Forget About the Theory!
By: Rachel Hentsch
Tags: Agency, Success, Expansion, Stories From The Field, Innovation

We are curious about how they got the top management on board with this. It turns out that Charlie works directly with the CEO, Michel Aballea, and that they are co-leaders of the vision. The trust and alignment between them is complete, so Charlie in fact has carte blanche to take initiative on whatever is needed to make the Vision Process work.

Stéphanie explains that they have recently opened up the process completely, to everyone. “Right now, we don’t even talk about Decathlon. We talk more in general. What would you like to see emerge? What are your concerns? We don’t push Decathlon, or the position of Decathlon in the future: it’s more personal. Decathlon is not yet the subject. The focus is on the evolving of the world: how do you picture it, and what do you think is important?” In order to carry forth this exploration they have created a network of Vision Relays all around the world, whom they train, and who then apply the methods and the tools to their context, locally.

Vision Relay Training in Lille, October 2019 — people came from 40 cities.

They have done this in 15 cities so far. “It works in every culture — but”, they hasten to add, “the conditions need to be right, obviously.” We ask them to elaborate more on these conditions, and the factors named are: trusting the people, trusting the process, ensuring that each person has a voice, paying attention to listening, locating the event in a non-Decathlon environment, democratising contributions using a digital platform so that “everyone has the same power” — even creating space for silence and withdrawal. To illustrate this last point, Charlie recounts: “There was a very warm moment when I was in Ghana. There was a girl from South Africa who didn’t say anything at all. Today, she is one of the biggest contributors to the Vision. She needed time to digest the process. She felt that she had that space of safety and comfort to not say anything: that’s quite important. We want people to feel that they can go as far as they want — or not.”

Reaching Outwards and Opening Up

We are curious to know more about how the Vision Relay trainings unfold, and inquire about the duration of the physical meet-ups. These typically last one day and a half. They usually keep the afternoon open, for agility and questions, and finish around 2pm at the latest. At that stage, the newly formed Vision Relay people are already thinking about how they can get organised in their own countries. It has so far worked in every country.

Vision Relay Training in Hong Kong

What shifts have happened since January 2016 and how do they know that they are getting to where they want to go? One of the biggest changes since 2016 is the possibility for external people to join in the vision shaping. Through social media, the opening has been communicated far and wide. One of the traditional Decathlon deliverables every 2 or 3 years had been to produce a book of macro trends for the world, where people from inside the company could write and share about their own vision. Then in 2018 they took the gamble to shift from “trying to represent the world”, to opening up the creative writing and envisioning process expanding it to a much wider ecosystem, to see what could emerge from that. They embarked upon a journey where they shared their intention, invited VIPs (volontaire, inspiré, partageant — voluntary, inspired, sharing people) to “just come over and start a journey together, exploring how would you like to see things change.” They went through different stages involving both people internal to the company, and local people from outside the company, building up an open-source sharing system to transition into the next future vision. As Stéphanie sums it up — alluding to the company’s signature chromatic branding: “We can’t “stay blue! The world, the earth is mainly blue, but the world is not Decathlon, so how do we change that, the posture, and our answers, and our impact, all together?”

Charlie adds: “When you open to all, not only are you bringing transparency — you can’t bullshit anymore — there it is: right there, in front of you. But also, you stop looking at it from the same point of view, in fact you want other people to look at it for you.”

“And this is a huge difference between the two vision exercises and yet, we have to be a little bit careful in the way that we communicate that. We want people to feel it and live it, rather than buy in about the why. That’s so important. So we keep a lot of the theory to ourselves.”

Towards New Structures and New Behaviours

Things are shifting in how people perceive the business place, its role towards the world, and society itself. We ask the Decathlon team whether they are observing structures or new behaviours ensuing from that? For instance, different evaluation and reward systems? New store practices? Innovative products?

Infograph extracted from the “CO-INSPIRING — Generic Vision 2030” Presentation: the Vision 2030 time cycle

Charlie pauses to reflect. He reckons the answer is: not quite yet. “We have a vision, and from that vision will come the strategies.” But there is still some resistance to overcome. He elaborates on the example of collaboration versus competition. “Why do we need to work with our competitors? Because we have all got the same problem when it comes to water, let’s say. Water scarcity is a global problem and we need to tackle it with our competitors, and yet we’re still not doing it. I’ve always said that the vision exercise has the excuse and the duty to do things differently.” Something has indeed started to shift since the moment that Decathlon employees realised they have the “permission” to think about a future with their customers, and weave in things they had always dreamt of doing, but never got round to actualising. “So we hope — and believe — that structures will change. Things have already been happening, we’re not just six: we’re probably a few hundred, and we do push the boundaries of the organisation in the traditional sense.”

Stéphanie adds: “We find echoes even within the company, something people are maybe not mentioning, but there are things coming up. I can’t say that we are seeing a change right now, but we can talk about things in an easier and more open way than before.” So although the innovation team are admittedly all dreaming of more investment in exploration, the current model of finance is still one of exploitation, to do with the running of stores. “And fortunately they do work, and that creates the money to pay us. But we see the need for an evolution in that structure which will eventually come, from whatever we decide in this vision that we have collectively written: so it’s a big step, to see what’s going to come next.”

Charlie believes that the power of the vision will work towards shaping strategies that will ultimately impact and shift structures. He offers an example from their last vision, where the cause was called “be where we are needed”. It addressed the importance of having a social impact, locally. He recounts: “It’s not something we ever did before. Our expansion strategy used to be just ‘open open open, be present, take a foothold in the market’, but once we wrote this intention to ‘be where we are needed’, it completely reorientated our expansion strategy. We were about to open in Cape Town, and we stopped! That’s not where we were needed: we were needed in Johannesburg, so everyone went to Johannesburg.”

Ghana, for instance, was never on the cards in the previous regime. That again changed with the “being where we are needed” intention. So Decathlon went to Ghana, only to discover that “you can’t sell diving masks to people who don’t know how to swim”, or basketball gear to a population with no playing courts. This suddenly took the initiative into uncharted territory, way beyond retail and sales, into the realm of societal and infrastructural impact: building, teaching. “This really gave birth to a massive social impact which is now becoming a trend throughout the company, and we’re starting to talk about societal impact, like it’s always been there — but it hasn’t.”

Charlie concludes: “So the power of the vision will then orientate strategies, and therefore organisation: it comes in that order, and we really hope that it is going to influence the business model as well. Because I don’t have a problem with selling 1.3 billion products, as long as every single one of them is eco-designed — which is not the case today. Only 4.5% of products are eco-designed.”

What is the impact on their employees? “The people who get involved in this, they really love it, and we don’t do it for what we call ‘employee brand’. But people will stay for this sort of thing, people will stay with us if they believe that they can play a role, they can have their say, because they know that in other companies it doesn’t really work like that.”

Asking the Right Questions

If this was all about Decathlon, it wouldn’t work. For the first time in 44 years the question is no longer: “what will a Decathlon store be in 10 years?” Charlie is emphatic: “I don’t care! We don’t care! And we see that, in fact, nobody really cares. Really. The questions are ‘what will the world be in 10 years, what do YOU want to live in 10 years — for you yourself, your family, your kids, and then: what role can WE play in that world that YOU want to live? And this opens up a reason to participate.”

We are curious to know how in 2030 Audrey, Charlie and Stéphanie will be able to assess what has shifted, and how they think they will be able to measure that? Quantitatively or qualitatively? There is a long reflective pause, and then Charlie says: “By the fact that we will exist.” There is some laughter, and then he adds, with a grave expression: “If we don’t change, we, as Decathlon (selling stuff in a store), die.” He elaborates further: “If we’re really obsessed about making sport accessible, what we have to do is to get people to play sport, and you don’t have to go through a store to do that, there’s a million different ways to do that. And this is what we have trouble with today: getting away from that.”

They hold the firm conviction that any multinational of their size that doesn’t reply to one or more of the problems of the 17 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) will not survive beyond 2030. “So we’ve got to get on this curve, we have to transform, and our way is to go through the U. Because it’s the sum of 100,000 people wanting to make that change that will make the difference.”

In closing, Charlie remarks: “And something that we haven’t said, but is definitely worth mentioning: we don’t believe that we have all the answers. We are far from thinking that we’ve figured this out and it’s really test and learn. Everything we do, we’ve never done before. Our IT partners are pulling their hair out because they’ve never done this before, and that’s cool, we’re quite happy with that. But what we want to do, at the end of all this, is make everything available. If our methods and tools are useful, to you or to anyone, we’re going to make that available, we’ll make a book, we’ll make a film, we’ll go on a tour, we’ll go on the road, we’ll do keynotes, because we believe that’s all a part of it. And that’s staying true to the spirit of the vision, which is: open to all.”