In step seven of the Breakthrough Process, the focus is on preparing decision makers for the forthcoming breakthrough recommendations. This step is crucial because breakthrough ideas are often unconventional and creative, requiring decision makers to be psychologically, emotionally, and professionally ready to embrace innovative solutions. The process involves resetting mental paradigms, addressing the fear of uncertainty, and expanding the boundary of the possible within the organization. To create a breakthrough curve, leaders must adopt a strategic intention to lead the transformational change. This step ensures that decision makers are not only receptive but supportive of the breakthrough ideas presented by the Breakthrough Action and Analysis Teams (BATs). The goal is to facilitate a smooth transition from traditional thinking to transformative action.
Transcript
As mentioned before, the failures I’ve had in my career—three or four, to be exact—are not due to the process itself. They were my failures. I failed to ensure that the decision makers were ready for the creative, inventive, and breakthrough nature of the recommendations. This breakthrough process is virtually guaranteed to produce solutions to problems that have never been encountered before. Remember, managers and decision makers are supposed to be the smartest individuals in the organization. While this isn’t always true, it’s the perception. The higher you go, the smarter you’re supposed to be.
Now, imagine being a senior executive decision maker in an organization, and you’ve just had some consultants come in and get the frontline people to come up with exciting new recommendations. And they actually do—they come up with amazing ideas that you haven’t thought of. It is very important that these managers be prepared psychologically, emotionally, and professionally to say yes to things they didn’t think of. We’ll discuss how to achieve this.
Now you’re down here, preparing the decision makers to move forward. This is extremely important.
Remember, you’ve got the breakthrough action teams that have been working on various projects, the OE team, the executives, and the steering group. They’ve been interacting and briefed on these projects. They’ve worked hard and come up with recommendations. But before presenting these recommendations, you must prepare the executive team. These are the actual slides I use and the conversations I have, sometimes in a half-day workshop with the decision makers.
I go back to the life cycle. I explain how this life cycle represents not only the life cycle of a product or business but also the life cycle of ideas, paradigms, and ways people understand the business. Even the processes and procedures you’re counting on right now are somewhere on that life line. The reason you need breakthrough thinking rather than traditional thinking is that these particular issues or problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them, as Einstein said.
What you need to do is, in a sense, go back to zero and ask yourself: Who are we now, and what are we trying to accomplish? What if we didn’t have any of this—the organization, the people, the structure, the procedures, or even the products? How would we be organized? This mental slate-cleaning is necessary to prepare for new ideas.
What’s needed is to create what I call a breakthrough curve. Go back and look at the video on the life cycle to understand this better. This is what I do with my clients: get them ready to not only receive the breakthrough curve but to champion it. They will end up taking credit for it, but that’s okay. Another thing I discuss is the different kinds of change.
First-order change is incremental change, like moving from where things are now to where they need to be later with small steps. Kaizen, or continuous improvement, is essential for any healthy organization. It requires a stable environment and simple changes with minimal impact on the organization. Planned change, on the other hand, involves moderate trauma. This is change management, which rarely works because it doesn’t fundamentally address the paradigms causing the problems. Managers and leaders prefer this because it gives the illusion of control, and they see chaos as the enemy.
However, breakthrough and transformation require some uncertainty and chaos. It also requires a clear picture of the future state. Any honest executive will tell you that plans rarely go as smoothly as PowerPoint slides indicate. You will need second-order or transformational nonlinear change, which is not incremental. This is like a quantum leap. You start experimenting with things, and suddenly you reach a new place. You need a strategic intention to get there. The plan is useful, but the process will be chaotic. Management needs a strong commitment, great courage, and continuous feedback throughout the process. Why? Because you cannot plan your way from A to B; you have to discover your way, which includes uncertainty.
Managers, like the rest of us, prefer to operate within known and familiar boundaries. Operating within these familiar zones creates what I call the boundary of the possible. When someone recommends an idea that approaches this boundary, they are often seen as troublemakers or crazy. Fear and turbulence set in, and the organization instinctively resists fundamental change. It takes courageous, mission-oriented leaders to push through and expand the boundary of the possible. When this happens, more things become possible than ever before. This is the power of the breakthrough process: it expands the boundary of the possible, increases the organization’s capacity for success, and leads to ideas that no one would have thought possible.
