"The organizations that look most ready for the future are often the ones most blind to the fact that they aren't." - Futurist Jim Carroll
This post evolved as I wrote it - it started out like this! So that's too good ideas in one post!"The moment you think your future is guaranteed is the moment it becomes certain that it isn’t."
One thing about the idea of innovation is that it's easy to spot when the setup isn't right for it to happen! I've gone into a lot of organizations that look great on paper, but underneath the surface, they're actively set up to fail.
Not from a lack of ideas, but because they're trapped in a loop of excuses, slow execution, and legacy thinking. I can usually see this during the keynote planning conference calls - little signals, small comments, careful observations when I'm chatting with the people who are bringing me in.
Here's ten red flags. See how many apply.
1. The Nostalgia Trap. Every idea looks exactly like last year's idea with a fresh coat of paint. People seem to be more focused on what was, rather than what could be.
2. The Informed Delusion. There are mountains of historical data to justify the old strategy, but no insight for potential new directions.
3. The Clarity Trap. Everyone is frozen, avoiding decisions while waiting for "the dust to settle." They don't realize that clarity is a myth.
4. Accelerated Incompetence. You think tech fixes everything, so there is a rush to automate a broken process - but no one asks why the process is broken in the first place!
5. Over-Administeration. Everyone is busy firefighting today's fires. There's zero time available to anyone to look out at the fringes where the real trends are born.
6. The Permission Deathtrap. Every initiative requires three approvals, two committees, and a pilot program that runs eighteen months. By the time you've finished getting things moving, your competitor shipped the product.
7. Generational Blindness. There's a lot of older leadership who make exclusive decisions about a future they know very little about, all while shutting out the digital natives who actually live in it.
8. The Crushing of the Misfits. The corporate culture rewards smooth compliance and groupthink. The rebels, outliers, and oddballs are the exact people who get the future done - and are actively ignored.
9. The Addiction to Consensus. Every bold idea gets smoothed over through so many layers of agreement that by the time it arrives, it's bland, dead, unimaginative.
10. Dissidents are shunned. Someone who sees a failing strategy stays quiet. No one ever tells the truth about what's going wrong.
Take a hard look at your team meetings this week. If your culture is built on protecting yesterday instead of running at tomorrow, it's time to change the physics of how you operate.
Fast beats slow.
Bold beats old.
Get moving.
Futurist Jim Carroll can spot inherent failure from a mile away.