PHOENIX–Seeking a low-budget but effective way to create change in your organization? Print up some “Permission Slips to Fail.”
That was just one recommendation from Beth Comstock, the former chief marketing officer with GE and president at Integrated Media at NBC Universal, who also addressed the 'imagination gap' and what strategy is really all about.
Comstock’s remarks to CO-OP’s THINK 18 Conference were all about how to react to change more quickly and effectively—indeed even to lead change–and a critical part for a credit union is to understand that failure is an important component to be embraced.
“The more comfortable you are with the given, the more vulnerable you are to the challenge,” cautioned Comstock.
“When things are going so well and everyone is so sure it will work out, you need to challenge them by turning that on its head and asking, ‘What if it goes sideways?’ We have to go forward without having the answer. That’s really scary. We don’t like change. That’s why we hang on to doing things the same way.”
The Imagination Gap
A critical problem that is increasingly found in organizations and companies and even schools is what Comstock calls the “imagination gap.”
“The imagination gap is where possibility goes to die,” she said. “We only want to do things where we can guarantee an outcome. And it’s coming at a time the stakes are getting bigger.”
The stakes are getting bigger, Comstock said, because the very nature of “change is changing” in large part due to the interconnectivity in the world that allows for a series of things to happen all at once. That means the ability to see patterns is more critical than ever, she said.
“Change isn’t the real scary part, it’s that we don’t want to face in to change,” said Comstock. “It threatens our view of a certain world. It’s time for people with the courage and imagination to take risks for the futures of our organizations. It’s no wonder we don’t want to take a risk because of the F word, that we might fail. We cannot process improve our ways to a certain future. So, the imagination gap is crowding out our very humanness, those leaps of creativity and those glitches that come on the path to tomorrow.”
In the machine age, suggested Comstock, the problem that has arisen is that “anything less than perfection is a defect” even though it’s in those defects where progress is often found.
“We can no longer afford to fail to fail,” said Comstock. “We have to become adaptable. We can’t make uncertainty go away, but we can change how we react to it. I believe everyone’s title now is ‘Change.’ To be change-ready, you have to empower yourself and your teams to try new things. You have to make room for discovery. You have to build testing and learning into your operating system.”
Share Failure
Comstock said organizations need to not just share failure but call it out.
“With my team we had ‘Fail Conventions’ with brown bag lunches and webcasts. We would share our failures and talk about how we messed up. What we created was vulnerability and trust, and that’s a challenge I give you. Rather than saying ‘What do you do?’ ask ‘How did you fail and what did you learn?’ If failure is not an option, then neither is success.”
Every Excuse in the World
Comstock acknowledged to the credit union leaders in the room that she, too, has heard every excuse when it comes to reasons something couldn’t be done by an organization. And she’s heard that from both subordinates and superiors.
“‘No’ to me has come to mean ‘Not Yet.’ I’ve learned you have to give out permission slips. I think they are important and I like the symbolism. When I was at GE I literally printed them out and when someone was fearful or afraid to try something, I gave them a permission slip. How could you encourage a colleague? If you could give a gift of permission, what would it be?”
Comstock said she learned during her career her job wasn’t to be a manager, but instead to be the coach of a team of collaborators.
“I call it leading with a good MO,” she said. “Your job as a leader is to paint a vision of the future and then encourage your team to fill it out. Teams need to be built around these missions, not the hierarchical structures. And the job of team members is to tell me what I don’t want to hear. Commit to telling one another what you don’t want to hear.”
The Importance of Discovery
What should move every organization and leader forward, according to Comstock, is curiosity.
“No matter who you are you have to make room for discovery,” she said. “You have to get out of the spreadsheet. Challenge yourself to see things that make you uncomfortable. When you pick your head up, you see patterns. I have a rule called ‘going on three.’ The third time I see something I’m convinced there is a trend forming and it’s about how to translate it inside an organization.”
Comstock added another word of caution: “I guarantee you, you are spending 10% of your time on something you already know.”
Comstock said that while with GE she had “field trip Fridays” once a month when she and her team would go out into the world and see a variety of new things.
What Strategy Really Is
“Strategy is a story well told,” Comstock told the THINK meeting. “Stories are important. It’s about taking your vision and creating a vision for the future. It’s about getting other people to believe in that story and contribute to it.”
What credit unions and other organizations must do, recommended Comstock, is scale their operations so that everyone can participate and be a part of that strategy.
“You must lead change. You can’t delegate it, and to do that, you have to be a fanatic about culture,” said Comstock. “Culture is what we say and do toward what’s important. It’s about asking more questions than giving answers. In a learning culture you ask questions like what is your hypothesis, what problem are you solving and my favorite, what are you afraid to tell me.”
In the process of doing all that, Comstock cautioned credit unions that many organizations throw money at problems long before they need to. To avoid that at GE, she said she created a “Living Lab” to test and prototype things and get them out to customers before they were ready for market.
“Teams are motivated when you are asking them to take smaller risks and encouraging them to try,” she said. We had what we called a ‘Growth Board,’ which I would recommend. It’s like bringing together venture capitalists for team ideas. What you’re doing is you are building learning and testing into the culture. We found teams feel incredibly empowered. They learned that by killing off ideas faster they could get to something that would work faster, and they knew their budget wouldn’t be killed.”