“Being a fish out of water is tough, but that's how you evolve.”

– Kumail Nanjiani

We'd like to begin by transporting you back to nineteenth-century England. The Industrial Revolution is taking hold, and the factories in the country's industrial heartlands are burning coal and pumping out black smoke. The residue from this smoke coats everything from buildings to trees.

Enter the peppered moth. In the 1800s, naturalists observed that peppered moths had evolved to fit in with this changed environment. The peppered moth is often found on the trunk of the silver birch tree and, therefore, its natural colouration is pale with darker spots, to match the colour of the tree's bark and camouflage it from predators. In highly industrialised areas of England, however, these moths were becoming darker in colour.

The pale-coloured moths stood out too much on the now-blackened bark of the trees and were therefore much easier for predators to spot. As a result, the pale moths were being eaten leaving the darker-coloured moths to survive and breed. Meanwhile, in regions where there was considerably less industrialisation the peppered moths remained pale in colour. They had no need to change their camouflage because their trees were not being darkened by soot.

This is probably one of the best documented stories of “adapt or die.” Peppered moths in industrialised areas adapted and evolved because those that didn't died. It really was that simple. To this day, it's still widely considered to be one of the best examples of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

What does your business have in common with the humble peppered moth? It too has to adapt or it will die. In the business world, just as in nature, our environment is continuously changing and that means we can never stop adapting to match it. There are many organisations in the world today that are undergoing a period of transformation because they have fallen behind and they need to catch up. What we're talking about here is not only transforming to catch up, but making adaptation and evolution a core part of your business so that you never fall behind again (or ideally that you never fall behind in the first place).

As a leader, it is your responsibility to determine the vision, paint that picture, and state your organisation's purpose so that you never fall behind again. Think about the Formula 1 race team principal who is continuously evolving the team's strategy and car to make sure that the team stays ahead of the pack. The principal's driver knows exactly what has to be done on the track, the crew knows exactly what's expected of it before, during, and after the race. This clear direction is what allows all on that team to function to their best ability.

However, a Formula 1 season is never just one race. Depending on performance throughout the season, not only will there be pivots and changes to the strategy set by the principal, but the end destination might also change. A string of poor results might suddenly see your driver and team aiming for third in the championship, rather than first, or a series of exceptional wins could put your team on course for winning the championship, where your initial goal at the start of the season was a top-five finish.

The Bandersnatch process

In business, we have to pivot and change direction sometimes and it's important to remember that the destination we're striving for could also change depending on the route we follow. We also have to recognise that we are never going to reach that destination because that implies an end point. In business, there is no end, merely a constant evolution and adaptation to stay ahead of the competition. Just look at 3M.

The interactive film Bandersnatch, which was produced as part of the Black Mirror series for Netflix, is a simplified example of this process at work. As the viewer, you chose the direction the storyline took at various points throughout the film. In taking certain decisions around the plot, you influenced the ending that you saw. Unlike the world of business, Bandersnatch does of course have an end.

However, it illustrates the point about choosing your direction of travel well. Much like in real life, in Bandersnatch you don't know what ending you're heading towards when you start watching the film. Each decision you take for the main character leads you along a specific story arc. You're essentially opening a door and stepping through it without knowing what's on the other side, even if you might be able to predict what you expect to see.

Another key difference between Bandersnatch and business is that in Bandersnatch you can never go back. Once you take a decision about your direction of travel you are committed to that trajectory. In business, this might be true in some cases, but not in others. Often it will be possible to step back through a metaphorical door.

What we have to recognise in a business context is which doors we can leave open to step back through if we need to, and which ones close behind us, leaving us to navigate forward from that point. As a business, it's vital to make that distinction because if you're stepping through a door that will close behind you, you need to be confident of your next steps from there.

How can you tell if the door you're about to step through will stay ajar or close behind you? There are a few factors that will play a role here. The first is the speed at which you're travelling through that door, because if you race through really quickly, by the time you realise you want to go back, you might be too far from the door. The second is measurement, which we discuss in greater detail in Chapter 2, but fundamentally if you're measuring the right things you will be in a position to retrospectively change the elements that need changing.

Each business will be different and therefore whether it is able to go back through a door will vary. However, all leaders should be challenging themselves on these decisions. As a leader, what you have to work out is whether getting a particular decision wrong is reversible. If the answer to that question is “no”, you have to take time to make that decision.

If the decision won't kill your business, you have to consider what the cost will be for you to step back through that door and course correct. The deciding factor should be whether the opportunity outweighs the risk of making the decision quickly.

This story highlights the danger of allowing your process to dominate logic. We can all think of scenarios in which a business decision has been driven by process rather than by the opportunity that the decision carries. As businesses grow, they become more process-driven and they start to put each decision through the same process; whether it's for a £100 000 project or a £20 million project.

Sometimes you just have to let the logical solution take over and leave the processes behind. If a Formula 1 driver spots a gap in the race to jump up a few places to a pole position, the principal can't let that opportunity slip just because it's not on the race plan, but instead adapts the plan.

Emotional intelligence is more than a process

There is a lot of talk within businesses across all sectors about the need to have empathy. However, we believe that focusing only on empathy isn't enough. What businesses need instead is to focus on emotional intelligence. What's the difference?

Empathy often feels like a box that needs to be ticked. Are you empathetic with customers? Yes, good, job done. In some companies you can almost hear them saying, “If you want empathy, go down the corridor and it's the third door on the left.” This misses the point.

Emotional intelligence (EQ), on the other hand, is much more about empowerment. Empathy is a part of that, but when you focus on emotional intelligence within your organisation, what you're doing is empowering people to think differently and giving them the authority to make decisions that are in the best interests of your customers and, therefore, your business.

Principles guide the business

The reason that having solid principles is so important is that you can't possibly map every single customer journey or interaction, or predict every single reason that a customer might get in touch with your business.

What you can do is embed a set of principles so deeply into your company that everyone knows how to respond in any situation in a way that matches your brand.

Compare and contrast that example about Harry's razors with another experience Rich had with a very different brand at a similar time. He wanted to test drive an £80 000 car from a luxury brand in preparation for an automotive presentation, so he contacted two dealers on a Sunday night to book his test drive. One dealer got in touch with him by lunchtime on Tuesday, and he's still waiting to hear from the other dealer he contacted.

That's a stark difference. Harry's solved a problem with a £34 product within minutes at 8 p.m. on a Thursday night, but a luxury brand, at best, took 1.5 days to respond to a request for a test drive and, at worst, didn't respond at all.

As a leader, selling the vision you have for your company goes hand in hand with embedding those core principles in the business. To get buy-in from not only everyone who works for you, but also your customers, you need to very clearly paint this vision from the outset. Without having clarity over this vision, you will also struggle to set the direction for the business.

Look at the 3M example that we shared earlier in this chapter. Board members clearly set the vision for the company when they decided to focus on knowledge rather than products. This key principle translates into cultural behaviours within the business that filter through to every person who works for and with you. In starting here, you're ingraining this behaviour and empowering your employees to start building a culture that reflects what you're trying to achieve. It's like a waterfall effect and it all starts from effective communication from leadership.

The aim is an adaptive organisation that can transform motion into progress

As a business, you might be working towards transforming your customer experience, but what we want to help you achieve is becoming an adaptive organisation. Why is that distinction important? Because there is no end. As we said earlier, this isn't a linear process with a final destination; it's a constant evolution.

The peppered moth that we talked about at the beginning of this chapter embodies that concept. Not only did the moths living in highly industrialised areas become darker in colour as their environment became polluted by the soot from factories, those same populations of moths have since returned to a lighter colour because a lot of the pollution that existed decades ago has been cleaned up. That species has continued to evolve to adapt to its current environment. A business is no different.

As a leader, you need to have a transformative mindset, which means that you're able to reframe your dream or vision for the business when required. Amazon's AWS service is a great example of this. It was initially developed as an internal system to manage Amazon's own infrastructure, but it quickly became clear that the technology had a multitude of applications that could be useful to a range of businesses. As a company, Amazon looked at AWS, recognised an opportunity to productise and monetise it, and then reframed what that meant for their business. Amazon adapted its offering and altered the direction of its business in the process.

Another way to look at this is through the analogy of buying someone a fishing rod versus teaching them how to fish. Imagine that each of the villages along a river represents a business. What often happens is that the people in one village look across the river and see that all the people in that other village are well fed. They look closer and see that they have fishing rods, so they go out and buy the same rods.

However, there is a difference between having the fishing rod and knowing where to find the fish, what bait to use, and how to start reeling them in when you do get a bite. Knowing how to fish is very different from having a fishing rod. What the people in that first village need to do is learn to fish, not buy fishing rods. Within business the same principle applies.

It can be easy to look at a competitor and think that if you have the same tools as it does, you'll get the same results, except this ignores all the knowledge that your competitor has. Our advice is to learn to fish instead of rushing to buy fishing rods, and our hope is that this book will help you to do that.

We often see businesses making this mistake in relation to technology: when an organisation will decide to change its technology because other businesses around it are doing the same. However, it's important to consider that changing your technology might not lead to the results you want. You have to ask whether you're using the technology you have correctly, how you can leverage what you've got, and whether you're driving the right value. Can you adapt how you're using your tools, rather than just throwing them out and buying new ones? Sometimes you will need new tools, but don't buy them because your competitors have them. Learn how to fish and decide if you need a rod or a net.

Progress accelerator

If you go to www.motionintoprogress.com, you can complete a simple online questionnaire that will help you frame your purpose and identify what direction you need to be heading in.

Highlights

The bottom line is that every business needs to continue to adapt and evolve throughout its life or it will die. You can no longer have and follow a single strategy; businesses need multiple strategies that they execute at the same time. To be able to execute multiple strategies simultaneously, and to do so effectively, you can't necessarily continue to work the way you always have; you need to continuously adapt.

Each organisation needs to focus on building and strengthening its change muscle so that adaptability is built in. One of the keys to successfully adapting is a leader's ability to clearly communicate that big picture, which sets the direction of travel for the whole organisation. We also have to keep in mind that there is no end to this process.

“It's never not day one” is a famous quote by Jeff Bezos. It comes from a letter that he wrote to his shareholders in 2017, 20 years after he started Amazon. In that letter he explained that there are four days in a company's life: day one when you're relevant, day two when you're in stasis, day three when you're irrelevant, and day four when you slide to death. He stated that his role as CEO of Amazon is to make sure that “It's never not day one.” How do you make sure that you're always at day one? By adapting.