Interview: Adam Mendler
I recently went one on one with Jonathan Brill. Jonathan was a senior leader and the Global Futurist at HP and is the author of the new book Rogue Waves: Future-Proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Jonathan: I’m passionate about solving new challenges and building a better future. We can know more about the future than we imagine. So I help senior leaders make decisions that put them in the best position, no matter what the future holds.
I work with visionaries, boards, and senior leaders to future-proof their growth plans. Today, I am an advisor, but I used to be the global futurist at HP, Hewlett-Packard, where I directed many of the company’s long-term strategy and planning programs. Previously, I ran contract R&D firms for the real estate, consumer electronics, software, food and beverage industries. Those companies helped bring over 350 products from idea to market.
I also helped launch a World’s Fair pavilion, cofounded a niche manufacturing firm and a virtual reality company.
New challenges drive me. With those come new failures to avoid—and new opportunities for success. That’s what my book, Rogue Waves, is really about: how to understand new situations and turn them to your advantage.
Adam: What do you hope readers take away from your new book?
Jonathan: In the deep ocean, 100-foot waves can build in minutes when smaller ones collide. These Rogue Waves sink even the largest ships. The same is true in business. Individually manageable trends collide to create a nonlinear impact. For example, two years ago, not many people understood that someone sneezing in Wuhan would upend the globe a few weeks later. In fact, 8 out of 10 of the largest publicly held companies in the United States failed to identify pandemics as a risk in their 2019 SEC filings.
There are systematic ways of identifying, positioning yourself for, increasing resilience to, and exploiting radical change. It’s the job of corporate leaders and boards to ensure that they have this skill set in their organizations. As my recent HBR article suggests, the companies who take change seriously tend to do better when it occurs.
Adam: What are the keys to future-proofing business? How can leaders build organizations that are adaptive to change?
Jonathan: When leaders work with me on future-proofing their businesses, we focus on the basics, what I call the ABCs of Resilient Growth.
A – Awareness. Organizations don’t change until they know why they need to. So we make surer that their people can Identify the rogue waves that will disrupt your business.
B – Behavior. Companies can’t gain from radical change unless the right people have the right skills. So we embed the skills to plan for, respond to, and exploit the unexpected.
C – Culture. Old ways of working won’t build a new reality. So we design processes and incentives that drive resilient growth.
Adam: How can leaders foster innovation?
Jonathan: There are a couple of ways.
The first is being clear about how you measure and incentivize risk-taking. When I do assessments of innovations programs, I frequently see that they are budgeted and judged as independent bets instead of a portfolio of investments.
Any investment portfolio should have a considered balance of experiments. They should range from, ‘Put a ding in the universe’ to sustaining the current trajectory to avoiding failure. You also need to consider timing; will the right combination of investments mature on the necessary timeline, no matter what the future holds?
The second is to communicate what you want to accomplished. This sounds obvious, but it’s not. Whatever your agenda, the goal shouldn’t be successful experiments. I see companies fail at this constantly.
The goal should be well-run experiments. If you incentivize near-term success, you disincentivize failure. You improve short-term risk mitigation, but you disincentivize actual risk-taking and strategic decision making. The result is that, for most companies, innovation is old, reliable ideas in new clothing.
The question shouldn’t be whether the experiment was successful. It should be whether the investigation was well-formed, generated practical knowledge, and balanced the portfolio.
You don’t expect all promising stocks to succeed. You shouldn’t expect that of experiments, either.
One vital communications skill to master is communicating what success looks like to employees. In a recent HBR article, I mentioned a technique that I call ‘Risk Bands.’ Roger Martin, the former dean of the Rotman School of Business, was kind enough to call it “Genius.” The idea is simple. Tell your employees the maximum level of risk and minimum level of risk you expect them to take without checking in. Unless you communicate this and put money behind it, your people have no idea what’s “nice to have” and what’s “need to have.” Bonus a 20% failure rate, not a 100% success rate.
The second communication skill, and this is a common invisible blocker that senior leaders leave in their wake, is to communicate the deeper goal of the action, how to know if it’s still a priority and what types of steps to take if they disappear. Your team can’t innovate in your stead without this information because they don’t know what success looks like.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?/What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?/ What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Jonathan: I think it depends on the context, but it comes down to knowing when to captain and when to coach. Coaching allows you, as a leader, to generate more innovation, but only if all of these criteria are true:
A–Awareness
Does the team have a shared mental model?
Are they considering the impact of overlapping waves of change?
Do they understand the context they are working in and how it is changing?
B–Behavior
Does the team have the technical competencies to make sense of the situation
Do people know how to report in ways that everyone can comprehend?
Is there a fast feedback loop between the team and the captain?
C–Culture
Individuals can coordinate experiments without excessive intrusions from above
They understand the overall goal of the team
Everyone is motivated to see the goal achieved
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Jonathan: Some leadership is probably innate, and the right way of leading is very much dependent on culture, governance, and incentive structure. Still, many of the most important skills can be learned and are consistent.
Start identifying the awareness, behavior, and culture gaps—and teaching your team to fill them. If they aren’t filled, it doesn’t matter how much you pay your people or how good they are; you are handicapping them. When the next rogue wave hits, you’ll need to make decisions faster than you, as a leader, can analyze information. Your people can’t coordinate and innovate effectively on your behalf—unless you equip them to do so. Otherwise, when the rogue wave hits, you become the blocker.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Jonathan: Just start. It doesn’t matter where you start until you understand the rules of the game. The best way to learn them is to play. So get out of your office and Zoom rooms and get on the ground. The first step in change and improvement is understanding what needs to be improved. You can’t do that by looking at reports. You need to get out and see what’s going on.