SwampFox

Coming in 2010: The Future We’re Creating Here: Learning Communities To Empower Your Champions To Drive Transformational Growth

Below is the current draft of the introduction to a book I am writing and plan to release at InnoVenture Southeast in May 2010. If you are willing to read the full draft of my new book and give me your feedback, contact me.

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists—Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition.

In the movie “A Few Good Men,” Jack Nicholson as the grizzled Commander of GITMO glares down from the witness stand at the young buck attorney Tom Cruise, ‘"We follow orders son. We follow orders, or people die. It's that simple. Are we clear?"

Ralph Hulseman, my partner in the start-up company Hoowaki, and I had lunch with Admiral Albert Baciocco, formerly Chief of Naval Research, to discuss how the Navy might use our technology to transform surfaces at the nano-scale. We had suggestions for traditional forces, like treating surfaces on submarines. The Admiral quickly redirected our attention to Special Forces. The Navy values anything that gets a Navy Seal on the beach faster or with a greater payload.

As lunch closed, I chatted that in today’s world irregular troops are much more important than they were. The Admiral said, “no the focus is still on regular forces.” I said I meant personnel like Navy Seals have become more important. The Admiral looked me straight in the eye and said, “Special Forces now are the regular military.”

The US military’s response immediately after 9/11 was the deployment of traditional military forces to produce shock and awe. But once the infrastructure was destroyed, then what? The enemy isn’t a conventional force tied to any particular geography, like the former Soviet Union. The US military is operating in a dynamically changing environment post 9/11, where the enemy doesn’t respect traditional country borders or organizational boundaries.

In this world, the “Doctrine for Joint Operations” published by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, emphasizes, “The successful conduct of special operations relies on individual and small unit proficiency in a multitude of specialized, often nonconventional combat skills applied with adaptability, improvisation, innovation, and self-reliance.” Special Forces don’t operate in isolation from traditional forces. Submarines deliver Navy Seals close to the beach. The Air Force delivers air strikes called in by Army Rangers. In a time of drastic change, though, the sense and respond capabilities of the Special Forces are at a premium to leverage the massive scale of conventional military systems.

The military is learning another powerful lesson. When allegiances shift on a daily basis to those who can best meet people’s needs for security and a good life, winning today’s firefights is not enough to defeat the enemy. Long term peace comes from winning the hearts and minds of civilians by understanding and developing pragmatic solutions to their problems. The military, designed to prevail in hostile conflict, has learned that winning the peace and ensuring long term stability requires growing trust with partners who can help create viable, prosperous communities.

The global economy has recently experienced shock and awe, rattling the foundations of institutions from governments to universities. Global corporations from banking to automotive have either vaporized or are dim reflections of their former glory. Great organizations of the future are phoenixes rising from the ashes of relationships and resources around the world. That the military, built on the cultural norm that orders are followed or people die, finds it essential to enhance its intuitive and adaptive learning capability, should cause all leaders to pause and consider if their organizations are sufficiently capable of learning to adjust to the dramatic turbulence we all are experiencing.

Learning organizations which can identify growth markets of the future are at a premium in this lackluster economy. For the past several years, economic growth was driven by an unsustainable, debt induced bubble, and companies could grow merely by filling the increasing, credit driven demand for more stuff. Now that the debt tsunami has washed by, massive deleveraging will be a drag on economic growth for many years, with little growth to be had for the foreseeable future from riding the debt wave.

Beyond the current economic crisis, we are in a period of profound change in our society. Revolutions in materials and connectivity are transforming industries from media to transportation to healthcare. The fall of the Berlin Wall is emblematic of the globalization of talent and resources flowing and settling in places offering the greatest competitive advantage worldwide. Just as the industrial revolution shifted energy sources from people and animals to fossil fuels, climate change and fossil fuel depletion are catalyzing a shift to clean, renewable energy sources.

Changes building over the past several decades are causing the most significant shift in our understanding of who are in half a millennium. A village priest in 1450 was understood by his parishioners to be an intermediary to God for a very pragmatic reason; theirs was a religion of the book which the people couldn’t read. That year, Johannes Gutenberg first printed with movable type. In the next seventy years a thousand printers throughout Europe dramatically reduced the cost of information. Many thousands of people became readers of mass-produced and widely distributed newspapers, pamphlets, and books, including the Bible in vernacular languages. In 1517 Martin Luther unintentionally flicked a spark on this dry kindling by nailing his 95 theses to the door of Palast Church in Wittenberg, observing that no where does the Bible say the priest is an intermediary to God. Thousands of newly literate parishioners agreed, and the blazing inferno of broad literacy so radically changed the way people saw themselves that we date the beginning of “modern” to that time. Before then people are “medieval.” Afterwards they are “enlightened,” like us.

We are also living through a transformative age in which the blazing inferno of ubiquitous connectivity is forging new peer relationships, blurring traditional country borders and organizational boundaries, and redefining a new “modern.” Like the learned medieval priests, learned managers and professionals today are in danger of becoming irrelevant. Learners creating the future likely will not be the leading authorities of the world as it exists today, but innovators and entrepreneurs with the best informed intuition about what the world will be tomorrow.

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz who had the power within her all along to return home, leaders can find enormous, latent potential all around them waiting to be tapped. Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, notes:

People who are part of the creative class—science, technology, arts, culture, entertainment and professions—account for 35 to 40 per cent of the work force and produce more than half of all wages and salaries. But here's the rub… every human being is creative.

The key to creating real, enduring economic prosperity is to extend the boundaries of the creative economy to everyone. Sooner or later, someone somewhere in the world will make this happen.

Make that happen in your world by creating a culture that nurtures your champions creating the future here, defining “here” from your perspective. While all people are innately creative, typically only a small percentage of people inside an organization regularly contribute insights about what the future of the organization should be. Even a smaller percentage of people from the outside with a vested interest in the organization’s success are engaged.

For almost thirty years, I have worked with organizations across industry, academia, entrepreneurs, investors and service providers. Organizations don’t innovate. Empowered individuals do—entrepreneurs of small and medium sized companies seeking to grow; large company executives expanding existing markets and creating new ones; academic leaders providing career opportunities for students and support for faculty; and not-for-profit directors attracting resources to fulfill their missions.

So far, there is probably not much here that you disagree with. So what holds us back? All organizations have a culture articulated in the values, systems and processes people use to do their jobs each day. Just as a harbor pilot keeps a ship in the center of the channel when entering a port, an organization’s systems and processes keep it centered in its marketplace. Those usually recognized as the most successful leaders most effectively and efficiently use the existing systems and processes to deliver incremental improvements meeting the needs of current customers. In a time of drastic change, this type of leadership is necessary but not sufficient to ensure a prosperous future.

A large, successful organization’s greatest asset in times of relative predictability is a very strong culture—its greatest weakness, especially in a time of drastic change, is a very strong culture. When the market channel shifts, what once were efficient and effective systems and processes become bureaucratic and expensive baggage that impede the organization from making the transformational change that is necessary to survive long-term. Large organizations usually fail when attempting to cram the new wine of an emerging market opportunity into the old wineskin of existing systems and processes. Many large organizations do not have an adaptable and intuitive learning capability for finding emerging opportunities and then crafting relationships and resources into new systems and processes attuned to meeting the new needs.

When global economic storms reroute channels of commerce worldwide, entrepreneurial organizations often are the most successful at addressing emerging needs because their systems and processes are not fully formed and can be molded by the market. A few entrepreneurial companies break out to become major companies, especially if they are lucky enough to exist in one of the pockets of infrastructure to support them, like Silicon Valley or Austin, TX. But most small and medium sized organizations never reach their full potential for lack of expertise and resources to deploy their solutions on a global scale.

The most globally competitive communities match the raw talent and technology developed in universities, with new markets discovered and developed by entrepreneurs, with the ability to scale of global companies. How do you create a learning community around your organization to thrive in our time of drastic change?

Phil Yanov, a friend who founded the GSA Technology Council, chatted online to me one evening that “people are looking for hope and a path.” That’s the purpose of this book. How do you identify the champions in your organization who can drive transformational growth by creating the future? How do you develop a culture that sparks their informed intuition of what can be? How do you provide them a process to systematically grow their credibility to attract the talent and resources necessary to realize their visions?

The informed intuition inherent in innovation emerges from conversations, so most of essential points in this book are illustrated through stories of organizations I have been involved with. While many originally appeared as essays on the SwampFox.ws website I publish and are local to the region around Greenville SC where I live, their lessons are universal. I have used real names in positive stories, and as a matter of discretion I have not used names in negative stories, but all of them are real. This book is inherently incomplete, because it is only comes alive it sparks your informed intuition as you make lots of notes in the margins connecting these stories to your expertise and experiences.

Best of luck on your journey. What an awesome time to be alive. Carpe Diem!

John Warner
January 2010