Frank Dopheide is the founder and managing director of the management consultancy human unlimited, which specializes in the topic of “Purpose”. Previously, he was, among other things, spokesman for the management of the Handelsblatt Media Group and chairman of GRAY Worldwide.
(Photo: Klawe Rzezcy, Getty Images)
Managers love plans. They are the anchor point of entrepreneurial leadership. A plan makes the big vision manageable and is the first step towards implementation. If you have a plan, you first have peace of mind from annoying questions from employees, the stock exchange and the media. You can work with that. But a plan has to be made and that’s a really tough job. The organization sweats for millions and millions of hours of work until this is coordinated and approved.
Once the plan is in the world, success and the board of directors demand that everyone stick to that plan. This may lead to a trap. The company gets to work in a focused manner and becomes blind to things that lie outside of the instructions. The company wears blinkers.
Every action is pre-programmed. Nothing is left to chance. This is the crucial flaw in the system. because dr Coincidence is the most successful employee of all time – worldwide.
“Never have I made one of my great discoveries through the process of rational thinking,” Albert Einstein already let us know. We don’t come up with the best ideas, we notice them – we know the stories of penicillin, porcelain, tea bags and post-its.
Coincidence opens up overnight opportunities for companies. If you open the door for him, earth-shattering things can happen out of friendship, out of love or out of sheer anger. Musician Mike Oldfield was devastated because no publisher wanted to publish his debut work. His friend and circuit board shop owner Richard Branson took matters into his own hands. 15 million sold “Tubular Bells” records later, the two are still happy about this coincidence. And about the new company Virgin Records, after all it was born like a virgin to a child. Today the Virgin Group has a turnover of almost 17 billion with 70,000 employees.
Frank Dopheide: Radically new things cannot be grasped with ready-made parameters.
Years later, when Branson was stuck at the airport and unable to visit his new girlfriend in the Virgin Islands, he calculated what it would cost to charter a jet. He offered all other “stuck sitters” a seat for $39. The flight was fully booked in minutes. The launch of Virgin Atlantic.
Steve Jobs loved his record collection more than computers. Which led him to develop a portable device to always have a thousand songs within reach and earshot. The iPod sold almost 500 million copies.
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Sometimes, however, a good portion of anger can also give coincidence a helping hand. George Crum was a chef on the Hudson River in New York when one of the regulars repeatedly complained about the thickness of the fried potatoes – Cornelius Vanderbilt, then the richest person in the world. The head chef was blown away, he cut the potatoes into wafer-thin slices, deep-fried them so that they could no longer be pierced with a fork, and then salted them properly. The guest thought it was delicious and the potato chips were invented.
The national dish of the Americans – everyone devours an average of nine kilos and thus generates 30 billion dollars in sales annually. You can’t plan that. Presumably Jeff Bezos also had other plans for Amazon than making videos and renting out computer storage space. But web services are already delivering most of the profit today. Who would have thought.
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That is why it is crucial for the future to open a door to chance in your organization. Radically new things cannot be grasped with ready-made parameters. The world is upside down, give it a chance to invent itself and ensure that employees discover unplanned potential: through intuition, attention and sensitivity.
Effectuation is the new term for an old phenomenon. Instead of great planning, it relies on great ability to act. Instead of focus, open-mindedness is the core requirement. A conceptual model that gives coincidence and the company a helping hand. Let’s call it active happiness.
So be sure to plan for the unplanned. It pays off.
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