The 90 days challenge for hybrid creatives
“Uncertainty and risk are elements that drive variance and create an opportunity for those who are willing to take it”, says Dave Ulrich when he speaks about the hybrid creatives and the future of work.
Dave Ulrich is known as the world’s leading authority on talent acquisition and HR. He is ranked as the #1 management guru by Business Week, profiled by Fast Company as one of the world’s leading business thinkers and author of over 30 books and 200 articles.
I had the opportunity to talk to Dave and learn about how organizations and hybrid creatives can work together and improve their collaborations and how they can make future work.
Part 1:
How open are organisations for hybrid creative talent?
D.U. — I think one of the dilemmas is something called the liability of success. When you’re successful, you tend to replicate what caused you to be successful. And one of the dilemmas is that you are successful in the context of a setting. So if I was successful in 2010 because I did A, B and C, I keep doing A, B and C. But 2021 requires D, E and F or X, Y and Z if the world has changed.
D.U. — And so, one of the liabilities of success is we think our success is what we’ve done, and in fact, success is what we’ve done in the context of the setting in which we did it.
Instead of looking at “I did A, B and C five years ago”, I need to look at what the context requires of me? And then A, B and C becomes P, Q and R and I have to change if I have that outside in view.
D.U. — What we found is that companies that don’t change eventually die because they keep doing what was good in the past.
There’s two things that companies do that keep them fresh and get this hyper creativity.
One is they focus outside in. They’re constantly looking at the external conditions. What’s the new digital space? What’s the new technology? What are our customer expectations? What are the millennials thinking about? New employees, new customers. What’s the political space? What’s the new social environment? They’re always looking outside to determine what to do inside.
And number two, they cherish and value diversity. They’re constantly looking for not convergence — “What should we do?” -, but divergence — “What are the alternatives? What else could we do?” And they’re constantly learning by divergence.
Focusing outside in and encouraging divergence more than convergence allow companies to continually reinvent themselves.
Most companies don’t do that. Most companies have a life cycle and they fail and they don’t reinvent very well.
Is the current global crisis an advantage for hybrid creatives to start a news role?
D.U. — It’s a huge advantage for the creative companies because they’re going to reinvent. I mean for example, in my world in Education and Training, we’d always do in-person programs. And so the companies that didn’t reinvent talk about how do you do an in-person training program?
In the future, there’s going to be hybrid programs, there are going to be some in person, some not in person, and the companies that reinvent fast, get ahead, and they create new things.
D.U. — So uncertainty and risk when there is high variance creates opportunity for the innovators and I assume the same — I’m not in fashion design. Look at how I’m dressed and my hair, I’m boring — but companies, I assume in fashion, they are the creative companies, are ahead and they want there to be variance. Because when there’s variance you can win, when there’s no variance, everybody does the same thing.
For example, in producing electricity. There’s not much variance in how you produce electricity today. And so the utility industry has relatively small risk and small profitability. The companies that create variance, say “well, let’s not produce electricity the way we’ve done it. Let’s use wind and solar and renewables and batteries”.
Uncertainty and risk when there is high variance creates opportunity for the innovators.
D.U. — There’s a lot of risk in those. We don’t know how to make money in solar. We don’t know how to make money in wind. So with risk comes increased opportunity, and increased risk.
What advice would you give hybrid creatives for navigating a new job and company?
D.U. — There are two answers to that.
One — the company can create an organizational logic that allows them to be more successful.
What that means is, instead of being part of a big hierarchy and I have one role, and I have a position, we have seen companies that succeed at that, creating a hub and a spoke. The hub is a platform of resources and then the hybrid creative is a spoke — they’re an independent business unit, they are a cell and they’re off innovating and trying to do new things and creative things. So the company can create a structure where those innovators are doing new and creative things.
Clayton Christensen called that The innovators’ Dilemma — we want standardization, but we also want to innovate.
And so one of them is structurally creating a system where the company becomes like an internal venture capital fund and says “you’ve got some great ideas, Dalia. We’re going to put a small team around you. Go try them.” And we protect you as you try those ideas.
D.U. — At the individual level — I think hybrid creatives can come into a company and my early advice is go find a success, create a simple success. Go get a victory. Don’t try to boil the ocean.
Go create a simple success and the success is like a pebble in the ocean. It begins to have concentric circles in the water and your success gets others to see success.
So I love to talk to the hybrid creative people who often come in. They want to change everything. Change one thing. What can I change? What can I see? So that my experiment, my changes begin to build credibility for what I do.
The 90 days challenge for hybrid creatives.
D.U. — And what happens, it’s the law of cumulation that small successes don’t have much impact over time, but they accumulate and then you get a tipping point — Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great book called Tipping Point — that if you accumulate a lot of little successes eventually they add up and the tipping point takes off.
So I love to say to hyper creatives: You have a great idea. What can you succeed within 90 days? What can you do in a 90 day success?
And then do another one, and do another one. And by the third or fourth 90-day success, then you’re getting momentum and other people are saying “I trust you. You’re doing good things, and I’m willing to allow you to invest more and hopefully progress more”.
*Thank you, @DaveUlrich! It has been a great honor to speak with you and learn from your experience and expertise.
*The interview has been divided in two parts for clarity and space reasons. Part two will be posted soon after.
*This interview was video recorded.
