Can you teach dinosaurs to dance?
That’s the question that comes to mind when reading Seth Godin‘s post the other day on Dancing With Entropy.
In that post, Seth writes:
People are often paid to enforce compliance. The job is to ensure that everything is in its place, that errors are zero, that things are delivered on time and as expected. The random event is a problem, something to be feared and extinguished.
Isn’t that what we all learned in Business school?
Everything can be boiled down to a process, governed by a series of defined inputs, monitored by a formula laden spreadsheet, which is delivered up to C-Level Executives as regular intervals.
Everyone hates risk: C-Levels, Board members, shareholders. Risk has to be factored away. You try to turn business into a science, and use crisis management to smooth out the hiccups.
Of course, once you have arrived at this point, phrases like “that’s not how it is done” or “that’s not the way we do things” enter into the company’s cultural vernacular, and the process becomes calcified.
That’s Modern Business 101.
The problem is: entropy happens.
Companies are groups of individuals, all with their own goals and needs, selling products or services to customers with their own goals and needs. Every interaction between the two has the potential to introduce entropy into the flawless process you’ve established to drive the business.
For a business: people are entropy. Your customers are entropy.
Which is why I ask if you can actually teach dinosaurs to dance?
Most businesses have come up in the process era, and are so calcified with rules and procedures that they are unable to cope effectively with the randomness of customer needs.
They are Dinosaurs with bones petrifying as they dance.
It will take a cultural shift within many organizations in order to get their calcified bureaucracy to acknowledge their dance partner, much less allow them to lead.
Which is counter intuitive, because without the customer, the company can’t run. The C-Levels don’t have expense accounts. The company’s employees don’t eat.
It’s not about social media, although that is the most visible symptom of the shift in business.
Consumers are more aware than ever that the competition for their attention and dollars puts the control of the whole purchase and sales arrangement firmly in their hands, and they are more than willing to vote with their feet if their needs aren’t met.
Companies that recognize this shift, and change their business processes and structures to compensate, will survive. Whether they thrive or not depends on how well they dance, but at least they will be on the dance floor.
For the others, it is time to reexamine the viability of your business and its processes. The dustbin of history is full of companies that did not recognize market shifts, or thought that they were just a fad they could weather.
Pay attention to what your customers are saying. You can’t dance without acknowledging your partner.
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