Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: Companies and Movements 09/02/2021, 08:55

Companies and Movements

On Labor Day, I posted about movements and the foundations for
successful movements. Many of the executives that I work with me gave
me quizzical looks. They asked, “Why are you writing about movements?
You’re a business consultant. What does this have to do with business?”

Good questions. Let me see if I can offer some answers.

Movements and companies – what’s the intersection between these

two? Sure, there are movements against companies – we all can name
dozens of boycotts against specific companies for a variety of reasons,
ranging from unfair labor practices to the politics of the countries they’re
from. Even the labor movement that gave rise to Labor Day was at one
level a movement against companies. But, what about companies that are
catalysts and drivers of movements of their own? How many of those can
you name?

There’s something unnatural about the question. Companies aren’t

movements and movements aren’t companies. We all know that.

I want to suggest something a bit heretical. Maybe it’s time to call for
a new set of movements – this time initiated by companies, but
engaging large segments of the population in a collaborative quest to
discover new ways to create value in an increasingly challenging
economy.

Before I develop the reasoning for this, let me step back and quickly re-
cap the definition of movement that I offered in my earlier blog posting. I
suggested that a movement is “an organized effort mobilizing a large
number of independent participants in a grassroots effort to pursue a
broad agenda for change.”
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Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: Companies and Movements 09/02/2021, 08:55

The Big Shift

So, again, what does this have to do with companies? As I’ve written
elsewhere, we’re in the early stages of a Big Shift that profoundly
changes how we do business. We’re only beginning to understand the
new practices and institutional arrangements that will lead to success in
this Big Shift. But one thing we know for sure: the new practices and
institutional arrangements will require significant movement from where
companies are today. (If you doubt this, see the significant long-term
erosion in ROA for all U.S. public companies since 1965).

Now, companies can undertake this journey in isolation or they can

invite others to join them in a movement of mutual discovery. If we
try to make this journey in isolation, it will be a lot more challenging.
No matter how smart we are in any single firm, we’ll likely be a lot more
successful if we enlist the help of others outside our firms and motivate
them to make the journey with us.

This is especially true if, as we’ve suggested in the past, one key
dimension of the journey is the shift from an institutional rationale of
scalable efficiency to one of scalable learning. It’s not surprising that
companies and movements were viewed as so different in the past.
Scalable efficiency fostered a quest to bring activities inside the four walls
of an enterprise and to organize them as efficiently as possible. If
outsiders were needed for anything (and inevitably they were, since no
firm is completely self-sufficient) the focus was on reducing the number
of participants from the outside and carefully dictating their activities to
enhance efficiency.

Scalable learning changes all that. If we’re seriously committed to

learning at scale, we’re inexorably pulled beyond the four walls of our
enterprise and drawn to connect with an expanding array of other
participants who can help us to learn faster. In other words, we’re
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Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: Companies and Movements 09/02/2021, 08:55

drawn to join, or organize, movements.

It may not be an exaggeration to say that movement of this magnitude

requires a movement to significantly increase the odds of success. But,
here’s the problem. Most companies don’t yet see the need for help
(except, of course, for the ever generous subsidies from our
government) and the few who see the need for help would be loath to
admit it publicly.

But that’s just the point. The few companies who see the need for help
and are willing to be vulnerable and express that need just might
differentiate themselves in a powerful way from their struggling
colleagues. And they might find that they pull together a growing
number of people and institutions who can be extremely helpful in
exploring new pathways towards much more powerful value creation.

Movements shaped by companies

So, what would such a movement look like? Well, we’re not talking about
the conventional “corporate social responsibility” movement that’s driven
by some noble purpose above and beyond the company. We’re talking
about the future of the company – re-inventing its core rationale so that it
can turn the mounting pressure of the Big Shift into growing success.

But, it can’t just be about the company itself. One way of thinking about
the Big Shift is that it’s a movement from an era when individuals had
to find ways to fit into the pre-determined slots established by our
institutions to one where our institutions will need to find ways to
organize around individuals. In this respect, movements are just a
natural extension of this new reality – and companies will need to
find ways to spawn and participate in movements.

It’s about identifying an opportunity for the company and others to come
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together to create something of much greater value than the company

ever could on its own. And, it’s about finding a common purpose that can
motivate and mobilize many others beyond the company to participate in
a shared quest. It’s ultimately about creating an environment for scalable
learning where all participants can learn faster and achieve more of what
is valuable to them.

What would we need to do that? Well, as I suggested in my earlier post,

successful movements of any type are built on two key foundations:
(1) a powerful and engaging narrative and (2) a creation space that
focuses on accelerating the learning of a growing number of small
groups committed to making a growing difference in their arenas of
action.

The role of narrative

Just to re-cap, I drew a sharp distinction between stories and

narratives. I suggested that stories are self-contained (they have a
beginning, middle and resolution) and they're about the story teller or
some other people, they're not about the listener. In contrast, narratives
are open-ended, they are yet to be resolved and their resolution depends
upon the choices and actions of the listener. As a result, they're a
powerful call to action, emphasizing the ability that we all have to make a
difference.

Now, here’s the problem. As I discussed here, here and here, very
few companies have anything resembling a narrative. At best, they
have an open-ended story about how they had humble beginnings, faced
enormous obstacles and achieved extraordinary things, with much more
to come. It’s still a story about them – the only thing that people outside
the company are supposed to do is stand back in awe and await the
accomplishments ahead. It’s certainly not a call to action, except perhaps
to buy more of the company’s products.
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An effective corporate narrative would identify an opportunity that’s

beyond the reach of a company today, an opportunity not just for the
company, but for many, many others. An opportunity so great that it
can’t be achieved in isolation but requires collective action. It would
move others to join forces and take action in powerful new ways. What
would such an opportunity look like?

Well, in the context of the Big Shift, such a narrative might focus on
harnessing the exponential opportunities made possible by the forces
driving the Big Shift. Depending on the market or industry, it could be the
opportunity to generate unprecedented economic value and wealth, the
opportunity to achieve levels of wellness and longevity that were
previously unimaginable, the opportunity to discover and express one’s
unique individuality and expand impact by connecting with others, or the
opportunity to nurture our children so that they can achieve previously
unimaginable levels of impact. These are just some of the possible
opportunities that a narrative might focus.

The role of creation spaces

But articulating an opportunity is only a first step. A movement requires

action and creation spaces are powerful ways to amplify action. As I
discussed in more detail in my earlier post on movements, creation spaces
help to organize activities in ways that accelerate learning. The basic
organizational unit of a creation space is a small group of people. These
people come together and collaborate in ways that help them individually
and collectively to achieve higher levels of impact. Through this
collaboration, they form deep trust-based relationships within their group
because they're sharing their vulnerabilities in a quest to learn from each
other. The real power of a creation space is that it creates an
environment that can scale in ways that help the small groups to
learn even faster by connecting with each other.
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Companies can play a powerful role in catalyzing, nurturing and

scaling these creation spaces. The key here is to move beyond
organizing communities of interest (something that I wrote about
extensively in Net Gain) and focus on organizing communities of action.
Note also that these creation spaces are quite different from conventional
crowdsourcing efforts that are usually focused on narrowly defined tasks
or problems. In creation spaces, the opportunity is open-ended and
invites the sustained collaboration of large numbers of individuals coming
together in small groups that form deep, trust-based relationships as they
experiment and improvise approaches to expand their impact.

The benefits of movements

But, what’s in all this for companies? As I mentioned earlier, the Big Shift is
requiring all companies to pursue models of scalable learning that extend
far beyond their own four walls. Movements shaped by narratives and
creation spaces can become powerful engines of scalable learning. By
mobilizing a large number of third parties, movements create rich
environments to accomplish the following:

Distributed innovation – Lots of groups proceeding in parallel, each

pursuing different approaches towards a shared opportunity, can
become a much more powerful engine for innovation than a single
company proceeding in isolation

Accelerated learning and performance improvement – As the

smaller groups share their results and see which approaches are
yielding higher impact and which approaches a falling short, they can
learn much faster than if they just focus on their own efforts and
move to higher and higher levels of performance

Leveraged growth – Properly framed, these movements can

mobilize the resources and capabilities of a very diverse set of
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participants to generate far more economic value at far lower cost

than the traditional “make versus buy” approaches to growth

Shaping strategies – These movements can profoundly restructure

entire markets or industries, pulling companies out of a short-term
reactive posture and positioning them to build positions of
competitive advantage that will be very difficult to attack.

Deeper and more sustained relationships – By building trust and

focusing participants on a long-term opportunity, these movements
can quickly move companies out of their largely short-term
transactional relationships with customers and other third parties.
These deeper relationships in turn amplify the conditions for even
more rapid innovation, learning, performance improvement and
growth, setting into motion an increasing returns dynamic that will be
hard to resist.

Greater passion among participants – As I’ve discussed elsewhere,

a specific form of passion – the passion of the explorer - is becoming
more and more central to scaling learning and accelerating
performance improvement in increasingly uncertain environments.
Movements built upon compelling narratives and high impact
creation spaces are powerful catalysts for this kind of passion.

Bottom line

The Big Shift can't be addressed in isolation. To make the transition

from mounting performance pressure to exponential opportunity,
institutions will need to catalyze broader movements, pulling in more
and more participants over time to pursue a shared opportunity. If
done right, small moves smartly made can set very big things in
motion.

To get started, companies should focus on five questions:

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What is a narrative with the power to engage and mobilize the

participants that will be most helpful in embarking on a quest to
achieve a shared opportunity?

Where are these participants gathering today in communities of

interest and how can we pull them into communities of action
where the goal is not just to learn about something but to
actually achieve greater and greater impact within a specific
domain?

How can we reduce barriers to entry for participation in this

movement?

What tools or resources can we provide to these creation spaces

to accelerate and expand impact?

What metrics can we develop to determine whether this

movement is achieving more and more impact and to provide a
compass for the participants we’re mobilizing?

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