How to successfully drive change
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There are two ways to go about this. If you combine them, you can change the world.
Innovation can take place in a variety of ways. First of all, someone needs to have an idea. For example, a person either invents something new, or formulates a new thought.
In our case, let’s look at a team of innovators. To be honest, I don’t know all their names, so feel free to name them however you like. They talked about some issues they experienced, they also saw other people having these issues, and together they came up with a completely new way to solve them. They then went on and presented their idea to people. Some of them really liked their idea while others said they either haven’t really experienced the issue themselves, or just don’t see how things could possible change in the grand scheme of things. So, our innovators try to figure out how they can change the world with their idea.
For a real change to take place, one of two things needs to happen:
1 Average people like you and me are convinced that a change needs to happen, usually inspired by very driven thought leaders, and we start to adjust little aspects of our lives. The idea turns into a movement with a massive number of consumers, citizens, students, … Just your average Joe doing a little something different, but with all these people doing it, it has a big impact. The change takes place bottom-up. Let’s have a look at a few examples, there are inspiring ones out there.
The pollution of our environment and climate change are issues that should concern the whole world. Some are already affected by the issue, others not so much. When people realized that there are things they could do to help drive the change, many started buying organic products rather than cheap stuff from across the world.
Other consumers that are aware of problems started taking a closer look at the origin of the meat they buy.
Carter and Olivia Ries raise awareness of the fact that “in America alone [people] are using 500-million single use plastic straws every single day, [which] is like 1.6 straws for every [person]. If you took the daily usage of plastic straws […] in America, you could fill up 127 school busses every single day and most never get recycled”. And remember, straws kill turtles. You don’t want that. People are starting to do something about that.
Before the internet existed, people didn’t think they needed to be connected to the whole world with a little device in their pocket. However, people always strive to be informed, to be educated about what is happening in the world, and to have the power to steer things in the right direction. Remember the Cluetrain Manifesto.
People changed their behaviour, and nobody would argue today that companies that didn’t adapt to the internet and the digital transformation are still successful today. In Germany for example, “Quelle” (the Amazon marketplace of the past, but as a catalog in your mail) failed to change their business model and switch to an online marketplace. They ran out of business in 2009.
Another scenario: Take a look at America, right now. There were 346 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2017, according to the Gun Violence Archive (Mass shooting definition: “Four or more shot and/or killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location, not including the shooter.”), many of them being school shootings. It might be hard to imagine for people living in a country where owning guns isn’t an institutional right, but there are many people who truly believe regulating guns either won’t be possible or isn’t necessary. I talked to a bunch of older people in the country about this, and they grew up with guns, so they don’t want to give them up. The issue of school shootings does not affect them. But it does affect students. And they are moving, look at those millions of young people on the streets. They will drive change from the bottom up.
And finally, remember Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement he started.
It is very important for the world that people become aware of an issue and start changing something.
Be it by protesting, buying different goods, or behaving in new ways. Widespread awareness and acknowledgement of the issue is a a key factor.
Now, people in the U.S. are buying so much organically produced milk that farmers who don’t switch to organic farming have a really hard time staying in business. The organic business model is really paying off now. The Netflix series “Rotten”, and many others, illustrate this in a capturing way. In 2015 already, David W. Crowder and John P. Reganold published a study which proves the “Financial competitiveness of organic agriculture on a global scale”.
And by now, you probably noticed that most big car manufacturers have an electric model in their fleet. Not necessarily because they love them so much, but because they realize that it is the future, fossil fuel is limited, so it will be more profitable eventually.
These students in America make it very clear that they will be able to vote in two years and that they will vote for whoever is in favor of regulating gun laws and with that, the big player NRA.
“Yeah,” you say, “pollution, gun violence, digital revolution, I understand that it affects the world. But what about me, I’m just trying to get by. What about Facebook still leaking my data and companies then trying to manipulate me, or Uber continuously increasing their cut and taking money from me as a driver? There isn’t much I can do. Things only really change if the big players in the industry want to change something.”
Believe me, they will have to change.
No matter if they agree or not, modern history has shown that disruptive movements will eventually force big players to either adapt or be out of the game. Like steve olenski pointed out in this article, “adapt or die” is a valid statement to make towards companies that try to hang on to their legacy systems. The internet reinforces this effect. People are now able to access information and educate themselves about any issue they want, or easily find more suitable products on the market.
It is true that many businesses only change their business model if they really must, meaning if they would run out of business otherwise. But those are oftentimes the ones that barely survive.
Let’s have a look at the winners, and with that we’re talking about the second way to go about solving issues and changing the world.
2Big and successful companies realize early on that there is a new movement with lots of potential. They take it seriously and find ways in which the change could benefit them. They adapt early on. Because they have a lot of influence, them making this change really drives innovation forward at accelerated speed. This is the top-down approach.
Take Tesla for example. They adapted so early that nobody believed they could succeed. But they found ways to decrease cost of production with the new business model and now the company is ahead of everyone else in the market of electric cars, and started to turn profitable.
At the same time, the market also shows that even companies that are known to adapt to changes need to make sure they don’t do so just once but stay ahead continously. Nokia enjoyed a lot of positive press and managed to stay competitive by changing their business model and taking advantages of the early adopter move in the mobile phone market. But Yves Doz describes: “While Symbian had given Nokia an early advantage, it was a device-centric system in what was becoming a platform- and application-centric world.” In the end, Nokia was sold to Microsoft in 2013.
As we can see, what is causing companies to come out on top, is
1: to take a new idea with lots of potential seriously,
2: find a way to decrease their cost of production or services when implementing the change and
3: to continuously adapt to change.
What do we learn from this?
If there is an issue that concerns a massive amount of people and they are not only starting to become aware of the problems, but also come up with one or multiple solutions to it, the world will change most effectively if the bottom-up approach and the top-down approach are combined and come together.
What does this mean for you?
- If you are an average Joe and there is an issue you care about, you should “be the change you want to see in this world.”
- If you are part of a big player or a company with influence, you should always be on the lookout for innovative ways to do business instead of assuming that current business models will continue to be profitable. As the Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, Julian Birkinshaw, already pointed out a few years ago in this Fortune-article: you don’t need to be the CEO to drive change, instead “people across the firm must keep their eyes open to changes in their business, and to take responsibility to push their new ideas and challenge existing ways of working.“ Sometimes these changes can seem too disruptive to be implemented. But sooner or later they will get to you, the average Joe will make sure of that. But you get to decide if your company comes out as a winner or gets pushed out of the game.
Wait, and what happened to our team of innovators that was introduced in the beginning?
They developed blockchain technology.
Some of them are reimagining the marketplace industry.
Do you see the potential for change?
