Scott Steinberg is an award-winning professional speaker who is among today’s best-known trends experts and futurists, a bestselling expert on leadership and innovation, and the author of “Make Change Work for You: 10 Ways to Future-Proof Yourself, Fearlessly Innovate, and Succeed Despite Uncertainty” and “Millennial Marketing: Bridging the Generation Gap”. Among today’s leading providers of keynote speeches, workshops and seminars for Fortune 500 firms, and the founder of travel + lifestyle magazine SELECT: Your City’s Secrets Unlocked™, his website is www.AKeynoteSpeaker.com.

What status quo? According to researchers at IBM, there are no more static or predictable patterns in business. Continuous change is the new normal. Considering that their research was conducted half a decade ago, business leaders would do well to wake up and realize that nowadays, it’s also more normal than new. To stay relevant in a fast-changing world, clearly, organizations must continually change and innovate as well. Happily, as research with scores of leading innovators for our new book “Make Change Work for You: 10 Ways to Future-Proof Yourself, Fearlessly Innovate, and Succeed Despite Uncertainty” reveals though, this process can be far less challenging than you’d think.

Case in point: Over the past several years, PwC’s Strategy& consulting division has had occasion to study hundreds of the world’s top innovators — including market leaders in every field — to determine their competitive edge. Strikingly, the world’s most successful enterprises’ top source of competitive advantage is that they simply provide workers with better platforms for sharing their insights and translating these ideas into action. These businesses’ leading source of innovative new ideas may also surprise you: Time and again, studies show it’s simply listening to customers — again, an area where frontline employees are best poised to spot rising opportunities or threats.

Seven Habits Vital for Organizations to Embrace

Clearly, corporate culture plays a pivotal role in driving innovation. And the same system that market-leading enterprises utilize to drive game-changing breakthroughs and continually stay in tune with changing times and trends can also be readily adapted and utilized to future-proof any organization. (Hint: Staying attuned to rising opportunities and threats, and brainstorming better ways to address them is far simpler when you find more effective ways to tap into the collective insights and capabilities of your membership.) Following are seven new habits that leading organizations say it’s vital to embrace in order to prepare your organization to stay at the forefront of fast-changing and highly unpredictable business environments:

1. Create a culture of trust and encourage employees or members to speak up. Leading organizations empower workers and reward them for bringing potential opportunities and challenges to their attention. That’s because frontline employees are often an enterprise’s most informed audience. Unsurprisingly, the system can work much the same for leading organizations — time and again, they can succeed by finding better ways to leverage the collective wisdom and resourcefulness of their constituents. So to create and sustain competitive advantage, do the same thing leading businesses do for their workers — provide your employees or members with the tools they need to share their ideas and insights, then translate those ideas into action. IT and big data leader EMC does a great job of this, for example, by putting pressing strategic problems to employees in the form of innovation contests that invite workers to share and vote for new solutions online via quickly assembled and quickly deployed websites.
2. Constantly rethink business practices. Is “The way it’s always been done” still the best way to do it? Like competitors, market leaders are always asking themselves this question. Quick-service restaurant leader Freshii exemplifies this philosophy by regularly holding meetings where it asks executives to discuss “bad stuff first, good stuff last” — i.e. routinely think about and prioritize what it could be doing better, and where it’s lacking in capabilities. What’s stopping your organization from doing the same — then quickly reacting and addressing these issues?
3. Freely collaborate across the organization. Flatten lines of communication, and allow information, insights and support to flow throughout your organization. The more readily you can align tools, talent and resources toward common goals, the more readily you can foster innovation. Case in point: At personal finance software leader Intuit, employees can easily propose, team up to work on and secure support for new prototypes online. Dozens of revenue-generating ideas and products have resulted.
4. See the future now. Rather than simply keep pace with rivals, top innovators always consider where the future is heading and strive to put the solutions tomorrow’s audiences will demand in place today. For instance: Google, HP and 3M are famous for encouraging employees to invest large portions of paid time exploring fresh ideas and experimenting with new innovations. As opposed to standard maintenance and upkeep tasks — i.e. research, fundraising, lobbying, education, member services, etc. — how much of your organization and its staff’s time are you investing in long-term growth activities designed to expand its reach and capabilities?
5. Be open to change. Leaders expect employees to stay abreast of changing business environments — and intelligently and flexibly respond to them. To this extent, market-leading innovators provide workers with the freedom to take small, smart risks that have the potential to help the organization better serve its customers … so long as these risks are intelligent, productive and cost-affordable. Online lodging service Airbnb actually encourages new hires to roll out new ideas on day one. What platforms and programs do you have in place for conducting similar learning experiments?
6. Spread your risk. Leading organizations don’t try to be risk free, but rather actively pursue a more calculated range of business bets. As with financial portfolios, these enterprises constantly manage and adjust a portfolio of strategic ventures. Not all wagers will pan out. But all are designed to collectively help the organization grow its capabilities, spread risk and learn through real-time monitoring and course correction. From Merck to FedEx, Cisco to Intel, market leaders are constantly using innovation laboratories and incubators to play a portfolio of wagers. You can do the same.
7. Never stop learning. Rather than just relying solely on contingency plans, market leaders consistently experiment with new innovations and solutions — especially when things are going well, and they can most afford to gamble. By consistently pioneering new ideas and approaches, and extending their experience, capabilities and comfort zones, they create added flexibility and room to maneuver in the face of changes or unforeseen events. Market leaders like Sony and Microsoft specifically commit teams to pushing the boundaries of technology in new directions, knowing that these new developments may be put to a variety of useful business purposes — not all of them commercial. Similarly, in good times, your organization can also plan for bad times by routinely rolling out new ventures and solutions that offer the potential for evolution, growth, and expansion as well.

Business Strategy Should be Flexible

In short, leading organizations turn employees and/or members into emergency responders. They transform infrastructures from barriers into enablers. They see business strategy as being flexible, not fixed. And they continually provide constituents with the tools and runway they need to reimagine, reinvent and innovate their way to success as scenarios change. You and your organization can also consistently innovate, succeed and stay ahead of the curve by doing the same. I&FMM

Scott Steinberg is an award-winning professional speaker who is among today’s best-known trends experts and futurists, a bestselling expert on leadership and innovation, and the author of “Make Change Work for You: 10 Ways to Future-Proof Yourself, Fearlessly Innovate, and Succeed Despite Uncertainty” and “Millennial Marketing: Bridging the Generation Gap”. Among today’s leading providers of keynote speeches, workshops and seminars for Fortune 500 firms, and the founder of travel + lifestyle magazine SELECT: Your City’s Secrets Unlocked™, his website is www.AKeynoteSpeaker.com.