The future is already here, we just haven’t seen it yet

Hi, it's Saul here.

What is the biggest threat or opportunity for business right now?

My hunch is that outside geo-political challenges, the majority of people asked are going to say something involving AI.

Seeing technology as the main disruptive force is not a new thing, even before the arrival of ChatGPT and its like, the world of business was already obsessed with ‘disruptive innovation’.

Technology, we are told, presents the ultimate challenge for existing companies trying to stay in the game, or, the greatest weapon for founders seeking to change the way the game is played.

Technology is only as disruptive as the beliefs that shape it

This blinds us to the truth: The really disruptive businesses often use new technology, but they will always use unconventional beliefs and thinking.

If you look at the poster children of disruptive innovation, Uber and Airbnb: their technology wasn’t particularly new or disruptive, it was already being used in different ways and in different places long before they integrated it. This is true of their payment systems, in how they delivered peer to peer reviews and ratings, their tracking capabilities and beyond.

The technology was critical, it inspired new thinking, but it was their ability to question fundamental assumptions that enabled them to see what others couldn’t, so they could attempt to create value that others had not.

It was their maverick beliefs that created a potential new theory of value that they could then interrogate and try and deliver on, often through technology, not the other way around.

It was Airbnb’s ability to see latent room capacity in every home and every home owner that transformed where we stay when we are away from home. It was Uber’s ability to see a potential taxi in every driver and every car that revolutionised point to point travel.

The real problem: chronic strategic blindness

It is here we find the biggest problem for long term business success: strategic blind spots.

The most pervasive one seems to be what O’Reilly & Tushman call the ‘Success Syndrome’.

This is where the higher performing an organisation is, the stronger the systems to keep them doing what has made them successful in the past are: The KPI’s, the reward systems, the culture, is all designed to exploit what they are currently good at.

What that means is that their way of being is grounded in conventional wisdom. This makes it harder for them to explore what they might need to do to make money differently in the future. They are often very innovative but in an incremental way, in smaller optimisations of the dominant design of an industry. Not the kind of radical leaps that can disrupt that dominant design and catch them off guard (Hotels and Airbnb, Taxi companies and Uber).

Or, they do make radical leaps but then aren’t able to effectively commercialise it. Because the rest of the business is built for the old way of doing things, they can’t see how it fits with who and what they currently are: ask Kodak who invented digital photography, but then the likes of Sony Cybershot owned the new category, not them.

A new theory of value: The ability to see value others can’t, by thinking what others don’t

So how can companies consistently think differently, and how can they then integrate the new beliefs that emerge into what currently exists?

I use an approach inspired by Professor Todd Zenger’s brilliant ‘Theory of your firm’ thinking, then shaped by my own Oxford work and experiences working with companies large and small all over the world.

You need 5 ‘Sights’ and Convictions:

It first asks what the Job To Be Done is: What is the customer trying to do, independent of any solution.

Hindsight: What are the conventional thinking and beliefs that define current solutions? What do most people believe?

Foresight: What new theories of value can we see that others haven’t? What are credible alternative beliefs? (This is not easy; it requires looking for ‘Workarounds’ and going back to First principles: more on this in the ‘Maverick Model’ link below).

Insight: What capabilities do we have inside that can uniquely deliver on this new theory of value?

Out-sight: What additional capabilities, currently outside, might need to be in place in the future?

Oversight: How does this all fit together into a cohesive whole? How do we organise ourselves?

Each of these sights flows to the next so that they form a coherent new value driving theory. One that is powerful in the day to day, but also able to evolve to match the changing world around it.

Convictions: how to capture what the company believes is the way the category, industry, discipline can be with its new approach. It must light the fire (people find motivating) and also light the way (people know what to do).

Sense-Shape-Seize: Lastly, these Sights and Convictions are always in beta, are willing and able to - Sense: changes in the environment, in technology, in culture, in customer needs and competition. Then Shape: a response to that change. Then Seize: on that challenge or opportunity in a timely manner (before someone else does it for them).

It is why the whole system, and especially the Convictions, are held firmly in the moment but loosely over time.

‍Saul Betmead de Chasteigner,
Strategy & Innovation Consultant, Executive Coach and Associate Fellow at Said Business School, University of Oxford.

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