2019: The struggle against mediocrity continues!
2018 was an eventful year for me. I left a job at a company that had been sold to a larger firm and, together with two partners, started a new company. The challenges for both the old and new companies turn out to be pretty similar: how to create and sustain something unique and desirable in the marketplace. That is the challenge of every business, although you’re excused if you didn’t notice.
At Savvy, the number one question we get is:`
“How do you differentiate yourself from other firms?”
I LOVE this question! In my mind it is really asking:
“What are you going to avoid mediocrity?”
It’s actually much simpler, and often more profitable in the short term, to create a business that does pretty much exactly what your competitors do. There’s an assumption that if there’s enough demand then it really doesn’t matter if you don’t stand out too much, as long as you can convince enough clients to buy whatever it is you’re selling. I’ve heard this a lot from clients: it’s safer to be a fast-follower or even a laggard, it’s risky to stand out.
This is the flock mentality to business, it replicates the type of defensiveness of herd animals apparent in different types of murmurations. If you’re a starling or a fish, you increase your chances of survival by joining and moving with the flock. It decreases the chance that just you will end up in the stomach of a predator.
Beautiful. But is this really how we want businesses to act? Is your business a starling or a hawk?
Most business strategy experts tell us that successful organizations need to differentiate, continually, for long-term success. Harvard professor Michael Porter wrote in 1985 about different competitive advantage strategies. In short, you can either sell something cheaper than everyone else, or you can differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Popular books like Blue Ocean Strategy and Built to Last with its BHAG reinforced this approach to differentiation. Lately Professor Rita McGrath argues in her The End of Competitive Advantage that this focus on differentiation needs to happen continually in our VUCA world.
And yet…most organizations don’t do any of these or don’t do them well. Somehow many of them still make lots of money. Freek Vermeulen argues that “The trick is that when there is uncertainty about the quality of a product or service, firms do not have to rely on differentiation in order to obtain a competitive advantage.”
The resistance to differentiation is a reminder that we tend and trend toward mediocrity. Mediocrity is the opposite of differentiation. It is the shortcut, the path of least resistance, the safe strategy. It speaks to our desire to stay with the herd.
So, here’s to making Mediocrity our enemy in 2019 and some thoughts on how to do that.
- To fight Mediocrity, you need embrace your rebels. This sketchnote above resonated with everyone I’ve shared it with. We all have a rebel within, even if some of us are better at letting him/her loose. Rebels challenge the status quo, they are bored to death by mediocrity, it’s why they are such pains in the assess. Who on your team is going to play the rebel, or the devil’s advocate? Maybe you need a rebel hat, that you can pass around and take turns with. This is not a one-time thing, it’s a way of working and collaborating.
- Find a way to agree to disagree. The struggle against mediocrity means not settling. It means that you’re going to have to find ways for you and your teams to disagree, to give creative feedback and to create and solve dynamic tensions. That’s going to make some people feel uncomfortable but creating differentiation means pushing yourself and each other past the easy answers. One approach is to create small trigger mechanisms to make sure you can disagree without turning people off. To do that, you have to understand how people react differently. But you can’t move forward if you can’t disagree
- Help people get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Mediocrity is comfortable. It’s why most businesses are mediocre. It’s also easier being uncomfortable if you’re able to share when you’re uncomfortable and receive support from your peers. There are degrees of discomfort too, the goal isn’t to make everyone feel like shit, but the struggle against mediocrity means intentionally moving people out of their comfort zones (even rebels who claim they have no comfort zones! See above.).
- Differentiation taps into a desire to win, or to continuous learning, or to personal development, or progress or whatever you want to call it. Personally, I believe that all of us human beings are competitive in one way or another, some more overtly than others. Differentiation helps us, as a group, compete with other groups, our business competitors. We feel good when we succeed, as a group. The drive for differentiation, and against mediocrity, pushes us forward and out of our complacency. As with everything, there is always a matter of degree. I think you can be competitive without creating a cut-throat and back-stabbing culture of “Me.”
- Standing out is fun. We like the attention. Even in the Swedish Jantelagen culture, people here act just like typical human beings: we need positive reinforcement much more than negative critique. When we differentiate, we stand out, just like Swedish heroes like Bjorn Borg, Avici and IKEA.
I think the biggest challenge is making the commitment to struggle against mediocrity. Committing to putting in the necessary time and work to stand out. To differentiate takes a lot of work. 10,000 hours? Maybe. Use your design skills to prototype and test, that counts toward those hours, we don’t have to figure it out right away.
But once we stop, we end up in the middle of a business murmuration. That’s fine, if you’re a fish. Instead, let’s focus our energy in 2019 on differentiation, on striving for something special, and on resisting mediocrity.
One more thing: when you notice someone struggling or defeating mediocrity, in big or small ways, tell them. Tell them you see them, give them positive reinforcement, and ask them to share what they did differently. This is a self-reinforcing behavior. Both of you will be better prepared to continue the struggle against mediocrity and to be able to spread your approach to others.
