Embracing The Fear Of Change

I have spoken with numerous executives from companies such as Red Hat, Oracle, UPS, Microsoft, and IBM, and they all share a common concern: the fear of making poor decisions.

• According to Norwest Venture Partners, 90% of CEOs acknowledge that their primary worry is the fear of failure.

• However, exceptional leaders embrace this fear.

Why it matters: Consider Satya Nadella, for instance.

• When he became the CEO of Microsoft in 2014, the company had a toxic and siloed culture.

• Nadella recognized that the fear of being wrong stifled innovation.

• To combat this, he shifted the culture from a "know-it-all" mentality to a "learn-it-all" approach, promoting rapid experimentation and learning from failure.

The AI journey: Similarly, leaders embarking on the pilgrimage to Enterprise AI understand that failure is an integral part of the process.

• They view setbacks not as career-ending events but as valuable learning opportunities that encourage growth and innovation.

• They implement two-way door decisions that allow for rapid experimentation and foster a culture of a "fail-fast" mentality.

The big picture: When things go wrong, these fear-facing leaders embrace post-mortems and openly discuss their failures to normalize them as necessary components of the invention process.

• This practice is reminiscent of Jeff Bezos at Amazon.

Zoom in: To ensure that no failure jeopardizes an initiative, they break large, high-stakes projects into smaller, more achievable goals.

• This way, they allow for failures at the micro level to facilitate learning before scaling up to the macro level.

Between the lines: Focusing on the journey of incremental improvement, rather than just the result, allows teams to appreciate small victories and make necessary adjustments throughout the process.

• This approach helps alleviate the pressure associated with achieving success or dealing with failure.

Go deeper: An analysis of corporate history reveals a stark choice: leaders can let fear become a paralyzing force that drives them toward mediocrity and eventual irrelevance, as experienced by Kodak, Blockbuster, and Nokia.

• Conversely, leaders can choose to harness fear as a source of energy, urgency, and focus.

• They can follow in the footsteps of turnaround artists and innovators at IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and Netflix.

• This approach channels the fear of disappointing customers to overcome the fear of internal change, systematically reframing failure as a prerequisite for innovation.

• It fosters cultures of psychological safety, where the fear of speaking up is substituted with a responsibility to do so.