‘No active inertia’ is a key leadership principle that is a driver of innovation. It is not enough to innovate in new ideas, technologies, and products. Innovation may be needed in the way we do business also.
We have to watch out for people complacently settling in in the current way of doing business. Being invested in the current processes and procedures, they may be reluctant to change. Running an innovative organization requires fresh thinking, thinking on one’s toes and adopting disruptive processes. An innovative and groundbreaking output requires this.
Somebody described active inertia as a situation where we dig deeper to escape a hole. We do more of the same expecting a different result! Newton said: Every object perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon. Newton got it right. We keep moving in a straight line until somebody forces us to change.
We have to institute a change in mindset among our people to overcome this. All innovations stumble at the entrance to the cave of this beast. But of course, we should not interpret ‘No active inertia’ as not having a stable functional hierarchy that focuses on day-to-day operations to deliver value to the market. What we are talking about is when innovation is in the offing, this stable structure should allow itself to be disturbed and changed, if needed, for delivering that innovation.
Some of the practices we need to put in place to overcome active inertia are:
- Have formal and informal mechanisms for sharing learning inside and outside the organization
Sharing knowledge helps disseminate stories of successes and failure around the organization and outside it. This helps teams not to try experimenting with options that have been tried before and have not succeeded. Storytelling, mentoring, coaching, training, special communities of knowledge and so on are some of mechanisms we need to have in place sharing knowledge. We also need some technology-based tools like intranet and extranets, and corporate wiki. To present knowledge into these usefully, we also need to have excellent content management systems, document management systems, and data warehousing and mining tools. We have to implement sophisticated search tools integrated with AI to retrieve knowledge and information from these intranets and extranets.
Active obsolescence monitoring and management of data, information, and knowledge are also needed. We do not want to go around sharing data and knowledge that is out-of-date.
- Foster a culture of critical thinking
Another practice is to foster a culture of critical thinking. This is a very interesting and advanced practice rooted in an ancient philosophical practices. This helps not only to stem active inertia but also to foster innovation. Critical thinking asks us to question everything, and re-analyse and re-evaluate (with a rational, skeptical, and unbiased mind) all available facts, evidence, perspectives, observations, and arguments so that we can form a judgement about a situation or fact. In summary, critical thinking is the ability to think rationally and without bias, and to use problem-solving, decision-making, communication, creativity, and teamwork skills.
Encouraging open-ended questions is one approach to achieving this. This will make people to explain, evaluate, and justify their ideas. Others are encouraging active listening, delegating decision making and encouraging considering multiple points of view before making the decision, and encouraging people to reflect on their words and actions and learn from them.
Normal approaches like training, mentoring, coaching are also needed for this. We also need to incentivize this by rewarding curiosities. People also need exposure to different kinds of thinking and networks into the real world. This needs to be done by encouraging reading, taking part in debates and discussions and so on. And, of course, one of the key methods is to show by example. Leaders who are critical thinkers themselves will foster critical thinking in their teams.
- Constantly review, and change technology, strategy, processes, practices, stakeholder relationships, and values to align with changes in the environment
As a result of critical thinking, we will feel inclined to change our technology, strategy, processes, practices, stakeholder relationships, and values to align with current reality. We will need to continuously look at these artefacts against what is happening in the market, and in the technological, economic, social, environmental, political, legal, and regulatory situation around us and evaluate whether what we have suits the current situation. If not, we have to change them and also actively implement them and encourage people to follow them.
- Learn to adapt to change
This fourth is a very important practice to get over active inertia. Normally it is fear of change that brings on active inertia. This fear can be dispelled through proper change management approaches, and formalizing training in change management.
These are some of the practices needed to overcome active inertia. Active inertia comes from thinking like a proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand when danger threatens. We ignore the changes in the environment hoping that the changes will go away and things will revert to the same old state. ‘We have always done it this way, and it has worked’ is the constant refrain of the followers of active inertia.
[Note: This is a modified extract from PM Power’s upcoming book, Full-Stack Leadership]
