From an ecological perspective the “adjacent possible” is an affordance, an action possibility that the environment presents or “affords” us with to achieve our purposes. Finding affordances is the essence of improvisation, which entrepreneurs excel at. In my experience affordances are more easily discovered “on the ground” than seen “from the air”. This best places and times to search for affordances is in the spaces and on the occasions when value is either being created or destroyed. The Japanese call them “gemba”.
I recall when I was responsible for a wholesale steel distribution business occasionally getting up at 4.30 am to ride in the steel delivery trucks with the drivers. It turns out that the customer’s yard is an important gemba. A sharp-eyed driver can assess the state of the customer’s business, determine whether competitor’s trucks are present, what they are loaded with, and develop relationships with the yard boss to get our load taken off as soon as possible. Looking to your drivers for this kind of intelligence and behaviour and sharing that knowledge ties them into the organization’s mission in new ways.
In organizations the only way to turn abstract ‘Whats’ into concrete ‘Hows’ is to connect the ‘Whats’ to individuals’ experiences. When this happens, the drivers as a group can become a source of advantage to the company; they will grow in the process as they start to connect actualities with possibilities – what they see and hear with what they do. They will start talking to each other, telling new stories about themselves and their experiences. Their activities will take on new significance. Horizontal communication will increase, a sense of coherence will emerge and slowly the corporate narrative will change. In what many people think of as a commodity business, like steel distribution, the competitive edge consists in many people performing scores of mundane actions all together and a little bit better than the competition. The same is true of top performers in many fields; excellence is often mundane!
From an ecological perspective the “adjacent possible” is an affordance, an action possibility that the environment presents or “affords” us with to achieve our purposes. Finding affordances is the essence of improvisation, which entrepreneurs excel at. In my experience affordances are more easily discovered “on the ground” than seen “from the air”. This best places and times to search for affordances is in the spaces and on the occasions when value is either being created or destroyed. The Japanese call them “gemba”.
I recall when I was responsible for a wholesale steel distribution business occasionally getting up at 4.30 am to ride in the steel delivery trucks with the drivers. It turns out that the customer’s yard is an important gemba. A sharp-eyed driver can assess the state of the customer’s business, determine whether competitor’s trucks are present, what they are loaded with, and develop relationships with the yard boss to get our load taken off as soon as possible. Looking to your drivers for this kind of intelligence and behaviour and sharing that knowledge ties them into the organization’s mission in new ways.
In organizations the only way to turn abstract ‘Whats’ into concrete ‘Hows’ is to connect the ‘Whats’ to individuals’ experiences. When this happens, the drivers as a group can become a source of advantage to the company; they will grow in the process as they start to connect actualities with possibilities – what they see and hear with what they do. They will start talking to each other, telling new stories about themselves and their experiences. Their activities will take on new significance. Horizontal communication will increase, a sense of coherence will emerge and slowly the corporate narrative will change. In what many people think of as a commodity business, like steel distribution, the competitive edge consists in many people performing scores of mundane actions all together and a little bit better than the competition. The same is true of top performers in many fields; excellence is often mundane!