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What Would You Say to Provoking the Future?


 

There is such a shift happening with new world thinking. How we approach problems and where we need to apply focus and effort.

Provoke is a great read that helps push your strategic thinking. What you will see from this book is the major differentiator that separates start-ups from established brands, and why some brands are able to adapt while others seem to fall off the cliff.

Provoke is all about how you as a leader, need to embrace taking action versus the slow burn that is so prevalent in our organizations as leadership is focused on year over year results and protecting the bonus.


Here are some key takeaways for me that will help you and your team have more success.


Accepting a Trend and Properly Understanding How Mature it is

  • Evaluate the trend that you are seeing and label as "if" or "when". Leaders often miss an opportunity because they either miss it, deny it, over analyze it or respond poorly
  • A correctly labelled "if" vs "when" trend should completely influence what your next moves will be
  • There are certain biases that impact your ability to see things clearly, they are: 

    • Availability Bias
      You use models that are readily available and easy for you, not necessarily the correct sample
       
    • Egocentric Bias
      You overweight data or context that is aligned to what you already think

    • Affect Heuristic Bias
      You rely on your emotions rather than facts when making a decision. This one can be particularly detrimental as our emotional state can be influenced by many factors. It is not uncommon to have the same situation, same circumstances, same needs and make two different decisions as you can feel different on different days

    • Status Quo Bias
      Prefer what you know to what you don't

    • Overconfidence Bias
      You over estimate the likelihood that you are right

Incorporate Difference

One way that you can insulate yourself from all of the biases that impact our judgement (stop worrying about it, this impacts everyone) is to focus on diversity.
Having different people on the team that come from different backgrounds, work experiences, demographics, whatever. We are all unique and a sum of our experiences. Everyone walks around with their own lenses that filter the world and whatever challenge is presented to them. Embrace this, it's a super power to be able to leverage this.

Create cultures of safety. Ask yourself, how can I make people comfortable enough that they will disagree with me if they do. You may have the best idea in the room, however you should never let that stop you from putting through a gauntlet of questions, analysis and attempted destruction.

If you can't kill an idea, now it becomes interesting.

Be open to changing your position. Something that I share with my team all the time is this.
I don't care who's idea it was, it seems to work and we will use it until we have something better.

Two personal things that you now know about me. I rarely accept that anything is as good as it can be, and I take inspiration from everywhere!


Construct the Future


One of the most powerful things that you can do is to imagine your Utopia. What is the end state, what happens if that trend takes hold. What happens if the market shifts a certain way.

When we open ourselves up to thinking about the end state, it becomes much easier to work backwards. 

Another great frame here is the concept of pre-mortem. You think about all of the things that did hurt or kill your product / service / idea. The goal is to again, get your mind into the place where you can see the different levers in front of you and TAKE ACTION.


All the thinking in the world will never make anything happen without action. Don't keep your team in a state of paralysis.

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