But if your team struggles to explain why they do a particular thing in a particular way, it might be the case that those good reasons either don’t exist anymore or that they need rethinking. After all, there are often good reasons that organizations do things the way they do, and there’s no need to fix something that’s not broken. The point of asking the question is not necessarily to burn the status quo to the ground completely, but to identify the elements within it that are preventing innovation. Once you’ve taken stock of your own status quo, the most important question is: Why do we do these things in these ways? What are the tools, processes and products that make the organization tick? This constellation of factors is the status quo that you will need to interrogate and disrupt if you want to innovate. The first step in that process is identifying what the team or organization is actually doing–not what you say you do or what your customers think you do, but what you actually do. If you’re a leader asking your team to “challenge the status quo,” recognize that what you’re really asking them to do is challenge “the way we do things around here.” On the other hand, it means any organization struggling to “challenge the status quo” might have to face some uncomfortable questions about itself in order to move forward. On one hand, this means there’s a lot more room for innovation than it might at first appear. Many of the most useful and most profitable innovations of our time have been those that find a new way to do an old thing–think ride sharing services or the smartphone–or those that create a new experience using existing methods and tools–think podcasts or farm to table dining. Does that mean any organization seeking innovation has to either reinvent themselves or reinvent the wheel, pioneering a completely new industry or solution? Not exactly. If the status quo means doing an old thing in an old way, or doing things the way they’ve traditionally been done, then it would appear that innovation means doing a new thing in a new way. In other terms, the status quo is “the way things are done around here,” like selling the same products to the same customers, having the same meetings, and hiring and promoting the same types of talent we always have. It may sound simple, but how exactly do you do it?įirst, it is useful to define what we mean by the “status quo.” Generally speaking, we can define the status quo as doing an old thing in an old way. As any organization pursues growth and innovation, a likely phrase you will hear from the boardroom is, “We need to challenge the status quo!” Indeed, challenging the status quo is one of the top capabilities that organizations today are trying to develop.
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