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Move Your Organization into the Communication Age

For the last several decades, we have been working hard at helping our company become an information age organization, finding new and better ways to distribute and display information. Having 24/7 access to email and web sites via our mobile devices, it’s hard to find any area in an organization that doesn’t provide access to information.

We receive more information than we can keep up with. Between numerous collaborative tools, memberships to multiple informative groups, subscriptions to paid and free information funnels, and being subject to mobile advertising, we’re literally drowning in information.

We must propel our organizations into the communication age to reach the next level of organizational excellence and to solve information overload.

Informing Versus Communicating

Informing is one-way, static, and seldom leads to action, while communicating is two-way, dynamic, and usually leads to action.

Ask yourself, “In our organization, are we better at informing than communicating?” The majority will answer “yes.” If you can’t communicate internally with your staff, how can you communicate to anyone externally? Do not stop informing people; start tapping into true communication. When you focus on maximizing two-way communications, you can create a communication age organization.

Fully embracing the communication age doesn’t erase the information age. You don’t want to erase the past; you want to move forward into the future. The “new” opens more options to innovate and lead. We did great at evolving into information age organizations, so we should move forth into the communication age in a similar fashion.

The Right Tool for the Job

Ironically, we have all these fantastic communication age tools, but we use them in an information age way due to our residual information age mindset. It’s time to learn how to use these tools in a way that advances the organization and promotes both internal and external communications. Here are suggestions that can help move your organization into the communication age.

  • Know and learn how people communicate.

Not everyone communicates in the same way. It’s common for some to not return voicemails but return text messages. Likewise, people in different generations prefer different communication tools. The key is to understand how people like to communicate. People tend to use the communication tool they’re most comfortable with. Also, ask the other party how they prefer to receive communications. If your goal is to elicit some sort of action, you have to communicate in the manner that will allow the other party to respond.

Just as people communicate differently, they also learn and absorb information differently. Some people would rather listen to a book than read it. Knowing this, it is safe to assume that person would likely prefer voicemail over email. A person’s learning style mirrors his or her communicating style. Deliver the message in a way that ties into their learning style.

  • Get social inside the organization.

Social media is all about communicating and informing. Before social media, the internet was solely for informing. Because of this shift to informing and communicating, it has been rapidly embraced by young and old alike. Companies should consider using these communication tools internally. Many social media platforms are great ways to connect employees across departments, regions, and countries. You can even have your own internal version of these popular social media platforms.

Reframing the use of social networking allows companies to increase communication, collaboration, problem solving, and competitive advantage with little cost. These tools are free or nearly free, making them accessible to organizations of any size. Embrace these tools and utilize them to enhance your communication of information that generates action and response.

  • Create community.

Two types of online communities exist: communities of interest and communities of practice. A community of practice is a professional type of community where members share their knowledge and best practices.

A community of interest is an environment where people share similar interests or passions. You can even get granular when it comes to communities of interest to filter information. Perhaps you narrow down your car community to one that only includes people who drive a Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat.

In your organization, you can set up virtual communities of practice in order to get people communicating ideas and sharing knowledge and expand it to diversify communication. For example, establish a community of practice for all the CEOs in your industry, which opens up the communication channels for enhanced dialogue and innovation industrywide.

Embrace the Future Today

These suggestions are aimed at improving communications rather than merely providing more information. You need to ask yourself how your organization can use these tools not only internally but also with your customers to enhance information and add communication.

Using today’s technology in a way that opens a meaningful dialogue will move your people to action and advance the organization to new levels of success.

Ready to see the future and plan with greater confidence?

Pick up a copy of my latest bestselling book The Anticipatory Organization. I’ll pick up the cost of the book if you pick up the cost of FedEx shipping. Go to www.TheAOBook.com to get your copy.

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Keeping Up is a Fool’s Game

Many business consultants agree that benchmarking is imperative to strategic planning. By using metrics, a business will study the practices, designs, and financial outcomes of industry leaders with one distinct purpose: To keep up with the pacesetters.

There’s just one problem. Keeping up—with technology, with the competition, with anything in business or life—is what some would call a fool’s game. Think about it: When you’re merely keeping up, what’s the advantage? In reality, there is no advantage; all you’re doing is making yourself just like everyone else.

So how do you gain advantage and truly stand out from the crowd? Here are three suggestions.

1. Get off the Treadmill

Rather than keeping up, a smarter way to benchmark means you will look to the future. Most benchmarking practices are based on two questions:

  • What path are my competitors on right now?
  • And, what are all the successful companies evolving to?

However, there is a third question to ask yourself – and it’s key to moving past the pacesetters:

  • What’s the likely progression of the industry as a whole?

Asking these questions enables you to go beyond your competition and get off the treadmill of keeping up. It opens your eyes to future possibilities—to stay ahead of the pack instead of side-by-side with them.

In my latest book, The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage, I reinforce the major competitive edge that comes from the ability to accurately anticipate the future. Think of being anticipatory as a new competency; it’s a mindset that teaches you to elevate tried-and-true strategies like benchmarking to new levels. Unlike traditional benchmarking, which looks backwards and measures what has already worked, being anticipatory requires you to look forward.

2. Use Hard Trends to Get Ahead

Ask yourself: Is your industry faced with cyclical changes, such as seasonal, economic, or sales cycles? If the answer yes, you can expect the normal ebbs and flows that go along with that. But, if the answer is no, there may be even opportunity out there.

Trends that are linear (and not cyclical) present the best opportunity for exponential change. These are trends in technology and innovation that show no signs of slowing down. Think about the future of virtualization, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT). How could advances in these areas impact your business?

I call the latter, Hard Trends, and they are things that are sure to happen based on their upward trajectory and other considerations I talk about in the Anticipatory Organization. Knowing how to identify them can give you a powerful window to the future.

3. Learn from a Leader

While Blockbuster worked to maintain its foothold as the largest movie-rental outlet, Netflix was redefining the concept altogether.

Though Netflix began in 1997 by lending or selling physical DVDs to its customers, it already had a technology platform. Consumers could order their movies online and have them delivered through the mail. One thing it didn’t do was open a brick-and-mortar store.

Ten years later, Netflix added streaming media to its mail-order business. From there, consumer behavior and digital technology took care of the rest. By the time Netflix reinvented itself as a content creator in 2012, the majority of its content was consumed online – including on tablets and phones, which didn’t even exist when the company began.

The key here is to realize that moving beyond competition into innovation wasn’t just a small tweak in order to hit a benchmark; it was a complete change in direction. Netflix didn’t even try to compete in the physical space, they made a one-way move and invested in the future of streaming technology instead.

Are you anticipating the future with confidence? If you want to learn more about the Anticipatory Organization, my new book is available on Amazon.com now.

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Best Practices Entrepreneurship Management Skills

Five Steps to Change Your Thinking

When you make changes, are they coming at you from the outside in or inside out? In my 30 years of working with top leaders from business, health care, government and education, I have found that the majority of change comes from the outside in. When a new law is passed, you have to make changes in order to comply with it; when a competitor comes in offering lower prices, you probably have to change some aspect of how you do business; and when a new technology comes out that changes customer behavior, you’ll likely request that your IT department get you on the new products ASAP.

Most of us are conditioned in both our personal and professional lives to make changes based on outside factors. For example, when the stock market goes down, people often sell, and when it goes up, they buy.

Whenever change comes from the outside, we are forced to react to it. Rather than being proactive, we find ourselves constantly putting out fires and managing the latest crisis.

Instead, let’s look at two examples. Did the crowd-sourcing disruptor Kickstarter become a dominant force because it was fast to react? Was being reactionary the driving force in Facebook’s dominance in social media? Nope.

One reason for Facebook’s success is that it picked up where the limitations of other platforms left off. Kickstarter developers took a popular altruistic concept – used by Caring Bridge and others – and applied it to entrepreneurship. I sometimes call this approach to innovating a new business going in the opposite direction.

So, how do you stop reacting to outside forces and become a disruptor instead? Think about the Hard Trends that are sure to impact your organization. Think about the problems and opportunities that derive from them. What can you do now to not only pre-solve those problems before they become genuinely disruptive, but also leverage those Hard Trends into game-changing opportunities?

5 Quick Tips for Thinking Inside-Out  

It is essential to spend at least a small portion of time thinking about your future in an opportunity mode.

1. Build thinking time into your schedule. Try spending a minimum of one hour a week unplugging from the present crisis and plugging into future opportunity.

2. Find certainty in chaos. Instead of feeling blocked by all the things you are uncertain about in your work and life, ask yourself: What am I certain about? Those are the Hard Trends.

3. Be Anticipatory. Based on Hard Trends, think through these key questions: What is sure to happen in the next two to three years? What problems will your company be facing? What problems will your customers be facing (and how can you address those pain points)?

4. Dream a Little. Another good question to ask is: What is my ideal future? What are the steps to get there – whether it’s a business goal or a retirement dream? Or, it could be a bit of both.

5. Put Ideas into Motion. Once you are clear on your vision and have identified the Hard Trends that will impact you, spend some of your opportunity time solving problems before they happen.

The level of pervasive disruption that you need comes from the inside out (making the first move) rather than the outside in (moving in response to something). What events and developments can you anticipate by using your inside-out thinking?

If you need help getting started, try my Hard Trend Methodology, which is the mindset I describe in my latest book, The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage.