Each person has a so called trigger point. The trigger point is the thing, that somebody says to you (I do not mean an insult, of course) and that makes you upset very fast – usually faster than you would like to. This week, my trigger point was pushed by the statement “I struggle to understand what you mean with inventions in business? – I would say that all changes in the way how we do business that came up during the last 100 years have in reality been enhancements of what existed already.”

Why that hit my trigger point so easily is also the way how it was said: Not like a question, not like a thesis, not with any doubt in the voice – it was stated as if that was the core of life wisdom, as if it was a fact. When I think about it now, funny enough, he might be absolutely right in a particular sense, without knowing it and without understanding it himself: What the majority of (traditionally thinking) management (including himself) is doing today is nothing else than an enhanced application of the same old mass production thinking and organizational design principles that have been invented 100 years ago – unfortunately, because there are much better options today and we see nice cases where new principles work better. So, he might have simply made a very true statement about his own world of thinking and acting. Tragically enough, the company where we both are working has become successful just by starting off with a good bunch of such new and different, non-traditional principles. How far has my company come in a decline of culture and leader-spirit to let such a statement be part of a serious discussion in management?

The point of the discussion where this statement came up was the question if our organization should be an can be in a role to enable or even drive the invention of new ways of how our customers are operating and managing their business. Or if it is only a unit to pick up technological inventions and to make them operable for the customer business. The discussion was not if management and business invention exists – because there is a pile of evidence and examples that invention of course happens in management and business. Not in the traditional management that still goes with the 100 years old mass production thinking – but in many other corners with people who are able to rethink and to question their own assumptions.

I belong to those who fight and work for change and innovation of management in our company – that’s why such as statement hits my trigger. It comes out of an attitude that new management principles and new concepts of how to lead and operate a business can not work and do only exist in theory and ideas, but not in practice. That attitude might be driven by an unconscious fear of change, of loosing the currently practiced form of control over a difficult, tough business – maybe going hand in hand with the big resigning assumption, that our type of business can not be other than tough and difficult. But it is certainly also based on a lack of knowledge of basic concepts and theory about management and organizational design (and of course, it is very hard to get these people into trainings where they could get such basic knowledge – they have ‘more important things to do’ and prefer to waste their time being busy with traditional management).

Why that statement makes me so upset, too, is the fact that because of people with such an attitude and distorted perception of reality, indeed frequently we are not able to bring such new concepts to life in our company – concepts that are already reality elsewhere. He is one of the ‘practitioners’ in management who define ‘practice’ as the part of existing reality that they personally are living and that does not include ideas or practices or theory that they do not know or do not understand. I thus sit in that meeting in such a discussion, hear that statement and all my knowledge and instincts push me to reply with a loud ‘No, that can not be true’ reaction.

And again I become aware of how change- and innovation-resistant some of our own managers are. While they are pretending to be the ones who are driving and keeping up and successful this business, in reality they are just about to ride it to death. They are complaining about how much customers demand from them and that it would be an impossible claim that they do ‘more with less’ (please! Come back to what economic activity means, wake up, this is what you call ‘productivity-gains’- everybody wants it, because it either saves effort and time or brings more wealth!) – and in reality they are the ballast that holds their company back from moving into the future. By saying that there is nothing new beyond what they know and do today, by simply going on to do what they have always done, by going on to think what they have always thought, they produce the evidence to support their own thesis: There is nothing new and better that can work in their area of influence. An expensive and tragic self-fulfilling prophecy.

For myself, I choose a better way: I look at the evidence that humanity has delivered with progress of all kind: Invention is the core result of the two most important natural human talents: Imagination and learning from reality by doing things differently.
Unfortunately, for the moment, there is a lot of ballast and debris to move out of the way if I want to walk it in my company: I see the gentlemen sit there, denying that better options exist, laughing at these ‘funny new concepts’ while they have admitted 10 minutes before, that they did not even understand them. And I see the others, the better educated, the smarter guys, who know it better, who feel the pretence – but they just do not speak up enough to get rid of these opinions. Opinions that do not help anybody to create a better future or to stay successful in an environment where the competition does not go with the assumption that invention does not exist in management.

After the day, I noticed that driven by my trigger point, for my part I have probably spoken up too much again to leave the impression of a doubtfree, knowing man who has the wisdom about management. Because giving the impression of having the truth without saying much is still weighting more in discussions in my company than argumentation, good theory and evidence. To leave such an impression, I just should have pretended that my view is clearly the important truth – with a few words only out of a deep bariton, not giving any sign of doubt that openness for different views and new ideas might be worth the effort. But you know what: I don’t really believe that last sentence that I have just written here. There are too many smart people who might not always say much, but who listen and recognize good arguments and who appreciate a drive for liberating new possibilities. I just wonder, when they will finally be as fed up by such talking as I am today. What are they waiting for?