Slow-twitch muscle
Evolution enablement
The capacity to change what you do without losing who you are.
Most organizations are built to resist change, and they are very good at it. Evolution enablement is the habit of changing anyway, while customers, employees and partners still recognize who you are. It is the hardest habit to train, because the thing that needs changing is usually the thing that is working.
How you train it.
Decide what must stay recognizable, and give named people the job of protecting it. Then make everything else cheap and normal to change, including what worked last year.
On your own: Act your way into the next version of yourself. Herminia Ibarra found that career changers rarely think their way there; the reflection follows the first step.
Who does it well.
Rewrote its mission and its culture, built on other people's platforms, and still reads as Microsoft. Refresh, not reinstall.
Unit heads free to run things their own way as long as they deliver, with former senior executives retained as facilitators to keep the culture intact.
Asked what a new CEO would do, walked out the door, came back in, and left the memory business it was built on.
Drills.
Ask three questions of the organization: how well does it sense opportunities, seize them, and transform itself to fit? Score each honestly; the weakest one is the bottleneck.
David Teece
Once a year, ask what a new leader brought in by the board would change first. Then ask why you haven't.
Andy Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive
Once a year, write the list of things the organization will stop doing, and treat it with the same seriousness as the plan of what it will start. Beloved traditions belong on it once they no longer serve what you are for.
Jim Collins, Good to Great
Separate what must stay recognizable, usually purpose and values, from everything else, which is fair game.
Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last
Give named people the job of keeping the core recognizable, so everyone else is free to change how they work.
Novo Nordisk's facilitators; my own post, Evolution enablement
People default to adding a feature, a step, a rule, a team. Practice asking what to remove first. The muscle is noticing the default at all.
Leidy Klotz, Subtract
Run exploration and exploitation as separate units with a shared leadership, rather than asking one team to do both. The structural answer to the fast-twitch, slow-twitch balance.
Charles O'Reilly and Michael Tushman, Lead and Disrupt
A vocabulary of four team types and three ways teams interact, so reorganizing becomes a design choice rather than a trauma.
Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
Small, autonomous teams; written narratives instead of slides; a standing refusal to let last year's process become this year's rule.
Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters
Trace how an insight actually travels from the person who had it to the decision it should change, and remove what blocks it.
My own post, Knowledge Flow Patterns