Involvism – Method 8: Courage
This is the 8th method of Involvism and the final one in this introductory series. The 7 prior methods can be found by clicking here
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Mantra
Courage is the internal drive that enables us to take chances, try new approaches and accept change as a desirable factor in business environments. Courage is the determining trait in whether many things are executed or shelved. Courage sets apart those who settle for the mundane, from those who continually push forward in creating remarkable products and services. Courage is mandatory in efforts of enabling value, efficiency, productivity, profitability and scale.
Key Actions
1. Accept that many activities will fall outside your comfort zone and start to embrace those chances
2. Assess the importance of familiarity and whether it is more important than creating the remarkable
3. Accelerate your involvement in new creations, re-prioritising the static to sub-prime
4. Award and reward those who assist and enable positive change, re-prioritising those who promote the status quo
Involvist Viewpoint
The methods outlined in Involvism require a significant amount of courage. Courage to accept that times are changing, courage to accept support from others, courage to try new business models and courage to be honest and collaborative with citizens. Courage to accept ‘your brand’ is in the hands of the public and courage to continually create and differentiate.
Our love of familiar circumstances conditions us not to be courageous. All you need to maintain the way things are, is a mindset that assumes everything will be fine as it is. This doesn’t require courage, it requires blinkers.
Involvism suggests that courage sets apart winners from losers and history has shown this to be true. Courage opens up opportunities that others miss, meaning those who are seen to be ‘lucky’ are actually just exploiting things that few others are aware of. Often, people dismiss the lives of winners by exclaiming ‘they come from a better background’ or ‘they haven’t gone through what I have’. We hear comments like ‘they were in the right place at the right time’ or ‘they would never be successful in this day and age’. These opinions are mostly looking in the wrong direction. The real question to ask yourself is, ‘would you have the balls to do what they did?‘.
Opportunity is pretty easy to seize when there’s nobody else trying to seize it. Chances of 1 in a million become 1 in 1 or 1 in 4. These are good odds.
It is vital to assess whether familiarity is actually that important in the scheme of things. If you are setting out to create remarkable experiences, products, services or companies, you will have to weigh up the importance of the ‘nice and easy’ stuff. If it turns out that the familiar isn’t cutting it (assuming you are aware of that), then the good news is you are totally in control of your fortune thereafter.
If you decide that a realise and accept that your environment is not optimum, then you must accelerate into the creation of new things, at the expense of the static. This may mean you have to leave your job, or risk getting fired. You may be unpopular with your peers who seek constant reassurance that their boring lives are ’stable’ and ’secure’ – whereas your courage threatens their comfort zones fundamentally.
So what? At the end of the day, you either ‘get busy living or get busy dying’ (as the saying goes).
You may be in a company that has such and extreme legacy that it’s very hard to change things, even if you have the courage to do so. This brings a need for extreme courage and a brilliant leader. Are you willing and able to take the challenge?
If you are, the courage you need has to be trained into the rest of your company. Your whole organisation needs to be courageous. People who are courageous enough to assist and enable positive change must be awarded and rewarded so they are incentivised to keep being courageous. Those who promote the status quo and whinge about the ‘barriers’ that stop change happening, need to be given the chance of learning a new way – or if that fails – bypassed. Quickly.
If you only had one choice from this introductory series of 8 methods of Involvism, the one to take on board is this one. You may not know the direction to head in, you may not know how to restructure your organisation, you may not know the roadmap ahead, you may not know whether you are ‘doing the right thing’ but all of these things can happen in time, so long as you have the courage to get there. At the very least, courage will place you in a strongest of positions to enable value, efficiency, productivity, profitability and scale.
