THE MAELSTROM THAT IS TODAY’S WORLD poses an existential risk for businesses around the globe. In the past, being adaptable to change was a nice-to-have feature for companies; today, it is a must-have. A ‘get-this-wrong-and-you-might-not-make-it’ requirement.
As change rages on and leaders do their best to keep up, it’s important to remember that tried-and-tested solutions are precisely that: They have already been tried and tested. In the past tense. And past-tense solutions will not be effective in today’s environment. New worlds need new solutions.
The epic challenges don’t end there for today’s leaders. Even once conceived, vetted and implemented, the vast majority of transformation efforts are unsuccessful. This level of failure is more than an execution gap; it is a signal that we need to embrace a completely different mental model of what we are trying to achieve as we go about adapting.
In particular, we need to do away with one of the fundamental beliefs underlying today’s transformations: The assumption that we are still just trying to get from Point A to Point B. This mindset treats the organization as if it were a machine: Make the necessary changes here and here, flip these switches, turn this dial up or down and the machine will start humming along effectively once again. To be clear, adaptation today is not about getting from A to B, tinkering at the edges or fine-tuning your strategy. We need a revised view of what transformation means. And we can look to a surprising field for some important teachings: science.
In the realm of, who defined a first principle as “the basis from which a thing is known” — the basic assumption that cannot be deduced from any other assumptions. First principles differ from observations. For instance, it had long been observed that the planets move across the sky and that apples fall from trees to the ground. But ’s laws of motion were the first to state that the deeper principle of gravity lays behind a whole host of such observations.
