E14: Don't Pivot; Divot

What if pivoting is the wrong strategy for your organization right now? 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 getthelenses.com with that. Let's get started with today's episode. Today we're going to talk about why pivoting isn't always the right strategy, especially right now when the world is going a little crazy. Pivoting is basically saying, we're going to go in a different direction. You're going to. Well, we were doing this, now we're going to do that. We were focused on one set of activities, we're going to do a different set of activities. We were offering one product, we're going to offer a different product. We had one service, we're going to offer a different service. So pivoting is used as a way of getting people to think about shifting direction. And in some respects, it might be somewhat synonymous with adapting. And if you followed my work, you know, I'm a big believer in adapting. I think that being adaptable, being nimble, is actually one of the most important things that we can do. Because the ultimate goal of innovation, the. The reason why we want to innovate, is not for novelty. It's not for changing direction. It's not for new ideas. It is to be adaptable so that we can stay relevant. What we want to do is we want to be relevant, and being adaptable is part of that. But there are times when actually we can adapt too much or we can change too much. We can change without purpose. All of our changes should be very purposeful. One of the things I just want you to consider right now is maybe, although we need to shift some parts of our business, given the pandemic, maybe there are other parts of a business which should stay the same. We talk about pivoting, about changing direction. But I want you to just bear with me for a moment as I describe a different concept. One of the things which I enjoy doing, I don't get to do it very often is going golfing. I'm not a great golfer or a pretty bad golfer. Have a pretty good drive. But when it came to being on the fairway, boy, that's, you know, those chip shots, I was not very good. And one of the things that would happen if you're a golfer is, you know, if you're not very good, sometimes you go a little too deep. You go a little too deep instead of hitting the ball, you actually go deep and you hit the grass and a big chunk of grass goes flying. And they call that a divot. That big clump of grass is a divot. And so I started thinking about this, and what I realized is maybe sometimes the strategy is not to pivot, but to divot. Instead of changing directions, maybe we want to go deep. And I think what happens is in businesses, in a lot of cases, we get focused on bright, shiny objects, new opportunities, things that look interesting and different. And this is not just now, during a pandemic. I'm talking about any time in business. In fact, when things are good, we often pivot because we get enamored with novelty. So I'm just going to use my business as an example for the moment, just so you can get a better understanding of what I'm referring to. Most of my business has been around giving speeches and writing books and doing advisory services. And over the years, I've published six books. And what was interesting is each of those books were different. So one book was called Goal Free Living, which is on how to live a life without goals. Not exactly a hardcore business book, but something which I was pretty proud of. I also wrote Personality Poker, which is a book around personality styles related to innovation. And then I wrote Best Practices are Stupid. So I could have. For my next book, my most recent book, gone in another direction, gone broader, philosophical. And what I decided to do is take one of the chapters from Best Practices Are Stupid, which basically said, ask better questions. And people became very interested in that. What they realized was, is it's easy to say ask better questions as a way of driving better solutions, but to actually do it, well, it's much more complicated. So as soon as that book came out, I decided to, instead of going on to the next concept, the next idea, I decided to take one of the ideas from that book and go deep, decided to divot. And what I started doing is developing invisible solutions. So all of the work that you are hearing me talk about right now actually started 10 years ago when my previous book was published and people said, I like this one chapter. I don't know how to do it. And this has been a game changer for me. The more I got into the depth of my content rather than trying to find the next bright, shiny object, the bigger and better my business has gotten. So the divot can be very powerful because if you're always pivoting, if you're always changing direction, you're going to create inefficiencies in your business. And it's also going to make it harder for your customers to understand who you are, what you do and what you stand for. So instead of asking yourself what's next or what's new, ask yourself, what now? What now could you do to go deeper, to go further, to leverage your strengths and to be able to offer even more of yourself to your customers. So if you're known for customer service, focus there instead of moving on to a new opportunity or area of the business. Say, how can we go even deeper into providing the best, the best customer service? I mean, one company that I've talked about a lot, I wrote about them, and best practices are stupid, is usaa. So they're a military focused financial services company and they're amazing at this. They do a brilliant job. Their goal is to serve those who serve the country. It's all about customer service. And as a result, they are consistently one of the top ranked companies across all industries in customer service. They go deeper, they focus on customer service for people in the military. Instead of trying to go broader, they go deeper, they go better. Think about what you've developed. Instead of trying to develop maybe the next hot new product, maybe you go deeper on the products you have. So one famous example of this is Steve Jobs. So when he got back to Apple back in 1997, he didn't focus on more products because they had so many products. In fact, it was getting a little difficult for them to explain what Apple was all about. So what he did at that time is he actually simplified the lineup and there were only four products or four sets of products. There was the Imac, the Power Mac, the ibook and the PowerBook. And at that time, this actually was transformative for the company because they were able to go deeper into those areas. Now they've started to diversify, but as they've gotten bigger and more successful in larger market shares, they can do that. It's also important to recognize that whatever advice you take from anyone, including what I'm giving you right now, context matters. So look at your organization, look at the resources you have in your organization. If you can add more, that's great. So maybe you can pivot and divot. There's nothing wrong with that. So ask yourself, where can you go deeper? Why do customers do business with you and focus your energies there? Because if you're trying to be the best at everything, means you're probably going to be the best at nothing. To be clear, you should not go deep in an area that risks becoming irrelevant due to advanced technologies shifting Buyer behaviors or new entrants. You need to stay current, pivot when it is needed, not just because it feels like it is time to change. Each year I choose a theme, and in 2019, I decided that 2020 was going to be all about virtual and local. Well, I got the virtual part pretty right without knowing that that was going to happen the way it did for 2021. My theme is ongoing relationships. So my business for the past 20 years now has been largely, not 100%, but largely speeches, sort of transactions. One and done. Get in, give a speech, leave. Maybe there's a little bit more around the periphery, but that's been a core of my business for 2021. I want to shift that. It doesn't mean I don't want to do the keynotes, but the keynote isn't the end, it's actually the start. I want to have ongoing relationships. I want to go deeper. I want to be able to take my content and actually transform the performance of an organization. Applying the approaches, the tools, the methodologies that I have around innovation and problem solving, that's divoting. What is the equivalent of divoting for you and your business? So to close, I just want to say that innovation is not always about doing something new or different. And I think that's one of the mistakes we've made, is we've collapsed. Innovation and novelty, they are not the same. Innovation and novelty are not synonyms. Innovation is about relevancy. And in some cases, you do not need to be novel, new, different, or change direction in order to drive innovation. Sometimes innovation is actually about going deeper. Can be about focus, it can be about depth, it can be about mastery, and it can be about leverage. So how can we take what we do and actually give our customers, our clients, our patients, more of it? Not something different, not something new, but more of what we already offer. Give them the best of our best and more of it. So this is what I'd like you to think about over the next week is how are you going to divot your business? How are you going to go deeper? What do your customers and clients want from you that they're saying, I need more, I want more, I have to have more. Where are they saying they would like to actually have more of a relationship with you? Move away from transactions, go to relationships. And with that, we are at the end of today's episode. We will get back to the lenses next week where we're going to have a conversation around how changing just one word in a problem statement can unleash a completely different range of solutions. That's going to be a really interesting one, so be sure to join me next week. But we are now at the end of this episode. As always, if you want to submit a problem to be solved in this podcast, go to www.invisiblesolutionspodcast.com. again, if you want to have the lenses to be able to use while you're trying to do some problem solving, go to getthelenses. Com. I look forward to being with you next week. And until then, happy problem solving.