Blast Off!

What the Space Shuttle tells us about Big Scale Change?

The Space Shuttle was heavy. At blast off, it weighed 4.5 million pounds. That’s about 700 pickup trucks. But the strange thing was that spaceship weighted was only a tiny fraction of this huge rocket. Empty, the “orbiter”, the Shuttle with the astronauts and satellite load bay, weighted a mere 165,000 pounds.

So what made entire Space Shuttle such a heavyweight? The answer: fuel! Blasting into space took 2.2 million pounds of rocket fuel. In fact, it took so much fuel that NASA scientists knew they would have to add even more fuel, to move the huge weight of the main fuel, to move the spaceship.

Large organizations can be no different. As company or institution grows it becomes more complex and unwieldy. Where once one functions was just part of someone’s job, they become whole departments. As these teams grow they often breed more departments. Specialties sub-divide and multiply. As paper, process and email replaces personal interaction the organization’s responsiveness slows. Procedure begins to trumps people. Inertia not innovation can become the mainstay.

There are three key ways you jump start and transform a large organization: cuts, value and disruption.

1. Cost Driven Cuts

Call it “downsizing”, “right-sizing” and just plain cuts, the aim is simple, chop the institution or company’s size. Often done as a desperate last step to save a company, cuts are simple in conception but tough in implementation.

Scaling back a bloated organization can be necessary but it can also have serious side effects. The main danger of such a draconian approach is that in order to reach a “cost saving” target you can axe areas that are the seeds of future strength. Not being able to return money to the bottom line today, research and product development areas can be seen as “luxuries” in a cost cutting exercise. With the focus on the here and now, you can jeopardize future growth.

The second reason why simple cost cutting strategy can be a lose-lose approach is talent. A company’s greatest asset, we are often told, are its people. But no one wants to be part of a sinking ship. Especially, one being circled by sharks. The result is that those people most able to jump ship, do so. As talent leaves and less capable remain. In the end it can be self-fulling cycle, starved of talent the company loses the very talent need to reinvent the firm to meet future needs.

2. Value: Line of Sight

During a period of unprecedented growth, and later when a stagnation sets, teams can become progressively disconnected from the firm’s founding purpose. As you grow big, the “reason” why you were successful, in the beginning, becomes blurred. As more people join, and those joining do so in increasingly specialized jobs, the distance between their work, the founding purpose grows still further.

In extreme examples, where bureaucracies have grown unchecked, the distance between the teams’ tasks and the line of sight to the customer can be colossal. By this stage the founding “why” of the firm can be entirely lost. With the result that the customer is forgotten, taken for granted and their shifting needs unnoticed.

The solution is more than slicing away the “dead weight” of the back office and focusing on changing market trends. Re-establishing a line of sight to value is about understanding “why” customers have relationship with the company, and what aspects of the product or experience they “value”.

Transformation, in this scenario, becomes about synchronization. Like repairing an old clock, you must strip the parts down, discard the broken parts and make sure all parts contribute to moving the hands and keeping time. For an organization, this process can be achieved through robust dialogue to understand if every function is aligned to company’s value generation. If the area has a “low” line of sight to value proposition it is ripe for deletion, reform or merger. Key throughout this process is a clear line of sight to the company’s purpose and the customer’s perception of value.

3. Disrupt to Overcome Complacency

Big is not bad. Many huge companies are vibrant and successful. But being big, slow and complacent can spell disaster. Institutions like this are walking dinosaurs. Plodding toward their own extinction.

Inside these corporate fossils, the ballooning hierarchies cause the pace to slow. The cadence decisions ebbs and willingness to change fades.

Often the root of the problem can be a leader’s overly long tenureship. Comfortable with past successes, they rest on their laurels, further ossifying the business. With leaders playing such a critical role, in defining a team’s culture, change resistant leaders narrow the bandwidth of ideas, weed out talent and retreat to “known” formulas. Stagnation and decline typically follows.

For a innovative leader faced with large organization with a slowed cadence of change, there can only be one solution: disruption. Stirring up, not only the “purpose” discussion, “why” business lines are focused on their current priorities, but setting elevated tempo of decisions through inexhaustible energy, action and probing questions.

One of the greatest exponents of this approach was Winston Churchill. Faced with lethargic government institutions, working at a slow peacetime pace, he summed up his management style as to “gnaw, bite and pester.” He used his immense energy to push the bureaucracy and break it out of slumbering pace. He forced institutions to work to his demanding cadence (and what the crisis situation needed) not pace they had become accustomed too. The result was to drag the organization back to the vitality it once enjoyed and to set heighten tempo for its future successes.

Return to Earth…

So back to the Space Shuttle and problem of fuel, to move the fuel, to move the spaceship. All great challenges need lots of resources: people, money and time. But it is the fundamental questions of value, line of sight to the goal and willingness to disrupt that tips an organization toward success.

The Space Shuttle was undoubtedly a technological marvel. It worked because of superb engineering funded by huge resources. But it was such a complex vehicle with its supporting organization, each flight cost over a billion dollars. In comparison, the Russians made more humble rockets. They blasted into space for mere $70 million. Both were bureaucracies. But one had a clearer line of sight to its core purpose: put satellite in space, cheaply and with less fuel too.

About the Author

Simon Trevarthen is Founder and Chief Inspiration Officer of Elevate Your Greatness (EYG). EYG helps individuals, teams and organizations unpack the secrets of success by becoming even better versions of themselves through dynamic keynotes, seminars and workshops on innovation, inspiration and presentation excellence.

To learn more about Elevate Your Greatness see www.elevateyourgreatness.com

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