Today’s business leaders face a daunting and unprecedented challenge: The world is changing much faster than their organizations. Every business in every industry, with no exceptions, has been overwhelmed by a relentless accelerating pace of change. What makes this challenge so difficult is that there are no signs that things are going to slow down anytime soon.
In fact, with recent budding developments in the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and blockchain technology, all indications are that the pace of change is only going to get faster. Whether we like it or not, for the foreseeable future, we are living in a permanently fast forward world.
The current reality of a world that changes faster than most organizations is unsustainable because the consequences are likely to be unrecoverable, as Kodak, Blockbuster, Tower Records, and many newspaper publishers discovered when their business models were completely disrupted by new technologies.
If business leaders want their companies to survive and, more importantly, thrive in a fast forward world, they will need the courage to adopt new habits based on radically new ways of thinking and acting. It requires courage because adopting new habits means changing longstanding assumptions and beliefs about how the world of business works, and changing ingrained habits is rarely easy.
One of the most successful business books of the past few decades is Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.Covey defines a habit as the intersection of Knowledge, Skill, and desire. Knowledge is the “what to do.” Skill is the “how to do.” And desire is the “want to do.” In business, desire is rarely an issue. Most business leaders are highly motivated to achieve results. When they are disrupted, it’s usually not a lack of desire that causes their displacement, but rather the failure to adapt their knowledge and skills to new realities.
Habits are powerful forces because the ways of thinking and acting they engender tend to operate on a subconscious level. When this happens, knowledge and skill often become second nature and the person is regarded as an expert. As long as the knowledge and the skills remain relevant, the related habits are valuable and useful.
However, if new technologies, such as digital photography, transform an industry, the knowledge and skills associated with film processing can rapidly lose their value, and yesterday’s expertise can suddenly become today’s folly, especially when the experts resist the new realities and insist on the old ways.
This can become compounded when habits are shared by a community of like-minded people and become the foundation for a mindset that encapsulates the shared assumptions and understanding about how things work. Like habits, mindsets also operate at a subconscious level and can be very resistant to change.
The reason the world is changing much faster than most organizations is because business leaders are invested in habits and mindsets that no longer work, and unless they mobilize the will to change, the gap between the world and their organizations is only going to get wider. However, if they can summon the determination to think and act differently, they can not only close this gap, they can also leverage new ways of thinking and acting into new individual habits and new collective mindsets that can become a sustainable competitive advantage for navigating a rapidly changing world.
Navigating businesses through the turbulent waters of rapid change means that business leaders have to become very knowledgeable in three new ways of thinking: networks, exponential thinking, and collective intelligence.
The most significant consequence of the digital revolution is the creation of a hyper-connected world that has accelerated the development of a new form of social organization: the distributed peer-to-peer network.
