Architect for Innovation Using the Hidden Blueprint Inside Your Organization

Adapt, or die. This is the law of nature, but it holds equally true for businesses, and research reveals a surprising trend. Market leadership cycles are becoming shorter. Just a few decades ago, companies comprising the Fortune 500 were the unrivaled incumbents of the business world. The average life span of these organizations is steadily shrinking, decreasing from 61 years in 1958 to less than 18 years today. And this fact has caused the quest for adaptation and innovation to assume an unprecedented urgency.

At Pivot International, we are global leaders in helping companies develop and deliver innovative products that position them as stalwart industry leaders. Driving innovation begins with innovating from within, continually reinventing how to best serve customers in response to an ever-changing world and market. Now in our 50th year of product design, development, manufacturing, and supply chain management, our pedigree of architecting for innovation speaks for itself. We are the driving force behind dozens of successful, award-winning products across fourteen industries, including medical, industrial, consumer, and more.

How can companies effectively architect for innovation to reduce their chances of obsolescence and extinction, consistently perform at the top of their game, and lead the market? Here are five insights that can make the difference between entropy and innovation, and help you discover the hidden blueprint inside your organization.

Opportunity Lies in the Gap

Architecting organizational structures that drive innovation requires identifying and harnessing informal networks, breaking down siloes, and recruiting participation from stakeholders far outside the C-suite. To adapt and innovate, companies first need to get up close and personal with the threat landscape in which they find themselves. Only by taking inventory of actual threats and other ecological pressures can businesses hope to accurately discern the gap between their current limitations and the adaptive challenge they are facing. (It’s in this gap that opportunity lies.)

“The Tree That Cannot Bend, Breaks.”

Nothing in nature or in a successful business is uncompromisingly rigid. Survival depends on flexibility, and innovation depends on the ability to adapt to ecological pressures and threats. Contrary to popular misconception, survival of the fittest is less about a focus on maintaining dominance and more about a focus on reenvisioning the threat landscape as one of opportunity. (The former puts companies in a reactive, defensive position, while the latter frees them to move freely to thrive in conditions that prove deadly to their competitors.)

As in nature, highly innovative companies are characterized by organizational structures in which flexible hierarchies, networked collaboration, and distributed governance feature prominently. And although such companies can provide meaningful inspiration, creating the organizational architecture for innovation can be challenging. Up to 90 percent of organizations aspire to such architecture, yet only 11 percent of executive teams say they’re confident about the undertaking.

Innovation is the Journey, Not Just the Destination

World-renowned leadership consultant and coach Marshall Goldsmith reminds us, “What got you here won’t get you there.” In other words, companies must be willing to decouple from their established business model and seemingly tried-and-true strategies. They must also eschew “copycat” approaches that focus on emulation (of market leaders) at the expense of innovation. This demands an appetite for experimentation and risk-taking. Innovation doesn’t lie at the end of this experimentation. Instead, this experimentation is itself an exercise in innovation and should be regarded accordingly.

Iterative Prototyping — An Illustrative Example of Innovation in Action

Perhaps nowhere can architecture-for-innovation be seen more concretely than in the practice of iterative prototyping where teams set out to solve adaptive challenges through a series of controlled “fail forwards.” Iterative prototyping illustrates the power of process-based, open, experimental, collaborative, “freedom-within-a-framework” architectures of innovation. At Pivot, these adaptive challenges are undertaken within the broader context of DFM — Design For Manufacture — a specialized competency that drives innovation by contending with the threats of cost and scale posed by large-volume production.

Architecting For Innovation, Inspired by Nature

Autopoietic. It’s a fancy term for the loosely networked, self-organizing processes exhibited by all living things from cell colonies to wetlands to business organizations. All company cultures have informal (hidden) social networks that self-organize and operate outside the bounds of formal roles and titles. It’s in them that the real action is found.

These networks (which exist at all levels of the organization like eddies within a larger body of water) can illuminate the pathways through which information flows, influence is exercised, alliances formed, and decisions made. Once these networks are identified, they can be mapped to serve as the basis for architecting structures that drive innovation. Said differently, companies don’t need to architect structures for innovation from scratch. They just need to discover the blueprint hidden inside their own organization. This “follow the flow,” nature-inspired approach to innovation is known as “biomimicry,” and it’s being increasingly deployed to solve adaptive challenges in the service of innovation.

Looking for an Innovative Partner to Help You Launch a Successful Product?

If you’re seeking a proven partner to help you design, develop, manufacture, and deliver an innovative product, Pivot is the answer. With a diverse suite of digital technologies, extensive product portfolio, a seamless approach to NPD, and a reputation for close collaboration with our clients, we are committed to fueling your market success. To learn more about how we can help you achieve your business objectives, contact us today.

Which of These Seven Leaders are You?

Have you ever given much thought to your leadership style? Maybe you’ve been exposed to management studies on the topic, or even taken an assessment. But have you ever wondered what accounts for your leadership style? Have you ever wondered if it’s fairly innate vs. acquired, to what degree you can change it, and if it has much bearing on your bottom line? 

At Pivot International, our executive team brings more than 250 years of combined leadership experience. At all levels of management, we understand that leadership is about so much more than how we run our organization and manage our teams — it’s also about ensuring that clients successfully capitalize on opportunity. (Especially in times of sourcing instability, market volatility, and techno-economic inflection points.) 

As a global one-source leader to companies worldwide, we provide advanced DFM expertise that spans fourteen industries, agile supply chain solutions, and 320,000 square feet of flexible manufacturing space across three continents. We help companies manage risk, defy disruption, drive innovation, and scale globally. To do this, we believe that successfully navigating complex market and geo-political landscapes depends on complex leadership styles — leadership styles that have been extensively studied by Harvard Leadership Professor and global Fortune 500 consultant William R. Torbert.

Torbert’s research reveals that an individual’s leadership style has little to do with their temperament or preferred way of doing things. Instead, it has much more to do with deeply held (and generally unquestioned) assumptions about how the world works. In this sense, Torbert’s work shows how an individual’s leadership “style” is better understood as one of seven “action logics.” These action logics can also be understood as “operating systems” (OS) that span a spectrum from least complex to most complex and resourceful. Although their names have changed throughout the years, Torbert originally identified these operating systems by the following descriptors. 

• Opportunist
• Diplomat
• Expert
• Achiever
• Individualist
• Strategist
• Alchemist

Fascinatingly, each leadership OS transcends yet includes the strengths of the prior OS while overcoming its weaknesses. (By analogy, “leveling up” your leadership OS is akin to the process seen in human development where children go from crawling to walking. Walking transcends yet includes the capacity to crawl while overcoming its limitations.) In other words, each OS is developmental (unfolds in a fixed, hierarchical sequence) and capable of being developed.

This last point is essential. Decades of research conducted with thousands of leaders — including those at Deutsche Bank, Hewlett-Packard, Trillium Asset Management, Volvo, and more — demonstrate that a leader’s performance is directly linked to their level of leadership OS. Notably, Torbert found that corporate leaders with the first three operating systems (Opportunist, Diplomat, and Expert, comprising 55% of the study) significantly under-performed the Achiever OS (including 30% of the study). And only the remaining 15% of leaders in the sample (Individualist, Strategist, and Alchemist OS) evidenced a consistent capacity to manage complex risk, defy disruption, drive innovation, and scale globally.    

Let’s take a look at the seven leadership operating systems to learn about the deeply held assumptions that underlie them, as well as their characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. Keep in mind that while you may exhibit traits from multiple operating systems, only one of them will constitute your “home base.” 

Opportunist (about 5% of corporate leaders)

Deeply Held Assumption: It’s a dog-eat-dog world. “A sucker born every day.” Survival of the fittest. Take no prisoners. To the victor, the spoils. 

Characteristics: Focuses on personal wins at all costs, seeks to control others, and does not hesitate to profit at others’ expense.  

Strengths: Single-minded pursuit of short-term objectives. Brute, unflinching force of will to overcome formidable obstacles. 

Weaknesses: A “blunt” instrument. Insistence on autocratic control precludes genuine teamwork, little capacity for long-term planning. 

Diplomat (about 12% of corporate leaders) 

Deeply Held Assumption: Success is achieved by dutifully performing roles prescribed by those holding power in order to gain favor and advance one’s position. 

Characteristics: Highly rule-bound. Sense of self is strongly tied to group identity and norms. Tends to look to others for cues for action. 

Strengths: A “loyal soldier” performs to the letter, is mindful of teammates’ needs, provides “social glue” within the organization.

Weaknesses: “Awaits orders,” hesitant to take the lead, goes out of the way to avoid conflict. (Unwilling to “rock the boat.”)  

Expert (38% of corporate leaders)

Deeply Held Assumption: “Facts, not feelings.” Expertise backed up by hard data is the only reliable source for assessing situations and making sound decisions.   

Characteristics: Highly analytical, numbers-driven, efficiency-focused — believes all significant problems can be solved with specialized expertise.  

Strengths: Strong individual contributor, helps to safeguard against “squishy” reasoning, pursues constant improvement and efficiency. 

Weaknesses: “Everything looks like a nail,” tends to defend against disconfirming data, confuses the map with the territory, blind to implications of qualitative variables.   

Achiever (30% of corporate leaders)

Deeply Held Assumption: Success is defined by peak performance, elite achievement, and high social status. Life is approached as a competition. (“You’re only as good as your last game.”)

Characteristics: Hyper-competitive, dominant player, relentlessly driven, laser-focused, high levels of mental and emotional stamina.

Strengths: Develops winning strategies, integrates immediate and long-term objectives, balances challenge and support. (“Sports coach” mindset.) 

Weaknesses: Vulnerable to missing the forest for the trees (blind to most externalities). Tendency to have unreasonable expectations of others and to be unduly critical. 

Individualist (10% of corporate leaders)

Deeply Held Assumption: Success must be redefined on one’s own terms using a plurality of strategically integrated perspectives, values, and approaches. 

Characteristics: “Self-authoring,” strong internal compass, seeks to reconcile idealistic vision with organizational realities and growth objectives. Makes seemingly “maverick” ideas successfully fly. 

Strengths: Captain of their own ship, systems thinker, flexible, innovative, collaborative, strategically “improvisational,” knows how to “break the rules properly.” (Unfettered by convention). 

Weaknesses: “Wild card.” Idealistic vision may be a case of “reach exceeding grasp.” Can be perceived (sometimes accurately ) as “going rogue.”  

Strategist (4% of corporate leaders) 

Deeply Held Assumption: The world is a complex interplay of relationships across multiple scales that can be strategically reconfigured in the service of growth.  

Characteristics: Meta-systems thinker (sees systems of systems), “sees around corners,” sees meaningful connections between quantitative and qualitative variables, builds bridges, forms win-win alliances, rewrites the rules of the game.  

Strengths: At home in high levels of complexity, comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, grasps non-linearity, plays the long game, transforms the organization.  

Weaknesses: Due to the relative rarity of OS, can be challenging to relate with. Vulnerable to “heroic leader” syndrome, or may succumb to arrogance.   

Alchemist (less than 1% of corporate leaders) 

Deeply Held Assumption: Life is a grand theater of play, possibility, risk, and opportunity to which each person is called to make a contribution on behalf of future generations. 

Characteristics: Lives by eulogy virtues reinvents the game, creates conditions for human flourishing that extend far beyond the organization. Commits to a deeper purpose for which the bottom line is a means rather than the end. Turns “lead” (division, conflict, adversity, failure, etc.) into “gold,” both personally and professionally.   

Strengths: Leads from the future. (Envisions, senses, and shapes emerging possibility spaces, actualizing them through new models and in historically significant and socially beneficial ways ). Dramatically “de-literalized” view of the landscape allows for radical forms of creativity and innovation. Inspires a unifying vision and recruits others to a higher cause without the need for recognition or personal fanfare. 

Weaknesses: Commitment to a deeper mission comes with the risk of excessive self-sacrifice. 

Each of the seven leadership operating systems brings valuable strengths to the table. But only the last three include levels of complexity and flexibility needed for reliably thinking outside the box and implementing effective strategy at scale.

If your company is gearing up to bring a new product to market, we can help. With nearly 50 years of proven experience, an internationally award-winning product portfolio, an extensive suite of leading-edge technologies, and a highly collaborative approach, we’re the partner you’ve been looking for. Contact us today to learn more about how we can partner with your business to ensure your success! 

Product Managers and the Need for Data, Design, and Complexity Management Experience

Product managers have always worn multiple hats to bring together the many pieces of the larger product development puzzle. But as the digital world continues to pick up speed, the role of a product manager is complexifying. Product managers must focus on more than execution and timely delivery, striking an optimal balance between day-to-day product development processes and non-product related tasks.

At Pivot International, we’ve been helping companies launch successful products for nearly fifty years. Our product managers represent the industry’s top talent with experience across supply chain, data, design, user experience, engineering, manufacturing, client relations, marketing, compliance, complexity management, and more.

Even in the face of unprecedented disruption, our teams at Pivot have driven growth for our partners with proven sourcing solutions, including alternatives to China. With product development expertise that spans over fourteen industries and 320,000 square feet of manufacturing capability, we help companies defy disruption, seize opportunities, and bring award-winning innovations to market.

The Case for Well-Rounded Product Managers

The changes that accompany digital transformation require product managers to possess a broad range of experience that extends far beyond engineering oversight. Let’s take a look at growing trends that make the need for well-rounded product management increasingly important.

The Primacy of Data

Companies that are leaders in digital transformation and product development alike depend on the deployment of what may be their most valuable asset: data, both internal and external. Because data must inform nearly every product decision, product management with experience in data science and analytics are among the most bankable candidates.

The need for product management well-versed in analytics is also underscored by the role of data in gauging a product’s long term success (post-launch). Data that tracks engagement, retention, conversion, repeat purchases, and more, is every bit as crucial as the data that went into creating the product in the first place.

The Ascendance of Design

If ever there was any question that design could function as a competitive differentiator and key revenue driver for consumer products, Apple’s stratospheric success settled that question once and for all. But for companies hoping to bring an industrial or medtech product to market, the revenue-driving role of design is often underestimated, and at considerable cost.

Product managers adequate to the demands of the digital age are no strangers to the role that design plays in delivering bottom-line results — in any market. Though their background is often in engineering, this expertise is augmented by a keen understanding of design principles and design processes. For this reason, the most talented product managers are also those most successful at promoting cross-functional alignment and collaboration.

The Demand for Complexity Management

With the acceleration of the digital age comes the complexification of both products and product life cycles. Add to this equation evolving organizational dynamics, changing consumer expectations, increased risk of disruption, continuing supply chain challenges, and more. Product management was never a simple affair, but complexity management is fast becoming a core competence for product management.

Product managers must have a capacity for:

1. Operating from a big-picture perspective.
2. Aligning short- and longer-term objectives with the company’s overall growth strategy.
3. Promoting transparency throughout the value chain.
4. Optimizing the value chain with disciplined tradeoffs.

In short, effective product management in the digital age requires a breadth of experience that can be seen as a precursor entry into an executive role.

Behind every award-winning product is exceptional product management. If you’re looking for a proven one-source partner with top talent to help your company bring a profitable product to market, we bring a trusted track record and nearly fifty years of experience. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you achieve your goals and grow your business. Together, we can make your product vision a successful reality!

Agile: The Path to Antifragility

Nobody needs to be told that 2020 has been a year that will go down as one of the most disruptive, unpredictable, and pivotal in history. In what can reasonably be anticipated as a new normal of unprecedented risk, leaders need a new paradigm for not only withstanding disruptive change but benefitting from it. This new framework may be best understood through the concept of antifragility.

What is antifragility?

Developed by Nassim Taleb, Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and co-editor-in-chief of the academic journal Risk and Decision Analysis, antifragility is a counter-intuitive concept to many leaders. It refers to systems whose capacity to thrive is increased rather than decreased by disruption. As Taleb explains, “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better”.

At Pivot International, we’ve successfully led global clients through COVID-19 disruption, escalating trade tensions, economic volatility, and environments of heightened risk for nearly a half-century. Operating from an antifragile model means prioritizing evolution over adaptation. It’s an approach that’s allowed us to add two new businesses to our family of companies amid a global pandemic and drive growth for our clients in challenging times. With product development expertise across fourteen different industries and alternative sourcing solutions across three continents, we’re helping our partners harness disruption to grow their business and improve their market position.

How Can Businesses Embrace Antifragility?

The development of agility can be understood as the most direct path to antifragility, provided this path is understood correctly. Agility is often mistaken for a company’s ability to operate with speed while navigating complex obstacles. But agility is about much more than speed. It’s about reengineering the vehicle itself. In this case, the vehicle is a leader’s mental model, a company’s culture, and its organizational structures. This reengineering ensures the vehicle is continually optimized for maximum performance across a wide range of unpredictable road conditions.

Orchestra or Jazz Band?

Agility requires decentralized decision-making, distributive organizational structures, and dynamic resource allocation. A second metaphor may be helpful to illustrate this point. While traditional organizations function like an orchestra, agile organizations function like a jazz band. In an orchestra, each musician plays a predetermined piece of music, taking their cues from a conductor. In a jazz band, each musician plays improvisationally.

Agile Mental Models: The Leadership and Cultural Challenge

Whether an organization can make the cultural shift to agile has much to do with a leaders’ mental model. A mental model is more than just a mindset. A mindset can be understood as a perspective or attitude that a leader may take. A mental model, on the other hand, is more like a cognitive-emotional “operating system.” It determines the perspectival or attitudinal “software” a leader can run.

We said earlier that agile involves decentralized decision-making. But many leaders have been deeply conditioned to think of themselves and their executive team as a command center. They view themselves as a directive-issuing hub around which culture revolves. Returning to our musical analogy, we could say that leaders often conceive of their role as the “conductor” of an organizational “orchestra.”

For this reason, leaders may struggle with one of the chief mandates of agile: granting authority to teams to act with a high degree of autonomy. Learning to operate from an agile mental model may be the hardest a leader may face of all challenges. This is because it requires loosening control and nurturing a culture in which all stakeholders are appropriately empowered.

Agile Organizational Structures: Dispelling Misconceptions

The analogy of agile as a jazz band sometimes leads to a common misconception that “anything goes” or that agile organizations lack structure or vision. It’s important to recognize that a jazz band lacks neither. Well before a set even starts, the key, chords, tempo, and style of each song have been determined. Jazz has strictly prescribed rules of etiquette. These rules are the basis for collaboration and innovation. Musicians who deviate from them raise their bandmates’ ire. If the behavior persists, they may be ejected from the band.

Agile isn’t a “free-for-all.” As with the rules of etiquette for jazz, agility is “freedom within a framework.” This allows for on-demand resource allocation that lets a company rapidly innovate and pivot in response to urgent needs, emerging market opportunities, and imminent threats. Once an action is taken, any available outcome-data is quickly analyzed for insights and fed back into the system. This enables the organization to evolve rather than merely adapt.

The difference between agile and more traditional organizational structures is not the lack of structure, but the type of structure and how this structure is created. Agile structures are dynamic and flexible rather than fixed or rigid. These structures aren’t built through a command-and-control chain of linear decision-making but a network of highly coordinated stakeholders. This structural coordination spans every aspect of the organization, from cross-functional teams to HR systems to finance and budgeting systems.

Antifragile is the new model needed for benefitting from disruptive change, and agile is the most direct path for reaching it. If you’re seeking a partner with agile operations to help your company bring a new product to market, Pivot’s industry-leading, end-to-end solutions can help drive your success. With extensive experience in multiple markets, we deliver top design and engineering talent and advanced manufacturing technology to serve your product development and supply chain needs. Contact us today.

The Founder’s Trap Has Never Been More Dangerous

Management consultant Ichak Adizes first became famous in leadership circles more than twenty-five years ago for his Corporate Lifecycles Model (CLM). This model looks at businesses through a lens that maps stages of growth and decline. It outlines both opportunities and challenges that characterize and accompany each stage.

The model helps business executives better understand and accomplish the critical tasks of both leadership development and organizational development. This serves to promote growth and offers protection from decline. Not only has the model stood the test of time, but its insights have also become increasingly relevant for navigating pandemic-driven change.

At Pivot International, a deep understanding of the Corporate Lifecycles Model has played a part in our ability to achieve and sustain outstanding growth. In the last five years alone, we’ve achieved an annual growth rate of 141% and added eight new subsidiaries. Our product development expertise spans fourteen industries and 200,000 square feet of global manufacturing capability. With nearly a half-century of experience in supply chain solutions, we’re helping companies worldwide defy disruption and seize emerging market opportunities.

The Corporate Lifecycles Model maps ten stages of organizational growth and decline. In this article, we’ll introduce you to only the first five (the growth stages). We’ll then explore how the lessons specific to stages three and four have particular relevance for navigating disruptive change.

Adizes’ Growth Stages

Courtship. In this stage, the founder or founding group is attempting to solidify their company’s vision and “court” both human and financial capital to achieve an initial launch. Entrepreneurial (and often unvetted) ideas prevail. Key challenges and dangers involve unrealistic ideas and failure to secure resources.

Infancy. The founders’ focus shifts from generating ideas to driving concrete results. The all-consuming preoccupation is with making immediate sales. Organizational development recedes into the background, with little to no thought for processes, procedures, or systems. Founders “burn the candle at both ends,” assuming heroic levels of personal responsibility for the company’s survival and success. Key challenges and dangers involve tunnel vision and burnout.

Go-Go. Growth accelerates at breakneck speeds. The sky is the limit. Anything is possible. Leadership still views sales as the key success metric with the result that supportive organizational structures lag behind revenue growth. The organization, quite literally, is “getting too big for its britches.” With rare exceptions, founders have fallen prey to the Founder’s Trap. The key challenges and dangers lie in founders’ unconscious biases about the infallibility of their personal “winning formula.” This bias is reinforced by rapid growth that makes this formula that much more difficult to question.

Adolescence. Leaders are freer from the Founder’s Trap and growth is becoming more scalable. Although they can now question their winning formula and delegate responsibilities, they struggle to see their role in a less centralized way. A greater focus is being brought to processes, procedures, and systems. However, organizational structures, like leadership roles, tend to remain centralized and relatively fixed. Key challenges and dangers include infighting and losing sight of the need to build structures for successfully scaling.

Prime. Leaders are keenly aware of the dangers of Go-Go and Adolescence and vigilant about avoiding them. Leaders view their executive role and organizational structures in decentralized ways. Innovation and agility are the order of the day. Teams at every level of the organization are appropriately empowered. This puts an end to infighting and frees up energy for innovation. Key challenges and dangers include complacency.

The Founders Trap — The Key Growth Challenge of Go-Go and Adolescence

Let’s take a closer look at the Founders Trap. First of all, it’s essential to understand that while this trap first emerges in early Go-Go, it only fully resolves in late Adolescence. Founders are most vulnerable to ensnarement when they cannot question their winning formula. Leaders in this trap blindly believe that “what got us here will get us there.” They view the organization as revolving around people — namely themselves and their executive team — rather than flexible processes and distributive structures.

Leaders caught in this trap often succumb to arrogance and “command and control” forms of governance that stifle innovation and agility and limit scaling. They often refuse to delegate responsibilities or are reluctant to hire or develop qualified talent. Teams are not empowered to act without the direct oversight of the founder or executive team.

Success in the Unfolding Era Depends on Escaping the Founder’s Trap

The relevance to navigating the demands of disruption are abundantly clear. Regardless of a company’s growth stage, the pandemic served as a powerful wake-up call for the need to think and act differently. In the face of acute disruption, formerly winning strategies were no guarantee of survival, much less success.

When the gale force winds of COVID-19 began to blow, companies with leaders stuck in the Founders Trap found themselves standing on a foundation of sand. Many were washed out to sea. The companies that weathered the storm were most often those built on a rock-solid foundation of innovation and agility. (“Rock solid” is an ironic metaphor: stability derives from the very processes and structures — flexible, decentralized, and distributive — that those in the Founder’s Trap most resist developing.)

The journey to Prime is not without peril, but for leaders with a commitment to ongoing personal and organizational growth, it represents an adventure of a lifetime.

Is your company seeking a proven partner for helping you bring a winning product to market? Our world-class teams will work collaboratively with your business to make your product vision a reality. If you’d like to learn more about how a partnership with Pivot can fuel your growth, contact us today. We’re here to help.

5 Mindset Shifts for Becoming a More Innovative Leader

Innovation has been a key term and area of interest in management science for well over two decades. The names of many of the world’s most noteworthy, profitable, and respected companies, including Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Tesla, are synonymous with this term. As it pertains to the leadership demands of successfully navigating the disruption of the global pandemic, the role of innovation is perhaps more relevant than ever.

The At Pivot International, we’ve been delivering innovative solutions to tough product design, engineering, development, manufacturing, and distribution challenges for nearly fifty years. Leveraging the latest supply chain technologies, 200,000 square feet of company-owned facilities, and access to a highly diversified global sourcing network, we help companies worldwide defy disruption, capitalize on emerging opportunities, and bring successful products to market.

Innovation: An evolving concept

The concept of innovation has continued to evolve in response to ongoing management science studies, industry developments, and market challenges. The challenges of COVID-19, in particular, have driven home the need for leaders to understand and practice innovation as more than just a design application. (Such as it relates to product design, supply chain design, or organizational design.)

Beyond innovative design applications

The Innovative Design Applications are core competencies of competitive companies, and our leadership team at Pivot cannot overstate their importance. But successfully navigating the challenges of an environment of increased risk and unpredictability requires that leaders also innovate their mental models. Peter Senge, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, defines a mental model as “A deeply held internal image of how the world works — an image that limits us to familiar ways of thinking and acting.”

The Mental models are essentially personal algorithms. As the name suggests, they are conceptual representations of how different scenarios, and the part we play in them, are assumed to necessarily play out.

Why leaders must innovate their mental models

Innovation has been a key term and area of interest in management science for well over two decades. The Mental models determine the range of possibilities we can perceive. This means they also dictate the degree of choice we have in making sense of and responding to any given situation. Especially in times of disruption or market volatility, the ability to perceive a wide range of possibilities is critical for identifying alternative paths forward, implementing novel solutions, and acting on emerging opportunities.

For this reason, our leadership teams at Pivot place a premium on continually innovating the concrete design applications of our business as well as our mental models. Both are critical competencies for the collaborative partnerships we form with our customers and for devising customized solutions for protecting our partners against disruption and driving their growth in challenging times.

Innovating your mental model with five mindset shifts

Innovating your mental model begins with making fundamental mindset shifts on how you conceive strategy, structure, process, people, and technology. Because these mindsets represent challenges to and revisions of common mental models, they run counter to many established ways of thinking about things. In practice, however, they open up a larger field of possibility, choice, and innovative action.

1. Strategy Mindset Shift

From: Resources are scarce, and success is about extracting value for our shareholders from competitors, customers, and suppliers.

To: There is an abundance of opportunities for those with the eyes to see them, and success is about generating win-win solutions for all stakeholders.

2. Structure Mindset Shift

From: Unless teams are given only small amounts of freedom and tightly managed, they will lack clear direction, prioritize their personal interests over the company’s, and perform under par.

To: When allowed to be self-directive in the service of achieving a shared goal, team members will feel greater personal ownership as well as greater mutual accountability. Investment in their performance will increase and drive synergistic solutions.

3. Process Mindset Shift

From: Key objectives and initiatives must come from the C-suite or upper management, along with clearly mapped paths for achieving them to ensure mistakes don’t occur in the process of execution.

To: The organization as a networked whole must define and adapt in real-time to a continually changing environment. Mistakes are intrinsic to innovation; the goal is not to prevent them but rather to rapidly learn from them to advance the innovation process.

4. People Mindset Shift

From: The role of leadership is to “steer” the organization and “align” the culture, set the agenda, establish rules of engagement, and define corporate identity.

To: Understanding that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Because leadership is embedded in the organization and therefore part of it, the culture can be meaningfully innovated only from within through the collective participation of all who comprise it.

5. Technology Mindset Shift

From: Technology investment is limited to specialized aspects of the business according to specific needs or budget restrictions.

To: Technological investment is a top priority and is seamlessly integrated at every scale of the organization to support coordinated action and agility in response to the needs of stakeholders and dynamic market conditions.

Innovation has never been more essential to gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage. If you’re seeking an innovative partner to help your company defy disruption and bring a product to market, Pivot brings a trusted track record with companies worldwide. With product development expertise that spans fourteen industries, including medical, industrial, security and defense, we deliver the top talent, supply chain solutions, and extensive ISO and ISE certifications to help your company successfully scale. Contact us today to learn more about how a partnership with Pivot can help you achieve your business objectives.