In December of 2019, our leadership team at xchange honed in on our strategy for 2020.

3 Months later, our strategy – and our entire business model – became obsolete.

Our only choice was to reinvent.

Our story is the story of most businesses, entrepreneurs.

We evolved from a training organization that hosted three in person training events per year (only in-person), to a membership organization, now hosting over 140 training events per year (entirely online).

Years prior, while doing prep work for a conference with Peter Senge, MIT’s renowned organizational and systems scientist, he shared a key insight with me:

As the world changes, we as leaders need to invite the consciousness from which we operate to change.

And maybe a key shift in consciousness could mean the movement away from outdated paradigms, beliefs and value structures.

For example.

Management schools around the world have long suggested…

What matters most, is our competitive advantage, at any given moment in time.

What unique combination of organizational strengths fortifies our value in the marketplace?

But what if our changing world has rendered this logic no longer useful.

Or worse, what if this long held, sacred cow, is now actually harmful?

What if we considered this alternative…

What matters most, is our Evolutionary Advantage, over time.

How can we learn, adapt and accelerate our pace of strategic renewal, to stay in service of a world that’s changing faster than ever before?

What if our Evolutionary Advantage – our ability to navigate continuous change – is the new competitive advantage?

Here’s 7 Questions to Support Your Evolutionary Advantage (personally, or organizationally)

1. Why does our organization, our customers and the world, need us to evolve? Why does this line of inquiry matter?
2. What in our work or our lives is wanting to die? And for what does this create energy and space to be born?
3. What are we learning? About ourselves, our customers, our world? And what are these learnings helping us to sense about an emerging future that might not yet be clear for any of us?
4. What strengths, core qualities, values and principles do we want to potentially protect, nurture and preserve, no matter how we evolve?
5. Leveraging the best of where we’ve been, and the best of who we are today… what could be? A year from now, what innovations, new sources of value creation, new possibilities can we see, hear and feel our way into?
6. Who might be our key allies, collaborators, partners, and/or networks… in bringing a new future into reality? Who’s mission could be lifted, up through the effort to pursue our mission?
7. What is the first, smallest step we can take right now, to move towards the future that is seeking to emerge? What small experiments can we breath life into?

(Photo Caption: Helping BMW engineers to design new questions, to strengthen their Evolutionary Advantage.)