With the massive drop-off in performance that the pandemic has visited upon the world economy, many business leaders are effectively frozen in place. But waiting and watching, rather than “learning through complexity” is the biggest mistake they could make, in Barry O’Reilly’s view. Resilient Futures discussed this and more with O’Reilly, the entrepreneur, best-selling author, faculty member of Singularity University, and powerful advocate for innovation.

With his Harvard Business Review Must Read bestseller, Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations innovate at Scale, Mr. O’Reilly became a leading voice in the lean and agile business movement. Now, his latest book, Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results, he is teaching business leaders how to let go of behaviours that are no longer relevant.

For example, O’Reilly likes to start his work with executive clients by asking them if they are clear on the outcomes they’re trying to achieve. “Most of the time, when people are responding to a decline or a shock to the system, they are in chaos or they don’t know exactly what to do. You have the people that stop, freeze, wait and see what happens. Which is a massive problem…because with a lot of this stuff, you have to learn your way through it.”

“So, what I get leaders to focus on is: what are some of the real outcomes that you are actually aiming for? Where are you not living up to those expectations? Where have you tried everything you can think of and you’re not getting the breakthrough you’re looking for?”

The answers to these questions can indicate where “existing behavior and thinking is not working.” According to O’Reilly, the challenge, then, is to not get “comfortable with behaviors that are accelerating their decline because they’re no longer relevant in the new context.”

To avoid “executing the practices of a paradigm that no longer exists” means creating a new “system [that allows them to] explore uncertainty and complexity as safely as possible.” In this system, leaders and their teams must “take small steps or run small experiments to learn their way towards the direction they believe is correct.”

O’Reilly is straightforward when he describes the type of leaders he chooses to work with. “They see uncertainty as opportunity. They manage uncertainty by thinking big and starting small. They take small steps to learn what works and what doesn’t. They build the capability to explore uncertainty in a systematic and safe manner. That’s what wins. And we’re only going to have more and more shocks to the system, so if you haven’t built this muscle to continuously adapt to changing circumstances, to learn your way through uncertainty, you’re really going to struggle.”

O’Reilly recommends dispensing with a “Industrial era” managerial mentality of “delivering on time; perfect results.” He argues that this approach is tied to a period in history when one or two well-educated people would set the agenda for an entire company, right down to tiny, individual tasks. But since we are no longer manufacturing simple assembly line products, it makes better sense for companies to set principles and make space for exploration.

O’Reilly gives Amazon’s 14 principles as an example. “These principles are not just up on the wall. People live them. So, when you’re sitting in a meeting people will say, ‘Are we thinking big enough about this? If they’re having lots of debate and it’s going around in circles, somebody will say, ‘Can we disagree but still commit to testing this for a short period of time?’”

“You know, Bezos was actually a hedge fund manager before he got into Amazon. He knows about optionality. He knows about making bets in the market, recognizing some will fail and some will have 100 times return.”

Interested in hearing more? This article was extracted from our discussion with Barry O’Reilly, on our podcast Straight Talk in the COVID Economy.

Listen to the full discussion here: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/need-for-unlearning-in-rapid-exponential-change-barry/id1523572830?i=1000490845514

or watch the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxVYJdSR7Hw

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