Your inner rebel is on to something…
By: Elvin Turner
Tags: Innovation, Change, Disruption, Transformation, Business

How to break the rules that could inadvertently kill your company

Could breaking a single rule disrupt an entire industry? This week, a British woman may do just that. The $511 billion global beauty industry will look on nervously as Elle Seline competes in the UK’s biggest beauty contest wearing no make-up.

Elle Seline

If she wins, the ensuing media frenzy could trigger trends that create new worry lines across the industry’s boardrooms.

Overruled?

More than ever, traditional ‘rules’ are under question in every industry: The speed and scope of change means that whilst rules may help drive consistency and predictability, they can also become a strategic millstone around the neck of any organisation.

Witness the rise of rule-breakers in industries including insurance (Lemonade), foreign exchange (Wise, formerly known as TransferWise), hotels (Airbnb) and healthcare (TytoCare). Such upstarts usually owe their success to deliberately barbequing an industry sacred cow.

This begs an awkward question: Are corporate leaders negligent if they are not encouraging people to deliberately explore news ways to break the ‘rules of the game’ in their respective industries?

“If you’re not burning down your business every 12 months, a competitor will supply the match,” says Andy Billings, Vice President of Profitable Creativity at gaming giant Electronic Arts.

Andy Billings, Electronic Arts

That may sound too radical for most, but it betrays a mindset that is unlikely to fall foul of the complacency that keeps the innovation juices bottled up inside most companies.

Darers go first

Every industry has its rules, and sooner or later they get broken by an organisation that asks a question that no-one ever thought of asking or dared to ask. Such questions can challenge relevance of prevailing business models and make many corporate innovation programmes look like lipstick on an ageing pig.

In my experience, it’s highly likely that these kinds of questions are not getting airtime inside your organisation. So how should you go about designing them?

Define reality, flip reality

One of the best methods to anticipate rule-breaking is to define your industry’s “non-negotiable” dynamics and then deliberately mess with them.

First, define reality: Map the dependencies for success in your industry or organisation today: e.g. pricing models, distribution, customer service, marketing, partnerships, capabilities.

Then, flip reality: Take each of those dependencies and ask deliberately unreasonable questions that significantly challenge industry norms. For example:

· How could we compete with hotels but without owning any hotels? (Airbnb)

· How could we have 7x more customers per employee than a standard bank? (Tangerine Bank)

· What if every track ever recorded could fit inside your pocket? (Spotify)

The greater the level of disruption that’s desired (or required), the more unreasonable the question should be. (For more tools to develop these questions, see chapters 15–19 in “Be Less Zombie: How great companies create dynamic innovation, fearless leadership & passionate people.”)

Seeing past ‘impossible’

Often these questions provoke management scorn. Whilst tantilising, until a solution can be imagined they feel like unrealistic and pointless pursuits.

What to do? When someone objects, “We can’t (do something) because…” try rephrasing the challenge with, “We can if…” and invite people to brainstorm dependencies for the problem being solved. The very act of stating that something is possible does something powerful to our brains. It clears the status quo fog and stimulates an overcoming mindset.

Often, we can’t see the box that we’re trying to think outside of.

In their book “A Beautiful Constraint” Adam Morgan and Mark Barden describe how Colin Kelly, the former Director of Research and Development at British baking firm Warburtons, used this technique. “He didn’t let people start with ‘we can’t because’. He forced them to start with ‘we can if’. So, for example, instead of saying ‘We can’t use that type of packaging because it will slow down the line,’ the person would be forced to say, ‘We can use that kind of new packaging if we run it on someone else’s line.’

It’s this kind of thinking that led to the development of Citizen M hotels. Founder Rattan Chadha wondered, “How could we give business travellers a 5-star hotel experience for a standard hotel room rate?”

Defying industry conventions, the company radically re-imagined how hotels should be built, staffed and furnished. It continues to grow rapidly most recently adding the Champs-Élysées, Paris to its locations.

CitizenM, Champs-Élysées, Paris

Sooner or later a major ‘rule’ in your sector will be broken. What would be unthinkable in your industry? What rules could ‘never’ be broken? What discoveries would your competitors hate you to make?

Deliberately trying to anticipate those shifts is single-handedly an act of good stewardship and, let’s face it, bare-faced cheek.