Provoke E-Book

Geoff Tuff

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 336

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Explore a new and effective method for seizing opportunity in the face of uncertainty In Provoke: How Leaders Shape the Future by Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws, renowned strategy consultants and best-selling authors Geoff Tuff and Steven Goldbach deliver an insightful exploration of how people tend to act tentatively in the face of uncertainty and provide the tools we need to do things differently. Tuff and Goldbach offer up a compelling argument for the proposition that taking a "wait and see" approach is the exact opposite of what helps visionary leaders change the world. Drawing on principles from business and behavioral economics, the book shows readers from all walks of life how to provoke action as a mechanism to advance. In this book you'll discover: * An overview of the assortment of cognitive biases which tend to restrain and distort leadership decision making in the face of uncertainty * How to recognize the 'phase change' that occurs when an uncertainty resolves from being a question of "if" to being a matter of "when" * Five different models of provocation which can be used alone or in combination to anticipate, drive through and exit that phase change in a way that creates the future you desire * How true "provocateurs" shake the foundations of their industries, firms, sectors, and governments by overcoming their need for certainty before action Perfect for leaders or aspiring leaders in all walks of life where uncertainty abounds--which is to say, almost everywhere --Provoke will become your go-to guide to overcoming those natural human instincts that keep us frozen in place and prevent us from seizing our opportunities.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

PART I: PREDICTABLE PATTERNS

CHAPTER 1: Patterns from the Past

MISS THE TREND

DENY THE TREND

(OVER)ANALYZE THE TREND

RESPOND MEEKLY TO THE TREND

THE SOLUTION IS TO

PROVOKE

NOTES

CHAPTER 2: On the Importance of “If” versus “When”

NOTES

CHAPTER 3: Personal Patterns

NOTES

CHAPTER 4: Expanding Peripheral Vision

EMBRACE DIVERSITY

NOTES

PART II: PRINCIPLES OF PROVOCATION

CHAPTER 5: Birth of a Provocation

RESPECT THE PAST, BUT HOLD IT LIGHTLY

PROVOKE THE FUTURE

KNOWING HERE FROM THERE

THE PROVOKE QUINTET

SUMMING UP

NOTES

CHAPTER 6: Envision: Seeing the Future

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF ENVISION

ENVISIONING THE FUTURE OF ENERGY

NOTES

CHAPTER 7: Position: Preparing for the Change

BETTING ON THE BUSINESS MODEL

USING A BEACHHEAD POSITION

UNTANGLING MULTIPLE VECTORS OF UNCERTAINTY

NOTES

CHAPTER 8: Drive and Adapt: Taking Control

DRIVE

ADAPT

NOTES

CHAPTER 9: Activate: Harnessing Your Ecosystem

A WORD ON ECOSYSTEMS

YOU ARE ALREADY PART OF AN ECOSYSTEM

MOZILLA AND THE CROWD AS ECOSYSTEM

ACCELERATING CHANGE

NOTES

PART III: PROFILES OF PROVOCATEURS

CHAPTER 10: Deborah Bial

NOTE

CHAPTER 11: Ryan Gravel

NOTES

CHAPTER 12: Valerie Irick Rainford

NOTE

CONCLUSION: MINIMALLY VIABLE THOUGHTS

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF FUN

LOOKING AT DATA WITHOUT CONTEXT

ON THE VALUE OF RECOGNIZING RECURSION

CEO AS THE LEAD SYSTEM DESIGNER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

INDEX

END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

Guide

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Conclusion: Minimally Viable Thoughts

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Index

WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

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FROM THE BEST SELLING TEAM THAT BROUGHT YOU DETONATE

Provoke

HOW LEADERS SHAPE THE FUTURE BY OVERCOMING FATAL HUMAN FLAWS

GEOFF TUFF

STEVEN GOLDBACH

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM FISHBURNE

Copyright © 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tuff, Geoff, 1970- author. | Goldbach, Steve, 1973- author.

Title: Provoke : how leaders shape the future by overcoming fatal human flaws / Geoff Tuff, Steven Goldbach.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2021] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021020639 (print) | LCCN 2021020640 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119764472 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119787556 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119787549 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. Classification: LCC HD57.7 .T865 2021 (print) | LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020639

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020640

Back Cover Cartoon: © Tom Fishburne

Cover design: Paul McCarthy

For our families: Martha, Michelle, our kids, our siblings, and especially our parents, who originally provoked us to look at the world inquisitively.

INTRODUCTION

Kids love rollercoasters.

Not all kids, and not all rollercoasters … but by and large they just love them.

Although they exhibit patience for nothing else, they are willing to wait in a long line just to get a few minutes of thrill. They smile with glee as the car grinds and clacks up the track at a snail's pace, anticipating the hair-raising freefall that comes on the other side when all that potential energy is converted to kinetic. Many of them even put up their hands as the car moves from one phase to the next to increase the thrill level, testing the safety design of the harness that is keeping them inside. Not knowing precisely what's coming doesn't scare them. It excites them.

In adulthood, it's safe to say one's relationship with rollercoasters changes. There are some who still love them, but our (albeit unscientific) experience suggests it becomes a smaller and smaller proportion of the population as we age. For those who do not enjoy rollercoasters, the thrill is gone and the experience is quite literally the opposite of the glee of youth. Instead of eyes wide open, looking around at the world and what's to come, the eyes stay clamped shut in the hope that not seeing will make the experience less painful. Instead of testing the boundaries of the safety system by raising your arms, riders freeze in place, white-knuckling the safety bar, fingernails dug in, just praying for a return to stable ground. Instead of seeing what happens, these riders wish for a mental map of what's coming next and desperately hope that the whole thing will just end as quickly as possible.

The physical experience is the same – the feel of the car, the path of the track, and the centripetal force bolstered by redundant safety mechanisms. But the emotional reaction to the experience is fundamentally different.

The history of leadership is chock-full of people who look like both types of riders: those who embrace the ride and others whose fixation on each possible pitfall renders them immobile. Both groups, in past decades, have had a reliable foundation on which to “ride,” with predictable outcomes linked either to carefree confidence that everything is on a safe path or obsessive overanalysis of knowable details. But the plight of each archetype is complicated by the realities of today's environment, which are serving up increasingly unpredictable twists, crests, and dives.

Whether their bias has been to follow the momentum of past experience or to call for ever-increasing burdens of analytical proof, leaders will have a harder and harder time anticipating and capitalizing on the peaks. Yet it's at these peaks when new opportunities shift from the possibility of “if” to the inevitability of “when.” Past data and experience are proving less useful and, to make matters worse, most leaders (whether they know it or not) are forced to act with blinders on. Basic human cognitive biases – what we call “fatal flaws” – narrow individual and organizational peripheral vision and lead to all-too-typical dysfunction.

The best leaders rise above these constraints to gain perspective; they set aside their terror of the ride and summon their inner child, who can better deal with the twists and turns. They recognize – and even appreciate – that while they may not be able to control all the outcomes, they can plan for and control their reactions.

These days, the conviction to act – especially in the absence of perfect data – is the only way to provoke the future you desire. Action creates potential energy. Action allows you to position yourself to see the peak sooner and more clearly than others. Action gives you the power to move through the phase change of “if” to “when” so that you can make the most use of the kinetic energy when it's released.

And action, in an uncertain world, is increasingly the best way to learn. If you don't act with purpose, your once-thriving business could suddenly become a “wind-down” firm, operating on borrowed time.

Detonate, our previous book, was our call to selectively blow up the foundations of past success to allow for forward progress. Provoke is about looking forward and working through the natural human instincts that keep people frozen in place, thinking and analyzing. It is about forcefully gathering the will to act in the face of deepening uncertainty and DO SOMETHING!

PART IPREDICTABLE PATTERNS

CHAPTER 1Patterns from the Past

“1.75%? Why would I care?” asked the senior executive as he flippantly tossed the PowerPoint page onto his conference table, put his foot on the table, leaned back in his chair, and, yes, stuck his hand into his pants like Al Bundy in the 1990s sitcom Married with Children.

Steve and his colleague exchanged a knowing glance. They had worked together for 15 years and by that point they basically shared a brain, which, at that point, was thinking: “Is this guy for real?”

They were in his lavish office, sitting at his conference table. Steve noticed the golf trophies, pictures with celebrities, and large and expensive desk. The office screamed, “I'm successful!”

It was 2009 and, given the difficult economic climate, Steve and his colleague were being especially aggressive in getting out to meet new executives. They had done some work for a large, diversified media and communications company, creating a segmentation of consumer behavior in its industry. Their client, pleased with the work, was looking to present it at an upcoming industry conference and wanted to get some reactions from executives at peer companies – hence the reason they were sitting in Al Bundy's office.

The work they were sharing included a detailed segmentation of the consumer landscape for communications services like Internet, phone, video/television packages, and security. They had surveyed thousands of customers about their behaviors and actions. The survey revealed the typical and expected results: when people got married or had families, their Internet and video usage dramatically changed from when they were single. Expenditure on things like pay-per-view and other channels tended to be higher among this group. With more devices in the house, they also were willing to pay for higher Internet bandwidth.

This wasn't news. Companies in this space knew and loved these customers. They paid their bills on time, they didn't move, and as a result they didn't “churn.” And, back in 2009, they probably had a landline, too. Therefore, if you successfully acquired one of these customers, you were likely to retain them, leading to a steady, predictable stream of revenue.

At the other end of the spectrum were the singles. They typically lived in an apartment and had more focused communications needs. This was a group that tended to select the most basic Internet and television packages. Sometimes this choice was driven by personal preference (think people who like to read at night). But sometimes this was driven by affordability, where having lots of channels could be expensive. You could predict the reasons for this choice based on income levels (typically tied to specific geographic locations) and whether the home was rented or owned. Some singles with higher disposable income bought a more comprehensive communications package, but it typically included just video and Internet; even in 2009, this group didn't want a landline – a mobile phone was just fine for them. These singles, perhaps because of their income or preferences, were willing to spend more on faster Internet speeds and specialty channels.

Because of the high capital intensity of the communications and entertainment distribution market, players in this industry wanted to win all of these customers. It wasn't economically viable to focus on just one segment, so Steve's work was designed to help companies customize their product, pricing, and marketing messages to better target the needs of each of these groups. For instance, if you had an area that overindexed on owned homes, that was a sign that there were probably a lot of families with kids, and you'd advertise a comprehensive package. If you were targeting an urban area with a lot of apartment renters, you'd make different choices.

None of this was particularly earth-shattering in 2009. The work was solid, but the patterns were generally predictable to experienced executives in the space.

Except for one small anomaly.

A seemingly inconsequential group of customers – that 1.75% that the exec had dismissed – was exhibiting some unique behaviors that made it challenging to assign them to one of the larger segments. When segmenting an industry, it's preferential to get to between four and eight meaningful segments of the marketplace that are small enough to be unique but large enough to merit individual focus. But, from an analytical perspective, the 1.75% just didn't fit into any segment.

These were younger people, so Steve and his team tried to type them to the segment with other single people. But they didn't really fit. They had lower income, so the team tried to group them with the budget-conscious single group, but they didn't pick the lowest-cost Internet. They actually wanted high Internet speeds. They tried to bundle them with the higher-income single people, but those folks didn't buy TV packages. Most of the time they would pick the most basic TV package, and many of them didn't even have a TV package at all. If they could buy “just Internet,” they would – but at high speeds. If their Internet provider required them to also purchase television or phone, they might purchase Internet elsewhere, sometimes getting a cellular hotspot (previously you could just use your mobile phone as a hotspot) instead of a wired home connection.

When Steve and his team further investigated this group and tried to understand whether they were just uninterested in video content, they found the opposite. This cohort of singles was quite interested in video content, but they weren't watching traditional network programming. They watched short-form videos on the then-new YouTube. They watched snippets of online video and they subscribed to the new streaming service offered by Netflix, introduced a year earlier, which had only around 1,000 titles and set a limit of 18 hours of streaming per month, a far cry from the Netflix that has become both a noun and a verb.1

Intrigued, Steve and his team dug deeper. What they found was that this behavior was rooted in preferences, not cost: this small group simply preferred to consume content in this way. The segment wanted to watch the shows they wanted to watch when they wanted to watch them. They wanted smaller, bite-sized chunks of content. They wanted it ad-free (but, given that they were budget constrained, they would tolerate ads if that helped make it more affordable). And they were pretty agile about finding ways to view their favorite shows online without paying for them, if it could be done.

In short, they consumed content in this way not because it was cheaper but because it was better – although the fact that it was also cheaper made it a zero-trade-off change for consumers.

But the executive wasn't buying it. He seemed more interested in discrediting the research methodology than the findings.

Remind me, how many people were in your study?

How did you weight your sample?

Did you conduct this study nationally or regionally?

Was the survey conducted online or on the phone?

After glancing at his colleague, Steve asked, “Are you curious to learn more about the behavior of this group of customers? It seems as though if the group became more prominent, it would challenge the way you make money.”

It was at that point the executive responded with his why would I care response and arrogantly stuck his hand in his pants.

The behavior of this executive is part of a pattern that we have observed time and time again with leaders of all kinds – and it's one of the core reasons we wrote Provoke. When an anomaly emerges in their space, something that might be important, the vast majority of humans behave in a persistently predictable pattern. It's as if executives are riding that roller-coaster but fail to recognize that they are in fact going up a steep slope that will at some point tip over into the ride of their lives – and not in a good way. The potential of the trend – if it might happen – shifts to when it will happen. Too many executives fail to anticipate that phase change. They:

Miss the trend

Deny the trend

Analyze the trend

Respond meekly to the trend

MISS THE TREND

The first issue that people seem to have is that they don't even see things that are happening under their noses. In the case of the cord-cutting behavior described above, the consulting team might have missed it themselves if there had not already been some reporting of the then-fringe behavior. But they also had the benefit of having a team of young people, many of whom were themselves contemplating cutting the cord because they simply could not understand why anyone would want to pay for something that forced them to watch a show at a scheduled time versus when it was convenient for them.

In general, we miss trends not because we aren't looking, but because our brain processes the raw data of what we see through an unconscious filter of our own experiences. Unless you consciously learn how to turn that filter off, it can be hard to see something right in front of your nose.2

DENY THE TREND

“1.75%. Why would I care?” The preceding experience with the executive is an example of denial. Denial can take many forms. Steve saw a subtler form of denial, which was to question and discredit the observation. We've seen with other trends (e.g., humans' impact on climate, vaccines) that denial can include just an outright refutation of the findings. But after missing something for a long time, having it pointed out to you frequently sparks a negative response and deniers will dig in. The lesson? People don't like to be shown they have missed something important.

(OVER)ANALYZE THE TREND

After a period of denial, some will turn to analysis. Executives will start to ask lots of questions about how big it is, how fast it's moving, how many people it will impact. And there are meetings … so many meetings … and all with their requisite PowerPoint decks. We frequently find that some analysis leads to more analysis. The more you look at something, the more you find other ways you could look at it. This is all designed, of course, to give executives more specificity on the problem (or opportunity) their business faces. Rarely do we see meetings that focus on analysis end with a decision to take action in the market; most of the time, the conclusion is that the action required is to go do more analysis.

RESPOND MEEKLY TO THE TREND

Sadly, in the rare cases where we do see executives take action – after an unduly long period of study – it's often too little, too late. Just think about the efforts of brick-and-mortar department stores to respond to the long curve of the online shopping trend. Instead of making deliberate choices to make what we call “minimally viable moves” in the face of early signals, they instead waited for evidence of the trend to hit them in the face and then had market forces dictate their path forward. There's often a theoretical debate in boardrooms about whether to pursue a “first mover” or “fast follower” strategy. Unfortunately, the fast follower position is almost always framed as “wait for someone to be successful in the marketplace to get started.” This is a choice that is increasingly doomed to failure given the degree to which markets are becoming more “winner take all.” And, let's face it, most “fast followers” are really dawdlers.3

This pattern of behavior, which we've seen over and over again, prompted us to write Provoke. There are many trends we see in our line of work as strategists and consultants that are labeled as “uncertain.” A chasm separates if something will happen (what we think of as true uncertainty) from the uncertainty of when something will happen. This difference matters immensely. It dictates how you act in the face of the trend, and the failure to recognize this nuance in meaning is what leads most leaders to miss, deny, analyze, and respond meekly, following the pattern of our hand-in-his-waistband executive.

THE SOLUTION IS TO PROVOKE

Our executive, and the organization he represented, had blinders on – blinders that we all wear, to one extent or another – that narrowed its organizational peripheral vision and ability to evaluate the importance of the changes found on the periphery. These blinders – constructed of basic human biases that we all share – mean that the playing fields we observe are narrower than the real world. Our maps, as the saying goes, are not the territory.

Combined with organizational dysfunction – overanalysis; meetings with no end or, seemingly, any point; and so on – they lead to systematic inaction. That inaction means that rather than setting our own course, we let others make decisions for us or limit the range of our choices – just as brick-and-mortar stores did. Our momentum (really, our inertia) will drag us into a predictable series of choices that will lead to failure in the face of a new reality represented by the glimmer of those trends.

These biases are the subject of the chapters of Part I, Predictable Patterns. We also offer solutions you can start implementing now to overcome some of these issues.

In Part II, Principles of Provocation, we introduce five moves you can make depending on whether you face an “if” or a “when.” These are: envision the future, position yourself for success, drive change, adapt to changing circumstances, and activate your ecosystem. These tools will help you avoid those biases that prevent meaningful action, expand your peripheral vision to better assess your playing field, and prompt you to actually DO SOMETHING!

Some people are more successful at circumventing the problems caused by our biases. In Part III, Profiles of Provocateurs, we present three stories – inspirational ones, we think – of executives who have provoked their organizations to create a better future.

But first let's return to our friend with his hand down his pants and perhaps a bit of egg on his face today now that we're all cord cutters. Steve and his colleague were unable that day to convince him to take an interest in that small group. It remained, at least on that afternoon in his fancy office, too small a segment to matter. We don't know if or how much his company debated the idea later, but it's fair to characterize their market responses as meek relative to Netflix's. They were too late to catch up (although we're sure they thought of themselves as fast followers). It took them a while to get around to taking action, despite already having many of the requisite capabilities within their organization.

In the meantime, Netflix's stock price (adjusted for splits) has gone from roughly $4 at the beginning of 2008 at the time of the meeting to over $500 at the time of our writing this, an increase of more than 100-fold. At the end of Q3 in 2020, Netflix was approaching 200 million paying members (the last published statistic at the time of writing) and had a market capitalization in excess of $200 billion.

At the same time, the executive team at our client (who introduced us to the person in the story) followed a different strategy. Based on their early insight into this trend, they realized they were now effectively a wind-down firm. A wind-down firm is a cousin of the pop-up firm, which itself is launched to capture a narrow window of market demand – think of a Halloween store that pops up on October 1 and disappears on November 1. The difference is that the wind-down firm had as its original intent the goal to “last forever,” but is now riding the wave to obsolescence whether its executives know it or not.

Because of their early insight, our client realized that, without meaningful reinvention, their business model was dead, despite still being highly profitable. So they sold the business. The choice to sell was ultimately a good one for them. They were able to cash out in time, whereas companies with similar assets, capabilities, and business models continue to struggle with the growing segment of customers that prefers to have more control over their content experience through companies like Netflix.

While choosing to become a wind-down firm is a completely legitimate strategy choice, there is a lot of potential value creation in adapting and successfully pursuing new market trends. That's what we want to explore with Provoke: as leaders, we all need to have better pattern recognition capability to enable us to spot trends and move to where the world is going to be. Even if you ultimately decide not to pursue the trend, the moves we describe will ensure you are making that decision on your terms and not those dictated by market forces.

But before we get into how to spot those trends, we need to identify – and correct for – the fatal human flaws that get in the way of us seeing these trends in the first place. In Chapter 2, we'll address how to go from “ifs” to “whens” – that is, how to stop treating trends that are already unfolding as mere possibilities.

NOTES

1

.  Christopher McFadden, “The Fascinating History of Netflix,”

Interesting Engineering

, July 4, 2020,

https://interestingengineering.com/the-fascinating-history-of-netflix

.

2

.  Arnold Zwicky, “Just between Dr. Language and I,”

Language Log

, August 7, 2005,

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002386.html

.

3

.  For more on the “winner take all” economy, see Roger Martin,

When More Is Not Better

(Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020).

CHAPTER 2On the Importance of “If” versus “When”

Daddy, I used the “Dude Wipes” and my tushy feels minty.

—Grayson Goldbach, age 5, during the great toilet paper shortage of March 2020

Before the pandemic, you probably took toilet paper for granted. And reasonably so. It's one of many things that we use every day without much conscious thought. It's something we just assume will be there for us – until it's not. That's when people go into a mini-panic. Remember the episode from the television show, Seinfeld, where the antagonist du jour told Elaine, “I don't have a square to spare”? The pandemic gave us a window into how humans would behave if a TP shortage were an ongoing challenge.

We believe human behavior is the most basic “subatomic element” of business. The pandemic gave us many opportunities to observe human behavior under periods of severe disruption. And it turns out that, when faced with such massive disruption, toilet paper is one of the things that helps people feel secure when on hand in large quantities. We also learned that people really have no idea how much toilet paper they actually need … so much so that in early 2020, a plethora of toilet paper calculator sites suddenly started to pop up on Internet ad feeds – something neither of us had imagined needing before.

The combination of fear and poor estimation led to some pretty interesting hoarding behavior and a resultant run on toilet paper. Rational or not, it was most certainly the case that when you went to buy TP it was difficult to find.

Before getting into this any further, let’s just be clear – we are going to devote a fair bit of Chapter 2 to the behaviors around, well, Number 2. Why must we talk about something that makes everyone just a slight bit uncomfortable? This was the best example of something that literally everyone must do, and, as it turns out, there were many new and interesting ways people dealt with the potential shortage. And new and interesting human behaviors are the building blocks of opportunity.

In one instance, we saw consumers leverage technology to make the sharing of toilet paper simpler. One such instance was captured on film in San Francisco, the technology hub of the world, where a person flew a drone to a friend who was in need. (It's worth the reading break to watch the video here: https://mashable.com/article/drone-delivery-toilet-paper-san-francisco-coronavirus/.) Could you imagine this as a business at scale? Instead of ride sharing, imagine a local TP sharing service with delivery-on-demand via drones. Maybe not. In another instance, we saw South Carolina police handing out toilet paper instead of tickets as a gesture of goodwill at the start of the pandemic.1

As it turns out, though, the need for actual toilet paper is not the issue. It's the fear of being without toilet paper that leads to hoarding behavior. We wish we could say we were “enlightened consumers” and didn't hoard, but we'd be lying. We freaked out, too. Steve did the grocery shopping in his household during the pandemic (a behavior that stuck as the initial lockdowns lifted) and was instructed to buy whatever toilet paper he could find on every trip. His family ordered commercial-grade toilet paper with a delivery date of six weeks out, just in case. They even ordered a brand of wet toilet paper they could find online for quicker delivery: “Dude Wipes.”

In times of dramatic change, humans are known to change habits, which can lead to permanent behavior change. At the time of writing, it's not yet clear what new habits will stick once we emerge from the pandemic, but it is clear that many longstanding habits will be challenged. A greater proportion of people will certainly be able to work remotely on a more frequent basis, even when there is return to office work. People will likely pay more attention to frequent handwashing. And maybe people will continue to make sourdough regularly at home.

Habits are a critical underpinning to businesses. Think of all the brands that you buy all the time without thinking – including, most likely, your brand of milk, your laundry detergent, and your deodorant. You probably have a habit around your morning coffee, whether you make it at home, pick it up at a basic local coffee shop, or pay premium prices from national retailers. And, until you read this last paragraph, you probably didn't think about it much.2

During the pandemic, many of these habits were challenged. For both of us, used to getting “our coffee on the outside” (to quote another Seinfeld line), we had to adapt during the lockdown. Geoff returned to getting his coffee on the outside as businesses opened up, while Steve is more than happy to continue to brew his own, having become proficient at making coffee with a French press. As sticky as they are, when habits do change, they impact businesses considerably.

So, given the magnitude of the challenge, did we see a shift in the market for toilet paper or substitutes? As it turns out – yes! A small group of consumers made the decision to no longer be beholden to toilet paper supply. They installed bidets in their homes.

Lest we be accused of only paying attention to the U.S. market, we should acknowledge that bidets are commonplace in many countries around the world, even mandatory. In Italy, for example, a 1975 hygiene law requires bidets to be in at least one household bathroom. In Asia, a company named Toto brought bidets into the digital age with electronic control panels and became a staple in Japanese homes. And then in March 2020, sales of bidets rose dramatically in the United States. Some companies saw sales peak at more than 10 times normal volume.3

The critical question this raises – for paper supply companies, for white goods manufacturers, and for consumers looking to move when prices are right – is whether this shift is a one-time blip in sales or a more permanent trend toward the use of bidets among Americans.

Let's leave the bathroom behind for a moment and generalize the concept that we are going to examine for the remainder of the book. Broadly, there are two phases of any trend, each characterized by the nature of the uncertainty around the trend. In the initial “if” stage, it's still uncertain if the trend will come to fruition; in the “when” stage, the trend has progressed, gathered momentum, and crossed an important inflection point where it's no longer uncertain whether it will come to fruition. It's only a question of when and, sometimes, to what extent.

Our core hypothesis for this book is that once an “if” becomes a “when,” the nature of a leader's response must change. The opportunity is to focus on the moves you can make that will shape the trend to create a better future – one where your organization is advantaged.

The “if-to-when” shift is, as we wrote in the Introduction, similar to a rollercoaster. That big initial climb as a cable pulls the car up the hill is the “if” stage. The rollercoaster cars are building up a ton of potential energy, and if they stop, they might just slide backwards. But when the cars get to the peak and start to tip, that potential energy becomes kinetic and the momentum takes the cars through loops, twists, and turns, seemingly with a life of their own. Once you hit that inflection point, the “when” stage kicks in. During this transition – something we call the “phase change” – the critical question is how long it will take for the trend to resolve into inevitability.

While it's impossible to be exhaustive about all the mechanisms that might be at play in moving from “if” to “when” (human behavior is admittedly more complicated than the physics of rollercoasters), we like to lean on something from the world of design-driven innovation called the “Balanced Breakthrough Model.” The basic notion behind this model is that a “balanced” innovation that has more likelihood of succeeding in the market will simultaneously build in aspects of desirability (the market wants it), feasibility (the innovator can produce it), and viability (the innovator can eventually make money from it). Similarly, a trend that seems headed in the direction of checking all three of these boxes has a much higher likelihood of passing through the phase change to “when” than other, less robust trends.4

The most critical aspect of desirability is the degree to which the trend has an unequivocally better outcome than the current state. If the endpoint of the trend is better for all customers on every dimension relative to what exists today, then it's only a matter of when it will take off. That assumes it is or becomes feasible and someone figures out the right business model to make money from it … but we're strong believers in almost anything being possible if the right demand conditions are in place. If the improvement is only marginal or only meaningful to a small proportion of the population, then feasibility or viability needs to be off the charts – likely via a cost advantage – since it offers less potential economic reward.

Consider the cord-cutting example from Chapter 1. The main benefit of cord cutting is that you get to watch the shows you want to watch, when you want to watch them. When compared with the need to conform to someone else's predetermined schedule, it is unequivocally better to have the flexibility to watch your show on your time. Even if by some amazing coincidence you wanted to watch the shows at the exact time that all the networks scheduled them, you would be no worse off than before. In this case, there is no uncertainty around the trend's desirability. Cord cutting is clearly better for consumers, so the question is whether you can overcome the feasibility and viability barriers.

Naturally, desirability is always relative: defined by the perspective of any individual consumer. Each has different tastes and might find different things attractive. Therefore, you should never (only) look at the market on an aggregate basis. Even with cord cutters, where the feature of being able