How to challenge the status quo - even if you’re part of it.

There’s a lot of talk, articles and advice in marketing circles about disruption and challenging the status quo. Everybody wants to be the new Tesla, the new AirBNB or the new Nest.

But if you’re not the new anything? What if you’re the old, established brand in the category, the very embodiment of the status quo, can you challenge the status quo too?

Absolutely.

We’ve worked with a few established clients looking to challenge the status quo over the past couple of years. From our experience doing so, we’ve developed a process that helps companies of all types, whether they be startups or established, to effectively challenge and disrupt the status quo.

Know this: if you don’t challenge the status quo, someone else will, disrupting you in the process.

Make the threat tangible. “If we don’t disrupt ourselves, there’s a good chance this company or that company will.” Write out the scenario, or scenarios, by which you think a competitor or an outsider will come in and blow up your world.

A little more than a year ago I was meeting with a large bank. They’re spending over a billion dollars a year on digital transformation, spending millions upon millions of dollars funding a whole host of projects aimed at developing technologies that perhaps a new fintech would come up with. “You shouldn’t be too worried a fintech coming along and disrupting you”, I said. “You should be scared shitless of a big platform company like Amazon or Apple.” It’s now happening at least one lead consultant at Bain agrees with me. Speaking wth CNN Money in March Maureen Burns, a Bain’s Partner said she thinks Amazon is a much bigger threat to financial services firms than young fintech startups.

The threat is much more tangible when you identify a specific enemy.

Identify and clearly articulate the status quo in your industry.

This is crucial. After all, you can’t effectively challenge anything if you don’t have a good definition of exactly what you're challenging, now can you?

There might be one big status quo, or there might be a few different ones.

If your company is an established status quo organization, I would go a step further and clearly identify what parts of your company are most tied to the status quo. You’ll then need to develop a plan to get them on side for obvious reasons.

Bring in outsiders.

This isn’t a pitch to hire Radical Quo, it’s just common sense. When striking out to challenge the status quo the biggest hurdle you will face is your own collective experience. People who spent years or decades in one industry get used to doing things they way they’ve always been done, and they feel they know what works and what doesn’t. You maybe have a set of Best Practices to which you closely adhere.

All these things are essentially why there is a status quo.

If you’re going to challenge the status quo you’ll need to unemcumber yourself from the past.

The fastest way yo do that is to bring in an eclectic group of thinkers who have no ties to prior experience. They can work with your team in quick flash spurts to provide new insights and ideas. And they can show you new opportunities thst you and your team might not be able to see.

A little over a year before Uber launched in Canada a cab company here in Toronto asked me for some ideas to get more customers in the downtown core using their dispatch. “You need to get on their phone”, I told them. And since they were the first cab company to have computer dispatch, I came back to them with a mobile idea that’s allowed their customers to order, pay for and see their cab coming right from their phone. Companies could give employees a code instead of paper chits with everyone billed to client’s account and automatically separated by employee or project.

They made fridge magnets instead.

The simple fact is that the most successful, disruptive companies launched in the digital era were launched largely by people with little or no experience in the industry. They could effectively and quickly scale to challenge the status quo players because they don’t play by the traditional rules.

The Four Wall Excercise

Gather your team in a meeting room. Fill three walls of the room with everything you know, everything that you think you should do. Leave it up for a day and get away from it, in order to let your subconscious creative minds mull things over.

Then fill the last wall with completely new ideas. Once you emptied your brains of everything you know, you have no choice but to get creative and think of new, untried ideas. The only rule of the fourth wall is that’s it must not contain anything that’s on any of the other walls. Both a liberating and difficult challenge.

Make it fun.

There’s more than a little research that shows that poeple are more creative when they’re having fun and working fast. We did this in one day with a large organization the other year. They were seeing revenue fall for their online portal and their parent asked us to help them develop a new business vision for the company. In a fast paced, casual day we started with them by defining what their status quo was, and then worked together with people from across their organization and some extra creative thinkers who we brought in for the day.

We made it a Shark Tank-like gamified day, at the end of which each group pitched their ideas to a panel of Sharks. Having some business visionairies to pitch to helped us both solidify our ideas to pitch and removed previous bias from the process. The winning ideas sent the organization on a course that turned into a new corporate mission that is guiding them still.

Act like a startup.

I’ve worked with a few startups over the last couple of years. Every single startup pitch deck, including our own, identifies a problem and then gives a solution. This is done to show investors that they have identified a market gap, a real need, and have developed an business to meet that need.

When going through the ideas developed by your team, this process will weed out the weaker ideas and bring the stronger ones to the fore. This allows you to make quick decisions on which ideas you back to rapid prototype and test for traction.

Once you have proof of concept, then you can work on implementation plans to roll out your concept, either as a status quo challenging new product, or as an evolution of the organization.

In summery:

1. Realize that you need to challenge the status quo and make it tangible to sell by identifying an enemy.
2. Identify and articulate the status quo you are challenging.
3. Go beyond your experience.
4. Bring in outside help.
5. Work fast to generate ideas.
6. Think and act like a startup to articulate the best ideas and plans.
7. Move quickly to proof of concept with a small test or a prototype.

I hope this helps.

Andy@snibblecorp.com