The Moment You Can't Ignore: When Big Trouble Leads to a Great Future by Malachi O'Connor & Barry Dornfeld

Author:Malachi O'Connor & Barry Dornfeld
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2014-10-06T14:00:00+00:00

WHERE TO LOOK FOR FOUND PILOTS

It’s not always easy to find these harbingers of the future within your organization, but they tend to show up in some interesting places: at the edges and on the front lines, in the words and actions of new people to the organization, and in things that startle or unsettle you.

At the edges and on the front lines. Found pilots can often be found at what we think of as the edges of an organization’s activity. Edges can take different forms, but an edge always stands in contrast to the core. The core focuses on the ways work traditionally gets done—based on current agreements that are usually tacit and taken for granted. Edges include the people and places where new ways of working often show up. One kind of edge can be close to the customer while distant from the core in the way field offices can be distant from corporate headquarters. Frontline workers work at that kind of edge, distant from where executive decisions are made, but often directly in contact with customers who can provide feedback and new ideas.

Another kind of edge, where the inside of the company meets the outside, is occupied by those who work with suppliers, outsiders who sometimes learn enough about a company over time to be valuable sources of alternative ways of working. A manufacturer of battery-powered tools, for example, discovered that a company supplying it with batteries had streamlined its manufacturing process in ways that reduced production costs while speeding up cycle time. The founder of the tool company became interested in what his supplier was doing and asked them to train one of his teams in ways to streamline the tool manufacturing process. By working at the edge with his supplier, our client was able to discover found pilots that eventually led to a long-term partnership between the two companies that has helped each improve productivity and increase revenue growth.

Found pilots operating at the edges act as heralds of the future. A wonderful example of this occurred when an executive at Hewlett Packard, one of the largest manufacturers of desktop printers, was settling his daughter into her dorm room for her first year of college. He suggested they visit the campus bookstore and pick up a printer. She said that wouldn’t be necessary. “I don’t really print anything out anymore.” In that comment, the executive caught a worrisome glimpse of the future of the computer printing business and a harbinger of some big changes coming.

Creative experiments at the edges of your organization don’t happen in a vacuum. They often emerge in reaction to current ways of working that are the norm in the core of the organization. It can be tempting to grab new and exciting things you learn from found pilots at the edges and drag them into the core immediately. But the core represents the status quo, and its inertia can be powerful. There is an emerging body of social science research on the relationship between the edge and the core.

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