60 / Rotman Management Spring 20 19
swear by the 70/20/10 rule: 70 per cent of the time, resources
and people should be focused on the now, the core part of your
business; 20 per cent should be focused on what’s next — the
next three to five years, depending on your business; and 10 per
cent should be spent thinking about and imagining the truly
new and different.
My guess is that at least 10 per cent of your time is current-
ly being spent on things that you already know how to do and
questions you know the answers to. In meetings, the next time
you ask yourself, Why am I here, again?, take control of your
schedule and give yourself back 10 per cent of your time. Get out
there and see the world. Make room for discovery.
- MAKE THE CHANGE HAPPEN. A vision is worthless unless it is acted
on. Companies are hiring a lot of Chief Transformation Officers
today, and that can be helpful, because it drives momentum and
gives someone accountability. But it will not be helpful if all you’ve
done is delegated change to someone else and said, ‘You figure
it out’. We all have to be involved in making change happen.
Here are some of the most important tools to embrace.
FEEDBACK. In an age of emergent change, you will have to continu-
ally adapt your story, and that means keeping up with new facts
and shifting landscapes. The faster you get feedback, the faster
you’ll be able to change. Think about how, in most companies,
people receive feedback once a year. That is so outdated. Going
forward, we need to be open to live feedback, even if it involves
criticism. The fact is, if everyone thinks your idea is great, then
maybe you’re asking the wrong people. We have to invite crit-
ics to the table — people whose judgment and perspective is very
different from our own, who bring a different point of view.
With Ecomagination, we created an advisory board of our
biggest critics — people from NGOs who had been doing fund-
raising campaigns against this type of thing and who wanted to
bring our company down. We invited them to help develop our
scorecard and tell us how to make things better. We also part-
nered with innovative start-ups. The idea is to be asked some
really tough questions — what I call, ‘agitated inquiry’. You need
to beat your own ideas up to make sure they’re sturdy enough to
stand the test of time. How often do we spend time fighting and
arguing over something when we’ve lost sight of what the actual
problem is? My favourite thing to say to a stakeholder is, ‘Tell
me one thing that I don’t want to hear’.EXPERIMENTATION. The next part of making change happen in-
volves experimenting: test, learn, repeat, test, learn, repeat. This
requires a lot of failing, learning and re-framing. The best thing
you can do is test an early idea with a customer. Find customers
who are open to this and get their feedback earlier rather than
later. And make sure to involve some tough customers. When we
did our dreaming sessions with users, we didn’t only pick those
who were open to it; we also included people who thought it was
a really bad idea.
Next, you’re launching, and starting to prove that you ac-
tually have a business model, that you might be able to make
a profit doing this. The problem is, many businesses hold their
seed-stage ideas to the same metrics as their growth and fully
scaled ideas. When you don’t even know if you have any custom-
ers yet people will ask, ‘What’s your profit going to be?’, That’s
why making new things happen takes courage and resilience.If everyone thinks your idea is great, maybe
you’re asking the wrong people.