What collective assumptions hold back your firm’s success?

“Success is about making the connection between two things previously unconnected. Success is often about two ideas coming together to enable success to take place,” says Qureshi.

Divergent and convergent thinking are on opposite sides of the same coin. Whereas divergent thinking expands to discovering, convergent thinking is about defining, narrowing down. You need both to shift from survival to thriving.

At a time when ‘ecosystem’ has become business jargon, companies no longer compete against companies. Networks compete against networks. An organisation is only as strong as its network. “You'll only be as successful as the relationships you can forge, that create networks that allow you to build strategic alliances,” advises Quereshi.

How are we thinking?

Next time you are in a meeting about tasks, take some time to shift the conversation from ‘What should we do?” to ‘How are we thinking? Most executives looking at how the business processes are performing begin with analysis.

For instance, reviewing market size, competitors, financial performance, customers and capabilities. But it might be helpful to step back and ask: “What assumptions are causing us to see the business this way?’

Qureshi points out that belief systems are major inhibitors of performance because people tend to filter information through their existing beliefs. Do we see the rocky business landscape through dark glasses, that shut out the rays of bright business insights? If management believes ‘our customers only care about price’ it will find evidence supporting that belief—and potentially fail to see customers willing to pay for quality, convenience or trust. Makes sense to take on another perspective and challenge the organisation's mental model.

Stop preaching - change the space

Companies often respond to disappointing performance with more training, or tedious boring workshops.  Qureshi argues that organisations are frequently too quick to train people rather than fix their environment.

Staff may already possess the necessary skills, but be operating within systems that prevent them from applying those skills differently.

Take the case of Red Oak Bank that tells relationship managers to ‘be entrepreneurial, be adventurous’ while its approval systems punish experimentation, another session of corporate preaching will achieve little. Smart question to ask is: ‘What is our organisation doing that makes good performance difficult?’

From risk to possibility

It’s standard practice to be thinking ‘What could go wrong?’ However, along with this consider ‘What are we trying to create?’

Managers are generally more motivated by avoiding failure, rather than pursuing an exciting possibility. In business, this produces incremental decisions, defensive approaches and excessive risk mitigation. Trying to protect its existing market is psychologically very different, from being on a S curve trying to create the next market.

We are addicted to planning, predicting what will happen. It’s helpful to put on a different thinking hat shifting from prediction to experimentation. Nothing wrong with conventional positive thinking that says ‘we will win’ but the smart manager asks ‘what might be possible?’

Instead of spending six months trying to prove that a new product will work, a company might ask: ‘What is the cheapest experiment that could teach us whether this idea has potential?’

Helps to take on a research lab mindset and ask some divergent questions like - What would we do if we lost our biggest most profitable customers? What about if our net profits doubled? What would we do if we had no marketing budget? What actions would we take if we had an unlimited marketing budget? What problem does the next breakthrough product address?

Qureshi's thinking suggests that the most important thing to diagnose in an organisation may not be its strategy, structure or processes but its collective assumptions.

Conventional planning retreat question is ‘What should our company do?’ But the Qureshi inspired wisdom would be to ask: ‘What does this organisation currently believe that prevents it from seeing what it could become?’

David J. Abbott is a director at aCatalyst Consulting. [email protected]