No, I’m not talking about Brett Favre, Dennis Rodman, or John Daly. I’m talking about Netflix, Accenture, Play-Doh, and other free-market players who’ve stood the test of time – and made fortunes – by doing away with old models.
It’s obvious that the goal of business and sport is to build up. Get bigger, faster, stronger. What’s less obvious is that high performance in either arena is equally about breaking down.
Organizational psychologist (and one of my favourite business gurus), Adam Grant, wrote a whole book (Think Again) about the value of changing your mind. One study he cites followed early-stage startups in Italy. The study found that those who changed their business model most generated four times more revenue than those that stuck to their original plan.
Closer to home, the Creative Destruction Lab is a non-profit organization run by Rotman School of Management that aims to “build something massive” (grow pre-seed science and technology start ups into billion-dollar businesses through mentorship and investment.) The very name makes the point: growth is a cycle of destruction and creation.
Even in our everyday lives, we observe and experience examples of this fact. Whether it’s fixing your golf swing or renovating your home: often our circumstances have to get worse before they can get better.
Biology Already Knows This
As always, our bodies are living proof of this process.
In the strength and conditioning world, research shows that the resistance training parameters that stimulate the greatest cortisol response —a hormone that breaks down muscle tissue and fat stores into extra energy—are the same training parameters that stimulate the greatest growth hormone response — a hormone responsible for energy storage and protein synthesis — and result in the greatest gains in muscle.
Our biology demonstrates that the recipe for growth is equal parts destruction and creation.
The Psychology of Subtraction
Here’s the catch: Most of us would much rather add (create) than subtract (destroy) on our path to high performance.
Research in the field of behavioural science shows designers and engineers default to adding features in an effort to improve products for customers instead of removing or revising them. A phenomenon known as “subtraction bias”.
Despite so many obvious examples in both business and sport of how breaking-then-building enhances performance, we don’t readily follow suit.
I have watched many-an-entrepreneur become visibly uncomfortable at the idea of replacing a sub-par process with something new.
Once I had a client aggressively argue against making modest-yet-meaningful changes to their business model in order to increase customer satisfaction, acquisition and retention (defeating the point of hiring me to do the research and analysis.) I was genuinely shocked when they doubled down on their existing model (that was broken enough in the first place that they sought out my help) challenging the accuracy and validity of their own data simply because they did not want to take a step backwards in order to move forward.
But, as a longtime entrepreneur myself, I do get it.
The thought of going backwards feels defeating. The thought of redoing your website, retraining your staff, or overhauling your financial model feels exhausting.
But going backwards needn’t feel defeating – it’s simply part of the process.
And retracing your steps isn’t the only prospective way forward that feels exhausting.
Knocking on twice as many doors to land the same number of customers because your offer doesn’t quite fit the market is also exhausting. Constantly hiring new staff to replace the ones that have left because they didn’t fit the role is also exhausting.
And these “stay the course” solutions are unlikely to change your circumstances.
But retracing your steps probably will.
The Real Problem for Entrepreneurs
The problem isn’t that going backwards is painful. The problem is that many Canadian owner-operators don’t expect to go backwards when they set out on their entrepreneurial journey. Like the slowest-growing Italian start-ups I referenced earlier, many Canadian Entrepreneurs don’t explicitly expect to change their business model as they go.
This might have been a reasonable position to take 25 or 30 years ago when the world moved more slowly, and the information a entrepreneur needed to confidently make a strategic change was harder to come by.
But today, the opposite is true: change is constant and information is abundant.
It’s always been true on a biological level but now more than ever, we need to break then build to perform in business.
Seek and Destroy
When was the last time you eliminated a suboptimal product, service, or process? Not because you had to, but because you chose to?
Here’s my suggestion: make it a habit to seek and destroy underperforming parts of your business to create space for bigger, better opportunities to take root.
Because the best players—the ones who win—don’t just build. They destroy.