Reverse Engineering the Organization

Now, more than ever, as social distancing impacts the way we work, as supply chain disruptions inhibit the ability to deliver goods, and as resources are reprioritized in an all hands on deck effort to find and deliver a vaccine, there is a need for leadership amid the COVID-19 chaos. And, that requires a new way of thinking.

Recently, I interviewed Mark W. Johnson, a senior partner at Innosight, a growth strategy firm he co-founded with the late, great Clayton Christensen—one of the most influential business theorists of this generation known for his theory of “disruptive innovation.” Christensen passed away in January, but Johnson, an aerospace engineer with an MBA from Harvard Business School, carries on his legacy through the consulting work at Innosight and the business books he writes.

Johnson’s latest book, Lead from the Future: How to Turn Visionary Thinking into Breakthrough Growth, was published in April. And while he and his coauthor Josh Suskewicz didn’t have a worldwide pandemic in mind when they wrote the book, it is extremely relevant right now as the world spins toward an uncertain future—at least in the near term.

It’s the long term vision, however, that manufacturers need to focus on, because “foresight leads to insight,” Johnson has stated. To that end, the foundation of this book is based on what Johnson calls a “future-back” approach to create growth strategy. Different from a “present-forward” mindset which assumes a company’s existing business can simply be extended into the future, future-back begins the planning process by envisioning what the company will look like decades from now. It is a methodology for defining a future state and working backwards to set priorities and milestones. It’s an iterative and nonlinear way of thinking that goes beyond an organization’s established way of doing things. And it requires a fundamental system change.

“In manufacturing, it’s a system problem,” Johnson said. “Trying to get someone to do something breakthrough means not following the traditional path onward and upward. It’s not like following lean and Six Sigma to drive efficiency improvement. It’s a step change. A point of departure. A transformation. And you have to go at it from a clean sheet system. Systems replace systems, so what is the new system? Imagine that and architect it by working it back.”

It can be likened to reverse engineering the business, Johnson told me, but it’s more than just applying the mechanics of the process. It involves humans, which means you have to have a method to learn and iterate and shape the system. “It’s not as clean as the traditional reverse engineering of a system where you don’t want the blueprint to be wrong…you have to be able to test and learn.”