Three Keys to Success

Excerpt from a 2017 podcast with Dr. Chad McAllister at The Everyday Innovator

Tenacity

One of the biggest factors in success is tenacity. One thing we found is that designing organizations is, first of all, never done. Even organizations that develop great design and achieve high performance will eventually succumb to entropy if they don’t build continuous renewal, reinvention, and rethinking into their organizational design. They’ll decline in performance. None of these solutions, or even the book’s solutions, are a recipe for success for the next century unless you do them all and keep doing them all. Consequently, there’s a whole chapter on learning and improvement and the ways to learn in the ReCreate the Organization You Really Want! book.

Learning

It is about learning, and it’s about learning forever. Learning things about your organization that nobody else knows. In other words, it is creating new strategies and ways of doing things, testing them, and finding out what works and doesn’t. You won't find those answers in a book. You’re going to find those answers by conducting your experiments. But you first have to develop a cool new design to test. So that’s a continuous process, and it just never ends. Back in the quality movement, we used to say it’s a journey without an end. It’s not a very good marketing pitch because most of you are likely saying, “Okay, I don’t want any of that. I want something I can accomplish and be done with.” When we figure that out, we will package it because we could make a lot of money. If we figured out the solution to the organizational performance that will be fixed for a hundred years, we’d really be good. But we haven’t, and I don’t know anybody who has.

Develop or Decline

Our organization is getting stale and probably declining if we’re not continually learning. So you may not have to grow in quantity, but you must develop continuously. Development vs. growth is a Russell Ackoff concept I got from a talk he gave 30 years ago. He said I quit growing in size somewhere in my late teens, but I’ve been developing and getting better since then. Whether we’re growing in size or developing, we’ve got to be developing. The same is true for our organization. That’s the only way we know to stay on the leading edge, stay competitive, and be relevant in a fast-changing marketplace.

The video is an excerpt from a 2017 podcast with Dr. Chad McAllister at The Everyday Innovator. For more podcasts on innovation and product development, check out the podcast on his website and iTunes.