When Robert Pasin returned to his family business, Radio Flyer, as a 23-year-old college graduate, the iconic wagon maker grappled with declining sales and financial woes. Instead of capitulating to the crisis, Robert leaned in and took on more responsibility, tested new ways to solve problems, and looked for innovative ways to modernize the brand.
In an interview on the Disrupt Yourself Podcast, he said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” referring to a phrase famously connected to the political stage. For an unproven member of the leadership team and with access to a family-owned business, this crisis was young Robert’s opportunity to challenge the status quo and reimagine what Radio Flyer could be.
But that disruption had to start with him.
Egon Zehnder, a management consulting firm, recently asked 1,000 CEOs whether they agreed with the statement, “As CEO, I need the capacity to transform myself and my organization.” Before the pandemic, only 26 percent strongly agreed. But two years later, when that survey was re-administered in the throes of the shutdown, that figure was 78 percent. There is a real recognition that if you are going to lead a team or an organization into the future—a fairly uncertain future—it starts with yourself.
Of course, growth and change are rarely straightforward. Instead, they’re what we describe as a journey of gradual S Curves, navigating through the launch point, sweet spot, and mastery, a process of deliberate self-innovation. We’ve developed this model to nurture organizational transformation by shaping individual development at a scale that follows through on the goal.
Strengthening Resilience
A starting point for strengthening resilience is simply understanding what change looks and feels like. Our S Curve model offers a visual representation of this. Outlining the stages of growth across the launch point, sweet spot, and mastery shows people where they are in their growth and empowers them to confidently make progress.
What we’ve found with this model is that it normalizes the experience as people recognize that they will feel uncomfortable, awkward, and unsure of themselves when doing something new.
One of Robert’s advantages was that people didn’t necessarily expect a lot of him, which gave him the freedom to try new things. The challenge now is to give everyone within the organization the latitude to try new things and take on a new role.
Resilience is further built when mistakes happen, but you have to consider how to talk about mistakes when they’re made. One of the things that we are cautious to measure in our work is how people respond to setbacks. What language is being used? Is it someone’s fault? Or was it the system’s fault? W. Edwards Deming famously said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the result it does.”
So, what needs to be changed in the system? Phrasing the question this way helps avoid shame, allowing your people to leverage the failure that makes innovation possible.
Challenging the Status Quo
One of the benefits of being on the launch point—of being in a situation where you or your organization has been disrupted—is that you ask questions. “Why do we do it like this?” is a really powerful question. The challenge in questioning the status quo is to ask the question so that the people responsible for how things are do not feel threatened or shamed. Honor the path, the system as it currently is, but then together ask, “Could it be different?” And then, of course, “Do we make it possible for people to ask those questions in the first place?”
Back to Robert: This was his family’s company. People had seen him playing there as a child, working on the manufacturing floor. They wanted the company to succeed, and they wanted him to win, so they were more open to his disruption.
“Because we were in this crisis, I asked many questions like, well, what does Radio Flyer mean to people?” Robert said in the podcast interview. “What are we? How can we move forward? It wasn’t until we unlocked those higher-level emotional attributes about the brand that we figured out how to survive.”
Seeing Disruption as an Opportunity
Seventy-nine percent of companies prioritize innovation, i.e., disruption. But few, if any, prioritize the fact that they will be disrupted in some form or fashion—be it economic upheaval, technological change, health crises, or new industry entrants. It will happen. And the only way through it is to be able to disrupt yourself. The situation required Robert to adapt, and he did. One of the rare gifts of the pandemic was that when we were disrupted, we got to practice disrupting ourselves. And we got a lot better at it.
A crisis is an opportunity, whether your organization is experiencing disruption as a whole or individually. It is in these moments that people are most open to change. During the height of the great recession, my boss at the time, the late Clayton Christensen, opined that the recession would have an “unmitigated positive impact on innovation” because “when the tension is greatest, and resources are most limited, people are a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.” Hence, the Kaufmann Foundation statistic: “51 percent [of the Fortune 500 companies] began during a recession or bear market or both.”
Prioritizing deliberate self-innovation and giving employees the opportunity for continuous learning will grow your people and your organization because companies don’t disrupt—people do.
