting challenges enabled by a mindset that turns problems into opportunities that creates economic and social benefit.
Passion for ownership and collaboration, thriving in uncertainty, relentless optimism about the future, deeply inquisitive, open to new experiences and unique skills of persuasion are powerful mindsets and beliefs demonstrated by entrepreneurial leaders. The best entrepreneurial leaders are good at experimenting, learning and iterating that unleashes an ability to unlearn and relearn at an increasingly faster rate.
Implementing business model innovation can be challenging, as it requires a fundamental shift in perspective and the mindset and how a company operates. It requires a deep understanding of customer needs and market trends and the willingness to take risks and experiment with new ideas.
Business model innovation is the art of enhancing advantage and value creation by making simultaneous and mutually supportive changes both to an organization’s value proposition to customers and to its underlying operating model.
At the value proposition level, these changes can address the choice of target segment, product or service offering, and revenue model.
At the operating model level, the focus is on how to drive profitability, competitive advantage, and value creation through these decisions on how to deliver the value proposition:
1. Where to play along the value chain
2. What cost model is needed to ensure attractive returns
3. What organizational structure and capabilities are essential to success
Business model innovation is also critical to business transformation. Many organizations share a common set of concerns: What type of business model innovation will help us achieve breakout performance? How do we avoid jeopardizing the core business? How do we build the capability to develop, rapidly test, and scale new models?
Inspiring an organization to change is not a trivial undertaking, but given the current strategic environment, it’s a critical one.
In conclusion, as businesses look to drive growth and competitiveness, it is increasingly essential for them to move from product innovation to business model innovation. By reimagining a new approach that includes entrepreneurial leadership and how it creates, delivers, and captures value, a company can stay ahead of the competition, tap into new revenue streams and markets, and remain relevant in an ever-changing business landscape.
A quote by Buckminster Fuller – an American theorist and systems architect.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
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