Facebook’s “Move fast and break things” posters in its workplace morphed into a Silicon Valley watchword. Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei and consultant Anne Morriss say it wrongly suggested a certain amount of wreckage – often in people – was the price to pay for inventing the future.
The duo has spent much of the past decade helping companies deal with the wreckage and have found the most effective leaders solve problems at an accelerated pace, while also seeing themselves as responsible for ensuring the success and well-being of their customers, employees and shareholders.
“How do they do that? In short, they invest as much time and energy into building trust – and yes, sometimes rebuilding it – as they do into building speed. Speed unleashes your organization’s energy and reveals where you’re going. Trust convinces your stakeholders to come along for the ride,” they write in Move Fast and Fix Things.
They call the combination of high speed and high trust “accelerating excellence.” If your organization has high trust but low speed it’s in a “responsible stewardship” state, making slow and steady progress. The reverse situation, high speed and low trust, is best described as “reckless disruption,” essentially the moving fast and breaking things formulation. The nadir of low trust and low speed is “inevitable decline.”
Which of those four situations describes your organization?
In the preferred state, you will be experimenting as you fix things, moving on less than perfect data, essentially feeling your way to the correct solution. The objective is to learn, so be willing to fail with enthusiasm, making intelligent mistakes. They urge you to try anything that has a reasonable chance of working, but don’t be attached to the results – you will get information from both successes and failures.
“Should you fix systems or people? Hire innovators or create a culture of innovation? Better train your people or redesign the way they work? The answer is yes. Do all of it, with ambition and urgency,” they write.
But give particular attention to trust wobbles – areas where your trust needs boosting. That means viewing the possible projects through the eyes of the stakeholder at the centre of each. Are Gen Z employees frustrated and leaving at an accelerated rate? That’s a trust wobble with those employees you should fix. Similarly, if customers are jumping ship for a competitor or shareholders are upset over profitability, you have to address the trust wobble with those folks.
Trust revolves around empathy, logic and authenticity. The stakeholders must believe you care about them, are logically capable of meeting their needs and can be expected to do what you say. What’s your company’s primary wobble and what are the reasons you are losing trust?
The authors note that most experimentation in companies is on products with far less such activity in other aspects of the business. In their experience, most of your problems are probably showing up in human form and you need to fix that.
Capability gaps are common. The team you have assembled does not match the work that has to be done. “We’re seeing it everywhere now as the complexity of running any business spikes. We now tell leaders to just assume there’s a capability gap somewhere in their operations, your challenge is to find it before your customers feel it and your competitors exploit it,” the authors write.
Once you have pinpointed the capability gap, you can improve the skills of the people you have, change the way they work or find new talent. They suggest starting with the first option – upskilling – even though that is often not where organizations usually turn their attention. They have found that development will take you further than you expect and generate benefits along the way, including higher loyalty, engagement and job satisfaction as it improves trust in your management and the organization. “People are the only investments with the possibility of infinite returns, and yet we often stop behaving as if that’s true once we onboard them,” the authors note.
They point to a survey that found more than 75 per cent of executives sampled from Fortune 1000 companies reported development was inadequate at their organization. These are sophisticated organizations in challenging, fast-paced times, yet they are allowing the learning curves of their teams to flatten. To adapt and evolve more quickly continuous development of employees is vital.
Airbnb set up an ambitious Data University after it decided that information was the voice of its users but only a small, highly technical team knew how to work with the data proficiently. Its 30-module curriculum trained others in how to access, interpret and integrate data into everyday decision making.
“We suggest at least a quarterly conversation with your direct reports about how they’re going to upgrade their skills. What are they going to do today to get better? What about tomorrow?” Prof. Frei and Ms. Morriss write.
You need to move fast and fix – not break – things.
Cannonballs
- McGill University management professor Henry Mintzberg says corporations must restore trust in themselves by striving to do better – not just do more. He urges entrepreneurs to find some patient, decent capital, that will allow you to grow responsibly and sustainably. Then grow qualitatively instead of quantitively – provide better quality or better service, for which you can charge an honest premium.
- Change consultant Greg Satell argues VUCA – the notion we live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous time – is mostly a myth: “The inescapable truth is that some things move faster today and others move slower. We don’t have – nor should we want – more change today than before. We need to be more thoughtful about change, more deliberate about the ones we undertake and more tenacious in our pursuit of them.”
- Hiring consultant John Sullivan says you can instantly improve hiring results by giving candidates a real problem your organization is facing and then asking them to walk you through the steps they would use to solve the quandary.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.