#36: DIVOT

What if the best strategy for innovating your business is to know what not to change? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to get with that. Let's get started with today's episode. If you've been following my podcast, you'll notice that I've taken a little of a hiatus. And the reason for that is because I'm working on a new book and a number of different offerings. But I'm going to focus only on the book today. And this is going to be sort of a free form, completely different than any of my other podcasts. Don't know where this is going to go, but we'll have some fun, hopefully, with it. So I'm working on this new book, and it's based on an article I wrote back in 2020 or so for Inc. And the title of it was called Don't Pivot, Divot. And the premise of that was that maybe we don't always want to change direction, but sometimes we want to go deeper. The term divot is something which I stole from the world of golf. If you know golf, you will know that when you swing the club, if you go really deep and you go way below the ball, you will hit a chunk of grass, it will go flying, and that's the divot. And I thought this is a really interesting metaphor. It's something I think, which is important for us to consider as we come out of the pandemic, because for the past two years, the word pivot was used over and over and over, and everybody's pivoting. The problem is, if you're always pivoting, if you're always changing direction, well, you might be going around in circles, and it's certainly not efficient, because if you're trying to go in a straight line, pivoting means you're moving off of your target. And of course, there are times when we have to pivot. We need to change. But it felt like for the past couple of years, we were often chasing bright, shiny objects, we were often pivoting for the sake of pivoting. And we forgot that we need to plant our feet and actually get down to some basics. And that's what I want to talk about in this next book. So this podcast is called Invisible Solutions. It's titled after the title of my most recent book, which came out in March of 2020, right at start of the pandemic. Great time to write A book. And that book was all around how can we solve difficult problems by reframing the problem. So the premise is that we ask different questions, better questions, reformulate the problem as a means of finding better solutions. But what I didn't talk about a lot in that book was how do we determine which problems to solve? And so in some respects, this new book, Divot is the working title again, of the book, is the prequel to Invisible Solutions. So if you watch Star wars, you know the first three. Well, number four was actually the prequel. It actually happened before number one. Well, Divot is the prequel to Invisible Solutions. Invisible Solutions helps you solve problems. Divot helps you determine which problems to solve. And it's based on some things that I've talked about here in this podcast and I've written about in the past, which are my five Ds of differentiation and my innovation targeting matrix. I'm not going to get into those details here. I just really want to talk a little bit about sort of the philosophy of the book, why I'm writing the book, and why I think it's important, especially right now. One of the things that we've noticed, if you've read anything in the news, is that there's the great resignation and everybody's leaving their jobs or changing jobs. And I don't think all of that is getting just due to the pandemic, but what the pandemic did to people. And I think one of the challenges has been companies constantly shifting direction. So the book that I'm working on, yes, it is about how do you determine the strategy for your organization, to know where you double down in your investments? And that's really the key thing is how do we determine where do we focus our energies? And it's not necessarily about changing direction, but figuring out we already do exceptionally well, that creates exceptional value that our customers love and appreciate, that helps us stand out and actually making larger investments there. So that's a big part of the premise of the book. And from a corporate profitability perspective, this is really important and really powerful. And I've been working on this concept of doubling down on certain investments for decades now. So this is not necessarily new content. It's new content with a new perspective on it. The part that I haven't always explored, though, which is going to be another part of the book, is the impact on the organization. If you're constantly pivoting, if you're constantly changing direction, it creates burnout. Because if you're taking 10 steps forward, but they're always in different directions, you're not really making a lot of progress. And from a workforce perspective, from an employee perspective, that can be demoralizing for a lot of people. Yes, they want a paycheck, but they also want to know that they're creating value, that they're doing something that people appreciate, that's going to create value. It's going to help the organization. They want to be appreciated. And the problem is with pivoting is it feels like if you're changing the direction on Wednesday that you had on Monday, then, well, where do we go? What do we do? And for a lot of people, it feels like they've been working in quicksand for the past couple of years. And I would even argue beyond or before the pandemic, I think there's a lot of this change for change sake. We need to change. We need to do something different. If we're not breaking eggs, we're not innovating. And all these fail fast, fail quickly, fail cheaply, whatever. And we've gone to the point where I think we've done a disservice to the people in our organization. People still crave some level of stability and predictability from which they can innovate on. So it doesn't mean that you never do anything differently. That's certainly not the point of the book. The point is you need a foundation on which to build your business. You need a foundation on which for people to work. And so that's the concept of the divot is if you plant your feet, if you dig deep, that helps. So I'm gonna give you a couple of personal examples, some corporate examples, and what you're gonna see is dividending is not about staying the same. It is not about not changing, but it's purposeful change. It is a deepening change. It is all around deepening the relationship you have with your customers. So it is about going deeper and not about standing still. It's about going deeper. And so what you need to do is you need to figure out, where do you go deeper, how do you build on what you. Well, so it's not about pivoting to something completely new, but rather it's exploring how you can add more value to your existing customers or maybe even new customers, or identifying new ways of delivering that value based on what you do best. And again, I call this the differentiator. So going deeper, it's not a static concept. It requires change. And my models around differentiation provide for sort of this radar where you can determine when you need to change direction. But you don't want to always be changing direction. You don't want to always be doing something different. There has to be some level of stability. So what you need to do is step back a little bit and ask yourself, where do you need some laser focus? Where do you need to go deep? It's not about spreading yourself thin. It's not about diluting your energies or dissipating your work. It's exactly the opposite of this. It is about the laser focus. It is about going deep, and that's where you get some of the greatest impact. And like I said, this is not just about your business, because I think you get higher levels of business returns when you are focused purposefully on some areas of the business, which will give you the greatest impact. But it's also about your people, because people are overwhelmed. I mean, there's this change fatigue. People are leaving because they're overwhelmed, because they're exhausted. People don't feel grounded. And when you don't feel grounded, well, you just don't feel good. You feel stressed. And so what we want to do is give people the sense that they're grounded, that they're making progress, that they're going to be valued, and that they're making an impact. Because if the business keeps on changing direction, it can be frustrating. One of the things which I want to explore in this book, and if anybody has great stories, certainly, definitely drop me a line. I'd love to hear from you in terms of thoughts that you might have about any great divots, great examples of where stability helped the workforce. So again, I want to create this collaboratively with as many people as possible. I've been talking with a lot of my clients about this. Sharing the framework, sharing the concepts, and the feedback has been really positive. But again, I want to include as many people in the development of this as I can. So, again, coming back to the concept, it's about stability. It's about getting your organization completely aligned on where you need to go and then making progress towards it. And that is the divot. It's the direction. It's not a fixed destination, but it is a. I call it a compass setting. It's basically a sense of direction. So you can course correct, but you don't pivot. I mean, if you think about a pivot, a pivot is you plant one foot and you change 45 degrees or 90 degrees, and now you're making big changes. I'm talking about tweaks, I'm talking about course corrections. Course corrections that make sure you're moving in a good direction, but it's not necessarily about wholesale change. And I call this process meandering with purpose. And I wrote about meandering with purpose first back in 2005 in my goal Free Living book, which was more of a manifesto on how you can live a life without goals. Through experiencing life rather than having fixed destinations, you allow life to unfold and you course correct. And that's really what I'm suggesting here, is we don't need a blueprint to dictate every step, but at the same time, we don't want anarchy. We want the right balance of predictability and agility. We want to give the employees direction, give them clarity, but also give them freedom. Because when we look at what it takes to motivate people, there are typically three levels that I tend to focus on, and it would be the compensation, community, and contribution. And when you look at what has people be as engaged as possible and as valuable as possible to the organization, it tends to fall into these three categories, these three levels. And it's going to be different from person to person. So each person might prefer one motivator over another. And it might also shift over time, depending on their situation. And it tends to build. Compensation is the base. It is the bottom line. I mean, people work, obviously, for most people at least, because they want to pay their bills, they want to feed their family, they want to give their children the best education they can have. And so that's a big part of why people work. But it's only the base. If you're making enough money, then at some point it doesn't become the primary motivator, might become a secondary motivator. It's not the primary motivator. The next level is community. And community is all around people feeling like you're part of a family, people working together feeling like you're part of something bigger. And so a lot of times, and I know I struggle myself with this a little bit right now, is in the work that I do. I'm a solopreneur. It's my business. I don't have any employees. I have freelancers who work with me in a variety of different things, whether it's marketing or website development or helping me build new skills. But on the whole, it's me running a business. But the thing which I'm missing, something which I strive for crave, is that community. When I was at Accenture, I had this team of people. We were creating materials. We work together collaboratively. And I really loved that. And we were able to scale it to 20,000 people. So it was a really powerful experience. And so at this point in my career, it is actually community that I crave the most. And so I'm looking for that. The last and the highest level is contribution. And contribution basically says that the work I'm doing is making an impact. It's helping the world. And this is becoming more important for more people as we have more challenges in the world. And so there are a lot of people who do what they do not because of the money that they're going to make or the people they're going to work with, but rather the impact that they are making on the world. And so those are the three levels. And it's going to vary again from person to person in terms of what they want and where they are. And so we're going to make certain decisions on that. And the reason why I bring this up in the context of the divot book is I do believe that people are leaving because they don't feel like they have a sense of community. Because if everybody's moving in different directions, people are working remotely, well, we lose that aspect. So what can we do to make sure people feel like they're part of a community that is focused on contribution? How can we make sure every person feels like, even if it's not making an impact in the world, that their job matters, that they matter? And the way to make sure people matter, or at least feel like they matter, is to have them doing work that is valued. And the only way you can do work that is valued is to know what is valuable to the organization. And that's where the divot comes into play. And the whole process that I'll be writing about in the book is really how do we make those determinations? How do we determine what's most important, most valuable for what we do? And I believe in the podcast, in an earlier episode, I might have Talked about the five Ds of differentiation or the innovation targeting matrix. And that's part of it. We're going to go deep, deep, deep into those concepts of how do you determine what makes your organization distinctive? What helps you create a valuable and desirable offering that your customer is going to want so that they're going to open up their wallets and do business with you? But we have to be worried about tomorrow. We need to make sure that what we're offering is durable. That is, the distinctiveness that we've created, the thing which makes us different is actually going to stand the test of time. And that others can't replicate it. So it has to be durable. But also the value proposition, the desirability, well, it has to. That has to be also long lasting. And it has to be able to withstand the test of time in terms of disruptions. So we want to be disruption proof. And disruption proof doesn't mean you're going to be disrupting the industry necessarily. But you need to have this sort of a radar system to be able to see what's happening, to determine when what makes you desirable might become less so. And it's not just technologies that disrupt us. It's not just AI or blockchain or whatever it might be. There's lots of technological disruptions, but sometimes the biggest disruptions are societal shifts. People don't smoke or people don't drink, sugary drinks or whatever it might be. Those types of things may impact the long term desirability. So those are four of the Ds. Last D is the one which I'm really focused on right now in this conversation is around being disseminated and dissemination of your differentiator is around leverage. How can you take what it is that you do better than anyone else that people value and that stands the test of time and now get every single person in your organization moving forward powerfully to be able to fulfill on that differentiator. And that to me is where you get this multiplier effect. When you have every person who understands, and I don't care where they are in the organization, when every person understands how they contribute to the differentiator that is powerful because each and every employee impacts the way you differentiate. But you need to articulate it, you need to communicate it, everybody needs to understand it and they need to understand how they contribute to it. So these are some of the key thoughts around the divot book. And again, in a nutshell, it really is around how can we identify what we do better than anyone else that creates the greatest value, that is distinctive and that's going to stand the test of time that we can now leverage and use that to make smart business investments. Use that to be able to determine where are we going to double down, where are we going to make our biggest investments in the business? And also how can we then communicate that to everyone in the organization so that everybody feels this sense of value and purpose and contribution? So my intention with this podcast was not to be structured. I had no outline, I didn't know where it was going to go. But it was really just a chance for me to share from my heart Some of the things that I'm thinking about writing in this book, and it will evolve over time. And I just want to close with a personal example of what I mean by dividend. And I've shared this before in some articles and I think I've shared even little bits of it in previous podcasts, but I just felt like to sort of put a bow on this whole thing. This would make sense. So I'm an innovation guy, and innovation is what I've been doing for over 25 years now. And for 20 of those years, I've had my own business. And back in 2011, I wrote a book called Best Practices are Stupid. And Best Practices are stupid contain 40 different strategies, tips, techniques, approaches for being able to innovate your organization and out innovate the competition. And one of them said, ask better questions. I think it was titled don't think outside the Box, Find a better box. And people really resonated with that one tip, that one strategy. And people would come to me after and say, love the book. But this one chapter got me thinking. I understand why I need to ask better questions and I understand what I need to do, but I don't know how to do it. And as soon as that book was published and I started getting that feedback, I decided, okay, let me figure out the how for that one. So instead of going on to the next book on a new topic, I decided to take one of 40 topics and go deep. And that's where Invisible Solutions was developed. Took 10 years for the book to come out. But the lenses that are in the book I've been working on for a decade now. I've been working with a number of clients, helping them use the lenses. Again, this is not new work. My books tend to be lagging far behind the work that I'm doing. But it was very powerful. That was a divot. I went deeper into one small piece of content rather than trying to boil the ocean. And when the pandemic hit, everybody was asking me, how are you going to pivot? How are you going to pivot? How are you going to change your business? You can't do in person speeches. And I my response was, I'm not going to pivot, I'm going to divot. And what I meant by that is, I'm going to double down on what can create deeper and greater value. So the pivot for a lot of professional speakers was, okay, I used to do it in person. I'm now doing it virtually. That is a pivot of sorts. I mean, it's basically just you're delivering the same content, different approach, you need to rethink it. But for me, I wanted to step back. I wanted to use this as an opportunity. And I realized that why should I be delivering speeches? Why should I just deliver one hour? If I have people who are engaged online, maybe there's more I can do. And so I started looking at how can I create greater value. And so I created a number of programs. And these aren't E learning, hands off programs. I mean, they're really deep, deep dives. In fact, the one which is really most powerful and the one where I have a number of clients who've just really gotten so much value from it is in a certification program. So what I do is I take a couple of people from inside a company from a client and I work deeply with them. Every week or every couple of weeks, we have deep, deep calls and I send them content on my process. And after a period of 3, 6, 9 months, 12 months, depending on the nature of the program, they now become certified in my process. They understand. They understand not just what I do, but can actually do it. That is, to me, a divot. I didn't create new content. I didn't really even just think about a different way to deliver the same content. I really said, how can I create more value? So is a divot a pivot? While it is, in some respects you could argue is a pivot, but it's a specific form of pivot. It's a deepening pivot. It's saying, what can we do to create the deepest relationship with our customers? What can we do to add more value? How can we build on what we already do exceptionally well? That is a divot. So hopefully at least get a sense of where I'm going with this book. Have no idea when it's actually going to be published. I was hoping originally to have it done at the end of this year. Maybe that'll be the case, maybe it'll be in 2023. But I think this is gonna be a really powerful book because it's also based on the content that my clients tell me has had the biggest impact on not just the bottom line, but also the biggest impact on their strategy, their people, the direction that they take, the organization. I'll talk about this more in the future, but I just wanted to share that with people. So with that, we're gonna wrap up the this episode. I will go back to the regular problem solving format sometime in the near future. I've got some special guests lined up some special innovators. We'll also go back to sharing some content from Best Practices Are Stupid. So if you do have a problem you want to submit to be used on our regular version of the podcast, go to Invisible Solutions podcast.com and remember, you can download the lenses at get the lenses.com I look forward to being with you next week. And until then, happy problem solving.