What’s worked in the past isn’t necessarily going to push your business forward into the future. At the Scale Institute, we've spent years developing action-orientated programs to help businesses solve this kind of challenge. Our aim is to help businesses develop capability to think differently and act entrepreneurially.

With my colleague Dr Tim Rayner, who’s an entrepreneurial educator at UTS – we’ve created a startup approach for existing businesses to adopt. The ideology incorporates eight key levers, providing a framework to create business value by renewing your business model.

Here’s an overview of two critical levers.

EMBRACING A CULTURE WILLING TO FAIL

Entrepreneurial cultures cultivate a shared understanding of ‘how we get things done around here’.

Cross functional collaboration and rapid learning processes is a sure way to get things done to meet the purpose. One of these learning processes, a hack, can bring together a diverse group of people that have permission to create something new. A hack is a quick experiment to learn something, to solve a problem.

What’s great about the idea of hacking, from a cultural perspective, is that it foregrounds the idea of playing things out, or ‘moving fast and breaking things’. Faced with a challenging situation, it's easy to procrastinate, sitting around worrying about how to proceed. If the cultural norm is “do it once, do it right” people can be terrified about trying anything new, and afraid of failing.

Astro Teller, is the Captain of Moonshots at X, when a team fails to achieve what they'd hoped to achieve, he’ll say: ‘You failed? Great! What did we learn from that?’

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WHAT CAN OPERATIONAL INNOVATION LOOK LIKE?

Cutting to the heart of the matter it’s the question that’s stopping us from scaling innovation across our businesses. How possible is it to empower people to collaborate? A flat structure can generally remove the bureaucratic processes that slow things down.

It's important to ensure the right decisions get made and the company stays on track. Every company requires some hierarchy. At the end of the day, someone must ensure the stakeholder’s interests are being served. But, with the right structure in place, such as a holacracy it’s possible to open things up and empower people to test something fast.

There are two key leadership tools required for keeping work on track:

Implementing the right decision-making protocols
Implementing learning metrics

Our model has been tested and refined with companies such as Stockland, News Limited, Hilltops Council, The Executive Connection and Westpac.

Every Thursday, whilst my family and I are self-isolating, I’m offering free 30-min consultations for people ready to act. Let’s connect for advice about how your business, institution or community can renew its business model. If you book my time, please come prepared with a draft agenda, what you want your FUTURE to look like, and some non-negotiables about your ambition.

I'll do my best to help you or connect you to people that can. You can book time with me using Calendly.

Thanks for reading. This is the third of a 5 part series on renewing business models. You can find all the content at The Scale Institute. Take care in this unstable period and do what you can to just start!

START TAKING ACTION

Business Model Innovation